Telling stories

Mrs Volkner to the left, Gov Grey to the left. Still from UTU above. 

Well, the mystery of the ripped out page (see last blog) turned out to be a trail of confusion. 

In fact the whole situation is a confusion of sources, which can happen very easily in any situation. It's a little like a form of cross-contamination - one thing ends up in the other, growing a kind of culture. 

My last blog could be said to be its latest manifestation, a form of verbal mould.

Thanks to several very good detective friends who managed to get hold of the

Millard book of photographs of Maori tohunga, it turned out there was no 'Kereopa' in the book - so the ripped out page was purely accidental - vandalistic.

In fact what happened was the man who gave the Millard book of photographs also gave the glass negative of a man called "Kereopa" to Te Papa. I have asked for some further details but all I can hear is silence, with the faint echo of an iron shop front trundling downwards. I am not sure why this is. 

There is also a silence from Rangiwewehi, Kereopa's iwi, who were about to make an important announcement about the way they wished to change perceptions of Kereopa Te Rau.

During this time I have got busy on the writing, or as it feels at the moment, assembling of my book. My partner is away in exciting Tokyo so I have taken over the studio - I can spread my wings and create piles everywhere of documents.

Studio invasion - room to breathe

I'm still feeling my way with the tone of this book. I have been reading several masterly histories, notably Dame Judith Binney's 'Encirclement' and Monty Soutar's thesis on Ngati Porou. This is the kind of history I don't want to write, linear, excellent in its own classical way. (The fact is I couldn't write a history like that.) 

What is behind that kind of writing is a mastery of resources which is truly amazing. But I made this note to myself, by way of encouragement.

What is history but a series of stories. Even the most footnoted history is only a piece of made-up logic with each step of the way given a kind of spurious legitimacy that there was a source in the contemporary period. But there is always a choice in which sources to acknowledge and elevate to being the 'true' record while other sources are quietly downgraded into being unreliable, or more accurately, not suiting the purpose of the story-teller who usually has an ideological groundplan embedded in their brain - a kind of ideal but hidden map whose real shape only reveals itself as a kind of lit-up ground plan, much as lights on a darkened runway help pilots land their aircraft by night.

It looks much more orderly than it is....

 I guess I am going with the story telling approach….

Mystery

A ripped out page

There is one very well known photograph of Kereopa Te Rau. This was taken by Samuel Carnell, an outstanding Napier photographer on the 8th December 1871.

We know this because the date is scratched into the negative, as is the person's name. (You can see it easily by googling 'Kereopa Te Rau'.) 

Kereopa by this time was in the Napier Prison, awaiting his trial - and he knew already - his execution. He knew this because he had already tried to exit the situation. 

Walking into Napier Prison a cut-throat razor slipped out of his clothes - before he could be searched. Incredibly quickly, given he was handcuffed, he managed to grab the razor and slit his throat. 

Though blood went everywhere, he did not die - he missed the major artery - and soon three doctors were on site, and one, Dr Hitchings, expertly sewed his throat up.

The photograph by Carnell shows Kereopa's misery. Carnell would have brought the props - ie Maori cloak - to the prison, so he looked 'legitimately' Maori. Perhaps because Kereopa looks so very pensive and sad, Carnell also overdrew, on the negative, his moko. 

This was an attempt to make a man whom many Pakeha saw as a terrorist look more 'terrifying'.

The photo would have been hot property, as people in the 19th century collected photographs of all sorts of people - royalty, celebrity midgets, circus performers, murderers, notorious poisoners, famous whores, beautiful society women, notable men like parliamentarians. 

It had an element about it of kids collecting certain kinds of cards.

Also photography, as a relatively new invention, delivered the news of what someone actually looked like - across space and time. In its own way it was remarkable.

Carnell later went on to be the chosen photographer for Hawke's Bay Maori. They felt at ease preening in front of his camera, rarely choosing to wear by-then 'antique' Maori costume. Instead they chose high status Pakeha outfits, refitted to ensure their own identity was recognised, mixed in with moko and other identifiable Maori elements.

