Walter Nash was here – a poem.

 

Walter Nash was here

 

 

Walter Nash was here

here when the Miners Hall was here

here when we were kids

kids in the Fancy Dress Ball

when the town was all

Labour voters

 

Walter Nash was here

here when school milk came in crates

here when women gossiped

at gates and baked cakes

for the Bring and Buy

before the town died

 

Walter Nash was here

all the way from Kidderminster

died-in-the-wool

old Christian Socialist

sat on the seat where the Railways bus

stopped outside the Post Office

 

Walter Nash was here

here for the 1966 Centennial

here to watch the wood chips fly

when the chops were on

and the candy floss

stuck to your chin

 

Walter Nash was here

and his ghost lives on

in everyone who walks this town

invisible inscrutable

of good conscience

whispering justice

 

 

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman  c. 2016

 

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“Me, me, me – or us?” The choice on 23 September is as old as humanity.

My childhood State house in Aorangi Road, Bryndwr, Christchurch.

Here it is: just like the one John Key grew up in and posed grinning in front of last year, as the sale of 2,500 of these homes was mooted. For me it was in the early 1950s, for him the 1960s – but it was still the same deal. Housing, recognised as a human right by the 1935 Labour government and provided at low rental costs for those citizens who needed it. For refugees too, like his mother.

We also got free education – for me, at Wairakei Road school just down the road; free health care (I broke both arms in the three years we lived there); and State Advances housing loans for those who wanted to buy a property. There was a Family Benefit for mothers to support each child, money that could be capitalised to create a deposit on a home. Socialism is so destructive, isn’t it: socialism at its best destroys hunger, ill health, ignorance and keeps us warm. It creates a more cohesive society and gives us all a leg up.

Some of those who benefited from this regime went on to enjoy the kind of success it was designed to promote; many remembered this largesse, funded by taxation; others forgot and set out to undermine egalitarianism and replace it with naked individualism, the exact laissez-faire dog-eat-dog culture, devil take the hindmost that the welfare state set out to eliminate.

Now the enemies of egalitarianism want to sell my house and John Key’s old place; they want to take these properties paid for by our taxes and pass them over to housing charities, private-public partnerships and even – yes – overseas providers. They want to disembowel the tradition of communal ownership and government responsibility for housing our lowest-earning, most vulnerable citizens.

These people are not governors, they are sales people: like Margaret Thatcher at her most crazed, they do not really believe there is such a thing a society – just competing interests, “consumers and taxpayers” – and their weirdest offshoot, the Act Party , with a naked self-regard, makes it clear they want to destroy “Big Government and the Nanny State”.

This is what it looks like next door to my place: a State house for rent, private agents.

Well, my Nanny actually was sheltered by the state and lived to the ripe old age of 89, cared for by good housing, adequate nutrition and social stability in her latter years. She survived two world wars and came from England in 1950 to live with us, in her seventies. Her first home in New Zealand was our first State house in Plymouth Crescent, Bayswater. If she arrived in Auckland today, she might have found her family sleeping in a car, or paying rack rents to local and overseas investors with little money left for life’s necessities.

That’s the choice I see in this election: “me, me, me – or us”, the primacy of the individual or the cohesion of the group that in its security, actually produces a better quality of life for all. I was at a candidate’s panel at the University of Canterbury yesterday, where I watched in disbelief as the National Party candidate, Nicky Wagner bobbed up and down behind her microphone, chanting, “Me, pick me, pick me!” Maybe she got carried away in the spirit of the moment, trying to upstage her Labour Party opponent, Duncan Webb, making his closing statement. It was a moment to conjure with. I wish I’d taken a video.

 

Sexist tracts

http://pantograph-punch.com/post/patriarchal-parade

A review of Blood Ties and others, by Vaughan Rapatahana in The Pantograph Punch.

 

It was a surprise to wake up this morning and discover I was a purveyor of sexist tracts, but after after reading this writer’s mis-reading of the poem T-bar Clothesline Okarito in his earlier Pantograph Punch review of Blood Ties, I suppose I should not be startled. He had alluded to my complicity with the Curnow gang there.

I’m going to point out one or two things in reply, the first being that I was certainly influenced by male writers in my twenties as I got going: they were cock-a-hoop indeed. Baxter and Hone Tuwhare are prime candidates. What the reviewer has no knowledge of is that my internal whakapapa of influence begins with a well-remembered poem at primary school level, written by Babette Deutsch, about soldiers marching. At high school, I have clear memories of Ursula Bethell’s work.

