Monu'ia Big Mama!

Cyclone Gita nears Tonga tonight, endangering not only people & fale but entire islands. I'm thinking of Ana 'Big Mama' Emberson, who with her husband is custodian of Pangaimotu, an atoll rich in history & poor in size. In 2014 Cyclone Ian turned part of the island to desert. 

Pangaimotu was home to a famous temple where chiefs came to hear kava-drunk priests ventriloquise the gods. Beach rock was quarried for royals' monumental tombs; cuttings can still be seen at low tide. Cook anchored at the island; Pompallier held Tonga's first Catholic mass there.

For all its history, though, Pangaimotu is barely a quarter of a square kilometre in size. It's one of a score of atolls that adorn Nuku'alofa harbour. When storms come the islands list like holed ships. In 2014, Monuafe atoll sunk completely below the waves.

Monu'ia Big Mama!

Reasons for becoming obsessed by the Banks Islands

I regularly bother my friends with my obsessions. I sent this e mail to Paul Janman recently.

Hi Paul,

let me just take up an aspect of our phone conversation and explain - as brusquely as possible, since you are busy and I am engulfed by kids - why I am fascinated by the Banks Islands.

For obvious reasons, we tend, in New Zealand, to contrast European and Polynesian culture. There was, after all, a confrontation between these cultures in the 19th century, a confrontation which has shaped our society, a confrontation that in many ways continues today. And, to be sure, there are real and significant differences between the cultures of Britain and other northern European countries on the one hand and Aotearoa and Tonga and Samoa and other Polynesian societies on the other: differences in the ownership of land, in attitudes toward history and the environment, in the balance of power between the individual and the collective, and so on.

But I think that if we turn our eyes to Melanesia (a region which I'll define here as extending from the northern half of Vanuatu through the Solomons, Bougainville and Papua New Guinea, sans their Polynesian outliers, and continuing into West Papua, Maluku and the eastern fringes of Timor-Leste), then we can get a new perspective on the European-Polynesian dichotomy. We can see that, despite all their differences, there are seminal similarities between the European and Polynesian civilisations.

Consider, for example, the extraordinary ability of both the Polynesian and the British to spread over vast areas of the world and plant and reproduce their culture there. Consider the homogenity of Polynesian civilisation, despite its vast reach: the fact that the language of Rapa Nui in the far east is so closely linked to that of Hawai'i in the far north, Aotearoa in the far south, and Nukuoro in the extreme west. Consider the gods and culture heroes - Maui, Tangaloa, and the rest - who have planted themselves on island after island. Consider the durability of the institution of hereditary chieftainship, in virtually every Polynesian possession. Consider the success of Polynesians in bringing their culture to the southern islands of Vanuatu, to Fiji, and to Kiribati in the last thousand years, despite the different cultures that the peoples of these places once practiced.

Patrick Vinton Kirch argues, of course, that the similarities between the various Polynesian societies can be explained by the fact that those societies had their origins in a single 'ancestral Polynesian culture', which was practiced by a discrete and very finite group of voyagers. And it is true that the Lapita ancestors of Polynesians only arrived in Tonga and Samoa and the other old parts of the civilisation three and a half thousand years ago. Polynesia doesn't, then, have the time depth of, say, Aboriginal Australian civilisation, or most Papuan societies.

But let us consider for a moment the fact that the complicated series of archipelagos we call Vanuatu were only settled three and a half years ago by the same Lapita people who became Polynesians. Where the Polynesians established what is essentially the same culture across their vast domain, the ni-Vanuatu speak, even today, one hundred and thirty mutually incomprehensible languages, and maintain at least as many cultures. In the Banks Islands, in the far north of Vanuatu, this diversity is at its most extreme: ten thousand people speak seventeen languages. In the 19th century they spoke at least thirty-five tongues.

The Lapita culture seems to have been relatively hierarchical, and to have been administered, like its Polynesian descendants, by hereditary chiefs. But in the Banks Islands and in other parts of northern Vanuatu, hereditary chiefs are hard to find, and societies often tend to be acephalous, headless. The hereditary chiefs who dominate southern Vanuatu are the result of Polynesian influence over the last thousand years.

