Pukeahu: An Exploratory Anthology

Bibliography

This is the first publication of the texts by Thomas Aitken, Lynn Davidson, Lena Fransham, Robin Peace, Vivienne Plumb, Angela Kilford, and Alice Te Punga Somerville.

Images have been sourced from the National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, Te Papa Tongarewa’s Collections Online, and original images provided by Thomas Aitken, Derek Smith and Alicia Tolley.

Sources of material that has appeared elsewhere:

Aberhart, Laurence. Aberhart. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2007. Print.

Baker, Hinemoana. ‘Ka aro au (Cuba Street song).’ Lyrics: Hinemoana Baker Music/ arrangement: Julian Raphael . Web. 1 May 2015.

Baxter, Archibald. We Will Not Cease. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1968. 19–19, 45–50. Print.

Beaglehole, Tim. A Life of J.C. Beaglehole: New Zealand Scholar. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006. 41–43. Print.

Best, Elsdon. ‘The Land of Tara and They Who Settled It.’ Journal of the Polynesian Society 26.4 (1917): 166–168. Web. 12 Mar. 2015.

Buchanan, Rachel. ‘Tomb of the Unknown Warrior’ and ‘Naming the Unknown Warrior.’ The Parihaka Album: Lest We Forget. Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2010. 220–231. Print.

Freegard, Janis. ‘Alice in the Eighties: The Wellington Years.’ AUP New Poets 3. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2008. Print.

Jenner, Lynn. ‘Thinking About Waves.’ Griffith Review Edition 43: Pacific Highways. Ed. Julianne Shultz and Lloyd Jones. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company, 2014. 110–112. Print.

Harcourt, Peter. ‘Mount Cook.’ My Brilliant Suburb. Ed. David McGill and Grant Tilly. Wellington: Platform Publishing, 1985. 16–17. Print.

Hyde, Robin. The Godwits Fly. Ed. Patrick Sandbrook. Auckland: Auckland University Press. 16–19. Print.

Ihimaera, Witi. The Parihaka Woman. Auckland: Random House, 2011. 168–171. Print.

Lawlor, Pat. ‘Saw the Prisoners Again.’ Old Wellington Days. Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd, 1959. 23–24. Print.

Lee, David. ‘Hopper Street Tram Crash.’ This is not a Dummy Run. Family Memoir. Unpublished. 2014.

Manhire, Bill. ‘After the Movie.’ Lifted. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005. Print.

Mansfield, Katherine. ‘Ole Underwood.’ Rhythm: Art Music Literature Monthly 2.12 (1913): 334–337. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

McGill, David, and Grant Tilly. ‘The Barracks the Convict Bricks Built’ and ‘Mt Cook Hickety-pips.’ The Compleat Cityscapes. New Zealand: Silver Owl Press, 2012. 204/394. Print.

National War Memorial Carillon. Images from the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand.

Rune, Alf. ‘Notional Significance: Resistance.’ The Wellingtonista, 28 Mar. 2011. Web. 13 Feb. 2015.

Wong, Alison. ‘A Shilling.’ When the Earth Turns Silver. Auckland: Penguin, 2009. 10–12. Print.

Image: Albatross (Bird Skins Room #6), Taranaki St, Wellington, 3 October 1995

Albatross (Bird Skins Room #6), Taranaki St, Wellington, 3 October 1995.

Photographer: Laurence Aberhart.

The Parihaka Woman

‘It was three days before Christmas, 1881. The weather had turned cloudy and cold. The Wellington streets were packed with horse-drawn vehicles of all kinds; men on horseback squeezed through the gaps. Te Wheoro’s driver, oblivious of the shouted oaths, navigated expertly through the traffic, sometimes with only inches to spare between his vehicle and the next.

‘“Bob’s showing off for the country constituents,” Anaru whispered to Te Wheoro.

‘As the carriage turned up Taranaki Street, Te Wheoro pointed out a rise ahead. “Ah, we are approaching Pukeahu,” he said. Mount Cook Prison crouched on the top of the small mounga. I caught glimpses of an encircling palisade topped with viewing platforms and sentry boxes. Guards holding rifles patrolled the walls.