More than the poets, however, my early life was shaped by women, my mother and my grandmother, and my lovers, daughter and granddaughters, who, as he seems blind to observe, figure several times in Blood Ties.

Mary at Dawn (39) tells of taking my mother to an Anzac Day service; We’ll Meet (43) speaks of mourning for her presence after she died in 2005; Rocket Engines ((45) speaks of my kuia’s PTSD and the tales she told me of V-1 rocket attacks in WW2; Plunging remembers the death of my partner, as I pass the spot near Otira where she died in a road accident in 1978; Crow Canyon (157) and Light from Saturn speak of a time spent with my daughter in the USA, the latter is directed to my granddaughter. The poem written in 1974 at my daughter’s birth (161) uses a phrase he objected too in the earlier review, speaking of the newborn’s “female mammal sleeping eyes”. This to me is more about music than sexism, but each to their own.

Tuna (143), Hard Travel to Arahura (145) and Papatipu kissing me (147) are all love poems, and while I would never pretend to know what it was like for the subjects of those poems to deal with me, I loved them and still do.

The most disturbing aspect of his work is the complete mis-reading of T-Bar Clothesline, Okarito (89), a poem about marital rape – or any other kind of sexual abuse really, where the victim has to get up the next day as my mother and the women of her generation had to do, and pretend nothing has happened. In her generation, marital rape did not exist as an offence.

The poem does not as Vaughan Rapatahana misconstrues it, relegate ” the sullied woman to the level of flapping linen on a West Coast clothesline”, but points out the obvious: the abused woman has to get up and hang out the washing, smile at the neighbours, feed the kids and on and on. The washing line and the creatures in the bush and lagoon underline this as, does the final line, the neighbourly comment, “it’s marvellous drying weather”.

 

I was amazed at how he got there, but when you look at the charge sheet, the way he’s constructed me and my work throughout, as a kind of throwback, it’s obvious he has an agenda that denies admission to anything outside of it. Yes, there are many wounded women in my poems, I’m speaking about what I grew up with and knew much later.

And yes, there are a good number of wounded and troubled men; my generation were raised, many of us, by disturbed and broken individuals who had served in the Second World War and come back with a whole raft of issues that we know about now as PTSD: alcoholism, gambling addiction, sleep disorders, anxiety attacks, rages, domestic violence and suicide. Their influence on me is a deep stain on my palette, but what kept me sane were the women around me. If I haven’t saluted them often enough in my work for this reviewer’s attention, I don’t think the problem is mine.

In case he did miss the point about my position, here’s another poem closer to home.

After School

 

I climb from the school bus

capped on the arse 1-2-3

by the Backseat Gestapo

in navy-blue shorts: home safe.

 

White weatherboards, black tar

roof rear up on rotten piles

to greet me, their bedroom

window starts to wink:

 

“Wanna know what we

saw, last night, Fatty?”

Everybody knows I do.

Twenty-five years freeze

 

those holes I bite through

the pillow and no-one comes.

She screams, my sisters shudder.

The front door whangs shut.

 

With a cry that is fear

made flesh, she falls

through the dark

into the ditch.

 

An impromptu admission, Tielt, Belgium.

It was a glorious summer’s day as we stepped off the train from Ghent and made our way out of the small town of Tielt on our hire cycles, heading for the Achielle Bicycle Factory near Egem, in Belgium. Jeanette had been planning this part of our trip for weeks, if not months, visiting the factory from where she imports these quality cycles into New Zealand. As we raced downhill on the cycleway out of town, just after 10am, I got my phone out and took her picture.

You can see what an excellent cycleway it is, complete with yellow plastic bollards to mark out a bus stop, one of which you can just see over her shoulder. I was so pleased with this effort, I decided to take a selfie.

I had my new racing cyclist’s hat on and was feeling pretty damn good. Next thing…

…I was airborne, with my finger still pressed on the phone as the above aerial shot indicates. I smashed onto the cycleway, banged my head, saw stars, broke my glasses and ended up on top of my bike, knee bleeding, hand bleeding, cursing my stupidity and swearing that now,  I’d  *#@**!!-up Jeanette’s big day – all in the same moment, sore, dazed and unable to get up. I’d rammed one of the yellow plastic bollards and canned off.

Next thing I know, a man is leaning over me, taking my pulse and asking if I can stand up? He’s an off-duty nurse it turns out and he’s ringing an ambulance. Jeanette arrives having noticed my absence and spotting me lying down, with my angel attending, cycled back to view the wreckage. Now I’m in an ambulance, on my way staring at the vehicles’s ceiling, to Sint-Andriesziekenhuis,  in the hands of the wonderful Belgian hospital service for the next four hours.

