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Editorial

Celebrating catastrophe

Here’s a story: a naval vessel arrives in a foreign land, scopes it out, stakes a claim. Its crew is armed. They murder some of the local people and steal their goods. We would usually call this an act of war. In New Zealand, we call it an encounter. On October 6, 2019, it will be 250 years since Royal Navy Lieutenant James Cook first sighted Aotearoa, and commemorations of his visit will be taking place throughout the year. The government will spend $13.5 million on marking this through a program called Tuia Encounters 250, and a further $9 million will be provided for community events through the Lotteries Grants Board. Using the word ‘encounters’ to describe the first meetings of British and Māori is a euphemism—a poor substitute for the enormity of what took place. We need to find better words to describe what happened. We need to be honest about the nature of the Endeavour’s mission—to take possession of land and expand the British Empire—and the impact that it had. We have the text of the secret orders that Cook unsealed in 1769, after observing the transit of Venus near Tahiti. (In summary: “Go find Australia, see if it’s got anything valuable, and claim any islands you stop at on the way.”) This obfuscation discredits New Zealanders. It treats Pākehā as though they are too fragile to cope with remembering the violence that accompanied British migration. Māori don’t have a choice whether to remember this violence or not—the ripples of it are still part of people’s lives. The bloodless word ‘encounter’ turns us away from what we have a duty to face. When I spoke to Tina Ngata about the symbolism of the Endeavour, she pointed out that remembering Cook’s visit in this manner promotes a false sense of reconciliation and unity, and furnishes the idea that we’ve put all those misunderstandings in the past. (We haven’t—just look at the way Pākehā speak about Māori on social media if you’re not sure.) Ngata is Ngāti Porou—her ancestors were among the first Māori to meet the British—and is a lone voice calling for plain speaking. “Those kinds of truths really need to be told,” she says. “It’s not about attacking [Cook], it’s not about attacking anyone—it’s about telling the full truth of the project of imperial expansion.” I’ll admit that it’s uncomfortable to imagine Cook as the tool of a military, to see his visit as the first stage of an invasion. I much prefer the story where he’s a hero—the story that’s all about daring and scientific discovery and exploration. That’s the one I was taught. But this is an opportunity to recognise that we’ve only been recounting the Pākehā story for the last 250 years. I’d like to hear the one told by the descendants of the Māori who met Cook. But we need to quieten down the first one in order to listen. As this issue went to press, Ngata was installing an exhibition at Gisborne’s Tairāwhiti Museum. It’s about Cook’s visit, from the point of view of the people who were already here, and involves art, performances, lectures and workshops. It’s called He Tirohanga ki Tai, A View from the Shore. It wasn’t funded by any of the government-sponsored grants. Many of these event-organising bodies use the word ‘celebration’. But I think that to celebrate this occasion is an insult to the people for whom Cook’s visit was a harbinger of disease, disenfranchisement, and death. We should be clear: the Endeavour is the backdrop for the opening scene of a tragedy. It symbolises something that we, as a people, never want to do again. The words we should use for its 250th anniversary are ‘lest we forget’. Māori have a whakataukī, a proverb, that I think of often: Ka mua, ka muri. ‘Walking backwards into the future.’ We move forward, but the only thing we can see is the past. We are not, as a nation, looking our past in its face. And we cannot take steps towards a unified future until we do.
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Geo News

