About that trilithon

I know that parents are the very worst art critics when they are viewing the work of their offspring, but I was quite impressed with the painting that my oldest son did at kindy the day before we jointly showed some slides of the Ha'amonga a Maui and other Tongan landmarks associated with the demigod and anti-hero of Moana. Let me go completely hyperbolic and suggest that there's a Rothko-like quality to those rectangular slabs of paint.

I recently ran into 'Opeti Taliai, my old boss at the 'Atenisi Institute, at Auckland hospital. I was there to pick up a new-fangled drug; he was getting his new liver tested. We'd lost touch, and got to talking about his recent efforts to develop his PhD thesis, which is called The Legitimation of Economic and Political Power in Tonga, into a book. I mentioned that I'd raided the thesis when I was reviewing the Tongan New Zealand artist Sione Faletau's remarkable flesh and blood reconstruction of the trilithon for EyeContact.

Ha'amonga a Maui translates approximately as burden of Maui, and 'Opeti links the structure with the centralisation of power in Tonga, and the extraction of a regular 'inasi, or tribute, from farmers. He suggests that the trilithon, which stood beside Heketa, Tonga's earliest capital, might have been designed as a gateway through which commoners had to bring their 'gifts' to a nascent monarchy.

'Opeti Taliai's explanation for the Ha'amonga is surely more plausible than the late King Tupou IV's claim that the monument was designed as a sort of open-air observatory, or Gavin Menzies' theory that it was raised by Chinese interlopers.

You can read 'Opeti's thesis here.

In defence of Maui

Morgan Godfery has written a long and fascinating  review of Moana, Disney's blockbusting excursion into Polynesian history and myth.

Godfery talks about how he, like many other Polynesians, grew up hearing two versions of his people's history.

The first version, which came from whanau, described the heroic and skilful settlement of the Pacific, and the development of complex cultures on often inhospitable islands.

The second version, which was broadcast in classrooms and through televisions and other media, insisted that Polynesians drifted desperately across the Pacific, were wrecked on random islands, and established primitive ways of life that were rendered obsolete by the arrival of Europeans.

Some reviewers of Moana have praised the film for making its heroes Polynesians, and for showing off Polynesian tattooing and vaka. The film's eponymous protagonist is a sixteen year old girl with an appetite and aptitude for adventure; she has been acclaimed as an 'anti-princess' and therefore a feminist hero.

Godfery, though, finds himself unable to join the chorus of praise for Moana. He points out that Moana is an invented character, not a part of Polynesian mythology, and that the supposedly feminist movie debases a real feminist hero of Pacific folklore, the fire goddess Pele, by portraying her as Te Fiti, a wretched 'lava witch'.

And like Jenny Salesa, the Tongan New Zealand MP for Manukau East, Morgan Godfery is upset by the depiction of the demigod and hero Maui in Moana. Stories about Maui's strength, cunning, and imagination have been told for many centuries in almost all of Polynesia's thirty or so cultures, from Rapa Nui to Tonga to Tikopia. When tales are told in marae, or beside a campfire, or around a kava bowl, it is Maui who is credited with pulling islands from the sea, with holding up the world, with stealing fire and sharing it with mortals.

In Moana, though, the legendary Maui is turned into what Godfery calls 'an American jerk'. Maui is obese, obnoxious, ignorant, a comic sidekick to the film's teenage hero.

Last week the kids at my oldest son's kindergarten watched Moana, and loved the film. My son came home from kindy laughing about Maui, and acting out some of his scenes.

I didn't want to detract from the kids' enjoyment of the film, but I thought I could broaden their appreciation of Maui by showing some images of the demigod's exploits in Tonga. This morning I put on my tupenu and ta'ovala and headed down to kindy.

When the kids saw the bulky mat tied around my waist with coconut fibre they were intrigued; one of them decided that I was wearing a 'Maui skirt'. I described how Tongans make ta'ovala by taking the bark off paper mulberry trees, soaking it in the sea, then beating and weaving it, and explained that on formal occasions in Tonga everyone must wear a mat.

