Recently I went to a place some New Zealanders have referred to as Atlantis. I brought back these notes and photos.
1:16 pm
The road to Atlantis begins at Wellsford service station, where we
watch shoals of SUVs & VWs heading northeast, towards the beaches
& golf courses of Tutakana, the Bay of Islands. They roll past with
the self-assurance common to migratory creatures. We will turn west,
aiming ourselves at Taporapora, the great sunken motu of the Kaipara.
1:28 pm
The rivers that extend towards the Kaipara harbour are tubercular
throats, clotted with phlegm-green islets, sandbar-cysts. We wait for
the road to change, listen for its gravel voice.
1:29 pm
On
the map, Taporapora peninsula resembles an old fashioned teacher's
wagging pedantic finger. The isthmus is named for the broad flat land,
adorned with kainga, plantations, & a whare wananga, that once
extended beyond it, all the way to the mouth of the Kaipara harbour. A
sliver of sand & toitoi remains: this relict island is known as
Manukapua.
1:31 pm
'Only the ship of fools' WH Auden wrote,
'is making the voyage to Atlantis this year'. Our party fills two ships:
a Honda Odyssey, which my wife drives suspiciously over the worsening,
winding road, & her brother's white van, where his kids & ours
bounce like fluffy dice.
1:34 pm
The lost land of Taporapora
survives in the mouths of Te Uri o Hau, & other fractions of the
great iwi of Ngati Whatua. The Mahuhu waka, storytellers say, threaded
the harbour heads, & disgorged the chief Rongomai at the island. He
married a local, planted crops from his tropical homeland of Hawai'iki.
1:37 pm
Archaeologists may cite Wairau Bar, that vault of artefacts &
bones, as the first site of human settlement in Aotearoa, but there is
reason to favour Taporapora. In a chant to Io transcribed in the 19th
century, the island is named as the first work of the god. Iwi that are
today scattered across Te Ika a Maui remember ancestors who tilled the
island's soil, and who now lie under Kaipara mud.
1:41 pm
Rongomai, the story says, went fishing one day in a waka tiwai, &
was swallowed by the jaws of the harbour. His brothers took a nihilistic
revenge: they cast spells that stirred the sea, until its waves ate
Taporapora. If Rongomai had to die, so did his fellow islanders.
Drowning became a habit, for the peoples of the Kaipara: in the
nineteenth century, scores of Pakeha ships were interred in the sandbars
of the harbour; just last year, half a dozen men drowned when a
chartered fishing boat flipped at the heads.
1:44 pm
By the
twentieth century those most unreliable ethnographers, the editors of
Pakeha newspapers, had discovered the tragedy of Taporapora. The island
was, the
Pukekohe & Waiuku Times told its readers in 1921, a 'Maori
Atlantis', and a 'cheap edition' of Plato's tale.
1:46 pm
We
pass Port Albert, the utopian city that became, a few years after its
founding by three thousand radical Christian settlers in 1862, a utopian
hamlet. The city's founding sects split as regularly as bacterial
cells; chapels spread along its ridges instead of houses & fences.
1:54 pm
This is a weekend drive, an adventure for the kids, & also a
reconnaissance mission undertaken on behalf of the most ferociously
original artist in the tropical Pacific, Visesio Siasau. Siasau and I
have dreamed of making the lost island in the Kaipara a bridge back to
his homeland of Ha'apai.
I have tried to convince Siasau that
Taporapora may have been a tropical Polynesian fragment of ancient
Aotearoa, a Mangaia or Pukapuka afloat on the temperate waters of the
Kaipara. Stories say hiapo were grown & tapa was made on the island;
archaeologists and fishermen have found tapa beaters in harbour mud.
The tools are very rare elsewhere in Aotearoa.
1:57 pm
We
pause, as the road dawdles along a ridge. Pinus radiate rise beside the
gravel, stop our eyes washing themselves in the harbour. 'Those are
rockets' my fur year-old says. 'Those are rockets, and they are ready to
fire. If we want them to, they can go all the way to Mars.'
2:06 pm
The ridge concedes the road to the flat end of the peninsula, where a
hamlet of baches - mean things, the size of duckshooters' hides, whose
tenants, I have been warned, shoot fentanyl into their feet & 22s
out their windows - has grown like a moustache above a creek-mouth. The
paper mulberry plantations may have drowned, but exotic crops still
burgeon in the Kaipara's microclimates. Near the turnoff to Manukapua,
we pass avocado orchards insulated against sea winds by bamboo.
2:07 pm
Should we be speak of Lemuria, rather than Atlantis? Clement Wragge, a
meteorologist, theosophist, & pioneering Pakeha pseudo-historian,
used that name for a sunken continent that had these islands as its
remnants. In 1910 newspapers reported Wragge's discovery of Lemurian
megaliths, huge stone temples, in the Bay of Islands. Nobody else has
seen these monuments.
