Ao Toa

by Cathie Dunsford

  “Don’t worry, Tony. If our experiments work as we expect them to, you’ll be so rich from the results that you’ll never have to work again. We all will be. Just relax, keep yer trap shut and leave it to us.” Steve wants Tony to know just enough to keep him happy and out of the picture. Of course, he’ll offer to buy the land if it works out for further experiments, and if not, he’ll dump Tony and his farm like a mutilated lamb.

  Ray perks up his ears at the mention of money. “What kind of riches are we looking at, Steve?”

  “No end to that if we are successful, Ray. You’ll be the chopper we use to collect the kauri if the barn experiments work. But if Operation Cave is a winner, then we’ll all be rich men. I can’t tell you more than this. It’s top secret.”

  “I thought you’d agreed to keep me posted on progress?” Tony is hurt he is being shut out.

  “No worries, Tony. You’ll be the first to know once we strike gold.” As if, thinks Steve, knowing he cannot trust this simple man with such knowledge when the time comes. He’ll divert him with a few good stories. “In fact, since you are both mates,” he adds with a carefully engineered grin, “I’ll tell you that we are to do some cloning here. Highly regulated, of course. FarmCorp will be inspecting the results, so everything will be above board. We have to pass it all by ERMA – the Environmental Risk Management Authority – so it will all be very rigorous. You’ll see them coming out here to inspect the premises and at the end to watch over the results.” Both Tony and Ray nod appreciatively, delighted they are in on it thus far. They know they’ve hit the big time and no way will they sacrifice money for gossip at this stage of the operation. Though it is tempting.

  Tena koutou katoa – Kuini here this time. We’re still at Tawharanui and the hikoi has moved on, but they will stay in touch via email. Tariana from Kawakawa will be on line when she can. Cowrie had a bit of a scrape on the knee while bodysurfing at Anchor Bay and she’s also got a few suspected bruised ribs, according to the vet who works here. We thought it appropriate for a vet to inspect a turtle, eh? No need to worry, Mere. Your Turtle is okay. It happened last night. We tried to call but your phone was engaged. Bet Maata was on the net, eh? Tena koe, Maata. Cowrie said she thought of you while in the water as she got pushed about a bit by the waves. She sent you energy just in case you needed it. I told her you could look after yourself and it was time she took care of her own body. She just had to get the biggest wave to the most rugged sea cave! Typical Turtle!

  We’ve decided to stay on a bit while she heals, and then catch the bus from the nearby township of Warkworth when she’s okay. We have not considered whether to join the others in Tamaki Makaurau yet. It depends on how fast our Turtle recovers. There’s a big anti-GE march planned down Queen Street and a rally at Aotea Square. Maybe some of Te Kotuku whanau will go down by bus? Check out the details on the GE-Free Coalition website we emailed to you recently. Kia ora.

  Last night I dreamed about caves. Probably because Cowrie was trapped in the Tawharanui sea cave. But this cave was strange. A bit like Waitomo. All rigged up with lights and wires. There was a body groaning in pain and I tried to crawl forward to see what it was, but every time I made some progress, I was being pulled back again. I could not see who or what was pulling me. Creepy. Reminded me of when I was trapped in some Maori burial caves on the farm as a kid. Remember me telling you about that? I fell down into them and lay with a broken leg, looking at a line of old skulls, until Kuri, my alsatian, alerted the whanau. It took me weeks to recover. I kept hearing our ancestors wailing out to me for destroying their peace. I thought they’d punish me until Aunty Poniki told me that they’d know I fell in by chance and did not mean to disturb them. That although burial caves are tapu, our ancestors know who comes with bad intent and who does not. I asked what would happen if I came with bad intent? They said it did not bear thinking about, that people had been cursed with illnesses and some even died when they disturbed such sacred places. However, that would not happen to me, they assured me. I was able to get over it then. Strange how these feelings can return with such force, eh?