Ripeka Hakiwai, ko Ngati Te Upokoiri ATL Neg number 1/4-022217-G

These were collected in a fine book called Nga Tamata which you can still find in bookshops.

...

But my mystery began with an idle evening recently when I did the obvious (which sometimes occurs quite late in research.) I googled Te Papa to see what they had of Kereopa Te Rau.

The two photos they had of him were from the same image - the famous (or infamous) one.

But I also noted there was another image, not on-line because permission from his iwi was needed. This piqued my curiosity immensely, as I was eager to see another image of Kereopa.

I knew Carnell had taken several photographs.

The curator at Te Papa kindly sent me an image which could not however be copied or used publicly. 

It was another image, but I was unsure whether it was Kereopa. (Kereopa was a missionary name turned into Maori, not a specific identity. ie there were lots of Kereopas.)

The image showed a rather plump man, once again wearing antique costume, holding a patu. He had none of the pensive grief in the well known portrait which is so affecting. He looked relatively ordinary.

When I asked the curator if she knew if it was indeed the famous Pai Marire warrior and prophet - and murderer? - she said the image came from a book called 'Portraits of Tattooed Warrior Chiefs of NZ: The Millard Collection'.

The book was unavailable at Te Papa because something was happening in the library.

…

I asked my friendly source at Napier Library, Steve Knowles, to try and find where else I could look at the book. I was fascinated to see if there was any further context.

Lo and behold there was a copy at the local EIT, in Taradale, in a special bookcase.

This morning I arranged to go out and look at it.

The glass case was unlocked and I was given the book - really a booklet - and told I could look at it right by the librarians, where I was publicly viewable.

The EIT librarian had already told me an image of Kereopa did not appear to be there. 

And sure enough, it wasn't.

It seemed inexplicable.

But then….some curiosity awoke in me. I looked very carefully at the binding and counted only nine images where it was clear there should be ten. And when I looked even more closely, I thought I could see where a page had been ripped out.

…

But was it Kereopa Te Rau? I glanced at the single page introduction. It was a curious piece for both its date - 1942 - and the person writing.

1942 was a strange date for a book, as this was the time in the 20th century when it was quite possible German and Japanese fascism would triumph and the course of history changed forever.

Only Britain and its empire fought against fascism, and it was quite conceivable the battle would be lost.  After the fall of Singapore and it was clear the Japanese could reach Australia and New Zealand with impunity, NZ's army was sent to Egypt - to fight German and Italian fascism. So New Zealand was very exposed.

In this predicament, cultural items like this book would have been used to arouse

a sort of pride or interest in NZ-specific history.

It was introduced by 'Victor R Millard' from the Royal College of Art, a sculpture student.

In terms of content it would seem that the ripped out page was indeed meant to represent Kereopa Te Rau.

Millard, giving some context to the photographs, talked of tohunga in a relatively respectful way (for the period). He also said, 'Being a cannibal race, they believed that by eating the heart and brain of a dead enemy, their courage and wisdom would thus be increased.'

(An alternative version was told by Ranginui Walker on the interesting series on Lindaeur at present on Maori TV called 'Behind the Brush' (Tuesdays 8pm). He said that by eating someone - an enemy - you showed how much you despised them, because basically after eating them, you shat them out.)

Anyway, long story short, I am going to have to find a hopefully complete booklet and see whether it does say it is Kereopa Te Rau - or whether it simply says the person is "Kereopa" - which was how Te Rau was pretty much uniformly known in the 19th century global press. 

…

My mystery is this: did the person ripping the page out do so because of his notoriety - or did the person rip the page out to protect his privacy, his mana?

Watch this space.

Who did what to whom?

Below is a tagline for an article which appeared in the NZ Herald on March 9 2013.

It relates to my project in that it is about the efforts of Mokomoko's whanau to get what they regard as proper restorative justice for their ancestor who was one of a number of people hanged for the killing of Carl Sylvius Volkner.