Why have the descendants of the same monolithic Lapita culture developed in such different ways in northern Vanuatu and in Polynesia? What can explain the incredible diversity of the Banks Islands? The linguist Alexandre Francois, who has spent his career documenting the languages of the Banks, argues that there exists in the group a 'powerful social bias towards differentiation and egalitarianism'.

None of the teeming societies of the Banks has been able or willing to impose itself on another; the average islander has been obliged to speak half a dozen tongues. The linguistic and cultural innovations - idiosyncratic pronunciations of words, neologisms, iconoclasms in dance and design - that might be suppressed in other societies are praised in the Banks.

Let's talk about this later!

S

A visit to the underworld

Upstairs it was summer. Cicadas hissed in tune with the traffic, & the air smelt of rotting pohutukawa blossom and melting tar. But New Lynn station was dim and cool and abandoned, like a silo that had fired its missiles.

We sat and waited for a train, any train, and I told Aneirin how sorry I felt for the escalators, as they made their ceaseless pointless ascents, descents. 'But they're busy today' Aneirin said. 'They're carrying all the spirits up to our world.'

Quarantined

Everyone knows about the refugees trapped in Papua New Guinea, but how many Kiwis realise that the people of New Guinea and of Melanesia in general are trapped in their own countries, because of the very tough restrictions on migration from the region maintained by Australia, New Zealand, and other Western nations? 

I talked last year with BFM's Mackenzie Smith about the quarantining of Melanesia, and about the case for allowing guest workers from the region to settle permanently in this country. The interview's now online here. 

Shots from Mahurangi

Whare Joseph Thompson's sculpture rises beyond the beach and barbecues and colonial gardens of Wenderholm, at the foot of Maungatauhoro, a place of eroding cliffs, ancient pa, a burst dam. 

Maungatauhoro's slopes ooze pipi shells. Some of them have escaped from middens; others were strewn centuries ago, to make the footsteps of approaching warriors audible. Once the pa's trenches were palisaded, so that they resembled bared fangs; now they are toothless gums.

Thompson's pou remembers the chiefs interned on Maungatauhoro: men like Murupaenga, who died at the mouth of the Mahurangi River in 1825, trying hopelessly to hold back Hongi Hika's invasion of the south. Thompson uses wood the way a brutalist architect treats concrete. His pou's faces are a few deep cuts. They are bold yet enigmatic, like the hieroglyphs of Rapa Nui. The pou's expanses of bare wood are rippled, ruffled, the surface of a young creek. This sculpture is not a boundary marker; it is a boundary.

With its sheer cliffs, the pa on Mahurangi was almost impossible to capture. Without a supply of freshwater and space for sleep, the island was perhaps just as hard to defend for long. Waves and wind erode Mahurangi, refine its defences. On a hot day, from a distance, it resembles one of the citadels of ancient desert monk-warriors, a Sinai or a Masada on the Waitemata.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

After the apocalypse

I've written about my trip to Dunedin for the arts journal EyeContact. Apologies in advance to Presbyterians.

Nuking the Kaipara

The South Kaipara Peninsula is, I now realise, a provisional, unstable piece of New Zealand. Made from sand dunes, undulating sandy loam and clay, the peninsula separates the Kaipara harbour, with its warm shallow waters and mangrove archipelagos, from the ultramarine sprawl of the Tasman Sea. Cook called the peninsula a 'desert coast'. When Hongi Hika led his army south through the Kaipara to Tamaki Makaurau in the 1820s hapu of Ngati Whatua and Te Roroa fled before him, trusting dunes and winds to conceal their villages and gardens.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Pakeha colonists planted millions of radiata on the peninsula. Dunes retreated behind the green wall. Enough grass to feed sheep and deer grew on the conquered territory.

In the twentieth century a series of fantasies were projected onto the peninsula. In the sixties the Holyoake government proposed building a nuclear power station at Mosquito Bay, near the northern end of the isthmus and the lower jaw of the Kaipara harbour. The station’s pumps would be fed the water that flowed in and out of the harbour; Australian uranium would glow in its reactor.

The nuclear fantasy was abandoned, but in the nineties a series of politicians and scientists imagined a tidal power station at the harbour heads. Opinion pieces and position papers were published, but the project was stymied by environmentalists and fishermen.