  Anyway, I’d better not rabbit on as Sheila needs to use the net to check up on some seaweed recipes. They collect a range of wakame from Jones Bay and she’s promised us a treat tonight. That’ll cheer Cowrie up. You know how miserable Turtles get when they cannot do all they want to do! Some interesting kai moana should do the trick! Hope you are all well. We love you.

  Kia kaha – arohanui

  Kuini – and Wounded Turtle! xx.

  “Please don’t ever do that to me again, Maata. I was so worried that the tide had ripped you away from me, that I’d never see you again.” Mere is nearly in tears and holds Maata close the next morning.

  “Sorry, Mere. I promise I’ll let you know where I am. But even then – you still could not have helped. You couldn’t have stopped the shark from coming, nor me from fainting.” Maata hugs her warmly.

  “True. But at least I would have known for sure you were there and not anywhere else. As it turned out, you did go off later to Rawene Hospital without letting anyone know.”

  “Yeah. I won’t do it again.”

  “Well, it’s taught me a lesson not to worry so much.

  You can look after yourself in the end. You sure knew how to beat that shark away, eh?”

  “Maybe I’m following in Cowrie’s footsteps? Perhaps I am protected by the turtle like she is?”

  “Maybe so. We’ll see. It doesn’t sound like she was too protected out at Tawharanui according to Kuini’s email. Then again, it could have been worse. Imagine if I had lost both of you on the one weekend. That would have been devastating.”

  “Can I make you a warm cuppa tea, Mere? That’ll cheer us up.” Mere nods as Maata moves toward the small kitchen area.

  Mere looks out the window onto the herb garden. The peppermint and lemon balm are lush this year, and orange and yellow nasturtiums wend their way around and over the leaves as if they are hugging the plants and nurturing them. At the border, lemon verbena are sprouting from their woody winter stems and the pineapple sage is sending up bright scarlet ribbons of fire. She watches Maata as she reaches out the window to pick the heads of lemon balm. What a strong and beautiful young woman she has raised. She is so proud of her. Despite the shock she went through yesterday, she seems to have recovered well. The young seem to bounce back like a tree branch held down by snow and now released into the spring air. She hopes her Cowrie fares as well. Soon after, Maata hands her a steaming brew of lemon balm and fresh ginger tea.

  Maata opens the fridge and sees the whitebait that Piripi dropped by that morning. While Mere is sipping her cup of tea pensively, she decides to make her aunty’s favourite whitebait fritters. She mounds up the stone-ground flour and tips in some milk from the marae cows. She then adds an egg from their own hens and mixes it all up with some kelp and pours in the small whitebait. When the pan has heated with a dob of olive oil, she drops tablespoons full of the mixture onto the hot surface, and it sizzles. About a minute later, she flips the fritters over, and her mouth waters for the delicious treats.

  Mere comes back to earth from her reverie. “What’s that you’re cooking Maata? Smells like heaven to me.”

  “It is. Now you just relax and I’ll bring them to you.”

  Mere is happy to do as she says and settles into her old chair with relish as Maata delights in preparing the treat for her. Whitebait fritters with fresh lemon slices and a salad of nasturtium and red mustard leaf. The perfect breakfast. Over this treat, they discuss Maata’s work and Mere’s upcoming medicinal plant hui.

  “How are you finding it at Flyworks? That Raymond fella treating you okay?”

  “Yeah. He’s okay. At least he got me a job at Mr Pratt’s farm. I’m glad of the extra money.”

  “You be careful of that fella, Maata. You know he’s Moana’s ex, don’t you?”

  “I figured as much. But he isn’t gonna hurt me at all. He keeps his distance and ju
st lets me clean up around him. Bloody messy fella though. You should see the state of his undies. Worse than a cow paddock on a hot wet day!”

  Mere laughs. “Ugh! He doesn’t expect you to wash them does he?”

