Adventure Divas

by Holly Morris

  “I like the color—and the fact that it was made the same year Shirley Chisholm ran for president.”

  Liza looks at me, puzzled. She’s not that old.

  “Yeah, she’s a fine old sheila,” muses Simon (about the car, not Chisholm), tapping her dashboard with affection, apparently inured to the fact that the car is without brake and tail lights. His patience with the Valiant will serve us well, it will turn out, as Old Sheila will break down repeatedly over the next three weeks.

  We drive Old Sheila through the bright green, lazy rolling hills and farmland that surround Auckland until we reach Marilyn Waring’s farm. Waring is a former member of Parliament (the youngest ever—she was only twenty-two when she first entered the hallowed halls in 1975) and author of the book Counting for Nothing, which is widely regarded as a seminal work of progressive economics. Trundling down the loopy driveway, we spot a person in a gray T-shirt, lumbering gumboots, and black khaki pants emerge over a grassy knoll. She has a stout, efficient build and short brownish-gray hair, and her thick hands are clapping together.

  “Come on darlings! Come on!” she chortles to the hundred or so goats that trail behind her. This is our first—and unforgettable—image of the intellectual powerhouse who imploded some of the most sacred orthodoxies of economics, and made her country famously No Nuke.

  We have one day with Waring. A busy academic, lecturer, and prolific writer, she made it clear we would have to join her routine in progress and interview her along the way as time allowed. So after perfunctory introductions we get down to business: farm chores.

  CHORE #1: FEEDING THE PIG

  “Here, shake this, Holly,” says Marilyn, shoving a bucket of slop into my hands. “Tam! Tammi! You awake? Where are you, pig? There she is. She didn’t feel well yesterday. Come on. Come on. Yes!”

  “Uh, have you had her a long time?” I ask.

  “Yeah, probably about six or seven years. We picked her up late one night wrapped in a towel at the local hotel, and she’s named after the barmaid—come on, Tammi!—because, well, the barmaid was a redhead,” she says as a 104-pound, wiry, auburn-haired creature lumbers its way over to us snout first and starts, well, pigging out on slop. Marilyn explains that Tammi is the resident garbage disposal, thereby keeping away possums and other scavengers.

  “How long have you lived the farm life?” I ask.

  “About fifteen years. When I was in Parliament I represented a rural constituency. Actually, Helen Clark’s [the prime minister’s] family home and her parents were in my constituency. I was so envious of the lifestyle.”

  “The lifestyle of your constituents?”

  “Yeah. I knew I just couldn’t live in town forever; I never really was a city person. I was forced to be in the city part of the time I was in Parliament but it’s just not me, so it had to be a farm. You know, you have to be quite resilient,” she says.

  “Do you have to be more resilient to live on a farm or to be in Parliament?” I ask, knowing she was elected to Parliament three times, and trying to lead this discussion toward something less agricultural.

  “It’s completely different,” she begins. “I found Parliament personally really brutal. Of course, in the 1970s there were only ever four women in the Parliament and for one whole session I was the only woman in the government.

  “But the resilience that’s required on the farm means really hard calls: Sometimes when animals are sick and cows are having calving trouble you have to make up your mind about life or death. Here,” she says, nodding at the expanse of the farm, “you’re working all the time with elements that are more powerful than any humans can ever be, and the only way to survive is to work with them. Whereas in politics humans assume they have power over, most of the time. So this is much better,” she says, letting Tammi lick the last bit of grub from the pail.

  CHORE #2: GETTING THE CRITTERS IN THE SHED

  “Come on, come on, girls!” Marilyn says, somehow successfully guiding an organic mass of goats in the right direction simply by gentle command. I doubt her fellow Parliamentarians were as easily herded.

  “You were twenty-two, right, when you entered Parliament? I mean that’s—”

  “That’s a baby. But when you are twenty-two you don’t think about it, and besides, you know, people in their twenties have a right to be there. Women have a right to be there. Indigenous peoples have rights to be there. It’s supposed to be a house of representatives, so it shouldn’t have been so quaint,” she says frankly, referring to the largely white and male legislature she became a part of.

