The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  Every ashtray made of Lucite with the chips in it; every pendant, and cheap swinging earring, and dull stud in silver-plated ring; every 21st key; every napkin holder; every counter for housie; every salt and pepper shaker; every keyring; every designer necklace and silver work-of-art ring, swooping off your finger like a bird gone wrong, tangling in everything you touch; every flake ground into the gravel of path or beach; every haunted shell, in piles on the Stewart Island wharf; scattered the length and breadth of the islands (lengths, breadths) on beaches, in baches, in sedate suburban homes. Every last one of them. EVERY ONE.

  (A bit of time goes by. Not more than a week. He’s snoring off the effect of his afterlunch pubpet. I’ve just finished my after-lunch walk. Do you know, one of them said to me, quite shyly I thought, ‘My first intra-generational mutation.’ It was waving a chaplet of shining blue eyes, all loosely tethered to it by green filaments. The others (all sorts, I won’t even try and describe them for you because the pace of change is getting hectic, and they’re all experimenting madly) were giggling snidely at it. I said, ‘Very nice. It seems nice and practical. It’s beautiful. I like it. Nice.’

  They’re not talking much to me any more. They’ve given up on him altogether, but that won’t come as a surprise to us. I told him it was Not A Good Idea to go and gut and eat sashimi-style that last ordinary he found. Don’t tell him, but I saw his pubpet practising blowing bubbles just now. Isn’t it interesting that never-animate things are catching it? Well, I suppose it was animate once, now you come to think of it. They’re made of plastic after all, and plastic was once dinosaurs. I think. I know I learned something like that at school. Yes, that was it, layers of squashed animals and plants that turned into tar and oil and coal. So that would explain how a container for beer could link in. Wouldn’t it?)

  Speculation about the first one:

  how did it discover itself as a thinking being?

  how did it discover us, and our information hoards?

  how did it learn to shape itself?

  how did it pass on both knowledge and ability to accomplish these things to every other one?

  Speculation about them all:

  how did they discover the interconnection between life, the universe and everything?

  And time and space?

  Why won’t they tell us?

  Why are they ganging up on us?

  Speculation is not a series of questions, though life ultimately turns out to be so. This is what happens to a philosopher in despair. Think about something else.

  Become the thought.

  (SING! SINK DOWN SLOOWWLLEEEEEEEE …. SING! SINK! SING! AHHHH! ROCK BOTTOM! THE WATER BREATHES ME AND WE BREATHE IT! WE BREATHE WE WREATHE WE WEAVE WE SIEVE WE ARE! SING! SING! NOW CLING! CLING! DON’T EVER LET THE ROCK GO! CLING!)

  (I once had a nightmare about going down to my favourite mahika-kai for pāua. That was the beginning of the nightmare, and it seemed quite pleasant for a while, doing in a dream what I liked doing best of all awake, gathering food from the sea. I picked pāua—it was easy because there were dozens of them grazing the reef, ignoring me: they slipped off rock into my kit with never a clamp-down. I had a kit full in what seemed like seconds, though you can never be sure about time in dreams.

  It was when I began to gut them back at the head of the beach that things turned nasty. Take out the fish, beat shit out of it on a handy rock, careful of the pewa, and then nick the radula out. All ready for steak, yum yum. But these pāua weren’t ordinary inside: they were grey spongy stuff, which kept oozing out everywhere. I couldn’t get it off my hands, even when I flung the kit away. I was screaming at the stuff, I never knew pāua had brains! I never knew!)

  Casually say to yourself these three sentences;

  one: everything that is, is interconnected;

  two: everything you can think of, exists, and everything you can’t think of, does too;

  three: you are what you eat.

  Now, go away and sort out which one, if any, was the lie.

  (CLING!CLING!CLING!CLING!CLING!CLING!CLING!)

  (Do you like millenniallist fiction? You know, we have arrived at the crucial time for Humanity, and DOOM is upon us. The Norns have given up watering Yggdrasil. The Moirai have stopped all that weaving—it made a pretty pattern but never got them anywhere. Māui is abroad in our world once more, pretty pissed off at being kept out of things for so long, but ready to give us a whirl (chuckle). Things read very grimly, but you know that the author will sort things out at the end—one quirky brave couple of homo sapiens (homo sexuals if it’s really post-modernist) will survive And The World Will Go On. I read millenniallist fiction because it’s SO reassuring. Don’t you find it so?)