I showed a series of pictures of sites associated with Maui on a laptop. My son, who was wearing his own tupenu, had visited all of the landmarks, and added his own commentary on them.

Even as I talked to my audience of three and four year olds, I realised how much I was simplifying the tangled network of tales that are told about Maui in the Friendly Islands. Some stories, for example, attribute Maui's deeds to a family, rather than the individual I described. Maui fusi-fonua, or Maui the puller of land, brought islands out of the sea; his nephew Maui Kisikisi was the thief of fire. A 1921 article by EEV Collocott introduced English-language readers to some of the Tongan stories about Maui.

The Ha'amonga a Maui, or burden of Maui, stands near the ruins of Heketa, Tonga's first capital, in the far east of the island of Tongatapu. Some stories say that Maui, with his prodigous strength, quarried the monument's three slabs of beachrock, dragged them to Heketa, and forced them together. In an essay for the art journal EyeContact I looked at other theories and versions of the Ha'amonga a Maui.

Scientists say that the boulder that stands near the village of Kala'au, in the west of Tongatapu, was ripped from coral rock and thrown inland by an immense tsunami about ten thousand years ago. But old stories speak of a giant chicken that was terrorising the island of 'Eua, which lies twenty or so kilometres from Kala'au across a deep and stormy Tongatapu Channel. Maui ran the chicken down and threw it across the water, away from 'Eua. When the bird landed on Tongatapu it turned to stone.

Maui's boulder almost qualifies as a mountain on an island as flat as Tongatapu, and during the wars that divided the island early in the nineteenth century the rock was used as a lookout.

A sign in the middle of Kala'au directs curious palangi to Maui's boulders, and to some of the other historic sites that cluster around the village.

It was hard work throwing a giant chicken across the sea, and as he struggled with the bird Maui sunk one of his feet into the porous earth of 'Eua. Maui's footprint is a giant sinkhole, and a favourite destination of the hikers who explore the 'Euan highland.

Lianga Huao a Maui, or Maui's archway, is found at the southern end of 'Eua, and is considered a monument to the demigod's mischievousness. After his mother forced him out of bed and into his kava plantation, and gave him a stick to dig with, Maui rebelled. He stamped his foot; the ground shook. His exasperated mother, who had as much strength as her son, grabbed the digging stick and threw it away: it stuck into a cliff. When Maui pulled the tool free, it left a hole that tourists like to photograph.

My oldest son's classmates seemed to enjoy seeing Maui's handiwork, and hearing about his feats. I hope that they now find the 'American jerk' of Moana more complicated, and interesting.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Reading Trump

At their best, Richard Seymour's texts mix political urgency with a very sophisticated use of Marxist concepts. Seymour's account of the chaotic first few days of the Trump presidency has the multiperspectival richness of a Cubist painting. He shows how Trump and his team have been cunning as well as incompetent, and how not only many ordinary Americans but sections of the country's deep state and financial elite have reasons to oppose Trumpism.

Through the archipelago

Auckland's public libraries are like small but densely forested islands scattered over hundreds of square kilometres of tarseal and tiles. I'm grateful to the city's librarians for spreading thirty copies of my book The Stolen Island through their archipelago.

I'm particularly pleased by the number of copies that have been stashed in the libraries of the city's south and west. There's even a copy in South Auckland's mobile library.

'Sometimes, the silence screams': Bruce Munro on New Zealand's slaving history

Publishing a book is like putting a message into a bottle and throwing the bottle into the sea. One is never sure whether or where the bottle will wash up; one is grateful if anyone finds it, and reads the text it has been carrying. 

I've been delighted with the response to The Stolen Island over the last couple of months. Beachcombers in New Zealand, Tonga, Australia and New Caledonia have unbottled my message, and discussed it in print, on the internet, and over the radio. 

I'm particularly pleased about two articles that Bruce Munro published in last weekend's Otago Daily Times. Munro wrote about The Stolen Island a month or so ago, and noticed the book's call for more research into New Zealand's role in the nineteenth century Pacific slave trade. He has been busy researching. 

