stammer onwards
into the new millennium. All those years like boxthorn
or gorse grown up the flank
of you, as we sit at your feet, studying the scriptures of circuitry, the wiring
of habitable towns, the falling light of comets and
errant stars. Here, I applaud the aching limbs of your
fife and drum band,
you—their conductor—in your bowler hat with its wind-battered raukura.
I praise the light
their disciplined music sheds on both you and the descendants
of the Thames Native Rifle Volunteers.
Like you, I can imagine the Opunake Hotel public bar
crammed ceiling-high with loaves of bread
anticipating a siege, long engagement, the possibility
of reprisal,
a half million warriors flowing like lava from your mountain.
But instead, a quiet morning—
Taranaki lost in clouds, after a night of electrical storms, fragments
of meteors, the cool vacant debris
of space. Also like you, I am worried about the health
of my family, descended as I am
from one J.C. Hickey, a man, by some accounts, responsible
for the introduction of boxthorn, gorse and wire gates
to the Taranaki. A notable brawler,
a one man travelling circus,
who famously fist-fought any person, Maori
or Pakeha and, after your arrest, Te Whiti o Rongomai,
upon whom fell the task of sewing new buttons
on your trousers. One version
has it that lots were drawn as to which constabulary member
landed ‘the important job’. Another version, that this man’s brother
had taken a highly-born Maori wife and the family connection
rendered him appropriate. Either way,
the passage of this small needle through your trousers
was the one detail of the invasion
he chose to remember when interviewed for the Opunake Times,
aged 80, in 1927. No mention is made
of his brawling tendencies after 1881, although a propensity for
civil disobedience later came to light
when he became the first citizen to run livestock
on the Opunake common, his twenty five head
of cattle successfully evading not only the bylaws but a
marauding ranger.
Not that I would presuppose a pacifism on his part,
perhaps at most a more
reasonable nature, cut but only slightly of your cloth, Edward,
or Eru-eti as you were known.
And as you were a bird once, ruru or native owl, and your friend
Tohu an albatross,
so my great Irish grandfather was known as—an irony that would not
have been lost on you—Cockatoo.
Watching the years trundle past, attended by
what beliefs we can muster
and this ever-present disbelief—what you might ask, has
become of us, Te Whiti o Rongomai?
We replace our gods like light-bulbs—only the current is
constant. And what of your illuminated province,
all darkness and hail
storm, across which I have led expeditions
into history books—in which I find you, your eyes
which have known the flash of lightning but seldom
the photographer’s bulb. They search me out, Te Whiti o Rongomai
while the god of bad weather and dissolving stars
studies the calm ocean of your brow, the peaceful
furrows of your face. He studies the shadow
of a boy running from the wharenui, hands clasped over
his ears, to escape the deafening roar of
the poi, swinging from the long arms of your many sons and
daughters. A line of roaring propellers.
Later, the women join in a haka
to flatten the soil, raise the mountain.
The view from the grave, as you know, is a long, undulating
one. Elevation a concern only
for the living and their business. They gather above us, as we speak:
aeroplanes, their bellies so crammed with phosphate
they can hardly take off. But there is a richness you bring to the soil
which cannot be dropped from a height.
All this we have seen in our lifetime: cables buried under sea
and earth, explosions of gases
in the atmosphere, waterspouts, satellites, the infinity motif
of the circular milking shed.
But there is another grid, laid as a blanket over your province:
one of fife bands, poi dances
your descendants gathering around a teapot the size
of a small room, just as the pa are placed
around Maunga Taranaki. If only the sky, the ever-present
sky, was a sponge capable of soaking up
whatever suffering we offered it, or a fog in which the lesser gods
of war and anger might be dizzied
and lose their way. The mountain climbs the mountain
track to reach its own
summit, sifts through relics of itself:
a box of bayonets wrapped
in wax-paper, a children’s hut
of stacked cannonballs,
each native feather of each living bird, stitched
into the mountain’s cloak.
Bowler hat and feather, feather
and bowler hat
Te Whiti, last year when a meteor was reported
flying above the Southern Hemisphere
I knew it would be drawn to your mountain. And sure enough, it broke up
over Maunga Taranaki.
Te Whiti, we share these flaming and extinguished stars
just as we share brass bands, certain Biblical
co-ordinates, a sense of disbelief and this recurring
belief. I have stood on the floor of your wharenui, where
your quiet room once was—the building itself burnt down
years after your departure
not by electricity but by an earlier form of light
and warmth. Leaving only a concrete floor-plan
your walls and roof now every star and falling
star and starless night
since then. And it is your wiring that keeps the heavens
radiant. In another sense, the source of the light
outlives even you—an electrical lamp
at either end of your grave.
As you were once, asleep and awake, so you lie. The mountain
our dark tent too, all black air and
thunderclaps and climbers
falling forever downwards.
But you wouldn’t want to make
too much of your mountain,
Te Whiti, even if the electricity of your province remains
light years ahead of the rest of
the known universe, because it is also true that farm machinery has
drowned out your kereru, your
ruru. So what of this affinity, then, that which
we feel?