Fragile records

In a storeroom in Mt Albert, Auckland, there stood large steel filing cabinets, which hadn’t been opened for decades. Their drawers were filled with fine sheets of glass, each in its own paper sleeve, filed alphabetically—photo negatives from the 1950s and earlier documenting work of the government research institute that’s now Plant & Food Research. When staff were moving premises in 2018, photographer Wara Bullot discovered the trove of images—documentation made by her science-photography colleagues long ago—and recognised their importance. Many of the glass-plate negatives had hand-written labels detailing the subject, its purpose and location. Others could only be guessed at. Before Kodak revolutionised film in the mid-1950s, glass-plate photography was the go-to process for documenting science, as it was more chemically stable than film available at the time. The glass-plate process was cumbersome and time-consuming, but has a unique finish—a softness and a wide range of tones. “I can only admire the skill of the people who worked in this challenging medium and used it so well to capture images that tell compelling stories,” says Bullot. “Some of these photographers, like Steve Rumsey, were phenomenal at their time. They were highly skilled and had great patience and a deep understanding of their craft.” Bullot has co-curated a selection of photographs, which will be exhibited at Alberton from January 16-27. More details and some of the images can be viewed online at scienceinthedarkroom.nz.
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Features

Departures

Since 1969, Gloriavale Christian Community has set itself apart from New Zealand society. Over the past six years, nearly 100 people have left or been expelled from the 550-strong group on the South Island’s West Coast. Gloriavale leavers know only the communal lifestyle, religious rules and conformity demanded by their former leaders. For them, Timaru might as well be a foreign country.
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Books

Tatau: A History of Sāmoan Tattooing

The first Europeans to reach Sāmoa—aboard three Dutch vessels in 1722—reported that the locals who paddled out to them were dressed from waist to heel in fringes and “a sort of artistically made silk cloth”. A later visitor, Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville, realised that this “ornament” was actually a series of indelible marks, very likely made permanent by puncturing the skin and applying the juice of herbs, “as I have seen practised by the natives of Canada”. For many years after, these early encounters, explorers, traders, and missionaries struggled to understand the social function of the Sāmoan tatau. One of the world’s most elaborate and richly symbolic systems of body decoration, it was carried out by master tattooists (tufuga), who employed sophisticated tattooing tools of various sizes, tapping them rhythmically with a wooden mallet to apply the designs. The tool itself consisted of a small comb made from pig’s tusk or bone sharpened to needlepoints and attached with coconut fibre to a turtle-shell plate, both of which were lashed to a wooden handle. The tufuga was assisted in his work by helpers (toso), who stretched the skin of the client and administered therapeutic massage. For a young male, getting a tatau, or pe’a, which covers the body from waist to knee, was not to be undertaken lightly (the female malu is lighter and its application less ritualised). Engaging a tufuga was expensive, requiring gifts of food and fine mats, and the procedure, which lasted many weeks, was painful and cloaked in formalities. But pain was more or less the point. It was, after all, a rite of passage; one with deep cultural significance, as Te Papa curator Sean Mallon and French anthropologist Sébastien Galliot make clear in Tatau, their landmark cultural history of the subject. For an individual, the tatau was, in the words of one Sāmoan religious leader they quote, “a literal inscription of his socioreligious identity, beliefs, and duties”. And its formalised patterns and imagery were “a visual depiction of his embodied life... his environment, family and God... cultural pride, beauty, bravery, ability, and potentiality”. Acquiring it created a cohort of young warriors, bonded by the experience, who were ready to fight, and if necessary to die, for their group. Western missionaries took a dim view of such things, and from the 1850s actively suppressed the practice of tā tatau. Where it survived, it was as a private ritual rather than a communal one. But it would be wrong to think of it as a rigid, unchanging cultural expression destined for inevitable extinction. For one thing, it exerted a powerful appeal to Europeans and Americans. The markings were painstakingly documented by foreign scholars and Sāmoan travelling troupes were fêted. The German governor of Sāmoa, along with some of his senior administrators, went so far as to receive the pe’a themselves. Sāmoan independence led to a revival of tā tatau, and in the 1960s and 1970s, Sāmoans arriving in New Zealand in search of work introduced it to this country. As it spread beyond its island shores, it adapted to novel conditions by harnessing new materials. Kerosene soot or Indian ink was substituted for the traditional burned candlenut-soot pigment, turtle shell was replaced by Perspex and other plastics, and sennit by nylon fishing line. In the interests of hygiene, tufuga began to use steel needles that could be sterilised in place of bone, and took to wearing latex gloves and covering pillows with plastic. Yet even as Sāmoan tā tatau became a global cultural phenomenon valued for its authenticity, it embraced new motifs and forms and was taken up by Western tattooists apprenticed in the art. As a result, it began to attract a wider range of interpretations, often loosening its ties with ritual and morphing into an expression of individual identity. Tatau celebrates—or, at least, acknowledges the inevitability of—these evolutionary departures, seeing them as the fruit of an endless search for personal and cultural meaning. Exhaustively researched, and enriched with interviews and striking documentary photography, it is a fitting tribute to a vital 3000-year-old tradition.
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Features

