‘And a prime amenity which is land ….’
‘Prime amenities of land and sea and people, as well as ….’
‘A million dollar view, so to speak, that ….’
‘Costs nothing.’
‘Everything we want and need is here.’
‘Well yes, yes of course. It’s a great little spot. But maybe you have not seen its full potential. I’m not talking just about tourists now. I mentioned before the family people. I’m talking about giving families, school children, an opportunity to view our sea life ….’
‘The dolphins come every second summer ….’
‘Maybe so, but not for everyone, and not close, where people can see ….’
‘Close enough to be believed.’
‘I mean this way the public would have constant access. Our animals could be viewed any time. There would be public performances ….’
‘Every second summer is public enough ….’
‘And the seals ….’
‘One comes now and again, then goes ….’
‘Killer whales. You’d be denying people ….’
‘The chance to watch you lay your head between its jaws. For money ….’
‘Denying people this access, this facility.’
‘We’ve never stopped people coming here, never kept anyone out ….’
‘Denying families, and school children, their pleasures.’
‘We’ve never told anyone to get off the beach or to stop catching fish. We’ve never stopped them cooking themselves in the sun, or prevented them from launching their boats. We’ve always allowed people to come here freely and we’ve often helped them out in bad weather. And, you know, these people—the families, the campers, the weekend fishing people—they’d back us up on this. They wouldn’t like to see it all happen. They wouldn’t like it.’
‘We’re not getting very far with this are we? I mean you invited me here and … I must say I expected you people to be more accommodating ….’
‘Not so accommodating as to allow the removal of our wharenui, which is our meeting place, our identity, our security. Not so accommodating as to allow the displacement of the dead and the disruption of a sacred site.’
‘I didn’t expect people to be unreasonable ….’
‘Unreasonable? Perhaps it is yourself that is being unreasonable if you think we would want pollution of the water out there, if you think we would want crowds of people, people that can afford caviare and who import salmon, coming here and using up the fish ….’
‘And jobs ….’
‘As we’ve told you, we have work. You want us to clean your toilets and dig your drains or empty your rubbish bins but we’ve got more important ….’
‘I didn’t say …. And I wasn’t …. And you’re looking back, looking back, all the time.’
‘Wrong. We’re looking to the future. If we sold out to you what would we be in the future?’
‘You’d be well off. You could develop land, do anything you want.’
‘I tell you if we sold to you we would be dust. Blowing in the wind.’
‘Well I must say I find it difficult to talk sense ….’
(We notice ….)
‘One puff of the wind and that’s it. And who is the first to point the finger then, when our people are seen to be broken and without hope? There’s upset all round ….’
‘Not so, not so. I mean I really believe that you people … have come a long way ….’
‘Wrong again. We haven’t come a long way at all. All we’ve done, many of us, is helped you, and people like you, get what you want. And we’re all left out of it in the end. We’ve helped build a country, all right. Worked in its factories, helped build its roads, helped educate its kids. We’ve looked after the sick, and we’ve helped the breweries and the motor firms to make their profits. We’ve helped export our crayfish and we’ve sent our songs and dances overseas. We’ve committed our crimes, done our good deeds, sat in Parliament, got educated, sung our hymns, scored our tries, fought in wars, splashed our money about ….’
‘And you put all the blame ….’
‘Blaming is a worthless exercise. That would really be looking back. It’s now we’re interested in. Now, and from now on.’
‘Well then, that’s what I mean. Why the concern with what’s gone? It’s all done with.’
‘What we value doesn’t change just because we look at ourselves and at the future. What we came from doesn’t change. It’s your jumping-off place that tells you where you’ll land. The past is the future. If we ever had to move our tipuna it would be for our own reasons, some danger to the area, some act of God. It would not be for what you call progress, or for money ….’
‘It’s necessary in today’s terms, money.’
‘Nothing wrong with money so long as we remember it’s food not God. You eat it, not worship it ….’
‘Better too much than not enough, as they say.’
‘Either way, too much or too little, you can become a slave.’
‘Just as you can become a slave to past things. And to superstition … and all that … hoo-ha.’
‘We have prepared a meal in the wharekai. You are welcome to eat before you go.’
‘I’ll go then. But I hope you’ll all think about what we’ve discussed here today. There are ways. I’m a man who gets what he wants, and you should think about that. Have a look at the advantages to yourselves, to your children. I mean you’ve got something we require. We could work on a deal that would be satisfactory to all.’
‘Something you require, yet you already have land, lots of land ….’
‘We need this corner or the whole thing could fall through.’
‘We give it to you and we fall through. We’re slaves again, when we’ve only just begun to be free.’
(1986)
Hone Tuwhare, ‘We, Who Live in Darkness’
It had been a long long time of it
wriggling and squirming in the swamp of night.
And what was time, anyway? Black intensities
of black on black on black feeding on itself?
Something immense? Immeasureless?
No more.
There just had to be a beginning somehow.
For on reaching the top of a slow rise suddenly
eyes I never knew I possessed were stung by it
forcing me to hide my face in the earth.
It was light, my brothers. Light.
