by Nick Spill
Maori: a native of New Zealand. The loose translation into English of the word Maori is “ordinary people.” There is no plural of Maori in the Maori language, so there is no such word as Maoris. However, as this story is set in the 1970s when awareness of the Maori language was beginning to be revived, I have used both the singular and plural, depending on context. Similarly, the macron (tohutō) has since become an important part of Maori language (te reo Maori) but for historical accuracy has been left out of the Jaded novels.
Pakeha: a European settler, Caucasian or white person.
The kauri forest that Wiremu visited: Before the 1800s, Northland was one vast kauri forest. By the turn of the next century, the Pakehas, who had sailed to New Zealand, had razed the kauri forests, stripped the land of the giant trees and seized huge tracts of Maori land. Land that belonged to Wiremu’s tribe, the Ngapuhi.
The kauri trees stood like gods, over one hundred feet high and sixty feet wide, with no branches for the first forty feet. Kauris had provided the strongest, hardest timber in the world, free from knots or other imperfections. These giants had been seedlings before the fall of the Roman Empire.
Maori gangs: Despite the rise of well-organized Maori gangs in the 1970s who dominated the illegal drug trade, there was little political will in Wellington to tackle such groups. The commissioner’s plan to take on Wiremu Wilson instead makes sense in light of such a political climate. Besides, the gangs in the 1970s were better trained, armed and more violent than the police.
Hone Heke: Hone Heke was a famous Maori warrior from the mid-19th century who had outwitted Pakeha settlers and provoked some of the sillier and more tragic episodes in what Pakeha historians called “The Maori Wars.” Hone Heke had chopped down the British Union Jack at Kororareka three times, the symbol of British rule, the flag that so many Englishmen had died for. The repeated dismantling of the symbolic flagstaff by Hone Heke led to an outbreak of hostilities between Maori and Pakeha and what became known as the Flagstaff War. Many lives were lost and the town was destroyed, which in turn precipitated the arrival of enlisted British Army soldiers in New Zealand. These hardened, bitter soldiers did all they could to destroy the faith of Maori in European civilization.
The Treaty of Waitangi: Now recognized as the founding document of New Zealand, the treaty was signed by over five hundred Maoris in the 1840s and by Queen Victoria’s representative, the Governor General. Hone Heke and Te Rauparaha both signed the treaty. The document is still the subject of much debate. The passage of the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi was in part influenced by the Maori Land March.
Anal scarification: Dr. Johnson’s lecture on Dr. Kegel’s exercises.
Dr Johnson had given Plum Blossom a thorough examination at the Women’s Clinic. She noted that Plum had intense anal scarification. She had casually asked Plum if she ever had anal sex. Plum said no. Mel gave her a lecture on genital hygiene. If a man entered her in the rear he could not go anywhere else. Fecal matter in the vagina, she told Plum, was a bacterial disaster. Even a minuscule amount can give you a very dangerous vaginal infection that can take hold before you are aware of it.
“It’s not for me to tell you what to do with your sex life, Plum,” Mel had finished her lecture to a blushing Plum. “But let me tell you how to tighten your love muscle. It’s called the pubococcygeus or PC for short. When you squat down, spread your legs and urinate, that’s the muscle that stops the flow. Here, I’ll give you some exercises to do that will give you more control.” Mel went on to describe the Kegel exercises, a series of isometric contractions devised by a Californian doctor in the late 1940s. Dr Kegel’s research was the result of helping women after childbirth to cope with urinary stress and incontinence, without resorting to vaginal surgery. One of the side effects of his exercises was the fact that some of these women started to have fantastic multi-orgasmic sex. The same muscle that controls the flow of urine also goes into rapid spasmodic contractions that make up a vaginal orgasm.
Mel instructed Plum on how to practice Kegel’s flicks, holds, gradual holds and bear downs.
“Flicks are contractions done rapidly. Holds are when you squeeze your PC as tight as possible for up to ten seconds. This is ideal when watching a movie or just sitting down. Gradual holds are more advanced and call for a gradual squeezing of the PC until after ten seconds you cannot squeeze it any tighter. Bear downs are best not practiced at the movies. They entail bearing down for ten seconds as though squeezing out a bowel movement, which you don’t do, of course. All four exercises should be repeated in sets of five. After a few weeks you can build up to sets of twenty or more, twice a day.