I can testify that when this picture was taken, I was feeling pretty groggy and chastened. I’m not sure what was worse: the pains in my body or the dent to my pride. I’d landed in a municipal hospital with a population of around 20,000, with a dedicated, efficient and caring staff who, without demur whizzed me from roadside to outpatient and finally discharge with a kindness and care I can still hardly believe.

I was given a full inspection: brain function checked, X-rayed, a CT scan, a tetanus shot and a referral to the opthalmologist after a fracture was detected on the orbit floor, the skull bone beneath my right eye. He showed us the picture, assured me the crack was minimal and not leaking blood into the sinus cavity. I’d dodged that bullet. I could leave hospital but should keep an eye on things (I did suffer nose bleeds for a few days, but they eventually stopped). I was meant to avoid sniffing and blowing my nose, which I mostly forgot to observe.

After a consultation with the accounts section, charged a set 150 EUR fee and giving our insurance details, I was discharged with the advice to seek medical care if symptoms like vomiting, vertigo and fever recurred. We then walked from the hospital back to our bikes and carried on to the factory, about 10-15kms away.

On retrieving the bikes, I noticed that my blood had dried onto the path; I reflected on just how sweetly Providence had ensured I was not so much more the worse for wear than I actually was. Sure, my body ached in several places and over the next week, my bruised ribs would make sleeping difficult, but I’d escaped with a mild concussion delivering me a regular daily headache. I could claim – rather lamely – to have shed my blood on Flanders fields.

I may not have felt much like going for another bike ride, but I was determined that Jeanette wasn’t going to miss out on her visit to meet her suppliers and tour the factory. Fortunately, the day was so hot that the workers had been sent home early so our late arrival meant the owners were much freer to meet and greet us, receive our gift of manuka honey and give us the guided tour.

The sign at the factory gate has a bit of history: Achielle were originally frame makers who supplied other manufacturers, but when in 1946 they decided to make the whole bicycle themselves, they crushed all the old frames – only to find later there was shortage of the steel tube needed! They survived that and have gone from strength to strength, producing some of the world’s best hand-made commuter bicycles, on site.

There was one willing worker left when we arrived and you can still see how hot it was.

Some of the wonderful works of cycle art that we saw that day.

I’m so glad we made it and my moment of madness didn’t force a cancellation on the day. That would have been very sad, not to say mortifying. The reason I’ve written this is not just to celebrate these marvelous machines, nor to make obvious my own shortcomings – but rather to salute the Belgian hospital system as I experienced it that day.

On reflection, what is it that we owe to each other as human beings that these good people personified that day in their treatment of me, a stranger? It was in my view a duty of care enacted, a Good Samaritan-like culture where everyone from the nurse who saw me lying on the roadside to the nurse who waved us farewell on discharge, treated me as an equal, as one of their own.

This is the fruit of civilization; when I hear of the woes of the NHS in the UK and the madcap schemes of Republicans in the US to undo the minimal gains that Obama was able to make in bringing healthcare within the reach of all American citizens – I have to ask myself, what does it take for the world to act like these Belgian angels did towards me? What is the difference? Why not for all? How can we leave each other on the road?

There was icing on the cake, by the way: I broke my glasses, as you can see in the above image of my shiner. They’re frameless and the arm came off on the right hand lens. A temporary fix by Jeanette got me to an optician in Paris a couple of days later; they were Silhouette dealers and fixed them in fifteen minutes, no charge. Grace abounding.

the latest coup: poem

the latest coup seen from Kaikoura after the 7.8M quake

 

 

i. Steve Bannon surveys a plate of stale lamingtons

 

Like I told the Pope

and like I’m telling the President

there’s good capitalism

and there’s bad capitalism

and one’s come off its Judeo-Christian

foundations, so we’re here to fix it

and fix Big Government, like Lenin did.

What the fuck are these pink fluffy dice

on my desk anyway? Libtards?

 

 

ii.Donald Trump slips on a pair of jandals

 

Fantastic. Beautiful. Signing orders.

I could do this all day.

I could do anything all day.

There’s never been a President like me.

Never has been. Beautiful.

What’s next, Steve? Who cares?

I’m what’s next, me.

See these crappy made-in-China flip flops.

They’re Hillary’s! That’s funny! Hilarious!

 

 

iii.  Mike Pence goes whale watching.

 

Mr President? Mr President? Sir?

Dear Lord, why won’t he see me?

I’m right here, here behind Steve.

What if he died, Steve? Steve?

