But for now they sighed in the dirty wind and as I listened I understood what the foreign cattle beast had said to me into the clatter of its escaping hooves, what the water had said as it went its low course. It was in the shape of the mountain which could never change—and yet had changed. There were strangers here.
This knowledge grew to certainty in me as I made my way up the gentle rise of the foothills. The afternoon was fading now, and soon the cold would come. Even I could not climb in the dark and so I looked for a place to bed down. It would be, I knew, a hiding place. Which sickened me, and made the anger build. To be hiding here, where my name was written in the dust—this was shaming.
I found a dry watercourse and gathered first brush for my bedding and then wood, which I lit with matches from the pocket of my coat.
At first it was a low fire, which I bent over, warming my hands. But as the cold gathered and the darkness grew blacker, as the stars came out, and memories of fires shared with my Daddy came flickeringly to me, I began to throw on larger pieces, and to glory in the way that the pillar of flame streaked upwards. This was my home! It will always be my home! I am here by right! My fire shouted these words out and the jumping shadows all around me were like spirits released after a long imprisonment. The watercourse was cupped like a hand and in its hollow I felt as though the land had made a place for me.
I remembered fires shared with my Daddy on this very mountainside, and one great blaze that Henry Stroud built for us on a beach, and dirty little fires squatted over with the girl Spoons in the back seats of abandoned cars and beneath overpasses in drizzly rain when the curling smoke had clung with the tiny beads of damp to her twist of hair. My ghosts, who travelled with me.
The fire rose and inside me the feelings rose also, as I remembered, that I had been done wrong, had been stolen from, and made to pay, and made to work, and never paid, that my Daddy had been torn from me, and also my life on the mountain, which was all I loved and all I had—the fire crackled and the sound was angry talk to me, as though the very elements would speak out my feelings. So I went deeper and deeper into the blaze, ever deeper into the leaping colours, which grew like the hunger twisting in my belly. Thus my head was down and my eyes so flooded by dancing light that it was some time before I grasped that beyond the flames there was standing a figure.
I saw first his boots, tooled and heeled, with cruel spurs. My eyes travelled up the long legs wrapped in the dusty chaps, saw there beside the legs the long barrel of the hefted rifle. Beneath a broad hat stood the coward Stronson, watching down on me, and the flames cast streaks of emotion on his face, loathing and cunning, which, blotchy, swam together in evil communion. His complexion, which ran naturally to freckles, was now a livid assemblage of spots, which danced; his watching eyes were the dancingest spots of all, deep set and cold—I leapt to my feet and, keeping the fire between us, ran headlong into the dark. I fell, twisted to one side—I knew that any moment the rifle would crack, that the small length of spinning lead would fly, humming, like a hornet making an angry line, spinning, spinning, seeking; would smack into my back and explode me open. I scrabbled, crawled, ran on. My face was torn by the long spines of a cactus which blocked my path, but I had no time to care for that, I could hear his boots crunching behind me, hear the action of his rifle as he worked the bolt.
Or so I thought. In fact the crack never came. There was no bullet, or even a footfall—that had all been, I realised, in my head. I was crouched now behind a low bush and all I could hear was my heart, which was thunderous. When cautiously I glimpsed from behind its branches I saw the flames, quite distant now, and then his tall shape, watching from the shadows beneath his hat. He was listening for me, was judging where to direct his fire—but no. He stood and, though I was too far away to see his eyes, I knew that they were trying to see me. But no. Instead he called.
His voice was full of honey, full of remorse and warmth. Into the night he called my name, ‘Chester,’ and his voice was full of the sing-song that the girl Spoons had called to me with, ‘Chester, Chester,’ full of emotion and regretful knowledge. But I knew this for the treachery that it was and, crawling low on my belly, I crept away from him, and out into the silence of the cold dark of the mountain’s foothills.
(2006)
Māoriland
Bernadette Hall, ‘Omakau’
The beautiful long back
of the woman in the black
and white photograph.
The shoulder-blades
of shorn sheep, the way
the light gathers there
as they bend and eat.
Then all start walking
in the same direction.
(2001)
Hamish Clayton, from Wulf
Near the start of 1830, towards the end of February, we left London in the merchant brig Elizabeth. Laden with the daydreams of trade, the lands of myth ahead of us, we rode trade-winds and the whale-road. We set our sails for the South Seas, for the ends of the earth, for those colonies that were becoming New southern countries that weren’t countries yet: New Holland and New South Wales. New Zealand. New Ulster, New Munster and New Leinster. Colonies yet to be that looked back over the shoulder of the earth to see Home.
We sailed south, the boat a great armchair rocking on the spot though we knew we were falling slowly around the surface of the earth. In only a few months we had sailed from our northern winter through the savage heat at the belt of the globe to another winter at the bottom of the world. We felt the enormous weight of the planet, a ball spinning beneath the tread of our brig, the seasons capsizing around us.