“In a couple of weeks you’ll notice a difference. So will your lover,” Mel had finished.
Hone’s Political Science Thesis: Hone had majored in New Zealand History at Victoria University in Wellington and was working on his doctoral thesis, “The Influence of New Zealand Law as enforced on Maori, 1945-1975, as evidenced in the Pakeha social structures and Pakeha justice.” He planned to complete his history the following year. He had assembled a series of case studies full of damning statistics and lurid testimony. Rewritten for publication, it was going to become, he hoped, a popular history of Pakeha injustices to Maori. Hone did not want his older brother to be included in his research as another casualty.
Armed Offenders Squad: Formed in 1964, this was a specialist unit of trained police officers carrying firearms and wearing protective clothing. In the 1970s, most police officers only carried a baton.
Clovis’s whole wheat bread recipe:
Clovis did demonstrate to Wiremu his secret whole wheat bread recipe.
“First, you get a large ceramic mixing bowl like this and warm it up with hot water.” Clovis adopted the air of a television cook. He held up a medium-size stainless steel bowl and with a flourish, swirled water around in it. Wiremu appreciated the theatricality.
“Then you fill it to so (about sixteen ounces), but I never measure. It’s all intuition. You have to feel good about yourself, about life and about bread. All cooking is love. Pure and simple. If there is no love, you can’t cook. If you are filled with love, then maybe you can cook. See, it all comes naturally, flows. Now dissolve two tablespoons of honey in the water. Notice the water is not too hot or too cold. It’s just the right temperature for the yeast to grow and feed off the sugars in the honey.”
Clovis took a small packet of yeast and crumbled it into the bowl. He stirred the contents with the spoon he used for the honey and the mixture went cloudy.
“Now we put a cloth over this and leave it in a warm dark place like inside a gas oven that isn’t on or a linen cupboard.” Clovis put a clean dishcloth over the bowl and put it in the oven. The pilot light and the February heat would keep the yeast at a warm temperature.
“You can use potato water or anything that’s got sugars in it, but I prefer honey because it’s hygroscopic, so after the bread is baked, it keeps moist. And Manuka honey gives such a rich flavor to the bread.”
Clovis half filled the large ceramic mixing bowl with whole-wheat flour. He sprinkled in some salt and left a hole in the middle of the mixture for the yeast to be poured in, in about an hour, maybe forty-five minutes.
Clovis took the stainless steel bowl out of the oven after thirty-five minutes. There was a rich brown skin on top. He poured the mixture into the ceramic bowl of flour, stirring it with a big wooden spoon. The mixture was wet and sloppy. He unfolded it onto a wooden board that had been dusted with flour for kneading.
“Kneading bread is like making love to a woman,” Clovis began.
Plum rolled her eyes. Here we go again.
“Pictures can’t tell you how to do it. It’s technique and sensitivity and soul. The bread responds to your touch. You can only go so far before putting it in the oven to rise.”
Clovis sprinkled more flour over the ball of dough and kneaded it till it was the required consistency; not too wet, not too dry, not overworked nor under kneaded. He rolled t
he dough out and broke it into two pieces before placing them in the well-oiled baking tins Wiremu had prepared. The dough filled the length of the tins but only came halfway up. He placed the covered tins in the unlit oven again, to rise. In forty-five minutes he would light the oven and bake the bread. The two tins would by then be almost overflowing with the risen dough.
Mount Eden: Mount Eden Prison is situated in the Auckland suburb of Mount Eden, close to where Dr. Mel Johnson lives. It is a forbidding stonewalled prison built in the 19th century and still exists despite a massive fire caused by a riot in 1965.
The so-called treaty, the Springboks tour and the Land March: Wiremu refers to the Treaty of Waitangi that was being challenged and rethought in the early 1970s. Prime Minister Norman Kirk cancelled the Springboks tour of 1971 after the police predicted mass civil unrest and violence if the apartheid all-white South African rugby team played the All Blacks in New Zealand. The Maori Land March took place in 1975 where over 5,000 Maori marched on Parliament and presented a petition signed by 60,000 people calling for the end of the sale of Maori land.