The Kaipara Air Weapons Range is a more successful fantasy. It occupies the northernmost stretch of Muriwai beach, on the west coast of the peninsula, and is strewn with the remnants of munitions. New Zealand’s air force lost its jet fighters more than a decade ago, but massive Orions still fly low over Muriwai, dropping bombs onto their bloated shadows, and sappers detonate their own explosions from hides in the dunes and tussock. 

The explosions can be heard in Auckland, where they have been mistaken for terrorist attacks, and for the audio effects of film crews at work in the Waitakeres. For the crews of the Orions, Muriwai’s dunes and lupins become the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan; the fairmounts and datsuns that boy racers dump at the tideline become the black husks of some ISIS or Al Qaeda convoy.

I have been talking about the South Kaipara Peninsula because it is the setting, and perhaps also the explanation, for a violent and enigmatic work of conceptual art. Last month I visited the peninsula in search of something I knew could not exist. I was driven by a friend, who does not want to be named, in a citroen whose rear windows had been covered in black masking tape, as a precaution against a disaster we knew was impossible. The day was warm, but I wore a balaclava; my friend relied on a keffiyeh to cover her nostrils, tongue, lips. You could say that we were playing parts, and that, through our actions, we were endowing a fantasy, an unpleasant proposition, with a semblance of life. 

Eight days before we boarded the citroen and drove from Auckland to Helensville, the river town at the southern end of the peninsula, I had received a book – it was less a book, in fact, than a set of documents, each brusquely truncated – by an organisation, or an individual, that called itself, him or herself, Artists for a Non Governmental Arms Programme: ANGAP, for short.

The documents arrived by e mail, in pdf format, but they seemed to belong, aesthetically, to the era before the internet, before digital communication, before high-resolution rendering. They appeared to have been spread out repeatedly on a failing photocopier, then scanned, then mixed randomly. Their texts had faded; their images had crumbled into cryptic blocks of dots, crosses, columns. 

The documents had titles that suggested they were the work of an impersonal body, pursuing a meticulous, even pedantic, strategy. There was a ‘Report on Progress’, a ‘Bulletin of Caveats’, a ‘Note on Vision’. But the voice of the texts was urgent, almost hysterical. The voice preferred repetitive assertion to argument or narrative. This passage, which I have taken from a document called ‘The Question is finally one of Word and Deed: proposal for an electromagnetic pulse’, could stand for a dozen others:

For too long in these islands!/ we are artists living after the death of art/ revolutionaries after the death of revolution/ O KILL KILL KILL THOSE WHO ADVERTISE YOU OUT/ Modernism was not a movement: modernism was a prelapsarian paradise/ once it was possible to imagine a new world/ Malevich dropped new colours from his biplane/ The Paris Communards made art/ Now the proletariat has become a mental peasantry, fed on cow mulch, fed on Tokien’s sickly sweet semen, images of feudal content/ New Zealand is Middle Earth/ Our artists are sentimental artisans, molesting the looms of their computer screens

ANGAP’s texts reek of frustration. They complain that, at some unspecified moment in the late twentieth century, the promises of both avant-garde art and revolutionary politics expired. The visionary modernist artist became the sly, self-parodying postmodernist; the revolutionary socialist became a Blairite careerist. 

ANGAP quotes Mark Fisher’s complaint that, in the twenty-first century, the future has been ‘cancelled’, so that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a post-capitalist world. (After obituarising the future in a series of pellucid essays, Fisher killed himself at the beginning of 2017.)

And yet politics and art have, according to ANGAP, come together in contemporary New Zealand, in the service of a new national myth:

Today peace is our state religion. OUR SOUTH STINKS PEACE! Art galleries throughout Pig Island commemorated the 30^th anniversary of our nuclear-free policy. Mayors give out peace awards, the way doctors in asylums hand their inmates tranquilisers. Doves flutter on public murals…

This state of affairs might not seem like something to complain about. For ANGAP, though, the ‘cult of pacifism’ is a ‘calculated denial’ of New Zealand’s history, as well as its present:

New Zealand is founded on blood/ the land was taken from Maori with blood, not axes or muskets or blankets/ young men were blood sacrifices at Gallipoli and El Alamein/ Trucks loaded with cattle and sheep (YOU FOLLOW THEM WITH YOUR BLOODSHOT EYE) roll through the Waikato and Horowhenua towards animal Dachaus/ New Zealand troops rampage across the world disguised as peacekeepers/ Willie Apiata slew scores of Afghans in the name of peace/ PEACE IS THE FINAL, MOST EXTREME FORM OF WARFARE