Perhaps because we were all diggers, a river of shovels
edging towards the sea
accompanied by the stitch, stitch,
stitching of Irish peasant hands
As people of mercy, love and a facility
for making whole, we now sit
by your trouser-leg and
sew, as the descendants
of Cockatoo Hickey will sit
for all time
attending each miserable thread
and the stitch, stitch
stitching of this conciliatory
needle.
(2001)
Alison Wong, from As the Earth Turns Silver
> Maoriland
Sometimes under the weight, the shape, of his brother’s expectation, Yung felt death-weary.
He stood before the washtubs out the back of the shop and gazed at his red-stained hands. He pulled the last beetroot from the water, brought down the blade quickly, once, twice, watched the leaves with their fine red stalks, the long end of the root, thin as a wet rat’s tail, fall into the wooden box. Then he tossed the trimmed beetroot onto the others, carried the enamel basin to the wash-house and tipped them onto the purple-red mass in the copper. It would take half an hour for the water to come to the boil and then another hour, bleached worms, beetles, spiders slowly boiling on the surface of the red dirt water.
He went back and cleaned the tubs, tipped in half a sack of carrots, covered them with water, then took the broom and pushed it under then up through the vegetables, sweeping, tumbling them clean in the ever murkier liquid. He could feel a layer of sweat forming on his brow, the dampness of his white singlet, his shirt, under his arms. He loosened his grip, relaxed his arms for a moment, then pushed down again. Once he’d had tender hands, hands that knew only the calligrapher’s brush, the grinding of ink stick with water. They were still soft, pale, not cracked and brown like his elder brother’s, but now calluses had formed on his palms, on the fleshy pads below his fingers.
He remembered the first time he’d done this, the rhythmic push and pull of wood and bristle, the sting of his skin rubbing, folding in on itself.
He pulled the plugs, watched the rushing, sucking waters, stepped back as the pipes drained onto the concrete pad. He picked out the cleaned carrots, dropped them into a bamboo basket, tipped the rest of the sack into the tubs and filled them again with water. How many years had he been here boiling beetroot, washing carrots, and trimming cabbages and cauliflowers? Eight? Nine? Almost ten years.
Standing on the deck of the Wakatipu as it heaved into port, he had been astonished by the landscape. Dusty clay and rock where men had hacked a footing. Where they had tried to anchor themselves, their wooden shacks and macadam roads from Antarctic southerlies. Hills thick with bush and curling foliage falling to the bays. Ships loaded with coal or logs from the West Coast or human cargo from Sydney. Wellington: a town built of wood and dust and wind.
Shun Goh told him gweilo gave this land a strange, mystical name. The name of the dark-skinned people, the people of the land. He said Maoris were dying. In fifty years they would be wiped out, the way a white handkerchief wipes sweat from the face. They would become a story passed from mother to son, like the giant birds they’d heard of. Fierce birds that could not fly. Moa, the people said, like a lament … Maori … their absence a desolation.
In those early days Yung thought he saw a Maori, hut the man selling rabbits door to door turned out to be Assyrian. And the man selling vegetables was Hindoo. This is what all the dark-skinned people were—Assyrian or Hindoo—the ones who lived in Haining Street.
Over months, years, he did see Maoris, their status and appearance as varied as gweilo. When the gweilo Duke and Duchess visited, Tongyan adorned a huge arch with flags outside Chow Fong’s shop in Manners Street. Chinese Citizens Welcome, it said. Everyone lined up along the route: gweilo, Tongyan, Maoris.
‘Who these Maolis?’ Yung asked Mrs Paterson from the bakery next door, referring to the proud people in their finest gweilo top hats, pressed black suits and gold watch chains he saw welcome gweilo royalty, the groups of them he sometimes saw near Parliament.
‘They’re from up north,’ Mrs Paterson said. ‘They come to petition the government.’
‘What is petition? Yung asked.
‘They want their land back,’ she said, and then asked about the price of potatoes.
Sometimes Yung saw Maori fishermen or hawkers of sweet potato and watercress. They dressed in old ghost clothes and heavy boots, or wrapped an army blanket fastened with rope or a belt around the waist, sometimes even a blanket around their shoulders. But whatever their standing they never called out names or pulled his braid. They smiled, cigarette in hand, as if to a brother.
The first time Yung saw them he turned to Shun, looking for a sign. But his brother did not smile back. ‘Be careful,’ he said. Have a small heart. Yung looked at the tobacco-stained teeth, the blue-green markings etched all over the dark faces. One of the men was young, perhaps his own age, and he had a straggly beard that partially obscured his tattoos. Yung looked him in the eye and smiled, just the corners of his mouth, then followed his brother, unsure of what he should do.
Yung pushed the broom down into brown water. Almost a decade, and he’d barely spoken to a Maori. Proudly tipped his hat to an old woman perhaps—the way he’d seen ghost-men meet, greet and pass their women—or to Maori men he’d smiled a hello. Only once one had come into the shop.
The man’s face was fully tattooed and he’d held himself so very erect and with such dignity in his top hat and pressed black suit, a white handkerchief neatly folded in his jacket pocket, that Yung had been at a loss for words. Yung could imagine him waving from a shiny black motorcar as crowds lined the parade.
