Consider the lotus

Oh dear, oh dear: I think some Tongans need to talanoa with the maker of this video clip. The clip is either an exceedingly good exercise in po-faced, Duchampian surrealism or a serious, and seriously bad, attempt to say something about Tonga and its maritime chiefdom (go on, call it an empire if you'd like). Parts of the clip are - unintentionally, intentionally? - very funny. I loved the bit about Tongans having a religion named lotu, a religion based upon the adoration of the lotus flower.

Paul Janman's latest video clip is, I would like to think, less egregious. Using footage he shot with Ian Powell and fragments of radio interviews, Paul has compressed the ten day, two hundred kilometre journey that he and I made up New Zealand's least salubrious road into three rather beautiful minutes. Watch it here. 

Seleka in the Waikato

At a gym on the edge of Hamilton artists from across the Pacific have been drawing and painting and sculpting for a fortnight. They have been guests at an art hui organised by Don Ratana, a lecturer in education at the University of Waikato. I visited the hui on Sunday to see Tevita Latu and Taniela Potelo, members of Tonga's avant-garde Seleka art club.

When Taniela approached me, stepping carefully around the paintings that his peers had left to dry on the floor of the gym, I noticed that he was wearing what looked like a large shell or a small patu around his neck. He came closer, and I saw that the object was a computer mouse. In their hometown of Nuku'alofa the Selekarians, as they call themselves, are known for their ingenious and sometimes irreverent reinventions of Polynesian tradition. Members drink kava from a toilet bowl in their lagoonside clubhouse, and listen to dub and techno while they paint and draw.

Don Ratana encountered Latu and Potelo last year, when he attended a conference of the Pacific Arts Association in Tonga, and invited them to the Waikato, where they have been mingling with Tahitian, Marquesan, Kanak, Hawai'ian and Maori artists. On a couple of signs beside the entrance to the university gym a series of phrases - 'Wanna go for a cigarette again?'; 'You're working hard mate'; 'Do you like sculpture?' - had been translated into Tongan and French.

In between working, the guests of the hui have been swimming in the two pools - one of them long and dark blue, the other small, with the pale blue colouring of a tropical lagoon - that sit beside the gym. When I jumped in one of the pools with Tevita Latu he explained that his stay in the Waikato was changing his art. In Tonga, where art materials are formidably expensive, he had to paint on cardboard or ngatu cloth with a few colours. At Waikato he could have as much canvas and as many colours as he liked.

The Selekarians have always been ferociously eclectic, so it was no surprise to find them ingurgitating the styles and imagery of other artists at the hui. One of the canvases that Latu had leaned against the wall of the gym showed a figure that resembled like a hei tiki stirring a bowl of kava. He'd made the image, he explained, with the help of a Maori artist. Another work featured what looked like a tuatara with a crucifix for a tail and the pendulous breasts typical of traditional depictions of the Tongan goddess Hikule'o.

If you're quick, then you can see some of these extraordinary paintings, along with work by other guests of the art hui, at the Creative Waikato gallery in central Hamilton.

Christopher Middleton's briefcase

Christopher Middleton, who died last week at the age of eighty-nine, was one of the great outsiders of twentieth century English poetry. In the 1950s, when Philip Larkin and his cohorts were writing verses full of dour and sour realism, the young Middleton turned away from England towards the Dadaists and Surrealists and Expressionists of continental Europe. He travelled through Europe and the Middle East, translating and imitating German, French, Turkish and Arabic poetry, before eventually settling in Texas, where he taught German literature and published books with beguiling titles like The Lonely Suppers of WV Balloon and Twenty Tropes for Doctor Dark.

When I hear news reports about planes falling out of the sky and men exploding in crowded rooms I sometimes think of Middleton's elliptical and eerie poem 'Briefcase History'.

Briefcase History

This briefcase was made on the Baltic coast
in 1946
some prize pig was flayed for the leather
metal strippedf rom a seaplane
silk for the stitching picked from parachute cord

People say where did you get that singular briefcase
and then I notice it
people ask how much did it cost
and when I say fifty cigarettes not many understand
once the leather was flying wrapped
around seaplane fuel tanks the space between
wadded with two inches of rubber
this briefcase might stop a bullet I wonder

For twenty-five years I have carried in it
books of poems battered or new
cosmic mountain notebooks plays with broken spines
bread and cheese a visiting card from Bratislava
and a pliable cranny for anything to be pocketed
at the last moment

The handle ribbed with stitches of parachute silk
anchored by clasps of seaplane metal
is worn shiny and dark with sweat
the whole thing has an unspeakable grey colour
running a finger over a surface
leprous one might say
various tones of grey flickering mould green
the scored leather looks to me like the footsole
of an old aboriginal bowman earth in a space photo
nerve webs of a bat's wing