‘My sisters became nervous. In an attempt to calm them, Anaru engaged them in conversation. “Did you know,” he began, “that the palisade was built by the very first contingent of prisoners from Parihaka? When they arrived they were put to work converting the original military barracks into the prison. They repaired and altered the buildings, put in the gas and water fittings, graveled the yard and built the prisoners’ wing — and then they moved into it.”

‘The carriage clattered up to the main gateway, interrupting him.

‘“Ah, here we are,” Te Wheoro said. He showed our credentials to the guard, and we were admitted. As Bob drove through, we saw that another guard was waiting at the steps to the administration block. He gave a snappy salute as we stopped. “Rank has its privileges,” Te Wheoro continued.

‘My sisters clung to me as we were led to the office of the prison superintendent. On the walls of the corridor were sketches of similar prisons in Tasmania and Norfolk Island. One showed a prison at night, its outer walls lit up and guards on constant patrol.

‘“Let me speak for you,” Te Wheoro said. It was fortunate that he did so because the prison superintendent was not helpful. No sooner had Te Wheoro introduced himself than that officious man responded by saying, “While I am forced to entertain your presence, I am not required to assist your enquiries.”

‘Te Wheoro almost lost his temper, but he maintained admirable self-control. “Sir, I quite understand your position. I am here on behalf of three of my constituents. Won’t you help them? All they request is that you consult the manifest for the month of August 1879…”

‘“That information is classified.”

‘“And advise them if the names of three particular prisoners appear on it. The men were transported here with the original 170 sent from Parihaka. They were not, however, among those who returned and my constituents understand they may have been transferred instead to prisons in the South Island. Once they know that destination they will thank you and be on their way.”

‘“I repeat,” the superintendent began again, “that the information is…”

‘At his words, Meri gave a sob and, well, my sister had her uses: she could melt a heart of stone, even if it did belong to a prison superintendent. After a while, he coughed. “I will make an exception to the rules in this case,” he said, and reluctantly called one of his men to bring him the relevant records.

‘“The names of the fanatics?” he asked us. Fanatics? We gave him Horitana’s, Riki’s and Paora’s names. He thumbed through the manifest. “Yes, we have their names entered in the register among the misguided men who were sent here.”

‘I could have hit him for his abusive words. “This prison follows the Pentonville model,” he continued, “and therefore, for infractions, felons are subjected to the normal punishments. From the very beginning the fanatics you refer to were sullen, morose, refused to work and were disobedient. The ones named Riki and Paoroa were punished for insubordinate behavior and the third, Horitana, was placed for seven days in isolation and solitary confinement.”

‘My heart lurched with fear. “The first two men were detained from transportation with their fellow fanatics to the South Island because they were undergoing punishment. The same applies for their misguided leader, Horitana. Upon completion of their sentences, however, the fanatic named Paoroa was conveyed to Hokitika…”

‘“Those prisoners have already returned to Parihaka,” Ripeka interrupted.

‘The superintendent ignored her. “…and the fanatic named Riki was sent to Christchurch.”

‘“What was the date of their release?” Te Wheoro asked.

‘“On 14 August, at 6.15 a.m., the fanatics were presented for transfer while the streets were still empty, so as not to disturb the harmony enjoyed by the citizens of our peaceful city.”

‘“What of the prisoner Horitana?” I asked.

‘The superintendent thumbed through the register. An expression of puzzlement appeared briefly on his face. “His name appears to have been erased. There’s no indication of his movements. Certainly, he’s no longer imprisoned at Mount Cook.”’

‘Te Wheoro asked the question I dared not ask. “Is it possible that the prisoner Horitana died in solitary confinement?”

‘My heart skipped a beat as the superintendent turned the pages. Finally, he shook his head, “No, I have no record of his death. I do have the name of Tami Raiha, however. He was so ill he could not be sent with the others.”’

Mt Cook Barracks and Hickety-pips

Arrows in the Bricks, Tasman Street, 2015.

Photographer: Rosie Percival.

The Mount Cook Police Barracks on the corner of Buckle and Tasman Streets is much more than a load of old red bricks. It has direct links with New Scotland Yard and end-of-the-century British architecture.

It is a case study of one man’s successful conservation campaign. Most of all, it is a major remnant of the remarkable Mount Cook brick-building industry, surviving proof that convicts were more than just mailbag makers.

Look at that magnificent rake of the retaining wall, says architect Grahame Anderson lovingly. And those rosettes in the quoins of the barracks — I’ve never seen anything like them anywhere. These prison bricks with the arrow trademark stamped on them are the best bricks we ever made.