The reptile smugglers

There’s a dark side to herpetoculture—the hobby of keeping reptiles. Attempts to bring exotic reptiles into New Zealand put native species and ecosystems at risk, while demand from international collectors leads to the poaching of endemic geckos from fragile populations. With three-quarters of our reptiles classed as endangered, we can’t afford for any to be stolen.

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Features

Meet the migrants running New Zealand's primary industries

There is a quiet revolution taking place in rural New Zealand. Over the past decade, migrant labour has become essential to the country’s dairy farms, vineyards and kiwifruit orchards, and as a result, the culture of regional communities is changing. A bustling Sikh temple has opened in Te Puke, songs from Vanuatu warm chilly nights in Central Otago, and in Southland, around 1500 Filipinos are employed on the region’s 900 dairy farms. Yet many new-migrant families lead insecure lives, at the whim of immigration law, their future in this country uncertain.

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Editorial

What tramping and religion have in common

I didn’t grow up tramping, and I started because of a Great Walk. Tramping had seemed like something you couldn’t learn about—you had to be initiated by someone who already knew how to do it—but the Great Walks simplified things. I picked the Routeburn because it had the nicest pictures of mountains. I thought 32 kilometres was a long way, and I didn’t know what to eat or wear or bring. That trip taught me what I should have eaten and worn and brought. It taught me that 32 kilometres isn’t far, that walking all day in the rain isn’t bad, and that the people you meet in huts are some of the best around. What I did grow up with was religion. As my devotion to Christianity waned, the time I spent outside grew, and looking back, I can see that they performed similar functions in my life. I appreciated Christianity for the reminder, every Sunday, of what is essential. For the way it brought me face to face with my failings and my values. For the reminder that human connection is fundamental to life. We don’t have a lot to remind us of what is essential, and tramping is about simplicities—only after 20 kilometres in the rain do I truly understand the worth of a cup of tea and a gingernut. The outdoors strips you to the bones. It puts a dye trace on your failings and your values, and shows you when and how they emerge. It connects you with strangers—you can’t cross a fast creek in a rainstorm by yourself (and sometimes, you just have to wait). In Alain de Botton’s book The Architecture of Happiness, the British philosopher writes that cultures create buildings, objects and art that capture qualities those cultures lack—light-heartedness, perhaps, or openness. “We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them,” he writes. “We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need—but are at constant risk of forgetting we need—within.” If we’re drawn to places because we seek to inwardly resemble them in some way, then New Zealanders need something about the outdoors. Our individualism needs a reminder of the importance of others. The artificial pace of urban life needs the human pace of walking. And we seek those reminders more often in the outdoors than in religion. Last year, more of us went on a day tramp than regularly attended church. We don’t have Gothic cathedrals in New Zealand—structures that remind us that the scale of time far exceeds a human lifespan—but we have limestone karsts, coal seams, valleys carved by glaciers, and trees that were standing before the King James Version was translated. According to a 2017 Sport New Zealand survey of 33,000 people, seven per cent of New Zealanders had been on an overnight tramp in the past year. That’s more than three times as many people as played rugby. It’s more than played soccer, basketball, netball, bowls or cricket. (Tramping skews male, and vastly more Pākehā take part than any other ethnic group.) There are a lot of people who probably would like tramping, but are prevented by circumstance, or by the fact they haven’t done it before. So I want a Great Walk on every other ridgeline. I want people going door to door asking, “Have you tried tramping?” I want Great Walks to be cheaper, and I want them to be nearer major population centres. Two weeks before this issue went to print, I walked the southern third of what will become our tenth Great Walk. The track on the tops of the Paparoa Range isn’t finished yet—there’s only a poled route that would have daunted me a decade ago. On the tops are tawny alpine meadows covered in tussock, the ridgeline dropping away to the sea on one side, the Southern Alps on the other. That morning, I crossed paths with photographer Neil Silverwood and his partner Lauren Kelley going the other way, returning from taking the final photographs for this issue’s story. (Lauren is on the cover.) At the end of the day, returning to Ces Clark Hut, I realised my friend and I were the only people on the range. And as the sunlight slanted low over the ocean, turning the tussock into spun gold, I felt terrifically wealthy, then greedy, that we were the only people there to see it.
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Editorial