A most beautiful sight infiltered past
the armpit hairs of the father. Why, I could
even see to count all the fingers of my hands
held out to it; see the stain—the clutch of
good earth on them.
But then he moved.
And darkness came down even more oppressively
it seemed and I drew back tense; angry.
Brothers, let us kill him—push him off.
(1987)
Keri Hulme, ‘One Whale Singing’
The ship drifted on the summer night sea.
‘It is a pity,’ she thought, ‘that one must come on deck to see the stars. Perhaps a boat of glass, to see the sea streaming past, to watch the nightly splendour of stars ….’ Something small jumped from the water, away to the left. A flash of phosphorescence after the sound, and then all was quiet and starlit again.
They had passed through krillswarms all day. Large areas of the sea were reddishbrown, as though an enormous creature had wallowed ahead of the boat, streaming blood.
‘Whale-feed,’ she had said, laughing and hugging herself at the thought of seeing whales again. ‘Lobster-krill,’ he had corrected, pedantically.
The crustaceans had swum in their frightened jerking shoals, mile upon mile of them, harried by fish that were in turn pursued and torn by larger fish.
She thought, it was probably a fish after krill that had leaped then. She sighed, stroking her belly. It was the lesser of the two evils to go below now, so he didn’t h
ave an opportunity to come on deck and suggest it was better for the coming baby’s health, and hers, of course, that she came down. The cramped cabin held no attraction: all that was there was boneless talk, and one couldn’t see stars, or really hear the waters moving.
Far below, deep under the keel of the ship, a humpback whale sported and fed. Occasionally, she yodelled to herself, a long undulating call of content. When she found a series of sounds that pleased, she repeated them, wove them into a band of harmonious pulses.
Periodically she reared to the surface, blew, and slid smoothly back under the sea in a wheel-like motion. Because she was pregnant, and at the tailend of the southward migration, she had no reason now to leap and display on the surface.
She was not feeding seriously; the krill was there, and she swam amongst them, forcing water through her lips with her large tongue, stranding food amongst the baleen. When her mouth was full, she swallowed. It was leisurely, lazy eating. Time enough for recovering her full weight when she reached the cold seas, and she could gorge on a ton and a half of plankton daily.
Along this coast, there was life and noise in plenty. Shallow grunting from a herd of fish, gingerly feeding on the fringes of the krill shoal. The krill themselves, a thin hiss and crackle through the water. The interminable background clicking of shrimps. At times, a wayward band of sound like bass organ-notes sang through the chatter, and to this the whale listened attentively, and sometimes replied.
The krill thinned: she tested, tasted the water. Dolphins had passed recently. She heard their brief commenting chatter, but did not spend time on it. The school swept round ahead of her, and vanished into the vibrant dark.
He had the annoying habit of reading what he’d written out loud. ‘We can conclusively demonstrate that to man alone belong true intelligence and self-knowledge.’
He coughs.
Taps his pen against his lips. He has soft, wet lips, and the sound is a fleshy slop! slop!
She thinks:
Man indeed! How arrogant! How ignorant! Woman would be as correct, but I’ll settle for humanity. And it strikes me that the quality humanity stands in need of most is true intelligence and self-knowledge.
‘For instance, Man alone as a species, makes significant artefacts, and transmits knowledge in permanent and durable form.’
He grunts happily.
‘In this lecture, I propose to ….’
But how do they know? she asks herself. About the passing on of knowledge among other species? They may do it in ways beyond our capacity to understand … that we are the only ones to make artefacts I’ll grant you, but that’s because us needy little adapts have such pathetic bodies, and no especial ecological niche. So hooks and hoes, and steel things that gouge and slay, we produce in plenty. And build a wasteland of drear ungainly hovels to shelter our vulnerable hides.
She remembers her glass boat, and sighs. The things one could create if one made technology servant to a humble and creative imagination …. He’s booming on, getting into full lectureroom style and stride.
‘… thus we will show that no other species, lacking as they do artefacts, an organised society, or even semblances of culture ….’
What would a whale do with an artefact, who is so perfectly adapted to the sea? Their conception of culture, of civilisation, must be so alien that we’d never recognise it, even if we were to stumble on its traces daily.
She snorts.
He looks at her, eyes unglazing, and smiles.
‘Criticism, my dear? Or you like that bit?’
‘I was just thinking ….’
Thinking, as for us passing on our knowledge, hah! We rarely learn from the past or the present, and what we pass on for future humanity is a mere jumble of momentarily true facts, and odd snippets of surprised self-discoveries. That’s not knowledge ….
She folds her hands over her belly. You in there, you won’t learn much. What I can teach you is limited by what we are. Splotch goes the pen against his lips.
‘You had better heat up that fortified drink, dear. We can’t have either of you wasting from lack of proper nourishment.’
Unspoken haw haw haw.
Don’t refer to it as a person! It is a canker in me, a parasite. It is nothing to me. I feel it squirm and kick, and sicken at the movement.
He says he’s worried by her pale face. ‘You shouldn’t have gone up on deck so late. You could have slipped, or something, and climbing tires you now, you know.’
She doesn’t argue any longer. The arguments follow well-worn tracks and go in circles.
