Story and Illustration by Sandshoe

Tiki is a revered Polynesian symbol of the beginning of time, evidence of a genesis; recognisable in jade, bone, ironstone and green plastic.

Living in Takau Street in Auckland I walked the slope of the hill into the city to buy mussels for steaming and bananas, yams and taro. The culture new and heady had the background song of the Polynesian congregations in local churches and at Christmas time the nativity. The vaporous steam and the delicious smells of the cooking later lead me to buy bamboo steamers that would throw a lid off as the shell of the mussels burst open and revealed their succulence. There in Takau Street, in the bungalow in a distinctive row of them on stilts, I became aware one week-end day of an assembly of Polynesian men laughing and jostling between them a squealing pig up the steep climb alongside the side division fence of corrugated iron. I assumed one of them sliced the pig’s throat open.

Much later when I learn Ruth Park had lived in Takau Street, it assumes a folkloric quality for me as if I had walked on hallowed ground.

Walking anywhere, I looked for the Pohutekawa tree and mixed it with the Feijoa because of the red blossoms. I think I will never see once I learned of the legend of the Pohutekawa Tree a more important tree in its impact, its story, in my consciousness of cultural difference, the importance of access to story telling and a nation’s symbols, legends, a people’s heritage.  It is replete with stories in Maori culture, as many possibly as one for each of the magnificent fiery red blossoms it flourishes in full flower. The pohutakawa was the first tree I knew in New Zealand in that it grew ancient and giant like in the front yard of the home which was my family home there with my then-husband and our children. My favourite image of the pohutakawa tree is from children’s books in which the roots of the tree allowed Tawhaki, the warrior, access to the land from a subterranean reality, an under-world.

I eventually became alone in an emotional sense in a culture that grew on me by a kind of osmosis of understanding, a hunger to understand, to recognise the symbols. Searching for the musical notes, the sounds, I read in the city library from a reference book about early Maori flutes and amazed at the variety of sizes and configuration in detailed plates of drawings.

Turning to the culture of the Europeans I read in a local council library a first hand account of the end of the Maori Wars written by a land agent established by the British Government. It surprised me for its empathy and most that I mastered the placename and remain captivated by it, Ngaruawahia, designated home of the Maori King established to meet the spokespersons for the British Queen Victoria.

I stumble in the local library on the story of Governor King at Norfolk Island who was ordered by the British Government to capture two Maoris and return with them to Norfolk Island to garner the secrets of flax growing and processing. The Governor hearing the plaintive song one sang in the evenings came to recognise grieving. To simplify; he had the men dine with him, created the rudiments of a Maori-English dictionary and returned them, against the orders of the British Government, to the location from where he had stolen the men. Claimed is that when a British boat returned to the location, local people ran to meet it shouting “Kingi”.

When I returned to visit New Zealand in recent time I embarked on a pilgrimage to the library. I am sure it is a worthy library. For my part, I could no longer recognise it, large, impersonal and nobody was recognisable, or immediately able to identify an “old book based on a University generated thesis or by a lecturer, about Governor King”. Pity nevertheless I could not find the text in the time available to me and short of resources. The story I read would make an excellent film, whatever basis for it might be established through detailed research.

Do I imagine it was claimed the author was discredited in his time or scoffed at but anyway, I settled in a library chair with a collection of short stories for old time’s sake.

When I lived in New Zealand, I was desperately hungry when I discovered their power, for short stories by New Zealand authors. Frank Sargeson emerges wry and friendly. I imagine him down to earth and perfectly accessible to an inner circle. Janet Frame who I had not heard of and I cannot understand why sweeps me off my feet with her short story, You Are Now Entering The Human Heart, about a teacher who drapes a snake around her shoulders. Frame published it in America first, I am sure I read that and it exemplifies for me living an existence that feels estranged in one’s native country. Driven by that understanding, I consider I would like to have the poem I wrote, The Horse, published in the Dari language and distributed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I believe it would be instantly appreciated, understood, find its admirers, be taken into the human heart in the Islamic culture of the region.

Lit by the torch of discovery so many writers in their culture in New Zealand told stories of elements I had begun to sense as migrant, nevertheless as an outsider and but felt isolated with, I consumed Dan Davin, Stead, Morrissey, Patricia Grace, the Maori writer Witi Ihimaera and on it went, in an immersion in the first class writers that have sprung out of the dynamic environment, the fascination that is the colour, smell, sights and sounds of Aotearoa, The Land of the Long White Cloud. The cloud is a persistent and recurrent configuration that evidences itself as a characteristic roll like a bed roll, like a chastity roll, like a round Japanese pillow to rest the neck on if only it were possible. It has to be seen to be understood for its power as a symbol of the country we know more commonly as New Zealand.

Land and sky, tree and mountain, cloud and formation in misty and re-formative shaping that is easily perceived and naturally incorporated into the soul are everything in the story telling.

When I worked subsequently for a juncture at the offices of the New Zealand Herald as a copy holder I was one of the staff employed to read The New Zealand Listener on contract. Here was access to the copy of some of the greatest of the contemporary short story writers published in New Zealand. I thrilled to the quality of what I was holding at first hand.

One of the regular political columnists to the Listener presented copy as a veritable rant of passionate declaration. She threw fact and raw opinion together with what looked like an ultimate faith in the editorial resources at her disposal. Thus I learned her column was what was left after the reduction of her copy, in my opinion brilliantly, by the editorial staff assisted by the Readers Department; sometimes from as many as 5 intensely and minutely hand written pages to 2. The published segments were lifted directly out of the text nevertheless with the barest alteration. I was privy to the emotion behind the scenes, the pulse of an environment at the heart of contemporary culture.

My marriage had meanwhile irrevocably broken down.

It was very much later I privately lampooned (in the doodle published here) myself in a hostesses uniform, hostess of myself, searching for identity. The allusion is to the attention to detail and money spent on the design of uniforms, which came to my attention in relationship with a one-time clothing manufacturer and designer who was brought to New Zealand by the government to assist establish the clothing industry in the 1950s, the industry it became, which was leading edge. One of his claims about his (spectacular) career was he had in one year designed the Air New Zealand hostess uniforms. I tried my hand at designing my own.

‘W’ is, of course, the initial of my surname. It is homage to a former lover who depicted himself in a cartoon thinking – at a job interview – “I wonder what Wilson is doing”.

I was caught up in another culture and travelling one of the hardest roads, almost too lonely to travel home alone.