A third place

Our towns and cities are lacking something important, and I was reminded of this during a recent visit to Hong Kong. There, senior citizens fill the social niche that teenagers do in Auckland. They loiter in the local square with their mates, laughing raucously. When they exercise in the park, their music precedes them, emanating from tiny boom-boxes clipped to their backpacks. Each morning, I woke to their voices chatting in the street, three stories below, over their first cigarette of the day. This is a city New Zealanders like feeling superior to. “We don’t want to turn into Hong Kong,” we say, worried about intensified housing. But Hong Kong has something we don’t. It has elderly people hanging out in public, everywhere you look. Its residential areas are packed with spaces for people to meet, gather, and linger—squares, plazas, tea-houses, corner stores, tiny parks, giant parks, streetside seats—while ours are not. And we suffer for it. Ray Oldenburg, an American sociologist, first noticed these places in the 1970s. Or rather, he noticed that European cities had them, and American cities didn’t. He named them ‘third places’, because your first place is your home, and your second is your workplace, but your third place is where you relax in public, where you encounter familiar faces and make new acquaintances. These places are cheap or free. They’re open to people from all walks of life. New Zealand has a great third place—the outdoors. My favourite third place is a DOC hut, any of them—the one space in the country where anyone is up for a yarn. But I can’t stop in at a DOC hut on my way home from work, and neither can the other 86 per cent of New Zealanders who live in urban centres. Reading Oldenburg’s book, The Great Good Place, I began to wish for an urban equivalent. “A community life can exist when one can go daily to a given location at a given time and see many of the people one knows,” writes another American sociologist, Philip Slater, author of a book on loneliness. When a city has lovely spaces for people for people to stroll in, or loiter, or meet friends—and importantly for our senior citizens, when these places are close to home—then the requirement for one’s house to be large and nice enough for entertaining is lessened. And when you have places to meet your neighbours by chance, you can get to know them without the pressure of inviting them over. Oldenburg describes third places as neutral ground: no one has to play host and everyone is at ease. “If there is no neutral ground in the neighbourhoods where people live, association outside the home will be impoverished,” he writes. “Many, perhaps most, neighbours will never meet, to say nothing of associate, for there is no place for them to do so.” Why is all of this important? Because a third of us said we were lonely in the 2014 census, and one in five of us will seek treatment this year for depression or anxiety. And because our cities aren’t bolstering one of the most significant aspects of mental health: a sense of community. Yet we blame this lack of community upon ourselves—we haven’t tried hard enough to build it—when the problem is in fact the lack of a venue for this to take place. It’s akin to wondering why no one plays pick-up basketball when there’s no court, hoop or ball. As we rapidly expand our cities, as we solve our housing crises, we have the chance to correct this. We could shift away from the prioritisation of cars as a method of transport, and make our streets places for strolls and encounters. That means living a little closer together, placing useful things within walking distance, perhaps forgoing individual parcels of lawn for large, shared parks. When our third places are a drive away, elderly people are fastened in retirement villages, and teenagers stuck in suburbia. We could treat the city as our living room, kitchen, dining room, back garden and sunny deck. We could value connection over privacy. The tiny-house dwellers featured in this issue are bravely striking out for a new way of life—one where we value the spaces we share with others as much as the spaces we keep to ourselves.
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Features

Tiny houses

The idea of minimal living, an international fad, has fallen on fertile soil in New Zealand, thanks to our national housing crisis and shifting ideas about the way we want to live. For some people, a tiny house is the only home they will ever afford to own. Others are stepping off the treadmill of modern life to ask: How much space does a person really need?
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Geo News

Are you in or out?