Steve, you asshole! Sorry, Steve.

I’m Number Two, not you.

I try harder. You know I do.

Send me to New Zealand, please! Anywhere

but here. I love whales, watching you.

 

 

iv. Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway go to Hobbiton

 

Were holding them accountable!

We sure are. Steve says so.
And Donald backs him up. You like Orcs?

Sure, Orcs are fine with me. Gollum, too?

Gollum is so cool, he’s like Donald.

Who’s Frodo then? Mike Pence?

Mike who? No way! Frodo’s such a loser, keep

it real! That Steve, he’s gotta be Sauron!

To Aitutaki

 

Last day on Rarotonga, off into Avarua and few hours wait at the airport for our Air Rarotonga flight to Aitutaki at 4.30pm. The tiny Embraer Bandeirante is intimate after the big 777-200 that flew us here: you can watch the co-pilot do his crossword after takeoff. It is a milk run after all, but I do like pilots who keep an eye on what is going on outside the aircraft.

A short 50 minute run and we’re over Aitutaki and coming in on paradise; Aki our driver to Paradise Cove welcomes us with fragrant ‘ei (lei) of frangipani and gardenia, and then Jeanette’s friends, Ade and Chris repeat the honour. They’re Kiwi expats who spend the New Zealand winter here.

 

The van looks like a painter’s wagon from the 1980s with rear seating looted from a Humber or an old Railways bus. We rattle along under palms and pull up at the place well named after a biblical oasis. Our thatched, stilted whare on the beach is named Are Tiare Taina – Gardenia House.

Jeanette who has been battling a headache for the last 48 hours has to lie down, while I do a recce of the beach: fabulous site, the surf breaking way out on the reef and the water at the land’s edge, almost still. It proves a long night for her and we’re glad when morning dawns for the new day.

 

I head down for breakfast on the beach and afterwards, hire a bike to ride down to Maina and the local trading post to get her some fruit and ice blocks. It’s all very laidback with plenty of scooter traffic and few motor vehicles. The store has everything including plastic garlands for the discerning scooter rider to decorate their head. I might invest later.

 

On my return, after some sustenance, Jeanette feels up to a walk so we set off back down the same road in search of a café, that proves elusive. There is a dairy open and after some cool drinks, we head home, picked up separately by a nice young local woman on a flash new Honda 50: she takes Jeanette to the whare and comes back for me. Class. Not like the motor vehicles we thumbed that roared on by.

I thank her and deliver a mihi and a blessing in (NZ) Māori; when she looks bemused I ask her if she understood me. No, she knew it was Māori from back here but she didn’t get it all, so I translate. “Thank you for your hospitality to strangers, may the Lord bless and keep you always”.

 

As the sun goes down and the first stars emerge, we share a meal of tuna and mashed potato with salad under the open skies, giving the last few bites to Bitza, the beach cat who knows just how to rub tourists up the right way at the right time: perfect. Tomorrow, it’s off to hire scooters at Popoara Rentals, then swimming and paddle boarding into the lagoon.

 

Another morning dawns at Paradise Cove – which we will later learn has a less than paradisal e-Coli problem, so no swimming off the beach. Breakfast with a die-for view precedes our expedition to hire a pair of scooters from Popoara and explore the island. The two 125cc Velimoto auto scoots look a little like they have been imported from an Eastern bloc country before the fall of the Wall, but they point and shoot, which is the main thing.

Having independence means we can explore at our own pace, so off we buzz on a circuit of Aitutaki; not quite the Isle of Man TT, but close. The average speed is 30kph on a limit of 40: what’s the hurry anyway? We take it easy. It is strange to ride without a helmet, in shorts and jandals, but after a while it seems normal – everybody else does. Just don’t fall off, ok? There is a hospital.

 

Back for lunch after a windblown fun ride past waves of coconut palms, we find divine organic food at Tauono’s Cafe just down the road, probably the best meal I’ve tasted for years. Banana chicken with local delicacies, like apple breadfruit and coconut cake to follow. Sonja the chef is a German-Canadian import who married into the local culture years ago and is now a widow, after her beloved Tauono died in 2009. Now she carries on the torch for organic gardening and cooking. She should be world famous.

 

Time for a swim and we head up the lagoon, to meet a couple of local spearfishermen coming in from out beyond the reef with a load of small fish. The water is warm but shallow, so I float while Jeanette plays with her GoPro waterproof video camera. The real fish fun will come on Monday with the Teking Reef tour: here there are only starfish and a schools of sprats that skip along the shoreline, pounced on by herons at dawn and dusk.