Mokomoko, a Te Whakatohea chief, was hanged at Auckland Prison on May 17, 1866 in what one could call the violent aftermath which followed Volkner's slaying.

The sad thing is Volkner, on his way to being killed, knew with a terrible foreboding that his death would lead to the most awful consequences.

Utu, so highly prized as a concept in the Maori world, is really not so different from plain old revenge.
Revenge works in many different ways in lots of cultures. (In fact I was interested to read in a blurb about the
soap television series called 'Revenge' an old saying: he would sets out to get revenge should first dig two graves.
ie those who set out to get revenge might as well set aside a grave for themselves, as that individual, or tribe, or society is enwebbed in a killing so bad that the whole enterprise is poisoned from the start.)

The article looks at the terrible consequences of utu which followed Volkner's killing - confiscation of
448,000 acres for a start. The Mokomoko family had a pardon granted in 1992 and in 1996 the Governor-General granted the pardon on the grounds that it was 'just and expedient'.

But no mention was made of Mokomoko not committing the crime. (He was alleged to have carried the rope with which Volkner was hanged and being present when he was hoisted up. The evidence is very contradictory on this, and the most plausible places him elsewhere.)

His whanau however have had to live with what they describe as a 'ripple effect' of 'extreme prejudice; resentment, anger, even hatred.' (The article is written by Yvonne Tahana.) This is because many people in Opotiki and elsewhere blame those who killed Volkner for the confiscation of their land and deep loss of mana.

It is an extremely complicated picture. For example one of Mokomoko's descendants says this: 'Mr Biddle says there isn't a question that the German missionary went bravely to his death. 'It was done by Kereopa. You always get a rebel and I can't tar (all Pai Marire followers) with the same brush (as Kereopa who was Pai Marire missionary.)'

This is difficult, as Kereopa Te Rau's whanau are equally insistent that he did not kill Volkner. (And there is very little evidence to show that Kereopa actually physically strung Volkner up and hanged him. Whether he influenced others to do so, is less easy to decide.)

So this article brings a key question to the fore: who did what to whom?

It is both an historical question - ie to do with what happened in the past - but it is also a contemporary question, in that its echoes still sound profoundly among different iwi.

Volkner was right: his killing unleashed the dogs of war. He had wanted to protect and nourish the members of his parish. When he was taken off the ship forcibly, he tried to shake hands with his Maori parishioners. Some stood by and wept. But nobody shook his hand.

The eyewitness accounts of what followed after this are many and contradictory, often based on iwi alliance or the degree to which an individual was implicated and wished to pass the burden of guilt on to others. In many ways it reminds me of 'Roshomon', a Kurosawa classic film from 1950.

The Roshomon effect is called 'the effect of the subjectivity of perception on recollection by observers of an event who are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it. (Thanks Wikipedia.)

Who did what to whom?

It's still a vital contemporary question.



http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10870118

Comet in a night sky

When I opened this blog to write something I was taken aback to find that I had written nothing here since January.
There was a reason for this. Over the past six months I had become aware that something was wrong with me
physically and eventually this reached such an impasse I could only barely walk. Anyway long story short,
I have been diagnosed with an 'aggressive' late development rheumatoid arthritis.

 I have been given some medicine which seems to be working very well, so my depression has lifted and my ability to walk and work has improved enormously. I now have a deadline for this book - July - so it is something to work towards.

And in that lovely way, once I felt better, things started to cohere and I suddenly glimpsed the end of the book. The truly wonderful thing is that it was the vision ,or idea, I had started out with. Over the past two years
I felt assailed, uncertain, pushed in different directions. Then suddenly it all seemed to fall into place.

'Seemed' however is the operative word. I have yet to write the ending, then go back to the beginning, look at the overall narrative, see what works and where it doesn't and begin that brutal process Patrick White called
'oxy-welding'.

In the meantime I have not yet got a title. One title I liked was 'Comet in a Night Sky' and when I saw this beautiful photo in the Dom Post of a recent comet passing over Wellington I could suddenly see the cover.