  “Yeah. But he has a fancy new washing machine and dryer. I don’t even have to hang the clothes out. Just bung them in and then throw them into the dryer afterwards.”

  “How can clothes get clean if they are not properly aired? The man’s a heathen. You just watch your back there Maata. Call me if ever you feel uncomfortable and I’ll get Piripi or Waka to collect you immediately. Okay?”

  “Yeah. You fuss too much. I’ll be fine.”

  “Better fuss now than be sorry later. Got any more whitebait fritters?” Mere licks her lips and places her fork onto her plate.

  “Course I have. Another plate keeping warm under the grill.” Maata fetches them and they tuck into a royal feast fit for Dame Te Ata, their Maori Queen. Outside the window, an orange and black monarch butterfly lands on a yellow nasturtium flower and tests her new wings by stretching them in and out, knowing she is safe in this sweet scented garden of Te Kotuku.

  “Next time you decide to run away on my old bike with a kuia, at least let me know about it so I do not worry,” Irihapeti admonishes, looking up from her laptop as Koa enters the nursery studio.

  “Sorry, Iri, but Mere was deeply upset and she did leave you a note.”

  “Yeah – but just get me next time. I should have been there to take her out to the beach.”

  “Fair enough. I didn’t think. I just felt the urgency of the minute. So – any more juicy responses to the government’s cop-out decision on GE yet?”

  “Yep. A stunner from a physics professor at Auckland University. Best piece I’ve read so far on it.”

  “Wanna share it with me? I’ve got a break before my session with the tamariki.” Koa settles into her old overstuffed armchair to listen. “Is it long?”

  “Na. Under two pages.”

  “Then read it to me and print it off later if we wanna share it with the others. Where did ya find it?”

  “Was printed in the uni newspaper, Craccum, and on one of our link sites.”

  “Sounds a lot more political than when I was there,” quips Koa.

  Iri looks up. “I didn’t know you had been there at all. Thought you were a Mainlander by then.”

  “Was. But I did a continuing educational course in botany when I first came up to Tamaki Makaurau. Excellent too.”

  “Ya wanna hear it?” Iri’s eyes are glued back onto the screen.

  “Fire away.”

  “Okay, then. Here goes.” Iri reads from the laptop: “Royal Omission – Great title eh? I like the way they spin off on the Royal Commission.” She goes on:

  Royal Omission

  by Peter Wills, Professor of Physics, Auckland University.

  The Royal Commission on Genetic Modification has recommended that things in New Zealand be left more or less just the way they were before it started its work. Except for one thing: we should abandon the possibility of a GE-free New Zealand, something that a large proportion of the parties who participated in the Commission’s processes asked for. The Commission describes excluding the possibility of a GE-free NZ as “Preserving Opportunities.”

  The country’s researchers, regulators and business people have been given the green light again, and the people who managed to get the light changed to amber while the Commission did its work have been told that they can have their GE-free New Zealand in bits. The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries will work out how far apart GE farms and GE-free farms should be and when disputes arise they will come in and mediate.

  The gist of the Commission’s attitude to genetic engineering can be gleaned from the second sentence of their report’s Executive Summary: “It [genetic modification] holds exciting promise, not only for conquering diseases, eliminating pests and contributing to the knowledge economy, but for enhancing the international competitiveness of the primary industries so important to our country’s economic well-being.”

  Genetic engineering is cast as heroic, fitting perfectly into the fashionable view of human good as the creation of wealth and health through global capitalism. Furthermore, our academic and governmental institutions, cooperating with industry, so we are told, have got everything right, at least more or less. The system needs just a bit of a tweak here and there, but they have made no fundamental errors. The report cites everyone and criticises no-one, but one has to look a little more closely to see whose interests and interpretations of the facts have been given weight. The recommendations make it very clear how interests vested in genetic engineering have been weighed against those somehow opposed to applications of the technology. In all of the major areas, research, agriculture, food, patents and liability, the Commission accepts the adequacy of the institutions and practices that have already been put in place by experts and makes only minor suggestions as to how things can be improved.