It was the arrows that pointed Anderson towards the preservation of this last explicit example of prison-made bricks. He was architects’ representative on the council’s historic places subcommittee back in the early seventies, when the barracks came up for discussion. Anderson said he had noticed the quaint arrows on the walls. That, it turned out, was all anybody knew about the barracks.

Anderson found out enough about the barracks and the bricks that built it to convince the authorities that it should be preserved.

There might be 150,000 arrowed bricks here. Late last century there were three or four million bricks on the National Museum area above, where convicts cast bricks under a warder the Post had heard was a tradesman without equal. The reputation of his bricks was actually tested by the forerunner of the DSIR, which confirmed their unparalleled quality, but couldn’t say why. Anderson attributes it to the man in charge and perhaps convict pride in being allowed to do a good job.

Whatever the reason, the convict bricks were too good for their own good. The commercial brickmakers working the Mount Cook cliff objected to the convict competition. You could see their point when the government preferred the prison bricks — not only were they better, they did not show up in the costing of government buildings.

The government also ensured that the arrows did not show up. Convict bricks built the General Assembly Library and the harbourmaster’s office, but you won’t see the arrows. Only the police barracks did not hide its illegitimate origins, at least of those buildings that have survived. The ruins of the Mount View Mental Asylum in the grounds of Government House not only have prison arrows, but also names, dates, and such curious hieroglyphics as a dinky colonial house and a crazy windmill.

The complaints of the commercial brickmakers were finally recognised in the late 1920s, when the government offered £100,000 for a museum and art gallery on the site, if the citizens could raise an equal amount. They did, in six months, quite possibly to the government’s chagrin.

The museum/art gallery complex was actually the site of the partially completed Mount Cook jail, an awesome construction designed by acting colonial architect Pierre Burrows. It was begun in the 1880s, but seems only ever to have held 20 Maori prisoners, following the second Parihaka incident.

The barracks were built in 1894. It was thought they were designed by Burrows, until Anderson discovered he had gone off in a huff to practise at Hunterville! A E King seems the likely designer of this stern, four-square block with street walls 24 inches thick. At the time it must have assumed symbolic dominance for Inspector Peter Pender and his 83 men, who had their work cut out trying to control the rapidly expanding Te Aro flat below.

It was built only a few years after the new New Scotland Yard, and in much the same style, considered at the time a daring design, notably in the black and white banding round the windows. In those days it was quite something for a colony to be up with the swinging London fashion.

It was helped by the brick boom. Wellington by then had swept the fear of earthquakes under its foundations. Fire was naturally considered a worse risk following the 1879 inferno that gutted 30 wooden buildings in the Royal Oak area.

Earthquake proofing from San Francisco allowed the brick boom to continue up to the 1931 Napier quake.

Not that this magnificently made barracks showed any sign of quake wear, except in later and much poorer additions. It remained a police station until 1956, and a police clothing store until 1972, when the land was handed over to the museum. No mention was made of the barracks building, and it could easily have been demolished before we knew what we had, if Grahame Anderson hadn’t got curious.

Since 1972 the museum has treated it as a dumping ground for stuff it doesn’t want to display, like that row of stags’ heads you can see through a window from Tasman Street. A truly horrible stench seeps out of the cells, where the museum keeps insects alive on decaying meat.

All that will change, as Anderson oversees the restoration of the original barracks. It may be a police museum linked by steps to its big brother above. An Historic Places Category B rating makes it safe as a monument to the best brickmakers we have had.

***

Former Mount Cook Police Station, Buckle Street, Wellington, 1956.

Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. EP/1956/1396-F. Alexander Turnbull Library

Mt Cook Barracks is the oldest military post in New Zealand.

Not the police barracks, but the other end of Buckle Street, where the Navy is tucked in behind the conservation section of the museum, there are actually remnants of the 1847 barracks built to house Imperial troops, occupied thereafter in unbroken sequence by the Militia, the Armed Constabulary, the Permanent Militia, Defence Headquarters, Headquarters Central Military District, finally Headquarters home command. From a few brick and wood structures on this few hectares of former hill, the defence of this nation was determined.