How the New Yorker saved my life.

I love motels and planes for writing. Something about the bareness, the absence of clutter is deeply encouraging. Transience too. The fact is my office at home is a claustrophobic nest of information. Just to enter it, at the moment, is to feel overwhelmed by information. It appears too close to me for my eyes to even focus.

So going away, staying in a basically bare room, is both holiday and clarification for me. This past week I've been down in Dunedin, at the Hocken Library, researching 19th century HB newspapers. The fact is there are more complete runs of them in Dunedin than in Napier, due to the fire which followed the 1931 Earthquake.

It's wonderful to access paper copies of early newspapers too. The jumble of information is deeply fascinating.

So I had a great week research-wise. On the plane up to Christchurch I read an article by John McPhee in the NYer called 'Structure'. 

It's about the difficulty - and importance - of structure in a piece of nonfiction. By the time the plane landed at Christchurch (cheap flight, two hops from Chch and then Wgt) I had the first line of the first chapter of my new book. It somehow crystallised in the flight, while up the air, in that ideal space of possibilities. 

I had wanted to start the book in a particular place but hadn't been able to find the right words.

Suddenly they came to me. I opened up my Mac, turned it on midflight and wrote them down.

One thing led to another. Inside the new post-earthquake airport at Christchurch

I sat at a table, having purchased a space with a gingerbeer and a slice of date loaf. I began writing the introduction to the book.

I felt elated but also very sensitive to sound.  I had a man sitting right beside me on his cell. He was leaving NZ for Australia - he had had chickens. There was a great deal of information about chickens. I tried not to listen - to hear. To concentrate and I sort of managed to.

On the flight to Wellington I wrote a little more.

In Wellington I relaxed over a beer and read another article in the NYer. It was now 5pm and I had left my motel in Dunedin at 11.25am. I thought I'd better go to the loo before the next flight. 

I had got a luggage cart to help me handle my computer and briefcase. I'm still having trouble with my hands and I find carrying any weight painful. The toilets on the main level at Wgt were closed, so the only men's toilets were down some stairs. This meant abandoning my luggage cart. I took my briefcase and went to the loo. But inside the loo I had a terrible realisation. My briefcase was too light. I suddenly realised I had left my computer in the luggage cart at the top of the stairs.

I sweated blood.

I realised it had all my research for the past week - and I had had a breakthrough in the week. I hadn't backed anything up. And of course, with the new opening chapter for the book - I hadn't backed that up either.

My whole book was on the computer.

I raced back up the stairs in a white sweat.

And suddenly, to my intense pleasure, there was my computer sitting in the top shelf of the luggage cart.

What had protected it was my copy of the NYer. The NYer was sitting on top of it, and anyone passing by, casually, might have thought it was just an abandoned magazine.

I had my computer, my research, my unrepeatable first chapter.

So here I give thanks to the New Yorker - again - you saved my life, my book, my sanity.

Disappearing buildings...

Driving round regional NZ I was very aware of the possible ramifications of the new earthquake legislation. This is that 'earthquake prone' buildings must be brought up to standard within ten years or be 'demolished'. 

I couldn't help looking round some of the smaller towns and deleting from my mind'e eye the few notable buildings to escape an improvised appearance. 

The ramifications are enormous, as many of these buildings are not easy to tenant even as they are. Let alone owners being able to find the finance to upgrade to a really very high standard. Demolition - gaps in the teeth - is what will happen. 

That is, there will be gaps in a run of buildings which were once reasonably coherent. Many of the more bravura buildings will vanish. Small NZ towns, which on the whole lack architectural charm  - or charm of any sort, I am afraid - will return to their rudimentary beginnings.

The problem is how to make these buildings safe in an economically feasible way.

But while I travelled round, I took these photos of some likely candidates for 'disappearance'.

The Taihape Cinema, endearingly called 'NZ's Finest Country Cinema'

Above is the cinema in Taihape. It appeared to be still well-used with an almost art-house list of films showing.