Despite the occasional left-wing flourish, there is a strong hint of Futurism – shrill, steely Italian Futurism, not the more eccentric, ruritarian Russian variety – in ANGAP’s prose. Like Marinetti and other accomplices of Italian fascism, ANGAP associates artistic and technological potency, and is in danger of aestheticizing war:

Art is magic or it is nothing. Wyndham Lewis wrote poems with a machine gun. Art matters when an artist wields a pistol or a depth charge. An artist with a paintbrush is an artist disarmed. An artist disarmed is a dead artist. A dead artist is fertiliser, for a municipal rose garden. McCahon Angus Hotere Apple: the bright blind eyes of flowering camellias.

A document called ‘Where we come from is where we are going’, includes a blurry photograph of young men and women offering clenched fist salutes. A red beret teeters on a blonde Afro; a Stalinesque moustache droops lugubriously; a Kalashnikov decorates a flag pinned to a roll-down door. Is the image a glimpse of ANGAP’s members? Of precursors? The document both celebrates and mocks revolutionary politics and modernist art:

They took the field in an alphabet’s soup of organisations: SAL, WCL, MLF…Revolution was an art. The artist was the vanguard of the vanguard. Now the struggle has been lost. It must begin at the point where contradictions gather. All power grows from the barrel of a test tube, Comrade Miaow wrote.

My friend had warned that she might not talk much during our drive to the South Kaipara. As we drive up the peninsula from Helensville, towards the massed rockets of the radiata forest, the silence in the citroen became steadily more uncomfortable. After studying ANGAP’s documents I had decided that I needed to visit the site – the approximate site, at least – of the group’s first ‘weapons test’. 

In an unusually terse document, ANGAP had taken responsibility for ‘detonating a low-grade nuclear device’ on ‘the margins of the Kaipara Air Weapons Range’. By doing so, the group claimed to have ‘reminded New Zealanders of their blood inheritance’ and ‘reasserted the importance of the artist’. The document was illustrated by a black and white photograph, which showed row upon row of pine trees laid low. I recognised the photograph: it had been taken in 1927 by Soviet scientist Leonid Kulik, during an expedition to Tunguska, a remote section of Siberia where a meteor had exploded nineteen years earlier, levelling an entire forest. 

My silent friend parked the citroen beside a large signboard that warned we were about to enter the unfenced air weapons range. Bombs of various shapes and sizes were illustrated on the board, like the toxic fungi that populate Siberian forests. It was late afternoon, and as we walked towards the pines the sky was suddenly sealed by steel-grey clouds. My friend knew the peninsula; as a child she had explored its craters and dunes while her drunk uncles excavated toheroa from wet sand. I walked behind her, obedient as a dog. The pines were surprisingly thick, and the light that worked its way through them seemed old and tired, like the images in ANGAP’s documents. Dead needles muted our steps.

Suddenly the ground opened; we stopped at the edge of a pit with walls of red clay. Pine needles cascaded silently over the edge of the pit. At the bottom, six feet or so down, was a lump of twisted metal: the fender of a Ford Escort or Datsun. It reminded me of the mutely writhing figures dug out of Pompeii’s lava fields. A trail of burnt earth, no wider than a rope, connected the pit to the ragged seaside edge of the pine forest. Beyond the trees dunes glowed darkly, the pyramids of some alien civilisation. I could hear the Tasman murmur like a distant motorway. 

I knew the air force only bombed north Muriwai for a few days every year, and I had not heard anything louder than a seagull above the pines. But I was pleased when my friend turned, and started back towards the signboard, the citroen, the road home to Auckland.

ANGAP’s weapons test is a fantasy. ANGAP itself must be, in some sense, a fantasy. But when I entered the site of the group’s fantasies I began to think in new ways about a secluded, apparently bucolic piece of my homeland. I remembered that the pine forest, like a nuclear power plant, is an alien imposition on the Kaipara. I feared the bombs of my own air force, in the way that a Taliban or Viet Cong fighter in a dugout might have done. And I kept adjusting my balaclava, in a hopeless attempt to stop breathing radioactive dust.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]