 

Next we visit Ade and Chris in their expat bach and get a bit of local history, arranging to meet at the Night Market for a meal after 5pm. They have plenty of inside goss after four years coming and going; now they spend most of their time on the island. It could grow on me. I think you would need to feel that a certain part of your creative life was behind you; that you were prepared to disappear out of your old New Zealand identity, shed that skin and reinvent yourself as a local, like these two happy Kiwis.

The Night Market is fun: a few stalls selling local kai, goat curry, chicken and beef; plenty of tourists like us have turned up to feast. After gorging on the delicious spicy chicken, we spend some time at the Fishing Club where a party is starting after the day’s fishing contest. This is a big deal, with a team over from Raro to compete.

 

There’s a local culture group in the park with drums and fire dancing to top off the evening; their amazing party trick is to do the Olympic Rings, two dancers on top of three and twirling fire. After this display, we scoot in the dark down to The Boat Shed bar for the Bledisloe Cup game, where the All Blacks inflict a 29-9 fire dance on the Wallabies and we head home replete.

 

Today is the second leg of the island exploration: breakfasted, we mount the scooters and head south to Maina and some tourist shopping first at the trading post. After a coffee and a chat to the cook and barista at the store cafe – “I tell my friends to come here and not Rarotonga – that’s like Auckland, or Sydney!” – we head off onto the sandy coastal tracks and the red dirt volcanic trails of the inner island.

 

Our first strike of gold is to see a local fisherman out on the reef, coming back in across the lagoon, poling his yellow boat: gold on turquoise, it is like a jewelled icon in a vast blue cathedral vaulted by the sky, established on the waters. We are looking for the ancient marae site – Te Pokai o Rae – but no success so far. Passing local cultivations of taro, cassava and banana, we remember Timi our guide on Rarotonga and feel at least a little well informed.

The usual scattering of chickens punctuates our noisy passage past goats tethered and loose, pigs tied up and crunching coconuts, which lie sprouting on the roadside. Easy to forget they are giant seeds: warning, do not stand under a tree for too long! Death can occur when the nuts fall like cannonballs.

 

We find the marae with its mysterious groups of stone witnesses and wonder what went on here back in time, before the Papa’a arrived to break the sky open and change the order of this world with the book and the gun. The silence is piercing.

 

Back at the Maina Store, we order burgers and chat with Klaus and his son, whose German I heard at the park last night. He is a former pearl trader from Munich, now living off the share market: his mother a Tahitian who met his German father in Paris. We swap addresses and spend a nice time speaking German, mine a trifle rusty but he is polite and helpful with corrections. The son proudly shows us his sheath knife made with a Sollingen blade and bought in Bangkok.

The afternoon is swimming time: we find a good spot near where our friends recommended, passing Ade’s Threads and asking permission. She is fine and gives directions, so we won’t blunder into the pricey, exclusive Pacific Resort where the well heeled go to escape the less well provided for.

 

The beach is the same and the water is a democracy, once we plunge in and look back at their expensive loungers and warning signs that the sand there is a private place. It ain’t: the locals pass by as always, doing what they do. The lagoon is warm and healing, it’s a pleasure just to float around like driftwood and chat idly. I feel for a moment like my world has disappeared, the one back home with its octopus arms of stress and concerns. That’s why we’re here.

 

The day ends with a superb meal at Tupuna’s Cafe with the promise of church tomorrow and more divine singing from the heart of Aitutaki. Back at the whare, it’s Island Night and we lie in bed listening to the pounding drums.

 

Sunday dawns like Saturday, with a trifle more cloud but the same atmosphere as usual: relaxed and easy. We head for church before 10am and arrive to the sound of joyful harmonies within the white vision that is Ziona Tapu – Holy Zion, the heavenly mountain of the Lord.

Within her walls, the white clad choir, the women with their decorated woven hats, the men with blinding white shirts and thin black ties proceed to call up heaven on earth with powerful acapella singing in Aituaki Māori and English. The visitors – us – are welcomed and the service swings into action.

 

On the painted and decorated ceiling, I spy an anchor facing the painting of the ark of the tabernacle on the other wall, the Holy of Holies, with inscription “Ebera 6:19”. I release it’s a famous verse in Hebrews, about hope being an anchor for the soul, “which enters the Presence behind the veil…where Jesus has entered for us”. They know their bible here and the iconography tells a story. Every time they sing, I feel uplifted by the raw power of their worship and carried to that place of which the anchor speaks.