Any cinema showing documentaries should be saved.

 I couldn't help but think what a gap, in many senses, the disappearance of this building will be.

This one is across the road. Of little architectural merit, yet it whispers the past. I love the way old faded signs remain on buildings long after their use has past.

This building in Marton in the Rangitikei caught my fancy. It is well maintained, indeed well turned out as befits a shop that once sold riding habits. 

J.J.McDonald Tailor and Habit Maker.

Marton, which prides itself on being the hub of the Rangitikei, is full of resplendent

brick buildings which speak of its once-wealthy past. What is their future?

As with Wanganui city, whose streets are full of big brick and plaster buildings of some elegance.

But 'disappearance' will strike many buildings.

This is a Catholic modernist church designed by Ernst Plischke in Taihape in the 1950s.

It is roughcast on the exterior and it sits in Taihape like some kind of satellite

landed from a different galaxy. 

But I doubt very much whether it will fulfil the new earthquake requirements so it will be labelled 'earthquake prone'. 

And at the end of ten years everyone will have to decide whether to 'disappear' it.

The built culture of Aotearoa New Zealand now faces its biggest ever challenge. It's daunting and there needs to be a wide debate about how to ensure our cultural heritage survives and the buildings are safe.

If I have time - away from my book - I hope to write some more on these challenges. 

PS One thing everyone can do is join 'Heritage Aotearoa' which will act as a lobby group.

Meeting at the crossroads of history

At the moment I am combing through the Hawke's Bay newspapers of 1871 to get an idea of what Napier was like as a town, as a psychological atmosphere almost, when Kereopa Te Rau was brought here for trial in December of that year.

It's fascinating - and boring, almost in equal hypnotic parts. I find myself snuffling the stale smell of newsprint almost like a drug. But overall I'm beginning to get a sense - a take - on the period. 

When Carl Sylvius Volkner was killed in 1865 New Zealand was in a period of unparalleled instability, almost amounting to a form of civil war. There were the colonial and imperial forces, backed up by kupapa. They were called Queenites. 

On the other side were the Maori forces called 'kingites' and 'rebels'. They fought fiercely and often without quarter.

This was happening at the same time as the American civil war, a battle to end slavery but also a war in which modern killing techniques led to an extraordinarily high death toll. There was a kind of viciousness in this war which the war in New Zealand shared. (Perhaps all wars are vicious by nature.) 

Some Afro-Americans began to identify with the Israelites in the Bible, just as some Maori did at the same period, especially Pai Marire. It wasn't a uniquely NZ response, it was a kind of global phenomenum, based on an intense reading of the Old Testament.

By the time Kereopa Te Rau was brought to Napier , however, in November 1871, it is an entirely different local - and global - picture. By 1871, what Volkner feared would happen had happened. 'Rebel' Maori were defeated by the great imperial power of the 19th century. They would suffer the bitter fruits of defeat - confiscation and diminishment. All over the North island different iwi began suing for peace, laying down arms - accepting in so many words - defeat. 

Te Kooti was still uncaptured but much diminished as a threat. And Kereopa Te Rau was such a problem for the Tuhoe he himself began to realise he had to hand himself in. It was the end of one kind of road.

Globally the picture was different too. In 1871 Prussian Germany became a bristlingly powerful global player after defeating France.  This opened the way to the Paris Commune - an uprising and the assertion of a collectivist, communist ideal which went down in blood and starvation. 

In effect the modern world was being formed by the early 1870s. What happened then would be played out, with a remorseless destructive logic, right through to the mid-twentieth century.

And it was the same within Aotearoa New Zealand. The modern assimilationist world was being created in the 1870s - one which ran on, pretty much undisturbed, till the 1970s. 

Assimilation for Maori became the way to progress, or, as it was seen, co-exist and somehow survive psychological defeat. By 1871 Aotearoa New Zealand was an entirely different world to that of 1865, when Carl Sylvius Volkner was made a sacrificial victim - a kind of guy atop the flaming bonfire of anti-Pakeha sentiments. 