2:09 pm
It was not only theosophists
like Wragge who thought Aotearoa a relic of a sunken continent. Hare
Hongi, the first scholar to work at both a whare wananga tohunga &
Pakeha universities, insisted Polynesia's motu, from Hawai'i to Tonga to
Rapa Nui, were fragments of an ancient continent, a primordial
superpower. For Hongi, who spent his life trying protect indigenous
culture from both neglect & appropriation, an ancient
super-continent of Polynesia was a source of mana, even if it put vaka
of his ancestors into drydocks. We turn down a road of dirty sand,
sniffing for the sea.
2:13 pm
My brother-in-law belongs to a
fraternity of off-road drivers. They wink wistfully when they spot each
other through rain and jammed traffic on Auckland's Monday morning
motorways. Each knows the other is dreaming of a route like this one:
sandy, rutted, circuitous, empty.
2:14 pm
Sitting under a
heaven of coconuts & bats on Lifuka, an atoll sinking slowly into
the same sea that ate Taporapora, Siasau & I discussed expeditions,
technologies. We imagined piloting a submarine whose stainless steel
crab-pincers could dig through Kaipara mud, & reveal koloa, taonga:
pearl shell lures from Mangaia, obsidian adzes from the sheer volcano of
Kao, war clubs cut from the forests of 'Eua, a necklace made with the
hair of coconuts, a necklace holding a gold coin salvaged from a Spanish
galleon that sailed over the edge of history.
2:16 pm
The
road becomes a track, then a trail, as the sharp fire of spring gorse
spreads. We abandon the Odyssey for the van, which wallows comfortably
in each rut & pothole, confident in its four wheel drive. The
nearing sea makes the sound of wind in the gorse.
2:19 pm
The
kids are first out, first into the shallow channel that separates us
from the surging dunes of Manukapua, last remnant of Taporapora,
Atlantis, Lemuria. Aneirin stops, turns, adopts the shocked expression
of a scout who steps on a mine in a bad war film. A crab has his toe.
2:20 pm
In 1936 a new railcar was unloaded in New Zealand. It had been painted a
brilliant red, the colour the head dresses of Polynesian chiefs, &
boasted a stained glass window. An article in the in-transit magazine of
our rail network explained that the new vehicle was named Mahuhu, after
the waka Rongomai brought to Taporapora. Wood had become steel.
2:21 pm
In the mellow late afternoon light, the gently curving dunes on the
edge of the island resemble the walls of some art deco castle. A small
sandstorm, a swarm of irascible insects, rises somewhere inland.
2:24 pm
To travel in space is to travel in time. The Kaipara exists mostly in
the past: it was a Maori heartland, where a dozen iwi contested rivers
& hills, before Hongi Hika brought his terrible peace from the
north. Pakeha flourished then foundered on abandoned gardens, forests.
In an article for Te Ao Hou in 1962, Colleen Sheffield made the sands of
the Kapiara into a metaphor for futility. Cook, she noted, called the
Kaipara 'the desert coast'; dunes drowned Depression relief work camps
of pine planters as surely as the sea covered Taporapora. The sands of
the Kaipara are as merciless as the desert that drowned Ozymandias'
works.
2:28 pm
I think about the name Manukapua. I can see
manuka sheltering in sand gullies; pua means to bloom. Are these pygmy
trees the remnant of some ancient forest, or the vanguard of a new one?
No birds adorn their frail boughs; no blossoms whiten them. 'Imagine'
Siasau said, 'if the island had survived. They might have had kava &
tapa in Aotearoa, but without the rules, the restrictions on drinking
& painting, that chiefs created in Tonga. They might have been able
to plant & harvest their crops, without having to offer them as
tribute to a god-king. Perhaps it could have become a utopia.' I can
hear his voice now, through the static of a cold harbour wind.
2:57 pm
In the centre of the motu I find a small lake, surrounded by drying
mud. Is it the remnant of some ancient lagoon, and did the dunes beyond
the mud bury plots of kava, hiapo? This landscape is less real the past
that bequeathed it. I follow a procession of wireless iron fenceposts
until they disappear into the dunes, like a party of Victorian explorers
lost in the Sahara or the Australian Outback.
3:13 pm
On the
windward coast, waves that have passed straight through the harbour
mouth deliver trophies from dead ships. Lui picks up a fishing float: it
is round & black, like one of the bombs the airforce drops a short
flight away, on Muriwai beach.
3:37 pm
Near the lagoon-pond, I
notice a row of slim & gnarled trunks rising like dead men. They
might be the palisade of some pa or kolo stormed by sand, by water, by
history.
4:24 pm
It is late afternoon. It is time to leave.
The steep dunes on the leeward coast glow darkly, like the pyramids of
an alien civilisation.