‘Yes,’ she answers.
but I should wither without that release, that solitude, that keep away from you.
She stirs the powder into the milk and begins to mix it rhythmically.
I wonder what a whale thinks of its calf? So large a creature, so proven peaceful a beast, must be motherly, protective, a shielding benevolence against all wildness. It would be a sweet and milky love, magnified and sustained by the encompassing purity of water ….
A swarm of insectlike creatures, sparkling like a galaxy, each a pulsing lightform in blue and silver and gold. The whale sang for them, a ripple of delicate notes, spaced in a timeless curve. It stole through the lightswarm, and the luminescence increased brilliantly.
Deep within her, the other spark of light also grew. It was the third calf she had borne; it delighted her still, that the swift airy copulation should spring so opportunely to this new life. She feeds it love and music, and her body’s bounty. Already it responds to her crooning tenderness, and the dark pictures she sends it. It absorbs both, as part of the life to come, as it nests securely in the waters within.
She remembers the nautilids in the warm oceans to the north, snapping at one another in a cannibalistic frenzy.
She remembers the oil-bedraggled albatross, resting with patient finality on the water-top, waiting for death.
She remembers her flight, not long past, from killer whales, and the terrible end of the other female who had companied her south, tongue eaten from her mouth, flukes and genitals ripped, bleeding to a slow fought-against end.
And all the memories are part of the growing calf.
More krill appeared. She opened her mouth, and glided through the shoal. Sudden darkness for the krill. The whale hummed meanwhile.
He folded his papers contentedly.
‘Sam was going on about his blasted dolphins the other night dear.’
‘Yes?’
He laughed deprecatingly. ‘But it wouldn’t interest you. All dull scientific chatter, eh?’
‘What was he saying about, umm, his dolphins?’
‘O, insisted that his latest series of tests demonstrated their high intelligence. No, that’s misquoting him, potentially high intelligence. Of course, I brought him down to earth smartly. Results are as you make them, I said. Nobody has proved that the animals have intelligence to a degree above that of a dog. But it made me think of the rot that’s setting in lately. Inspiration for this lecture indeed.’
‘Lilley?’ she asked, still thinking of the dolphins, ‘Lilley demonstrated evidence of dolphinese.’
‘Lilley? That mystical crackpot? Can you imagine anyone ever duplicating his work? Hah! Nobody has, of course. It was all in the man’s mind.’
‘Dolphins and whales are still largely unknown entities,’ she murmured, more to herself than to him.
‘Nonsense, my sweet. They’ve been thoroughly studied and dissected for the last century and more.’ She shuddered. ‘Rather dumb animals, all told, and probably of bovine origin. Look at the incredibly stupid way they persist in migrating straight into the hands of whalers, year after year. If they were smart, they’d have organised an attacking force and protected themselves!’
He chuckled at the thought, and lit his pipe.
‘It would be nice to communicate with another species,’ she said, more softly still.
‘That’s the trouble with you poets,’ he said fondly. ‘Dre
am marvels are to be found from every half-baked piece of pseudo-science that drifts around. That’s not seeing the world as it is. We scientists rely on reliably ascertained facts for a true picture of the world.’
She sat silently by the pot on the galley stove.
An echo from the world around, a deep throbbing from miles away. It was both message and invitation to contribute. She mused on it for minutes, absorbing, storing, correlating, winding her song meanwhile experimentally through its interstices—then dropped her voice to the lowest frequencies. She sent the message along first, and then added another strength to the cold wave that travelled after the message. An oceanaway, someone would collect the cold wave, and store it, while it coiled and built to uncontrollable strength. Then, just enough would be released to generate a superwave, a gigantic wall of water on the surface of the sea. It was a new thing the sea-people were experimenting with. A protection. In case.
She began to swim further out from the coast. The water flowed like warm silk over her flanks, an occasional interjectory current swept her, cold and bracing, a touch from the sea to the south. It became quieter, a calm freed from the fights of crabs and the bickerings of small fish. There was less noise too, from the strange turgid craft that buzzed and clattered across the ocean-ceiling, dropping down wastes that stank and sickened.
A great ocean-going shark prudently shifted course and flicked away to the side of her. It measured twenty feet from shovel-nose to crescentic tailfin, but she was twice as long and would grow a little yet. Her broad deep body was still wellfleshed and strong, in spite of the vicissitudes of the northward breeding trek: there were barnacles encrusting her fins and lips and head, but she was unhampered by other parasites. She blew a raspberry at the fleeing shark and beat her flukes against the ocean’s pull in an ecstasy of strength.
‘This lecture,’ he says, sipping his drink, ‘this lecture should cause quite a stir. They’ll probably label it conservative, or even reactionary, but of course it isn’t. It merely urges us to keep our feet on the ground, not go hunting off down worthless blind sidetrails. To consolidate data we already have, not, for example, to speculate about so-called ESP phenomena. There is far too much mysticism and airy-fairy folderol in science these days. I don’t wholly agree with the Victorians’ attitude, that science could explain all, and very shortly would, but it’s high time we got things back to a solid factual basis.’
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 101