 

After the service we head out to Koru Cafe for lunch, past the airport on its finger of sand, compacted coral laid down by US Seabees in 1942 as part of staging post run to Australia, away from the danger of the Solomons. The first aircraft to land here were B-24 Liberator bombers and in the 1950s, Globemasters on their way to Antartica, via New Zealand. Harewood, Christchurch in fact, where I saw them as a boy of eight or nine, droning overhead with their orange dayglo tails.

 

On our way back from the cafe, we call in at the airport, where I glean the above information from a display in the tiny terminal; heading out, we stop to talk to the No Sunday Flight protestors with their banners at the entrance, an eight year long fight to silence the skies and keep the Sabbath holy.

The afternoon passes reading and then dinner at the flash Pacific Resort down the road. As we enter the dining room, two moko (geckos) fall from the rafters at our feet, and I recall how when we entered the church this morning, one fell on my head – or so it seemed. The only other explanation was that it had crawled into my new Aitutaki cap overnight, lodged between the cardboard lining I’d neglected to remove on buying it, and the material itself. Were these showers of lizards a sign?

 

Monday is the big lagoon adventure: snorkelling with Teking Tours. We assemble at the wharf for instructions and head out with our pilot and guide Opu and Captain Cook his offsider who we drop off in the shallows near Maina Island; he wades ashore towing an Esky with the food he will prepare for our lunch.

 

Then it’s off to the first pool to feed the fish and begin snorkelling. I take a while to get used to the facemask and the breathing tube but by the next stop, I’m flippering face down into fish wonderland like a human torpedo. The fish hug the coral as we pass over, just like in a David Attenborough TV series; they are a child’s crazy crayon series of hues, variations of red, yellow, green and blue you could not invent – but someone did.

We head hungry for that meal on the island and feast on a sumptuous range of fish, chicken, steak and local fruits, along with coleslaw and freshly grated coconut, all displayed in giant clam shells. I have never tasted anything and good as this before nor felt the urge to devour it all like a wolf. Unforgettable morning.

 

Red-tailed Tropic Birds wheel all around us as we eat and their fearless young sit under the trees as we pass, as if this is Eden morning and the creatures do not yet flee at man’s approach. Above them float a squadron of Frigate Birds, soaring and riding the tropic airs with no effort at all, masters of the winds. They cannot land on water, of course, having no oil in their feathers, so they must stay aloft over the seas.

 

We end the day with a sprint across the lagoon in bucking waters to One Foot Island where you can get your passport stamped – if you bring it. We walk the sandbar to the place where the story goes, a father gave his life for his son by fooling an enemy war party that there was only one person on the island, walking in the boy’s footprints, then hiding him up a tree knowing he would die but his son would live.

 

Teking Lagoon tours finish with a trip to Akiami where in the 1950s, TEAL Solent flying boats used to land and moor while refuelling for the next leg of the Coral Route. Fabulous sights and tales, the perfect way to crown our penultimate day in Aitutaki.

Our final day was just chilling out, postcards, lunch with our dear new friends Ade and Chris, the ideal expatriates: living simply locally, involved in the small but tightly knitted community, “the benevolent prison” that is Aitutaki.

 

You cannot go far, and you find yourself very soon back where you started; it is hard for the young, Chris says, they really have to go if they want more: Rarotonga, New Zealand, Australia or further. This is the old island story about the outward flow of the locals and the inward tide of tourists like us.

It has had the interesting effect of teaching me I am really a Pacific person and that New Zealand is not a southern outpost of European culture, but of the Pacific. I knew this in my mind of course, but being here in the flesh, in these latitudes and longitudes, I could feel it.

 

I feel that if we in New Zealand want to have a sense of belonging, it needs to be outward looking, not backward: out to the ocean, out to the sea of islands and the island people, that same map of the world Epeli Hau’ofa wrote of years ago. Meitaki ma’ata e au motu Kuki, kia manuia!

 

 

 

 

To Rarotonga

First day in Raro on Island Time. Landed yesterday washed out from lack of sleep to our first “small world” discovery: Te Uira our taxi driver to the Edgewater Resort was in my Māori language class at Canterbury in1998-99 and was taught by Te Rita Papesch. He’s happy to be back home now but wishes there could be more to the economy, now that tourism has taken over.

 

Roads here (correction, “the road“) are busy with scooters: no helmets, shorts and skirts and jandals on a 50kph limit, so maybe they don’t have too many crashes requiring skin grafts. Little kids hang on to mama, shop girls buzz around with flowered garlands and along the roadside under the coconut palms framing the near vertical mountains, chickens graze. Relaxomatic mode ensues.