Mana: a Maori concept that denotes deep spiritual power and bearing. Male and female Maori leaders and tohungas had mana, as did warriors.
Maori language: Maori (the word is now commonly spelled as Mãori) is an official language of New Zealand. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s there was a strong movement to teach Maori in schools. Maori is now taught in schools as a second language and there are radio and TV broadcasts in Maori.
Makutu: Makutu is generally believed to refer to occult powers or behaviors and conditions that cannot be explained by traditional European culture and science. Makutu can also mean witchcraft or sorcery, including the dark arts used to kill people. We are hindered by our western definitions and concepts in understanding what makutu means.
Ngapuhi: The tribe or iwi based in Northland. Wiremu, Hone, Hei Hei and Moana are Ngapuhi.
Tohunga: loosely described as a Maori wizard or shaman or wise man, tohungas can be seen as gifted spiritual leaders who could communicate between known and unknown worlds and possess special powers.
Somes Island: Jewish refugees from Germany were interned during the Second World War on Somes Island along with their fellow Germans who were known Nazi party members and sympathizers.
Sincere Laundry: A short history of Plum Blossom’s family
In 1868, Sam Lee Look, aged twenty-eight, immigrated to the Otago Gold fields in the South Island of New Zealand. A poor farmer from Kwangtung Province, he was one of twenty Chinese men sponsored by a Dunedin Consortium to rework the Otago claims. The contract was for three years of labor in return for ten New Zealand pounds.
Sam Lee lived with his fellow Chinamen in damp drafty hovels made of sugar sacks and kerosene tins, across from the Central Otago gold town of Lawrence. They worked six days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a day. Their task was to go over the tailings, the rejected mounds of gravel that the Pakeha gold miners had already sifted through. The economics were such that the few ounces of gold they recovered each week made their work very profitable for the Dunedin consortium that owned them. Their social worth was reflected in a local bylaw, where they were banned from entering Lawrence, the nearest and only town they could travel to.
After three years, Sam Lee, ten pounds richer, moved with his surviving male workers to Round Hill near Orepuki in Southland. The Chinese called it Longhilly, the Pakehas, Canton. Here, he lived in a shack actually made of wood and visited the local Fan Tan house and the Chinese temple.
Sam Lee’s luck turned in 1878 when gold fetched three pounds fourteen shillings and six pence an ounce. Along with three partners, they made over four thousand pounds. Two years later Sam Lee took his savings and moved to Wellington to open a laundry, the Sincere Laundry on Haining Street.
Haining Street was in the center of a restless Chinese population; many men wanted to sail back to China but were either uncertain as to their fate when they returned or lacked the money for the sea fare. Few Chinese women had immigrated to New Zealand. His two younger sisters, aged twenty-three and twenty-four, finally joined Sam Lee. They had brought over their best friend, an orphan aged eighteen, named Betty Wong. From Longhilly, Sam had sent letters and small gold nuggets hidden in parcels back as often as he could to his family. In their twelve years of separation, he had dreamed of being reunited with his mother and three sisters. When he met them at the wharf, Sam Look was shocked to hear of his mother’s and his older sister’s deaths. He also fell in love, on the dock, with the young, serenely pretty and penniless Betty Wong.
Sam Lee, his wife Betty and the two unmarried sisters, soon tired of life in a supposed European city that excluded the Chinese from ordinary life, yet at the same time possessed no European culture. The local police were constantly raiding the laundry, as they were every shop and home in Wellington’s Chinatown. Under the 1901 Opium Act, the police needed no search warrant. Chinatown was packed with homesick Chinese men who could neither afford their fare back to their Province nor find work outside Chinatown. They could only gamble, smoke opium and dream of their homeland. Those who could afford it got their shirts cleaned and pressed at the Sincere Laundry.