In an article called 'Document Confirms a Slaver's Character' Munro introduces readers to Edith Cromie, from Waihao Downs in South Canterbury. Cromie is the custodian of a fragile letter, handed down through her family, that was composed by Phillis Seal, who in the 1860s was the widow of one of Hobart's wealthiest shipowners. 

Phillis Seal had entrusted a brig called the Grecian to Thomas McGrath, a veteran Tasmanian whaler, but instead of cruising the Pacific for a year and returning to Hobart with barrels of whale oil McGrath had dumped most of the ship's crew, recruited new hands, and raided the Tongan islands of 'Ata and Niuafo'ou in search of slaves. After selling Tongan captives to a slave ship bound for Peru, McGrath used his cash to buy large quantities of liquor and food. He took the Grecian down the western side of New Zealand, avoiding busy ports, and landed quietly on remote Stewart Island, which had only recently been annexed by New Zealand. 

When she wrote her letter, Phillis Seal did not know about Thomas McGrath's slave raids; she only knew that he had vanished with her property. A rage at the whaler's impudence can be detected behind the epistle's circuitous, lawyerly sentences. 

McGrath eventually visited Campbelltown, the port that is nowadays known as Bluff, where he was arrested and charged with customs offences and with appropriating the Grecian. The ship was returned to Tasmania, and to the Seal family; McGrath was found guilty of stealing the Grecian and breaches of customs law, and spent time in prison, but he was never brought to justice for his slave trading.

In a longer article called 'Chained to a Sorry Trade', Munro reports on his research into Otago's connections with the Pacific slave trade of the late 1860s and early 1870s. He refers to a couple of texts listed in the bibliography of The Stolen Island, but he has made new discoveries in the vast online Papers Past archive. 

Munro describes how the Dunedin steamship the Wainui would ram and destroy smaller, Melanesian vessels then pull the survivors of its attacks from the water and into captivity. He names Charles Clark, a Dunedin businessman, as the owner of the Wainui, and like me he links the ship's raids with the slaying of John Coleridge Patteson, the first Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, in 1871. Munro introduces two other Otago-based ships, the Lismore and the Queen of the Isles, that also carried slaves. 

In his article's eloquent conclusion, Munro describes the eeriness of encountering history in old newspapers:

[T]he digitisation of newspaper archives means the link [with the past] is restored. The reports of ships' crews kidnapping people, the talk of buying niggers, the clamour for the trade to be stopped is now all continually available, soundlessly waiting, bending the important, horrific events of 1871 towards the present day for anyone who cares to seek them.

Sometimes, the silence screams.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton] 

My top five

I've been telling the Fairfax papers and Stuff about my favourite books.

L'Ile Volee

Bernard Laussauce has written about The Stolen Island for OutreMer1re, a radio and television service and website aimed at France's dependencies in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans.

'We are not customers': Denys Trussell's Fairburnian rebuke to Auckland council

Denys Trussell is a living link to what we might call the heroic age of New Zealand poetry. In the decades after World War Two New Zealand was, as Allen Curnow said, a 'hard homeland' for poets. Instead of the grants and residencies that are today up for grabs, the state offered poets and artists of all kinds discouragement, and sometimes persecution.

Poets like James K Baxter and ARD Fairburn responded to the strictures of their society with satire and polemic. They became public figures, as they lambasted the philistinism of their age.

As a young man Denys Trussell befriended many of the important poets of the postwar era, and wrote a biography of ARD Fairburn. In his poems and his essays he channels the anger and energy of Fairburn and Baxter, and as the head of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Society of Authors he does battle with the philistines of our era, who tend to use neo-liberal economics rather than religious dogma to justify their assaults on the arts.

Today's New Zealand Herald quotes a polemic that Trussell has directed at Auckland Council, which is considering sacking fifty of the city's librarians. Trussell objects not just to the prospect of redundancies but to the way that Auckland's councillors think about libraries, books, and readers:

Libraries are not supermarkets, but complex social institutions...We are not customers. We are readers and citizens in question of knowledge, information and the pleasure of books

You can find more of Trussell's polemic here.