By 1871 it was Kereopa's turn to become a sacrificial victim. This ' new' world had its own stern logic too.

….

I thought of this while I was reading an article about Karaitiana, a Hawke's bay rangatira, and new Maori member of the House of Representatives. He was reported as saying it would be good if Maori schools taught students how to read and write and speak English. The newspaper editorial thought this was an excellent idea.  

Interestingly it accused missionaries of trying to do the same but they had 'supplied the party among them who were hostile to the interests of the Europeans with leaders of a higher degree of cunning and capacity.' By this they meant leaders like Te Kooti who was actually educated at the Williams' missionary school at Waerenga-a-hika, outside of Gisborne. (In fact it is quite possible, in one of those weird intersections of history and fate, that Te Kooti was actually taught English by Volkner himself. How's that for an extraordinary meeting at the crossroads?)  

The Hawke's Bay Herald saw the use of language as a tool of assimilation. If English had been taught from the start, it said, 'we should, no doubt, have witnessed by this time something like an amalgamation of the two races.' Maori youths could become clerks in 'warehouses' and obtain employment in 'the public service' while 'Maori maidens, especially if they were in many cases wealthy heiresses,' might have become 'suitable helpmates for their English compatriots.'

(It's one of the ambiguities of this period that intermarriage could be easily accepted whereas, as time went on, Pakeha-Maori intermarriage became more controversial, not less.) The Herald looked forward to a time when 'really acute and clear-headed Maori could articulate their own interests 'instead of  'Europeans who have been either from an official or other reasons, brought into intimate connection with the natives.'  

As I read this I was aware of a Maori boy and girl, probably in their mid teens, sitting on a couch not too far away from me. They had been engaging in a muted but extensive conversation nonstop for a long time.

In one way it was rather touching. There were two couches placed in a nook of Maori books and somehow they had found themselves a home there. I tried to concentrate on my research, at the same time keeping an ear open for what they were talking about.

Mostly it was chat about friends and acquaintances, a sort of extensive entertainment of unmalicious gossip. I noted that neither thought of picking up a book or looking at it. In the same way I noted the way Maori kids -and lots of Pakeha kids too - on the whole didn't understand ways of behaving in a library. They enjoyed talking too loudly. They did not obey the general rule, which went in the direction of silence more than sound. They always looked pleased to be disobeying rules. And in keeping with the world we live in, nobody felt it was right to point out that libraries, just as marae, have rules.

At one point I registered they were silent. Were they reading, I wondered? No, they were texting, both their faces looking down as their fingers clicked.

I thought about Karaitiana's idealistic premise: that education could change Maori and help them go forward into the modern world. This was true of course, to a degree. The wealthiest Maori today were those well educated enough to make a very good living out of working Treaty issues. But this was a long way from these kids.

Now some friends came to join them. They were all taken with an outsized, somehow Alice in Wonderlandish chair - actually a mayor's chair from the past, I think.

The kids looked at the chair, appreciatively. It was the king's chair said one. The queen's chair said another. They posed by it, sat on it, then restlessly, like a wave, moved on. 

In some way they were absolutely harmless. It was good, too, they were in a library. There was always the chance that one of them, finding him or herself on their own, might actually pick up a book and let their eyes be entranced by the tiny symbols which collectively made up the wisdom of the world - the written wisdom of the world.

But what was the value of the written wisdom of the world beside the tiny universe they lived in - of teenage gossip, of love and jealousy and fun. The girls would become pregnant fairly soon. Hawke's Bay after all had appalling rates of teenage pregnancy for both Maori and Pakeha, so that poverty was embedded in their fertility. I knew there were classes for teenage mothers who went back to high school to try and get back into the educational loop. 

I wasn't too sure how the uses of English had helped them. Or the degree to which they had grasped the potential of the only truly global language which history had sent their way.

I turned the page and went on reading. I knew I was reading about the birth of modern Aotearoa New Zealand...

And I had begun to scent the 'psychological atmosphere'...