The two side pockets have their seams intact
two straps happily slip through buckles and hold there

Furthermore this briefcase has contained
a dynasty of shirts mostly now extinct nothing to declare
my Venus relics old stones believed
animal figures carved back of beyond in France

Everywhere
this briefcase has been with me somehow
I find reason to celebrate it today

Briefcase helping friend
ploughshare beaten from the sword
briefcase bag of tricks peaceful seaplane spirit
ocean wanderer
you have never contained an explosive device
never have you contained an explosive device
yet

Who's censoring Peter Wells?

In a blog post and an interview with the Herald Peter Wells has accused Creative New Zealand of interfering with his newest book, Journey to a Hanging. The book tells the story of Kereopa Te Rau, a member of Te Arawa hapu Ngati Rangiwewehi and evangelist for the syncretic, anti-colonial Pai Marire religion. After members of his family were killed by British troops during the Waikato War, Te Rau went to the Bay of Plenty, where he instigated and oversaw the slaying and mutilation of Carl Volkner, a missionary who had been spying on Maori rebels for the colonial government in Auckland. Volkner's death outraged Pakeha, and when Te Rau fled from the Bay of Plenty into the Urewera heartland of the Tuhoe people colonial troops soon followed him. Te Rau was eventually apprehended, tried and executed.

Wells says that, in exchange for funding him, Creative New Zealand insisted that he talk with the descendants of Kereopa Te Rau about his plans for Journey to a Hanging. He complains that he was made to feel ‘paranoid about getting the facts right’. He thinks that Creative New Zealand's keenness for him to consult with Ngati Rangiwewehi was a symptom of the 'political correctness' that afflicts New Zealand. This 'political correctness' has, according to Wells, made New Zealand's colonial history a 'taboo' area for researchers and writers. 

I think that anyone who is writing non-fiction should be paranoid about getting their facts right, and anyone writing about one of the most notorious series of events in New Zealand’s nineteenth century history should be particularly paranoid.

I'm puzzled that Wells thinks Creative New Zealand was somehow burdening him when it tried to get him to talk with the descendants of the man whose life he was researching. I can’t think why any researcher wouldn’t want to acquaint him or herself with the oral traditions surrounding the subject he or she was researching.

I read Journey to a Hanging a few months ago, and I remember being surprised when Wells declared that he hadn’t looked at any of the Maori accounts, either in oral tradition or on paper, of the slaying of Volkner, the hunt for Kereopa Te Rau, and the trial and execution of Te Rau. I was even more bemused when he followed this confession with some knockabout criticisims of the supposed political correctness of unnamed historians who had studied the killing of Volkner and the trial of Kereopa Te Rau. How can you decide these interpretations are biased, I thought, when you haven’t looked at half of the story yourself?

I’ve just written a short book about another terrible series of nineteenth century events, the slave raids that some New Zealanders and Tasmanians made on Tonga in 1863. I researched the book in the archives of New Zealand, looking at old newspapers and at missionaries’ letters and diplomatic despatches – but I also went to Tonga and sat around kava circles and heard what the descendants of the slave raids had to say, and looked at old Tongan publications. It’s not too hard to do all this, even if you don’t have command of a Polynesian language. Most Tongans, let alone Maori, speak English, and many oral traditions have been translated into English. Dictionaries are wonderful things.

I've blogged in more detail about Kereopa Te Rau and the killing of Carl Volkner here and here.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Talking the walk

Paul Janman and I have hobbled into the Auckland studio of Radio New Zealand and talked to Lynn Freeman about our walk up the Great South Road. A big malo aupito to everyone who helped Paul raise six grand for the documentary film he's making about the road. I'll be writing up our walk over the summer, and publishing it next year as part of a book called Fragments of the Great South Road.

Paul made this montage (click to expand it) out of his portraits of the various people - some of them old friends, some of them new friends - that we met on the road.

The end of the road

Paul Janman and I have finished our walk up the Great South Road from the King Country to central Auckland. Thanks to everyone who walked and talked with us along the way (that's Ted Jenner, who along with Ben Work helped us make the last few kilometres, in the photograph). Paul's put a new clip up here that uses footage shot during our trek.

Roading

Apologies for the lack of posts this week: I've been on the road with Paul Janman and, intermittently, Ian Powell. Paul and I have been interviewed about our journey by TV 3 and Radio New Zealand. We're posting regular updates on our facebook page.

Now I'd better get back to that wind-swept, traffic-strewn berm...