We arrived in Sydney in the rain in the night. We looked at Gunn’s maps of the Australian country, a whole continent the shape of a bison. On those maps Sydney was a paper-weight holding that great island down in the ocean. The steady, ancient earth. But our captain pointed to those other islands, far smaller and wilder, further south and east, that moved like driftwood on the tide of the Pacific. Those lands, restless with earthquakes we’d heard, were being called New Zealand. Those lands pulled like an angry fish on a line, like a wild dog on a leash. They were the last place on earth and our captain said we are going over there to trade, men. Or he said we are going over there to trade men.
In August we left Sydney. We crossed the ditch of ocean that lay between Australia and New Zealand called the Tasman Sea. Though it was winter there, that was a mild sea till we were more than halfway across it. Then the season started snapping its salty teeth and through the cold rainy air we came upon the islands of New Zealand: New Ulster in the North, New Munster in the South, the final, broken shelf of the planet.
*
To the South its sides
rose steeply from the sea,
as steep as the green sides of a ship
whose timber sides were turned green
by the sea.
To the North it lay
as flat as an animal that lay
in the water, watching us watching it
as we approached, entering its water.
*
I never saw in all my wide-wanderings a country so fresh, so harsh, so beauteous-green. I never set foot in any country so bitter-cold in the middle-months.
The country lay like a gift from the open sky before us.
*
When we landed we realised they’d seen us before, others like us, earlier traders, whalers. They knew us from the thin colour of our skins. Our strange boots. Our muddy eyes and beards. We had not landed among war-like ones, though they knew the craft of war. They welcomed us. From earlier traders, whalers, they knew about our customs in ways that impressed us. We moved among them, keeping our distance, mindful. They knew our habits: our need to get drunk in the evenings, our love of songs and the fire. Our wish to trade. Our muskets for their flax, our rum for their flax, our tobacco for their flax. Our flints wrapped in blankets. Our sea-calloused men’s hands for the smooth round hips of their women and girls. Their wa
rm brown shades. Our white flesh, at sea for months, tasted of salt to them. We gave them meat and took handfuls of arse and breast. They were game. Our desire for trade, so rampant, our minds and bodies thick with it—our desire for trade always turned to the business of fucking.
*
We were wary of them, more wary of putting down roots, of planting ourselves there. Going native was the concern.
There was a madness that grew from that earth, those strange trees that grew in dark wet gullies: black and green, the sun-shattered leaves that stayed green on the trees through the cold of winter. The madness of that winter light: in the late afternoon it lay low and orange, pouring shadows into gullies like basins, empty and over-flowing, everything made into black wet shadows. And deep in those gullies, opening like arms and legs as black and green and wet as the great trees that grew from deep inside them, and whose roots grew from a stomach of stars inside the earth, everything was as black as the stomach of a tree. The black green trees. The black trees green. We were wary of everything there.
The madness that grew from inside that land grew quickest when the shadows grew long, like snakes crawling from the corners of the earth, though we knew there were no snakes crawling through those islands. If there was a madness growing from out of that earth, then it was a madness that grew from our own imaginations, for we’d stowed these away with us during the long months at sea, brought them ashore like handfuls of seed or dirt and then scattered them like accidental traces of ourselves in the soil of these new islands.
One evening I felt that madness come upon me, its cool green fingers becoming my fingers, its shaded eyes becoming my eyes.
I had been walking through gullies through the afternoon, through sheer green gullies, through wild green rooms. Those forests were dense and ancient forests—could barely be moved through except by following rivers or occasional paths already made. For the land there steers the man walking through it. And when he finds a path to follow then the terrain seems to have been already sliced by another mind. Yet it is always the land that steers him. After many hours, when I had walked through many strange valleys, then the light became suddenly cool and thin like water, and I realised that the sun had fallen away beyond the western edge of the world. In the quickly fading light I hurried to find my way back through that unsettling country. That was a fearsome terrible hour for me, for as the light was drained from the forest the green world I’d been within suddenly became dark and colourless, and I felt submerged, underwater. And though I could look up and see, through the trees, a sky which was—even then, beautiful, coloured—not yet night, everything beneath my feet and before my body was confusing, made of ink. The land regarded me through its dark guard of trees, sinister eyes invisible within their branches, and everything moved around me as I moved through that landscape, my breath held like a silent paddle.
I came to a sloping path plunging into the heart of a very deep cleft in the side of the earth which, I was sure, I had neither walked through nor seen that afternoon. But it was heading in what I took to be my direction—north-east—as well as uphill, towards what remained of the day, out of those hideous gullies, and I began to breathe again as I climbed its gentle slope. And as I walked I looked to the sky above me, to be cheered again by the beauty of the pure evening shade and the reminder of the day within it. When I looked back down to look along the path before me I froze and every drop of blood inside me turned to ice.
