Sunday, June 19, 2016

What's in a name?

My very first blog in this series was about naming places, and the significance and meaning of place names. The past few weeks I've been learning with work colleagues a waiata relating to Te Whanganui a Tara (Wellington Harbour). From the perspective of someone sitting on Mātairangi (Mt Victoria), it names and relates stories about some of the harbour's features - locating them through Maori genealogies and histories.

It got me talking to a friend this week about Māori and Pākehā placenames round Wellington. The Maori names are generally more colourful and have a rich story around them - when you find out what they was. It also seemed to be more relevant to the place.

But I realised that even European names that seemed bland or largely irrelevant to the feature so named, started to speak volumes about aspects of the European/Pākehā relationship to the land in question. For instance, Somes and Ward Islands in the middle of the harbour take their name after Joseph Somes and John Ward, London-based governor and secretary respectively of the New Zealand Company - which bought the islands and other land around Wellington from Te Ati Awa in September 1839.

Those same two islands bear the names Matiu and Mākaro, after daughters or nieces of the Māori explorer Kupe, said to be the first person to visit these shores. However, as far as I know, Somes and Ward never visited the country, preferring instead to make their profits from those lured by the promises of the Company. But Somes, Ward and others' foreign and purely financial interest in the land leaves its legacy in their name on our islands - even after being handed back to Māori.

However, after sounding that discordant note, I leave you with an electronic version of the waiata we were learning, Noho Ake Au, by PAO. (We didn't sing it like this.)

Sunday, February 28, 2016

A Tale of Two Pams - Surviving in Suburbia

Common Unity Gardens, Epuni, Lower Hutt
Years ago in a nearby suburb in Lower Hutt, a woman named Pam started out doing preserves and soaps and selling them on a small-scale. By the time I met her she was running sustainability workshops and had transformed her perhaps-slightly-more-than-a-quarter-acre into a mini urban farm: growing veges and flowers in every available outdoor space, including the road berm; while also housing several varieties of ducks, hens and a couple of beehives out the front. It was – in actuality – ‘The Good Life’ (for those who may remember the British ‘70s comedy in which Tom and Barbara Good transformed their urban backyard in suburban London into a not quite model example of self-sufficiency.

This week, our city of Lower Hutt was visited by another Pam, this one being Pam Warhurst from Incredible Edible Todmorton, where a group of dedicated but fun-loving volunteers has transformed their north England town in the last eight years to one full of ‘edible landscapes’ – the good life on an urban scale. They describe themselves as “passionate people working together for a world where all share responsibility for the future wellbeing of our planet and ourselves. We aim to provide access to good local food for all, through working together; learning – from field to classroom to kitchen; and supporting local business.

Pam Warhurst is the founder. She said she was motivated by “a complete lack of leadership” around for building a world that our children could actually live in. So she got together with others to start “doing stuff around food”. They planted food wherever they could – on public parks, roadside berms, community spaces. Sometimes they’d ask permission sometimes not. They would also share their skills for preparing, preserving and cooking healthy local food.

At an informal gathering in Lower Hutt this week, she shared what she’d learnt and also heard from community initiatives in the Hutt Valley, Wellington and the Kapiti Coast. Appropriately enough, the event was held at Common Unity gardens based at Epuni School - providing a place for growing and preparing good, healthy local food for children and their families, in the heart of the Hutt Valley.

For Pam, it’s all about coming together round a place and over food. “You connect through food, it stimulates conversations with neighbours,” she said.

Other key messages:

Four types of people you need:
· someone who knows how the system works (authorities, etc);
· a networker, someone who knows where resources/other people/connections are;
· someone who understands gardening;
· a good communicator: someone who can tell the stories regularly and share.

Four basic principles for activities: Fun, fast, simple and cheap.

On action:
We know what we need to do to provide a sustainable, healthy world.
Don’t wait for the system to say you can do it. Don’t wait for experts or reports, just go ahead and do it. Sometimes you ask permission, sometimes you don’t.
Make it up as you go along.
Be positive and not negative. 