The rest of the community, the Pakehas, the Europeans, avoided the Chinese and looked down upon them. The Pakehas were afraid of these strange people who had yellow skin, slits for eyes and spoke an indecipherable gibberish. Although there was an active Christian mission in Chinatown, they were still viewed as pagans who did not worship the Lord Jesus Christ. Instead, they let off firecrackers on their New Year’s Day, a day that bore no relation to the European New Year.
In fact, these “poker-faced people” had their own calendar, with years for pigs, monkeys, cows and rats. To the Europeans, the Chinese all looked shifty, took drugs and gambled relentlessly. These same Europeans resented the Chinese because there were too many of them concentrated in one city, and therefore, presented a threat to European jobs and European welfare. This same bizarre prejudice would resurface during World War II, when many Chinese, some second or third generation New Zealanders and most of them residents of this country for a longer period of time than their prosecutors, were placed in concentration camps. (Along with German Jews who had escaped the Nazis.) The Pakeha authorities feared the local Chinese would side with the enemy; the dreaded Japanese. This is hard to imagine now, but didn’t Japan invade China before World War II broke out? What of the Rape of Nanking? And wasn’t China an ally of Great Britain and therefore of New Zealand? Well, the answer was they all looked alike. You could never trust the jaundiced-looking bastards. The Great Prime Minister of New Zealand, the very late Richard Seddon, had said so himself.
Although Sam Lee played Fan-Tan occasionally, he was more concerned with building a nest egg for his family. Betty had three miscarriages before finally giving birth to Sam. Sam was fifty-five and Betty was thirty-five years old. She died in childbirth the next year. Sam, his son and the two elderly sisters moved north to Onehunga, a small settlement on Manukau harbor on the western side of the Auckland Isthmus. Although Sam Lee did not get a good price for the Sincere Laundry, he had enough savings to buy a small house and five acres of fertile land. They became market gardeners.
The Lee family never went hungry, despite two World Wars and a depression. In the early fifties they sold their freehold land in Onehunga for a profit and bought two hundred acres farther away from Auckland in Pukekohe. Following other relatives and kinsmen, they established a thriving market gardening center in Pukekohe, with its rich fertile soil. They supplied the rapidly expanding City of Auckland with fresh vegetables. If the Pakehas did not accept them socially, they at least bought all the vegetables the Chinese New Zealanders could grow.
Tuna: Maori for eel.
Wanganui Computer: Operational in 1976, the Wanganui Computer Center was a nationwide database of police, justice and traffic files. The database was rumored to include every New Zealander from their birth certificate to their de
ath certificate with any arrests, court cases, traffic cases or other filed reports. There were also rumors that the database included tax records, social security records and other government agency information all linked to an individual’s name. The cost was estimated at $21 million, about $7 for every man, woman and child in the database.
Marae: the communal and ceremonial center of Maori life, a traditional building with sacred carvings.
Cape Reinga: the northwestern tip of New Zealand where Maori spirits of the dead fly off into the underworld “Reinga.”
Tangata Whenua: literally “people of the land,” the original native population, Maori.
Maoritanga: the Maori way of life.
Utu: Standard European interpretations relate utu to the concept of revenge. With a greater understanding of Maoritanga, the Maori way of life and thinking, utu is now being understood to bring balance in life, reciprocity for both good and bad deeds. Trying to define ancient Maori concepts that were communicated orally can lead to much misunderstanding in relation to European culture that is semantically bound by the written word.
Tangi: Tangihana is a Maori funeral, a ceremony performed at the deceased’s marae. Because of Hone Wilson’s close ties to the Maori protest movement, his funeral was moved from his iwi’s home in Hokianga to Mangere.
Norfolk pine: Early missionaries planted Norfolk pine seedlings across Auckland. They believed the cross design of the saplings (when seen from a hill or on top of Auckland’s extinct volcanoes) would help Christianize the pagan land.
“E Hei Hei, he aha to koha ma ku?!!” “Hei Hei, what is your gift to me?!!” It was the sentence Potatau called out to Te Rauparaha when Potatau was surrounded by Te Rauparaha’s men and was about to be massacred. Hei Hei was well versed in Maori history and immediately understood the meaning of the words, implying an ambush from all sides, while the police had no idea what this exchange meant.