  “Did you do something about that?” I ask.

  “Well, in lots of ways I don’t think I achieved anything. I can’t show you a memorial or a private bill or anything that I managed to pass. Sometimes I think some of the most important [achievements] were stopping some of the worst things happening. In the seventies and early eighties it was a really important time in New Zealand for the women’s movement and for me to act as a kind of a bridge and sometimes as an interpreter—just to be there, you know, screaming, ‘Excuse me but . . .’ ”

  No memorial, maybe, but in fact Marilyn is responsible for her country’s antinuclear stance—a formidable contribution. Marilyn felt strongly that there should be no nuclear weapons inside New Zealand’s sovereign territory and committed a now legendary act of political courage. In June 1984, she announced that she would vote against her party in favor of an opposition bill to ban nuclear weapons.

  Marilyn’s political party, the National Party, controlled the government, headed by Prime Minister Robert (“Piggy”) Muldoon. In response to Waring’s revolt, Muldoon dissolved Parliament and called a snap election four and a half months earlier than the election would have been held (some say Muldoon was visibly drunk at the time). The Labour Party, then in opposition, won the election in a landslide, bringing the Muldoon government to its knees and ushering in a proud antinuclear era in New Zealand’s history.

  All this was the result of a gutsy stand by Marilyn, who has just said to me, “I don’t think I achieved anything.”

  New Zealand’s antinuclear policy led the country to ban the United States from parking its nuclear submarines in its waters, a stance that strains political relations between the two countries to this day.

  Marilyn picks a chunk of hardened mud from the nape of one of the goats. She might have been one of few women in government in the seventies, but things are considerably different now.

  “With all the women currently in power in New Zealand, do you think there has been real institutional change?”

  “Kind of. You know, with a woman prime minister and leader of the opposition and governor general designate and chief justice and mayor of Auckland. Having that range of women in important or figurehead positions still doesn’t mean that you have a kind of substantive equality, but it is very different. One of the former women governors general used to tell this wonderful story about primary schools and one little boy putting his hand up and saying, ‘Can a man ever be governor general?’ ” she says with a laugh, illustrating how quickly norms can change.

  “It doesn’t by any means change things like the distribution of wealth or racial inequity or the whole range of other things. . . . A lot of the women are in power in some of the very last bastions of patriarchal structures, to use the old language, so I guess they start to change language in small ways. They start to change the priorities that are on the agenda and some significant legal changes, of course. So, it’s an evolution just as long as you’re not too impatient,” she concludes, somewhat hopefully.

  “I’ve always thought of New Zealand as being conservative in a blokey-bloke kind of way, but in terms of women in power, in terms of women’s right to vote, New Zealand has really led the way globally, right?”

  “Yeah, there’s some good stuff. It’s because New Zealand is so small and so a lot of the politics are pretty transparent. It’s very difficult to be highly corrupt here because everybody knows everybody and
there aren’t many of us.”

  Pub intelligence. When you are so small that the politicians and constituents share pastures and pints, it’s tough to pull the wool over.

  CHORE #3: MUCKING OUT THE SHED

  While we are chatting, Marilyn mentions the goat shed, our next stop, more than once. The problem is, her accent, with its inflected vowels, makes it sound as if she is saying goat shit (goat shiiiid, in Kiwi). Every time she says goat shed I wince, knowing PBS censors won’t like a potty mouth. And bleeping a diva goes against my libertarian principles.

  “I’m going in there to sort this lot out,” she says, entering the crowded wooden shed. “Excuse me, babies.” She nudges a pair of confused goats in her way. “Just pull that gate,” she tells me, “so they don’t slip out. Push them. Push them! No, no push them up there,” she yells as one dashes through my legs, snagging the wire from my radio mic and dragging it through a pile of fresh goat shed.