The first soldiers on Mt Cook were probably the 96th Regiment, from the 1843 Wairau Massacre scare; joined about 1846 by the 65th, the Royal Tigers after whom the nearby pub is named. They came with their families from service in India, brought out to meet the challenge of Te Rauparaha and his 190cm nephew Te Rangihaeta.

The first Royal Tiger hotel went up in 1860 and the soldiers undoubtedly spent more time there than they did on any battlefields, regimental records indicating that it was a nightly chore for the guards to trundle sodden soldiers back to the barracks in a wheelbarrow.

Too much could be made of the fact that 80 percent were Irish in the 65th, though it could have been the reason why they got on so well with settlers and Maori both, the Irish being known for their friendly disposition. They got their nickname of hickety-pips from the nearest Maori could approximate the name of their regiment — ‘hiki-tipi.’

Locally, they fought the bloody seven-day skirmish up in the Horokiwi Valley against Rangihaeta’s men, at a point along the Paekakariki / Pauatahanui Road known subsequently as Battle Hill.

The Hickety-pips also distinguished themselves as firefighters, when they were called out to a fire on April 27, 1856, begun in a store in Bond Street and threatening to raze the young settlement. The grateful citizens presented them with two magnificent silver salvers. This was Wellington’s first volunteer fire brigade, the first official one not being formed until 1865, the year the Tigers returned home to Plymouth.

When an officers’ mess was constructed in 1970, the original 65th barracks was demolished but some of its pit-sawn timber was incorporated into the entranceway.

Around the barracks, a fortress was built by a Mr Mills, slicing off the top of Cook’s Mount and sinking 18,000m of Tasmanian hardwood, which later proved the devil’s own job to demolish. Huge gates were set in to both ends of Buckle Street and placed under armed guard day and night.

The barracks were used in the late 1860’s as temporary quarters for immigrants but in 1871 demolition was got under way using prisoners from the Terrace Jail, digging the foundations for their own quarters. Only one wing was ever built, by 1874, and the prisoners never got to experience the fruits of their own labour. Outraged Wellingtonians made sure of that. Dick Seddon eventually admitted to Parliament in 1897 that there had been a ‘blundering on the part of someone in the matter’ of erecting a jail on ‘the noblest site in Wellington.’ That year one publication went appropriately further and called it ‘a criminal blunder.’

A reporter looked over the completed wing and gave it the thumbs down, particularly the women’s quarters, which he said were dark and dungeon-like and a place where ‘no gentleman would dream of stabling his horse.’

The Army was delighted to be stabled there, for it took over the building in 1901, Dick Seddon having rejected a suggestion that this three-storey edifice might make a good university because he feared a stigma would attach to every youth who entered its portals. The Army had no such scruples, proudly naming it Alexandra Barracks, reoccupying the old sight, you might say. Defence Headquarters occupied the women’s quarters, despite the reporter suspecting it would ‘breed consumption in the strongest woman.’ Soldiers were chuffed to move from the dilapidated dormitories into the luxury of a single, strong-bricked cell.

In 1927, the citizens finally won and the place was demolished. However the brick barracks and the hill itself, which lost about 45m during development, live on in the bricks made there. The Mt Cook police barracks and the General Assembly Library are notable examples. The Drill Hall put up in 1880 was from the same stock.

A new Drill Hall went up in 1907, volunteers helping to build it and contributing their pay of two shillings and six pence per diem to its materials. Its floor played host to much drilling, but also to the annual soldiers’ ball and to many of the 75 victims of the wrecking of the SS Penguin off Wellington in 1909.

The drill hall is the only readily identifiable building left from the nation’s old defence HQ. Veterans of the last world war will remember enlisting there and may be interested in seeing its survival.

Ole Underwood

Down the windy hill stalked Ole Underwood. He carried a black umbrella in one hand, in the other a red and white spotted handkerchief knotted into a lump. He wore a black peaked cap like a pilot; gold rings gleamed in his ears and his little eyes snapped like two sparks. Like two sparks they glowed in the smoulder of his bearded face. On one side of the hill grew a forest of pines from the road right down to the sea. On the other side short tufted grass and little bushes of white manuka flower. The pine-trees roared like waves in their topmost branches, their stems creaked like the timber of ships; in the windy air flew the white manuka flower. Ah-k! shouted Ole Underwood, shaking his umbrella at the wind bearing down upon him, beating him, half strangling him with his black cape. Ah-k! shouted the wind a hundred times as loud, and filled his mouth and nostrils with dust. Something inside Ole Underwood’s breast beat like a hammer. One, two — one two — never stopping, never changing. He couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t loud. No, it didn’t make a noise — only a thud. One, two — one, two — like some one beating on an iron in a prison, some one in a secret place — bang — bang — bang — trying to get free. Do what he would, fumble at his coat, throw his arms about, spit, swear, he couldn’t stop the noise. Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Ole Underwood began to shuffle and run.