 

 

Had an early night to get up fresh for our first full day, with a trip on the bus to Avarua. The island is certainly ringed with tourist traps, beach hotels and cafes, dive shops, car and scooter rentals, but it looks pretty relaxed with almost nobody passing us all the way. We arrive in the main town after first circling the island’s main traffic feature: a roundabout. Not a red, green or amber light in sight.

 

After some brunch – coconut pancakes, yum – we head for the old palace where Eruera (Ted) Nia was laid to rest in June. We search for Ettie Rout’s grave in the nearby church but no luck there. Ted’s grave site is unmarked but fresh concrete reveals his resting place. Aere ra, e te rangatira! I say a poroporoaki and we leave him in peace.

 

On the return bus trip, a different driver who cracks jokes and sings songs entertains us. I guess this will be the only time I ever get to hear a bus driver sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Time for a swim: these new Warehouse reef shoes feel like moon boots and with my glasses off, the few reef fish seen through goggles look a trifle impressionistic. Off to the market tomorrow.

 

Wake to discover the All Blacks have thrashed Australia 42-8, so that’s a good start to the day; might be a replay later on the down-home-hardcase local sports channel that feels like its been produced by people who have just walked into a studio. Nice. This morning after breakfast early, we head for the town market at Avarua and catch some real local colour: not a beige anything in sight. Even my compatriot baby boomer tourists with their bad veins and white flabby bodies have come prepared, in colour – kind of.

 

We cruise the many local stalls selling everything from taro to paua jewelery; grizzled elders kōrero in the local Māori reo as they sit behind the tables stacked with fruit and vegetables, keeping alive a vanishing world. The local paper speaks of a reo endangered as fewer and fewer children are growing up speaking the language. English – swamping the culture with tourists like us – is as usual, the enemy of indigenous identity.

 

After a shirt and jandal shopping foray, we head back for a coffee at Salsa, where they will feed you on the finest coconut pancakes west of Tahiti. Bacon and banana sweetened with maple syrup: why are our fellow tourists eating scrambled eggs, like you can buy in any cafe in New Zealand?

 

I have spotted a poster on the window outside Vonnia’s, advertising an exhibition at the National Museum: conch shell carvings by Michel Tuffery and local artists that memorialise the 500 Cook Island soldiers who served with the Māori Pioneer Battalion in the Great War. We walk to the site and find it is closed on Saturdays, followed by a three-legged dog we have picked up in our perambulations. The Cook Island kuri is a ubiquitous, homeless kind of beast that wanders at will, like the chickens.

 

We head back to Cook’s Corner via the Library and University of the South Pacific: this is where higher education happens after high school. The bus we need to catch – clockwise this time – departs from this famous corner every 30 minutes, servicing the tourist accomodations that ring the island. There is no public transport apart from these rattly buses; few locals use them, preferring their scooters. I find a nice honu (turtle) pendant as a souvenir and compare tatau with the shop assistant: she loves my Pule art work and her whānau design abstracts are superb.

 

The bus is packed, the window is jammed so no blasts of cool air this trip; we rattle and roar from stop to stop, passengers alight at the well-appointed resorts and spas, sandwiched by the dilapidated homes of the locals, their whanau graves and the dazzling array of churches: SDA, Mormons, Catholic, Pentecostals and Baha’i. Paradise is definitely run by the godly.

 

Sunday dawns and it’s time for our visit to the CICC church at Arorangi nearby. This was founded initially by LMS missionaries in the 1800s and today, is one of the largest Christian denominations. We board a bus with a dozen other interested parties off for a cultural experience; for us, it’s a normal Sunday in a Māori church.

 

In this one of course, the dominant language in the local culture – among mature adults at least – is not English. We’re used to a liturgy in Māori back home, but here, with a few genuflections to “our overseas visitors”, they run it their way. We’re ushered to the upstairs seating by a deacon who says cameras are ok, which is great as the colour and the fabrics, the hats and and faces of the people shout life in all its glory.

 

There follow prayers, notices, singing, sermons, everything you would expect, but here, it is full of a communal passion I have never experienced before, either in full blast Pentecostalism, or Moravian communities where the whole group can at times seem like one organism, effacing individuals. You literally feel in the singing as if you have entered the throne room of grace.

 

My fingers burn up image after image on the tiny Lumix LX70 with its massive zoom lens; any other camera would be intrusive, but this classic device is not much bigger than a pack of Rothmans. I can’t wait to share to power and the glory of this church and this people with others. Three hours later, we are still there.