On building community:
Think: what do you know? what can you share?
Everyone has a gift to share in their own local community or situation. Each of us is a piece of a jig-saw. We’re all part of the solution.
Support local businesses – it keeps the local economy turning over.
Make the connections that aren’t the normal connections.’
Village thinking considers the needs of the children
If you do the right stuff, it will attract people.

In the general discussion, people shared about how it is preparing our children for the future – provide them with gardening skills, cooking skills, preserving food skills, hunting and catching their own food. Bees and beekeeping also came in for a heavy focus, with backyard beehive making underway in Alicetown using recycled timber and old real estate signs. Someone shared their large ‘honey pot’ harvested from just a three-month old hive.

Finally, some key survival tips from Pam:
· Have a laugh along the way.
· Celebrate.
· Make it look beautiful.
· Tell your stories.

See more:

Sunday, February 7, 2016

Waitangi weekend - Amid a jumble of rocks


My 'weekly' blog has started out more 'monthly' this year - but, hey, it's summer and the sun is still shining . Who'd be on a computer? Mmmmm.

Below, some musings from Waitangi Day, when I based myself among some rocks surplus to river stopbank requisitioning.


Amid a jumble of rocks
No standing stones are these,
no ordered sacrifice
or tribute to a Higher Being.

No, just a jumble of rocks,
a random collection of jagged edge greywacke
and lumpy, disfigured amalgam.

Like New Zealanders,
thrown together in a new society,
randomly clumped together.

Sharp edges and hardness,
still working out
how to fit together.

Monday, January 4, 2016

Tackling the sacred cow


Chancing upon this colonial artwork by William Strutt at Te Papa, depicting Taranaki Māori chasing off settlers’ cattle in 1861,* prompts some questions about our country’s ‘sacred cow’. I’m not talking about a beast that we won’t slaughter, but rather the beasts we do slaughter – and other environmental sacrifices – made to feed the great God Mammon, aka export earnings

It’s almost sacrilegious to question our dependence on dairy exports as the key driver of our economy – but isn’t the increasing pollution of our waterways and atmosphere arising from the intensification of dairy a signal that perhaps we’ve gone too far and need to look at other ways to do dairy and agriculture – or even go further and question: what is the best use of this particular bit of land?

SAFE’s highlighting of cruelty to bobby calves merged into a wider challenge to the ethics and morality of separating newborn male calves from their mothers, to feed our appetites for milk and dairy. But most of the concern was about the threat to our dairy export industry.

This topic – apart from the fact that I enjoy my milk and cheese so much – makes me doubly uncomfortable, because my father was part of the dairy industry all his working life. In fact, when he arrived in New Zealand from the Netherlands in 1954 he began work in a cheese factory in Taranaki – ironically on Parihaka Day (5 November).

Thirty years later, I also came to be living in Taranaki for a couple of years. Working for South Taranaki District Council, my wages would have been partly paid by the rates from local dairy farmers.

But only recently have I come to appreciate – and question – our huge reliance on dairy industry and the environmental impact it has – unnecessarily in my view.

And Māori ‘difficulties’ with dairying are not only historical: the Parihaka community on the western slopes of Taranaki still face the loss of traditional tuna (eel) and piharau (lamprey) sources due to stream diversion and other practices from neighbouring dairy farms.

The Māori depicted in William Strutt’s painting were only defending their lands to protect their own wellbeing and local livelihood. Perhaps things may have been better if they had succeeded. The dominant view that ‘we need dairy for our national livelihood’ is only one perspective. There are two sides to a coin, and many angles on any particular story.

Te Papa’s notes on William Strutt’s painting (painted in 1861) interestingly observes that, “Strutt heightens the action by placing us, the viewers, with the group of Māori – an unusual vantage point.”

* The oil painting by William Strutt is entitled: “View of Mt Egmont/Taranaki, taken from New Plymouth, with Maori driving off settlers’ cattle, 1861.” It was painted from sketches he made in 1855-56, after hearing about the land wars that broke out in the 1860s.