Away below, the sea heaving against the stone walls, and the little town just out of its reach close packed together, the better to face the grey water. And up on the other side of the hill the prison with high red walls. Over all bulged the grey sky with black web-like clouds streaming.

Ole Underwood slackened his pace as he neared the town, and when he came to the first house he flourished his umbrella like a herald’s staff and threw out this chest, his head glancing quickly from right to left. They were ugly little houses leading into the town, built of wood — two windows and a door, a stumpy verandah and a green mat of grass before. Under one verandah yellow hens huddled out of the wind. “Shoo!” shouted Ole Underwood, and laughed to see them fly, and laughed again at the woman who came to the door and shook a red, soapy fist at him. A little girl stood in another yard untwisting some rags from a clothes line. When she saw Ole Underwood she let the clothes prop fall and rushed screaming to the door, beating it, screaming “Mum-ma — Mum-ma!” That started the hammer in Ole Underwood’s heart. Mum-ma — Mum-ma! He saw an old face with a trembling chin and grey hair nodding out of the window as they dragged him past. Mum-ma — Mum-ma! He looked up at the big red prison perched on the hill and he pulled a face as if he wanted to cry. At the corner in front of the pub some carts were pulled up, and some men sat in the porch of the pub drinking and talking. Ole Underwood wanted a drink. He slouched into the bar. It was half full of old and young men in big coats and top boots with stock whips in their hands. Behind the counter a big girl with red hair pulled the beer handles and cheeked the men. Ole Underwood sneaked to one side, like a cat. Nobody looked at him, only the men looked at each other, one or two of them nudged. The girl nodded and winked at the fellow she was serving. He took some money out of his knotted handkerchief and slipped it on to the counter. His hand shook. He didn’t speak. The girl took no notice; she served everybody, went on with her talk, and then as if by accident shoved a mug towards him. A great big jar of red pinks stood on the bar counter. Ole Underwood stared at them as he drank and frowned at them. Red — red — red — red! beat the hammer. It was very warm in the bar and quiet as a pond, except for the talk and the girl. She kept on laughing. Ha! Ha! That was what the men liked to see, for she threw back her head and her great breasts lifted and shook to her laughter. In one corner sat a stranger. He pointed to Ole Underwood. “Cracked!” said one of the men. “When he was a young fellow, thirty years ago, a man ’ere done in ’is woman, and ’e found out an’ killed ’er. Got twenty year in quod up on the ’ill. Came out cracked.” “Oo done ’er in?” asked the man. “Dunno. ’E don’ no, nor nobody. ’E was a sailor till ‘e marrid ’er. Cracked!” The man spat and smeared the spittle in the floor, shrugging his shoulders. “’E’s ’armless enough.” Ole Underwood heard; he did not turn, but he shot out an old claw and crushed up the red pinks. “Uh-uh! You ole beast! Uh! You ole swine!” screamed the girl, leaning across the counter and banging him with a tin jug. “Get art! Get art! Don’ you never come ’ere no more!” Somebody kicked him: he scuttled like a rat.