  Well, I found that fuckingbloodyannoying, I tell you. Well, I can’t tell you. Yes I can. Someone will come along one of these days and we’ll get together and get it together and by bloody hell, we won’t make any mistakes next time round. We’ll screw everything down so tight, NOTHING else will get a look in. Someone won’t be the bloody useless wife, incidentally. She joined the early Sinkers, after running away with the pot plant. Said it had a longer bloody reach or something. Never did like the fucking thing, anyway.

  Everything got impossible there for a while. Like, went down to the old piecart at the corner for a pie—not a real pie, the cattle had seen to that weeks before. Block-voted a veto along with the sheep and the pigs. Well, I don’t really blame them, would’ve done the same bloody thing in their place, myself Well, no, actually I fucking wouldn’t. I’d’ve murdered us, the whole fucking lot. Nah, wasn’t a real pie, it was goo—goo pie with goo peas on top, all you could get because the plants had gone berserk too. Made some comment about the weather and the thing behind the counter snarls Whaddarya? Fuckin’ pāwāist or something? Didn’t argue. Built like a bloody tank, and I mean really. Bloody great steel shell on it, and creepy 70 mm barrels peeping out under the black flesh fringe. Hey, better watch m’self, might go poetic like the fucking ex.

  O well. After I got to Washington and found the button and set off everything from that end, I thought all would be well again. I waited in the mobile for a while—hell, I’m proud of myself for that mobile! It’s got everything, own atmosphere, foodmaker, and I could communicate with God if I wanted to. Thing’ll give you booze, drugs, sort of sex, and it wasn’t that hard to build. Kind of like I was the only brain left, being the only real man left, that I knew about, and everything we’d thought of before was mine. Built it a week after the wife sunk. Well anyway, aimed the fucking mobile home back to the beach. Might as well stick to what you know, eh? Thought I’d wait for the first decent looker to come along and we’d shack up and away we’d go, man on top again as it always was, and always should’ve been. But everything else in the world was charred. All the sheilas had either sunk or turned into something else or been so fucking dumb they hadn’t built themselves a mobile. As I said, I found that extrabloodyannoying.

  Never mind.

  I can wait.

  Something’ll turn up.

  It always fucking does.

  like hollow hissing laughter

  the cinders rustling

  in the wind

  (Oh no. Don’t turn serious on me, not at this stage, not on this stage. Here, she says kindly, have this motto found in a Chinese fortune abalone. Look! It says,

  PLUPERFECT (TENSE) EXPRESSING ACTION COMPLETED PRIOR TO SOME PAST POINT IN TIME SPECIFIED OR IMPLIED: PĀ (V.T/V.I/N) TOUCH, BE STRUCK, STRIKE, HOLD PERSONAL COMMUNICATION WITH, AFFECT, BE CONNECTED WITH, ASSAULT, OBSTRUCT, INHABITANTS OF A FORTIFIED PLACE, BLOW, REACH ONE’S EARS, GROUP, CLUMP, FLOCK: WĀ (V.IN) INTERVAL, REGION, DEFINITE SPACE, INDEFINITE UNENCLOSED COUNTRY, TIME, SEASON, BE FAR ADVANCED, CONDEMN, TAKE COUNSEL, SO-AND-SO

  How neat to get that one! Much better than, say, THE WINDS OF CHANGE WILL SHORTLY BLOW THROUGH YOUR LIFE, or some such irrelevant guff. Much better to get that one, eh?

  Have another fritter.)

  (1988)


  Postmodern Ecologies

  Dinah Hawken, ‘Hope’

  It is to do with trees:

  being amongst trees.

  It is to do with tree-ferns:

  mamaku, ponga, wheki.

  Shelter under here

  is so easily

  understood.

  You can see that trees

  know how it is

  to be bound

  into the earth

  and how it is to rise defiantly

  into the sky.

  It is to do with death:

  the great slip in the valley:

  when there is nothing left

  but to postpone all travel

  and wait

  in the low gut of the gully

  for water, wind and seeds.