The man had nodded his head slightly. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.
‘Good afternoon, sir.’
The man smiled, flashing a gold tooth. He looked at the strawberries and grapes.
He only wants the best fruit, Yung thought. The most expensive. ‘Stlawbelly go lotten. No good,’ he said. ‘Glape best quality. Velly sweet.’ He walked over, selected the best cluster—each grape plump, juicy, purple-black. ‘Please tly,’ he said, offering it up.
The man took a grape and placed it delicately in his mouth. He smiled again. ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘I’ll take two bunches.’ Then he looked around again. ‘How is the pineapple?
Yung lifted a pineapple to his nose and sniffed. He tugged gently at one of the inner leaves, then put the pineapple back on the stack. He picked up another, smelled it and tugged at a leaf which came away. ‘Good pineapple,’ he said. ‘Lipe and sweet.’
As he handed over the packaged fruit, the man thanked him.
‘Good luck,’ Yung said.
The man looked at him quizzically.
‘Your land,’ Yung said.
‘Yes,’ the man said.
They almost bowed to each other before the man walked out into the southerly.
What gweilo had ever treated him as respectfully? How many had even looked in his eyes?
Each day he worked in the shop. Each day but Sunday white ghosts came in and out. He handed them vegetables wrapped in newspaper or paper bags filled with fruit. They put money on the wooden counter and he counted out their change. Good day. Good day.
He wanted to talk. He wanted to understand. But how to say? His English was improving. But how many customers truly invited his stumbling conversation?
On Sundays and other afternoons or nights when his brother gave him time off, he would go to a clansman’s—to another fruit and vegetable shop or laundry—or go down Haining Street, Taranaki, Frederick or Tory. They called the area Tongyangai—Chinese people’s street, where people of the Tong dynasty lived. In shop or cook-house or gambling joint, or even outside on a warm summer evening, they’d gather together to gossip and drink tea. His best friend Ng Fong-man, Cousin Gok-nam, everyone would be there. Everyone but women. Chinese women, wives. Even as he visited greengrocery, laundry, market garden, as he drummed up support and donations for the Revolution, how many women did he see? Who could afford the poll tax or even the fare?
Yung shut his eyes. He tried to remember his wife’s face, the way her brow furrowed in concentration when he wrote the first line of a couplet, when he challenged her to complete it. He tried to remember her voice, the sound of her laughter ….
No, everyone would be there in Haining Street, and gweilo also, placing bets, or after work, crowded in with Tongyan, checking their pakapoo tickets. Aaaaiyaa. Aaaaiyaa. The thumping of tables. The smell of pork soup. The sizzle of garlic and ginger. White ghosts should
er to shoulder, familiar faces without names. Their only intercourse green-inked characters marked on white tickets.
‘Beetroot cooked la! What are you doing? Why aren’t the carrots out in the shop?
Yung started. ‘All right la!’ He dropped the last of the carrots into the basket. Watched the back of his brother’s head as it disappeared inside again, his shiny shaven skin, the long oiled braid running down.
(2009)
Tina Makereti, ‘Skin and Bones’
He was lonely. It’s what you’d expect really. A man in his situation. He was surrounded by the good earth, his plantation, his stock, a nice river in the valley for fishing. He thought he should be happy. Fulfilled. But something was missing.
It was spring. He went about the place tilling and planting and from time to time felt an urge. He’d look down and see his own weighty erection and think What am I supposed to do with this?
He worked hard. There’s a massive amount of work to do when you first start out on a place. He needed to get everything working in rhythm with everything else. He wanted to be self-sufficient. So he added in fruit trees and feed crops, and found he enjoyed the bird life that came to fossick in his orchards.
Despite this, at night the urge all but overcame him. He would thrash about in his bed, the mass of the pulsing thing between his legs making it impossible to lie comfortably. Nothing would relieve it. His own desperate fumblings had little effect. He tried dousing it in cold water, strapping it down with bandages. He prayed for relief.
Even though there was no one else around, he felt betrayed by his own neediness. When he stopped for a breather and a drink he no longer surveyed his land proudly as he wiped the sweat from his brow. He frowned. The birdsong no longer reached his ears. He saw that the shed needed painting, the weeds needed pulling, and the trees needed fertilising. He saw that it was not good.
There came a day so hot the earth beneath his fingers was warm to touch. He had watered it in preparation for his seedlings, and now he sat and ate his lunch beside it, running his left hand through the dirt as if it were sand on a beach. He was hard again, as he was almost constantly these days. It occurred to him that it would be pleasant to unsheathe his penis in the warm sunlit air. He looked far around himself. Of course, there was no one there. He hadn’t seen any of his brothers since they had had that fight last winter, during which Tāwhiri destroyed several of his crops and crashed into his house, causing the roof to collapse. Tāne, you gotta get him back for that, Tū had goaded, I’ll back you up! But he’d rejected Tū’s advice, so Tū turned on him as well. The only one he was on speaking terms with at the moment was Rongo, but he lived miles away.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 139