  “What inspires you more these days, farm life or, ah, politics?” I ask, as I latch the wooden gate to curb further goat attrition. I delicately sniff my mic before clipping it back on my collar.

  “Farm life!” she declares instantly. “Good intensive labor that keeps you fit but doesn’t require a vast amount of cerebral activity. You’re free to think creatively. I certainly wrote some of the most significant parts of Counting for Nothing in the goat shiiiid.”

  Wince.

  “I probably have some of my best ideas in the goat shiiiid.”

  Wince.

  Her best ideas resulted in Counting for Nothing, a book that posits the simple yet radical idea that women’s unpaid work, and the environment, should be valued and figured into the global economy. Across the world, 65 percent of women’s work time is unpaid, whereas men’s unpaid work is about 30 percent of their total work time. Unpaid work includes housework, informal enterprises, and family businesses. In many of the so-called superpower First World nations, women account for 50 percent or more of the unpaid workers in family businesses.* 1

  Why is it, Marilyn asked in her work, that market economies are all that count? Often economic policies pretend to be objective, but are in fact elitist and mask political agendas. Her ideas challenge many of the economic policies that drive modern-day globalization. Just as Jimmy Carter demonstrated that human rights can be a part of foreign policy, Marilyn Waring’s is an unapologetically value-based economic paradigm. She says economic models should include humane ways of measuring quality of life, and that community well-being is data worth measuring. If only more of the world’s thinkers spent their time in goat sheds instead of ivory towers.

  “What’s easier to handle, goats or members of Parliament?” I ask, stumbling after a kid that has wandered off.

  “Well, goats are invariably all intelligent,” she responds. “They can be very stubborn.”

  “Goats or Parliament?” I say.

  “Oh, goats, but of course people in Parliament are stubborn. I mean, if I thought Parliament was easy I would still be there,” says Marilyn. “Aren’t you a little beauty!” she declares to a small angora. It’s clear she doesn’t want to talk about Parliament anymore.

  “So do you think there is a direct correlation between being out here”—I gesture to the rolling hills and the shed—“and your economic philosophies?”

  “Absolutely. Because there is a whole different sense of value operating out here,” she says.

  If policy makers the world over were the ones carrying buckets of water three miles every morning, like the women in India, policies might look different, and unpaid work might be a part of economic models. You value what you sweat for.

  Marilyn wrestles one of the goats and brings the analogy even closer to home. She shows me the goat’s ear, which is heavy with a brown, crusty square-inch chunk of . . . something. “It’s cancer,” she says when she realizes it’s not obvious to me what I am looking at. “See, this goat’s ear is developing a big skin cancer because of the ozone layer depletion. It’s not something I suppose people in the northern hemisphere think about very much, but in terms of the hole over Antarctica, we here live with the effects of the discharge up north,” she says. “The best we can do is try and wait for it to dry off a little bit and then actually just cut if off,” she says, scruffing the animal’s good ear, “to make it more pleasant for her. She’s healthy, you know, at the moment, but I mean the ear is very close to the brain and she’s an older girl. This is the kind of thing we’re having to watch for all the time now.”

  “Does this kind of thing change the atmosphere around environmental politics?” I ask, petting the ailing goat.

  “Yeah, I think it’s hard to live in this country and not have a certain attitude about environmental politics. A huge percentage of New Zealand land is locked up in national parks and forests or reserves. There’s a tremendous consciousness especially among those that have the privilege to travel,” she says.

  In fact, one third of New Zealand is protected as national parks and forests and wildlife areas. They are considered taonga (treasures) of irreplaceable value.

  CHORE #4: COMBATING TOE JAM

  “C’mon, it’s time for a footbath!” Marilyn hollers to the troops. “In you go. C’mon, little beauty.” She encourages a few rogue goats through a treated puddle. The solution of water and zinc combats skold, a nasty inflammation between halves of the cloven hoof that can cause foot rot.

  “That’s it?” I say after we hustle several more into the treated puddle.