He walked past the Chinamen’s shops. The fruit and vegetables were all piled up against the windows. Bits of wooden cases, straw, and old newspapers were strewn over the pavement. A woman flounced out of a shop and slushed a pail of slops over his feet. He peered in at the windows, at the Chinamen sitting in little groups on old barrels playing cards. They made him smile. He looked and looked, pressing his face against the glass and sniggering. They sat still with their long pigtails bound round their heads and their faces yellow as lemons. Some of them had knives in their belts and one old man sat by himself on the floor plaiting his long crooked toes together. The Chinamen didn’t mind Ole Underwood. When they saw him they nodded. He went to the door of a shop and cautiously opened it. In rushed the wind with him, scattering the cards. “Ya-ya! Ya-ya!” screamed the Chinamen, and Ole Underwood rushed off, the hammer beating quick and hard. Ya-ya! He turned a corner out of sight. He thought he heard one of the Chinks after him, and he slipped into a timber-yard. There he lay panting . . . . Close by him, under another stack there was a heap of yellow shavings. As he watched them they moved and a little grey cat unfolded herself and came out waving her tail. She trod delicately over to Ole Underwood and rubbed against his sleeve. The hammer in Ole Underwood’s heart beat madly. It pounded up into his throat, and then it seemed to half stop and beat very, very faintly. “Kit! Kit! Kit!” That was what she used to call the little cat he brought her off the ship — Kit! Kit! Kit! — and stoop down with the saucer in her hands. “Ah! my God! — my Lord!” Ole Underwood sat up and took the kitten in his arms and rocked to and fro, crushing it against his face. It was warm and soft, and it mewed faintly. He buried his eyes in its fur. My God! My Lord! He tucked the little cat in his coat and stole out of the woodyard, and slouched down towards the wharves. As he came near the sea, Ole Underwood’s nostrils expanded. The mad wind smelled of tar and ropes and slime and salt. He crossed the railway line, he crept behind the wharf-sheds and along a little cinder path that threaded through a patch of rank fennel to some stone drain pipes carrying the sewage into the sea. And he stared up at the wharves and at the ships with flags flying, and suddenly the old, old lust swept over Ole Underwood. “I will! I will! I will!” he muttered. He tore the little cat out of his coat and swung it by its tail and flung it out to the sewer opening. The hammer beat loud and strong. He tossed his head, he was young again. He walked on to the wharves, past the wool bales, past the loungers and the loafers to the extreme end of the wharves. The sea sucked against the wharf-poles as though it drank something from the land. One ship was loading wool. He heard a crane rattle and the shriek of a whistle. So he came to the little ship lying by herself with a bit of a plank for a gangway and no sign of anybody — anybody at all. Ole Underwood looked once back at the town, at the prison perched like a red bird, at the black, webby clouds trailing. Then he went up the gangway and on to the slippery deck. He grinned, and rolled in his walk, carrying high in his hand the red and white handkerchief. His ship! Mine! Mine! Mine! beat the hammer. There was a door latched open on the lee-side, labelled “Stateroom.” He peered in. A man lay sleeping on a bunk — his bunk — a great big man in a seaman’s coat with a long fair beard and hair on the red pillow. And looking down upon him from the wall there shone her picture — his woman’s picture — smiling and smiling at the big sleeping man.

Saw the prisoners again...

In the early part of the century the prisoners from the Terrace Gaol marched daily to the site of the Mount Cook Prison (also known then as “The Barracks”) to make bricks for building construction in the city. They would be grouped into twos and fours and guarded by warders who were mounted and armed. As the sad, drab procession walked from the Terrace, sometimes via Webb Street and occasionally down Ingestre (now Vivian) Street, many curious spectators would line the pavement.

Sometimes there would be an exchange of salutations between friends or relations. I was not allowed to stand and stare. It was just as well for these often desperate looking men terrified me. Also I feared that one of them might break away and kill me before the wardens could get busy with their guns. The prisoners were dressed in yellowish clothes ornamented with arrows, striped stockings, and each with a white cap something like a cricketer’s.

Even now I can picture one fearsome looking fellow, a “lifer”, so they said, who seemed to single me out with a villainous grin. Others would hang their heads, some would march almost gaily. Mostly they just plodded along listlessly — unseeing. I think of them now in terms of “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”:

He walked among the Trial Men,
     In a suit of shabby grey:
A cricket cap was on his head,
     And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
     So wistfully at the day.

Some years later humanitarian counsels prevailed and the prisoners were taken to and from work in closed vans.

We Will Not Cease

View of the Alexandra Barracks, Mount Cook, Wellington shortly before it was demolished in 1929.

Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. EP-3276-1/2-G. Alexander Turnbull Library.

We were taken down to Wellington and marched through the streets to the Alexandra Barracks. On arrival we were ordered by the Corporal in charge to change into our denims.

‘What do we want denims for?’ I asked. ‘Our own clothes are good enough.’

‘You want them to work in.’

‘But I don’t intend to do any work under military orders.’