Thirty feet off, to the side of the path, crouched the black shape of a large Wolf, facing me, watching me, and even in that second which had split and stopped me straight and dead in my tracks I cursed myself a bloody fool—for now the animal had surely seen me, guessed that I had spotted it having seen my sudden stop, and would be upon my throat in a moment.
And inside that broken second I thought how, it was supposed, there were no wolves on those islands. We’d been told. But I was once a hunter in the north of the world, on islands far away from these, and I know the shape of a Wolf in the twilight as it sits on the edge of its dark country. I know the shape of a Wolf that is watching and waiting. I know the shape of its leap, made in the air when the line of protection is crossed. This line it wears against itself between itself and the world like the outline of its own body. For the Wolf is an animal of line, and is made of lines: a stripe in the fur, curves of tooth and claw, triangles of ear, shelves of paw. A whisker. These keep the Wolf from becoming something else in the world, and yet they are only a conspiracy of lines. In the dark places of strange lands outlines make a shape we can name, a beginning and an ending we recognise even within shadows at the far end of the earth.
All these things I thought in the broken chamber of a single second. And even as I thought them I knew they were madness. No Wolf I had encountered had ever leaped at me, save one which had been rabid, mad. The creature that crouched before me was too still, too composed, for that animal insanity to be buried within its folds of flesh and fur. I found my fear cooling like an ember where previously there had been flame and I crept carefully forward. And though the Wolf still did not move it changed before my eyes so as I stepped gradually closer it became clearer to me. Miraculously I saw two things held within the same shape: a Wolf—its pointed ears, its sloping back—and a broken, blackened tree-stump. A tree-stump! Erupting from out of the earth at an angle like a twisted tooth. As soon as I saw that stump for what it was, relief came like a flood within me. I laughed out loud. The sound, as flat and empty as coins dropped into a tin bucket, quickly died in the cold air. I went to the stump and stood over it and saw how hollow it was, the faint green colour about its lichen flanks. The Wolf had vanished. I patted its head behind its two wooden ears and laughed again, and again the gully killed my laughter. So I hurried on up the path until I broke the surface of the forest and I felt then as though I was coming up for air. It was lighter there, out of the trees on the ridge overlooking the forest-thick hide of the earth. Behind me the sunset an orange scar. A bright star hung in the east. I followed it home. A short walk to our camp.
(2011)
Anna Jackson, ‘Huia’
Huia feathers were always rare treasures,
kept in waka huia,
treasure boxes.
An iridescent bird, blue-black like petrol,
with a geenish sheen,
rarely seen,
the huia hopped along the ground, grounded.
But sang like the tui,
like a flute.
Dressed in treasure too valued by people
for the bird to be valued as bird,
the huia is no longer heard.
When the Duke of York was presented
with a feather for his hat,
trade
in huia feathers leapt to extinction.
Now the waka huia preserve
other treasures.
This is my waka huia for the bird.
(2001)
Anna Jackson, ‘Takahe’
For so long gone,
how strange
to find them again
not extinct
after all, small
families
passing on skills
for survival,
mother and father
teachers
in the intricacies
of tussock eating,
fern rooting,
and how
to hold food
with a foot.
Its beak a
red exclamation
mark, the takahe
shows how to find
the sweet core
through knowing
the tough exterior,
what to eat
through what
to leave:
watch me eat the
tussock core
so sweet and
so cold.
This is just to say,
takahe.
(2001)
Anna Jackson, ‘Moa’
Th
e first Maori waka arrived
at a pastoral kitchen,
stocked with moa
roaming on giant drumsticks,
named by the Maori settlers
‘chicken’, which is
to say, meat.
They moved as slowly
as a crowd, and loudly
as a feast,
which is what, after all,
they were.
Those pastoral days
when we walked
with our dinner,
two legs by two,
if we had not got along
so well, may well
have lasted
longer.
(2001)
Gregory O’Brien, ‘For Te Whiti o Rongomai’
A system of water-supply and the installation of electric light has brought
Te Whiti’s pa into line with the most advanced ideas of municipal
development.—Mr O.T.J. Alpers, 1902
Te Whiti was a prisoner at Opunake for a short time, and the buttons coming off
his trousers, volunteers were called for the work of sewing them on again. I was
given the important job.—Mr J.C. Hickey, Opunake Times, 22 March 1927
Te Whiti o Rongomai, the great bearded god
of electricity beams down on you
and shines approvingly and flickers
roundly and blows
the occasional fuse. But the lights of Parihaka
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 138