People who vote for the same party or follow the same group regard each other as intelligent and hard-working, and see those who vote for different parties or belong to different groups as brainwashed and incompetent, according to research published in Political Psychology. Moreover, these attitudes exist no matter which side a person is on. Study participants described people who had the same opinions as them, or ‘ingroup followers’, as lions, wolves, tigers or dolphins—while ‘outgroup followers’ were depicted as sheep, snakes, hyenas or lemmings. Critically, participants thought ingroup followers were best influenced by persuasion, and outgroup followers by coercion. The authors of the study warn against assuming that “the followers of political outgroups are merely sheep who will only respond to coercion—not least because, from their perspective, the opposite is likely to be true”.
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Geo News

Old friends

Having a good time—not a long time—with grandparents may be the most important factor in a child not being ageist, or discriminatory against older people. The study of 1151 children aged 7–16 was conducted in Belgium and published in Child Development. The quality of time spent with grandparents, where children were happy, was much more influential than the quantity of time. The children who spent quality time at least once a week were the least ageist of all. There were three other factors that made children less likely to discriminate against older people: being aged 10–12 (those aged 7–9 expressed the most prejudice), being a girl, and the grandparents being in good health.
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Features

P

Most of the stellar yachting careers of New Zealand’s America’s Cup sailors began in humble seven-foot boats—a class now a century old—designed by a Public Works employee who couldn’t swim, and who was too hard up to build anything larger.
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Features

Gold rush

Mānuka honey has exploded in value in recent years, and now it’s a high-stakes business, attracting hive thieves, counterfeit products, unscrupulous players—and triggering a race for the blossom every spring, wherever the trees are in flower.
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In the field

Leave no one behind

Charlotte Graham used to live on the top floor of a wooden house in Wellington. On November 14, 2016, two minutes after midnight, it began shaking so badly that she struggled to make it to the doorway to shelter. When the earthquake finally subsided, and she heard her flatmates return to bed, she wondered: Do we all need to evacuate? Head up Mt Victoria? She couldn’t find anything online about tsunami risk. Someone on Twitter sent her a map of Wellington council evacuation zones. It didn’t have street names, but she knew the city well enough to place her house in one of the safe zones. It made her wonder: What about people who didn’t use social media? Or the internet? A longterm Radio New Zealand producer, freelance journalist and community volunteer, Graham was well versed in earthquake reporting. She wanted to know what provisions were in place for the vulnerable in disaster planning in New Zealand, and whether the organisations looking after them were getting the same kind of help as quake-stricken businesses. “It became clear that the picture in Wellington was a lot more interesting than I’d first realised,” she says, “but also in the way that Wellington’s most vulnerable were not included.” In early 2017, she won a Scoop Foundation grant that enabled her to do the legwork of finding out more: “I ended up putting in an Official Information Act request to every council in New Zealand to find out what they actually had in documentation to address the safety of vulnerable people.” Councils were, by and large, baffled. No one had asked this before. Some have yet to furnish Graham with answers to questions first posed beginning in April 2016. It’s information she believes is vital. “You can ring a government department and ask for the national picture, but you’re not necessarily going to get the minutiae of the challenges that different areas are facing,” she says. Sometimes the reporting process is time-consuming and boringly administrative—and sometimes the outcome is vitally important. The result of Graham’s research, which has spanned eight months and counting, is a national picture of our disaster readiness, more detailed than ever before.

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