The others said the same. We were taken before the Major in command, charged with disobeying an order, and sentenced to three days bread and water and to be deprived of our mattresses. We were then locked in our cells which were in the top storey of the building. The windows were large and permitted plenty of light and air and we could get a good view of the town through them. There were no bars, escape not being considered possible from that height.

There we spent the next three days, seeing no one but the guard who brought us bread and water. At night, not being allowed mattresses, we slept on the floor in our blankets. I did not eat the bread, as I refused to submit to the humiliation of this sort of punishment. This was not noticed until the evening of the third day, when the guard, bringing me my final bread ration, saw the pile of it in the corner. ‘Where on earth did you get all this bread?’

‘It’s what you’ve brought me every day.’

‘And you haven’t eaten any of it?’

‘No, and I don’t intend to. It’s not the sort of fare I am accustomed to.’

That night I was given a cup of tea and a chop. The next day, our sentences being up, we were allowed out on the landing. I asked the others if they had had any chops. They had not, and they had eaten the bread. If they had known I was hunger-striking, they would have struck, too.

Though we now mixed with the other prisoners on exercise and at meals, which we ate in common, we were still locked up while they were at work. The N.C.O. in charge argued with me on the subject of obeying military orders. ‘If the military authorities chose to,’ he said, ‘they could compel you to obey.’

***

I was not anxious for the change to Mt. Cook, which, I supposed, would come when someone, perhaps the Governor, considered me fit for the work there. I had become accustomed to the routine at the Terrace and knew the worst that could happen to me there. Whereas Mt. Cook I didn’t know and I had heard lurid accounts from prisoners sent over to the Terrace for punishment of the hard work over there, of a brick kiln in which you were baked alive and the soles of your boots curled up with the heat. I thought that, not being up to my usual strength. I might find the work too hard.

However, what I thought on the matter was not likely to affect the course of events. In due time I found myself sitting on the back of a lorry on my way to Mt. Cook. It was pleasant, anyway, to be out in the fresh air again and see hills and the harbour down below me and hear the ordinary street sounds, after having been completely cut off from them for weeks, although I could not help being self-conscious in my conspicuous attire. The thought of escape did not pass through my mind, for the driver never turned his head, and I could easily have slipped off when the lorry was going slowly; but the broad arrows would have put it out of the question, even if I had had any real thoughts of escaping, and I had not. I had made up my mind on that matter long before.

The lorry ran up to the gates of the prison, passing a group of men shovelling out clay from the hillside with an armed guard over them. I recognized several of them, my brothers amongst them.

The warder who received me said I must have another pair of boots; the ones I had worn at the Terrace were not strong enough for outside work. I tried on a pair.

‘No good. I’d go lame in five minutes in these.’

They brought me several pairs and I rejected them all. Finally, the warder took me up to the stores. Trying on all these boots had given me the illusion of being in a shoe shop, and it was with a distinct jar that I heard the warder say to the man in charge of the stores: ‘Here’s a prisoner can’t get fitted for boots. See if you can fix him up with a pair.’

A prisoner! Well, I knew I was, but I never felt like one, and as it happened in the Terrace I had always been referred to as ‘this man’ or ‘Baxter’. […] Next, I had an interview with Burrows, who was in charge of Mt. Cook. The two prisons were run in conjunction, under one superintendent.

Burrows was very reasonable. He asked me whether I looked on my sentence as military or civil. I said as it had been imposed by a court-martial, I would regard it as military.

‘That’s so, but once you are handed over to the civil authorities, you are entirely in our hands. The military authorities have nothing more to do with you as long as you are here. So you won’t object to working as it won’t be under military orders.’

I saw that he had probably had trouble with the others and wished I could have spoken with them first, but that, of course, was what he wanted to prevent. I said that as I had worked at the Terrace I did not see that I could refuse to work now. He seemed relieved. He always endeavoured to avoid trouble, often compromising when another man might have been unyielding, in order that things might go smoothly. Offences against discipline were fairly common at Mt. Cook, and men were often sent over to the Terrace for punishment, but I don’t think it was due to greater leniency. Most of the prisoners at Mt. Cook were short-sentence men, who as a rule were less amenable to discipline than the men who had been in prison longer, having retained some spirit. They looked much healthier than the men in the Terrace.