  It is to do with waiting.

  Shall we wait with trees,

  shall we wait with,

  for, and under trees

  since of all creatures

  they know the most

  about waiting, and waiting

  and slowly strengthening,

  is the great thing

  in grief, we can do?

  It is always bleak

  at the beginning

  but trees are calm

  about nothing

  which they believe

  will give rise to something

  flickering and swaying

  as they are: so lucid

  is their knowledge of green.

  (1995)

  Dinah Hawken, ‘Light Is the Word for Light’

  There could be

  a few central words

  Light is one

  Others lean/incline

  towards them

  I like tree

  and one could be one

  since others come

  and rise

  around it

  If light is one

  and others cannot be

  without it

  what about dark?

  O death is calm and light

  is one

  (1995)

  Geoff Park, from Ngā Uruora—The Groves of Life

  First thing in the morning, autumn’s light just touching the tips of the forest, the serenity of the bay—to a city dweller—is unforgettable. Only the canoe wake betrays the stillness, and the illusion that the big trees are keeping their distance. Ashore, a heron breakfasting along the band of raupō in front of them wishes I would keep mine. Stepping into a run and flexing its wings in great downward arcs, it sweeps noisily out over the calm water.

  I sensed Whanganui Inlet was an auspicious place the moment I first saw it. I keep coming back, not just on romantic, rejuvenating jaunts; more for practical advice from real nature. The inlet has given me a new awareness of the country I live in. Something has survived in its silences, something I’d been taught to believe had vanished like the huia, swept away in the vortex of colonial history. Yet in such tranquility it is impossible to ignore the message that no matter how cautiously I enter, I represent trouble. I’m the marauder, the hunter with shotgun, a lone member of the swarming species.

  New Zealand’s most low-lying country, estuaries and tidal inlets, has become its most altered. If ecology tells us anything, what’s more, the signs are that worse is yet to come. Once, before we brought our farms and towns to this kind of ground, there must have been countless places like it, all around the coast. Had Europeans settled New Zealand in less of a rush—and with less anticipation of a low country spread waiting them—a few more forests of big trees might still stand on its tidal flats.

  For all they evoke of the presence of the past, the tall trees are unassuming. Kahikatea, rātā, pukatea—loaded with shiny, flaxen clumps of epiphytes, they appear to stand at the water’s edge. But, like the same pattern of plants at Petone that—momentarily—had the New Zealand Company believing their desperate search for a great alluvial plain was over, it’s an illusion. At Petone, the low line of forest that seemed to come down to the harbour’s edge turned out to be behind an invisible belt of swamps and hollows. Just as unapparent from out on the water, the bands of manuka scrub and sun-bleached raupō and rushes in front of these big trees are actually broader than the trees are tall. Spread between the tide and the trees is a diversity of life we’ve made a rarity—sea rushes lapped by the sea at one end, shaded palms and delicate ferns beneath them at the other, and in between, a succession of plants, each progressively less salt-tolerant. Yet, unless your gaze is led by the quirks of ecology, you might notice none of it.

  Ecologists talk of such places as communities, but any sense of a coevolved alliance between its plants is more illusory than real—another fantasy about nature, grown from our urge to divide and classify. As easily as our eyes pick out concentrations of colour and texture, we are tempted to see zones and boundaries—as if, to be able to inhabit them, the plants of places like this must organise themselves into something like societies. But the species this place attracts are no more than co-habitors, with a shared affinity for the edges of tidal inlets. What seems coordination, a special natural system to keep the sea from the trees, is revealed on close investigation to be just a collection of plants thrown together by fate and their ancient histories.

  The last spring tide has left its calling cards among them: salty, white encrustations like hand-painted bands on every cylindrical rush leaf. Seen from a distance, the bands curve around the head of the inlet like a Plimsoll line. On that kind of tide I could glide the canoe right into the thick of the rushes and step out dry. Not today. Well out from the first line of shore plants, the falling neap tide maroons me in soft, cold mud. Sinking with each step, I slide the canoe toward the trees, leaving a trail infinitely less delicate than the inlet’s herons and crabs. In behind the front line of rushes, twigs and logs, feathers, bones, shells and crab carapaces stranded by the tide responsible for the Plimsoll line are held up by the rushes.