 

This is because today is a celebration of Cook Island youth and four groups have assembled to recite scripture verses by heart, sing himene, perform skits and generally give it their all, to show the elders they are ready to take on the mantle of evangelism for the next generation. It is encouraging to see they are all Māori speakers.

 

The marathon ends with some of our party having ducked out halfway; expecting an 11.30am finish, we were still in the church at one o’clock. Pity for them that they missed the feast afterwards, as this was a special day and so it was more than a cup of tea. The table was spread with all the best the island could provide and we climbed into the bus for the return journey full to bursting, body soul and spirit.

 

Monday morning we’re booked on an Eco Cycle tour with Storytellers: Timi our driver and guide is a local man who never wants to live in New Zealand with his parents. His grandparents brought him up and he loves it here where “the loudest noise is the sound of the chickens”.

 

We pick up Bob, a retired printer from Wanganui, a game retiree with a few tasty views on “the Maoris” back home (he seems unaware that Timi is a relative, since the waka left from here around 1350). We get fitted out for our mountain bikes and head inland on the Ara Metua, into the cultivations of the locals you can’t see easily from the tourism-dominated ring road that hugs the coast and the beaches.

 

 

Timi takes us on a guided tour of taro, banana, arrowroot and many other local crops, giving us the benefit of his encylopaedic hands-on local knowledge. We discover that the government does not own the land, the people do; there are no fences and title is with ancestral family links; unused land, or that left behind by those who have gone to NZ, is tilled by somebody else.

 

He’s a warm and generous host and unhurried; we get to the picnic area on the beach a few minutes after noon, to a spread of rice, chicken, prawns and taro chips. Just the best way learn some local history, geography and share time with a Cook Island man who is happy to stay right here. His kids will go to Auckland for high school, where their grandparents live, thirty years after leaving. Not Timi: “the noise drives me crazy, I only stay one week”. We can see why now.

 

Tuesday the plan is to hire scooters and do some exploration on the back road and some other sites. Problem is, the rain has set in and it means get wet and scoot, or hire a car. Both being slightly mad, we opt to scoot and so get two Honda Lead 100cc autos from Tipani Hire, $20 a day, magic. Heading through Arorangi to Rutaki, southeast, the tropical rain sets in and along the coast, exposed to the sea, it feels like we might get blown off.

 

No way back now, we stop sopping at Te Maire Nui Gardens and with hot coffee, regroup. We cut our garden tour short and head back on the main road for Muri where the rich cats are sleeping still, and stop at the departure point of the waka that sailed to Aotearoa. Too wet and cold to tarry, time for a brief mihi to those hero migrants who are the ancestors of our many friends back home.

 

 

We dogleg west to the inner road and all seems well until Jeanette is struck down by headache from nowhere that proves disabling. It’s all she can do to stay upright and slowly, we head for the National Museum in Avarua where we planned to visit the Michel Tuffery exhibition of carved mother of pearl shells that are a memorial to the Kuki Airani soldiers of WW1.

 

The kind museum worker sees our problem immediately and provides water and paracetamol to get us to a point where I can take Jeanette on pillion back to the resort and come back for her scooter later. I do a quick recce of the exhibition while she recovers: the backlit carved shells with the faces of the soldiers are stunning, archetypes, demi-gods, each with their own special feature.

 

Many have a flower behind their ear and a lemon squeezer hat; some have shovels (for trenching and tunneling); others rifles with bayonets, gas masks and all the accoutrements of modern war. They look Homeric in their eternally fixed gazes, men who left a paradise of sorts to visit hells of slaughter, fighting for a King whose principal contribution to their lives was to conquer them first.

 

We manage to get ourselves back to base two-up so the patient can rest in the dark, managing the pain as best she knows, until later in the day, it lifts enough for us to continue. We visit the wonderful work at Pacific Weave where an artist from Penrhyn has opened up a new store. Amazing shell and fibre work that calls out for a home, the kind of skill and beauty you can take with you that is a level above the regulation tourist tat.

 

 

We end the day with a tuna feast at the legendary Tamarind House, navigating there and back two up on the wee Honda in the rain and the dark. This would have to be the best restaurant so far, with Oceans a close second. Chunks of yellowfin in curry for me, while Jeanette goes for a tuna steak, finished off with a shared coconut ice cream.

 

Writing about what one has eaten – unless you are a restaurant critic – is not ideal, it seems somehow unkind, as if inviting friends to a feast and refusing them food. Last night here finished off with a marathon dream which carried on in my head as it woke me. I was giving an off the cuff presentation about Tutakangahau and Elsdon Best. It almost felt like the two of them came into the room.