  “No, they are going to stand there for about ten minutes,” she says. “In you go, in you go,” she says, shoving a few more into the bath. She hauls the gate into place, leaving the goats to their pedicure soak.

  “What sort of mistakes do people make, in terms of activism—environmental, political, feminist, what have you?” I ask, noting that this is the first time I’ve competed with goats for an interviewee’s attention.

  “Well, I think too many of us are taught to think that you have to embrace a political ideology, or it could be a religious ideology—any ideology. That somehow there’s a central committee, you know, determining the right way to do something. Sometimes I think there is too much internecine warfare, even in terms of advocacy for the environment, for the feminist movement, or for the indigenous people’s movement. There’s not one way, you know.”

  Marilyn Waring doesn’t seem fond of orthodoxy or fundamentalism in her political views. Reminds me of former Black Panther Assata Shakur in Cuba, who mentioned her evolving relationship to revolution, which I interpreted to mean a relaxing of orthodoxy, a recognition of the hazards of fundamentalism. Marilyn appreciates a diversity of methods in progressive politics. I wonder how strategic her political path has been.

  “Have you ever felt or do you feel now that you have a mission or has life just unfolded?” I ask.

  “Ahh. Life’s just unfolded. I don’t have a kind of zeal, you know. I’ve just happened to find myself in some unusual places at some unusual times,” she says, with what I now understand to be characteristic understatement.

  “But there are certainly times when I wish my brain would stop,” she says, panting because she’s just heaved aside a fence post, but I also sense another kind of fatigue in her voice, too. The fatigue of thirty years of activism.

  “It’s also one of the great things about farming . . . the fact that I can have a little bit of time off from, you know, worrying about the war crimes tribunal, or the conflict in Bougainville.* 2 But of course, I can’t stop worrying about foot-and-mouth disease.” She laughs and wipes her hands on her pants. “Yeahhh.”

  “There’s a real strain of independence, a real matter-of-factness among the people around here,” I observe out loud.

  “Oh, well for me, it’s just that I don’t want to make things complicated, and I want things to work, I don’t want to waste time and I want to be able to do it myself. I’m trying to do really simple things like having tools the right size for a woman’s hand. G
etting things where I can maintain them. It’s like, I don’t need a beast of a machine that makes me depend upon somebody else.”

  Simplicity in farm or economic theories, I’ve read, is a Marilyn trademark.

  “You’re known for being able to interpret complex things like economic theory into lay language. I think you said during your time in Parliament you became ‘the master of the simple question,’ or something like that,” I say.

  “The art of the dumb question,” she clarifies.

  “The art of the dumb question, yes, and, um, do you think that the fact that you were so young—”

  “One of the things you learn is that nearly anywhere you are and you ask a dumb question, like three quarters of the people in the room are really pleased you did ’cause they didn’t know either, and they were just gonna sit there and suck it up and just be ignorant, you now, and, um, it helps to cut through the bullshit, you know? Yeahhhh.”

  Or goatshiiiit or sheepshit or piggy(Muldoon)shit. We load up and Marilyn continues to work in the muck, chucking sheep into their proper pens, demonstrating, it seems, an important correlation between being up to your ankles in crap and the stroppy skill of cutting the crap.

  “People love her for bringing down Piggy Muldoon,” says Simon, as we drive back from Marilyn’s for our last night in Auckland. “And what a great interview. Who would have guessed she would be so funny.”

  “Yeah, she really was,” I say, grateful. Feminist Economist isn’t exactly a title that ushers forth images of (prime-time-worthy) knee-slapping good times in the populist psyche. “And for a politico, she doesn’t seem to get mired in politics—not the conservatism of the right or the knee-jerk reactions of the left.”

  “What’s with this traffic? In Auckland of all places,” he says, forced to hit the brakes three blocks from our hotel. Down the street we see the red flashes of a dozen fire trucks and cop cars. How annoying.

  “Do a U-ey, Simon. Can we get to the back alley where we unloaded our equipment?” We begin to creep down the alley, avoiding the roadblocks.