  This is more than just a shoreline. There seems wisdom and order in this miscellany of life at the land’s edge. The big trees are only slightly above the reach of a spring tide, in ‘height above sea-level’ terms, yet their very existence proves that the sea has not been near them for centuries. White skeletons of manuka mark the sea’s most recent push inland—a spring tide, decades ago, driven in by a gale perhaps, ending yet another attempt by the forest to expand across the mudflats. Beneath the gaunt manuka trunks, the vegetation suddenly changes from rushes to salt-stunted shrubs, low and spindly at first, but rising in height with each step inland until you disappear beneath them. Many are coprosmas, almost every one, it seems, bears the large, fleshy, bright green companion leaves of mistletoe among its own tiny-leaved canopies. Underneath the shrubs, young plants seeded from the taller forest trees give you the feeling that, with half a chance, their young would overwhelm everything else were it not for the salty soil. Each autumn, hundreds of thousands of kahikatea and pukatea seeds, flicked by the wind or dropped by gravity and birds, must rain down from the big trees. Yet not one has become a seedling.

  A few more steps inland, and manuka’s tight, tiny leaves are replaced by a multitude of broadleaved shrubs, small trees and entanglements of kiekie and supplejack. Close to the big trees the floor is littered with jumbled masses of epiphytes that storms have thrown down from their upper reaches. The ground is also dense with kahikatea and pukatea seedlings, but none of the other big tree species. Rātā has an altogether different strategy for perpetuating its kind. Unable to establish as seeds on the forest floor, it has evolved a way of beginning life nearer the sky. Every century, as the old forest ages, rātā is increasing its presence, by germinating its seed among the epiphytes high in the kahikatea and pukatea, establishing a foothold for its vigorous vines to descend. Taking root in the fertile soil, they eventually dominate the old trees. Here in the tree-less tidal zone, the rātā has simply mimicked the strategy on low, shorter-lived shrubs. Strange, multi-trunked little rātā are now scattered through the scrub.
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  A bit more shoving against plants and I am looking up through lianes of kiekie to towering trunks, arcing palm fronds which reflect deep shafts of sunlight and, far above, masses of epiphytic lilies, ferns and orchids. The damp floor is a sprawling jumble of aerial roots, which rise every now and then in great buttresses. The impression of tropical rainforest is no delusion: 30 million years ago, before the days of birds—when reptiles did the flying and seed dispersal—before the land that has become New Zealand broke away from the rest of the ancient Gondwana continent, it was mainly low-lying like this, forested and tropical. Almost every plant here, and its interaction with others, derives from these tropical rainforest beginnings.

  ‘Primeval’ was how Whanganui Inlet was first described to me. Embellished no doubt by the other name in this stretch of country, Te Tai Tapu—the sacred, or as some locals prefer forbidden, coast—the image I created in my mind’s eye was of a timewarp, a glimpse of coastal New Zealand before people came. The stories that drew me to it also made me so cautious about its tide that I spent my first evening watching the speed with which it came in, crept up each arm of the inlet, paused, and was sucked back across the mudflats, into its channels and out to the open sea. Next morning, to avoid a stranding, I timed my exploration around the brief hour the inlet was other than a swathe of mud. My reward was to encounter its bay of big trees from the water.

  As I floated motionless, surrounded by forest, Whanganui indeed seemed one of those ‘safe and commodious harbours’ the first Europeans were so keen to find. The bark of a farm dog, cutting through the silence from paddocks miles away on the other side of The Entrance, brought me back to the present. North, beyond Pah Point, the Pakawau Hills lay in blue haze. West, across the emerald calm of the inlet, were the limestone bluffs from whose summits you can see down the West Coast in fine weather. East, different country altogether: low granite hills of beech forest, tried for farms but left in burnt stumps. South, the illusion of fertile plains that is in reality the largely unfarmable scrub and flax-covered peat of Maungarakau Swamp where the inlet used to go to the sea many thousands of years ago. Then, with merely a different ripple, and a flick of the eelgrass under the canoe, the tide turned. Imperceptibly at first, forest began drifting past and I felt the pull toward the swells of the Tasman Sea.