  The unique circumstances of the “biotechnology century”, as the Commission calls our times, are dealt with by setting up a Bioethics Council and a Parliamentary Commissioner on Biotechnology and asking the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology to develop a biotechnology strategy for the country. And then the Minister in charge of the Environmental Risk Management Authority is to have a “call in” power (that has never been exercised) extended so that it includes the significant cultural, ethical and spiritual issues that have been at the heart of the debate about genetic engineering in New Zealand during the last few years. The wishes of those who went to the Commission and asked for New Zealand’s GE-free environment to be kept the way it is, even for the time being, have simply been omitted from the substance of the recommendations. It is recommended that there be research into environmental impacts on soil and ecosystems, research support for organic farming, a strategy for the use of BT, protection of GE-free honey, special assessment of GE trees and so on, but all predicated on the progressive introduction of genetically modified organisms into our agricultural environment. Everything can exist side by side. It doesn’t matter that mounting evidence suggests that humans are pretty well incapable of keeping GE farming and organic farming properly separate from one another. New Zealanders will work out, as no-one else has managed to, how to make cross-contamination impossible.

  The main result of following the Commission’s recommendations will be that organic farmers will just have to accept International Seed Corporation’s and Aventis’s genes getting into their crops. The Australia New Zealand Food Authority has already proposed that 1 per cent contamination with GE material in any product must be considered normal and should not trigger any labelling requirement. The Commission praised ANZFA, in spite of their blatantly unscientific support for genetically engineered food.

  The Commission has accepted the word of the experts from the academic-governmental-industrial biotech complex and has set aside the concerns of people who want to retain the integrity of more natural ways of practising agriculture – free of wholesale wired-in manipulation for the short-term commercial gain of big biotech multinationals. What will our great-great-grandchildren think of the way we are treating our world? www.safefood.org.nz/comission.htm

  “He’s really hit the nail on the head in that last paragraph. Our mokopuna will never ever forgive us if we let this madness go ahead. We must show this to Mere. She’ll get it out to her network. Needs to be emailed on to the Green movement too.” Koa is pensive a while, then adds, “D’ya reckon he’d come and talk to some of our elders? They said they’d like to hear a more scientific approach. If he spoke alongside the kuia in the Far North Organic Growers, I reckon they’d really listen to this fella.”

  “Maybe. I’ll suggest it to Piripi and see what he thinks.” Iri notes this below the article on the screen and copies the message into her email files.

  “If we can convince them it is as serious a danger as the nuclear issue – and much more lasting a
s far as we are concerned as guardians of Papatuanuku, that there is no going back once the field trials begin – then we might be able to swell the support for our cause. Let’s remember most of them were not anti-nuclear in the beginning either. They thought the protesters were a bunch of anti-Vietnam stirrers. But then when the wider issues became known, they were, like the rest of Aotearoa, vehemently against any form of nuclear power or warfare.”

  “Yep. I reckon if we can keep reminding them of this and making the connexions, then they’ll really listen. At first, I never thought that over 90 per cent of the people would vote against nuclear power.”

  “But remember, we already have the vast majority of submissions to the Royal Commission against GE. We just need to make sure all the Aotearoans who voted against it are as educated by the time the government makes its final decision.”

  “Sounds like it is pretty much made up already. I can’t believe that Helen Clark has sold out so drastically. Some see this as a compromise, but I see it as treachery, when we all fought so hard to support her as a feminist politician in power and our first elected woman Prime Minister.”

  “Yeah, but with MagicMilk and those creeps from the Round Table breathing down her neck, she has to make some compromises, even if we may not agree with her. Maybe she’s just buying time until Jeanette and the Greens convince Aotearoa to go completely GE-free.”

  “I might have thought so once, but I am really beginning to wonder now. Hey – let’s call a hui tonight and see what the others think of this news. It stinks.”