I found a considerable difference between the two prisons. The work, for one thing, was nearly all in the open air. I worked in a gang with my mates. The cells, owing to the fact that the building was of lighter structure, were much airier, and admitted more light, especially where we were, on the upper landing, on which the cells had skylights instead of windows. We washed in the hall instead of our cells, and, consequently, never had time to wash properly as the warder’s whistle always went before we could possibly have finished and we had to stop immediately and go back to our cells. The bread ration was larger, sixteen ounces instead of twelve, and so was the meat ration.

There was one warder at Mt. Cook who thought my pride needed taking down a peg—my overweening pride that was such a trouble to officers in the army. At least a dozen times, I am sure, in the six weeks, he made me strip naked for search. He succeeded in making me very angry, but not in taking down my pride. I very nearly revolted, but only refrained because I had so little time to go.

When I joined my friends in the clay-cutting gang I was heartily welcomed. No one seemed to have hit on illness as the reason I had been left behind at the Terrace, and as I was by now pretty well again I don’t think they believed there had been much the matter with me. Many of these men I had known at the Barracks. Some of them I met for the first time. My new boots came in for admiration and envy. Did I think they could get new ones too? I thought it very unlikely, since they had put up for weeks with the ones they had.

As I had thought, my brothers and Little had doubted when they first came over whether they should work in prison, but Burrows had explained to them carefully that they were entirely under civil control, and they had taken it on, though rather doubtfully.

The work was not hard for men accustomed to manual labour, and Jack and I, at least, soon found that we had to accommodate ourselves to a much slower pace than anything we had been accustomed to. Once we forgot ourselves and went on shovelling clay into the trucks with such vigour that the man who drove the trucks to the brick yard came back with a strongly worded message that we were to moderate our stroke; they couldn’t keep up with what we were doing. Some of our lot, who were unused to work of that kind, didn’t make a very good showing. One man, who had worked in a shop, used to get hold of a ridiculous little shovel that had somehow got amongst the others, which hardly lifted more than a spoonful of clay. The warder would say: ‘There’s Hugh got that shovel again,’ and take it from him, but he nearly always managed to get it back.

I recognized several familiar faces amongst the civil prisoners. A Maori, who had been waiting his turn in the office when I had my memorable interview with the doctor, said to me with a friendly smile: ‘Glad to see you well again. When I see you last you just one inch from the peg hole.’

One of our group told me hair-raising tales of the crimes he had heard of since he had come to prison—crimes he had never known existed. He pointed out the Maori as having committed a particularly bestial crime. I said I didn’t believe it. He was not that sort, and anyway, I had heard something quite different about him.

‘Who told you?’

‘He did.’

‘Did you ask him?’

He admitted he had. I said that that was what he could expect to get if he asked. They had feelings and would fire out that kind of thing as a sort of defence. But I don’t think he believed me.

There were men there who had committed horrible crimes. There is a great deal of difference between crimes that are really horrible and crimes that are made to appear so by law. Words can hypnotize people. Nothing exemplifies this better than the phrase ‘Habitual Criminal’. It conjures up a picture of incorrigible rascality and marks out the possessor of its brand as a being of a different species from his fellows. Even amongst the prisoners this was the case. I have had a man pointed out to me.

‘Do you see that man? He’s just been declared an habitual criminal.’

As if the man in question had suddenly become something entirely different from themselves. And what does it really mean? That a man, convicted of an indictable offence a certain number of times, has been declared by the judge who tried his case to be an habitual criminal under the Act, the Dog Act, as it was called in prison. Some judges would frequently make use of the act, others never at all. Having been declared an H.C., a man could be and often was, upon the expiry of his definite sentence, detained in prison until the Prisons Board, which as a general rule means the jail officials, saw fit to release him. And even then the brand is still upon the man, and the indefinite sentence can come into operation again if he is reconvicted, the judge of course being aware of it, and the jury too, in many cases, with the result that a conviction is certain on the sketchiest evidence. Men have no right of appeal against that sentence, no means of breaking out of the trap that holds them.

The habitual criminals I knew in prison were filled with bitterness and despair at the hopelessness of ever freeing themselves or being freed from the grasp of the Act. I was particularly sorry for one man. A kind-hearted, decent little chap his trouble was drink, and he had frequent convictions for using obscene language when silly with it. For this he had been declared an H.C. and was being held for an indefinite period in prison.

He said to me: ‘You’ve been one of us; you know the life we lead here, better than anyone outside can ever know it. Do something for us when you get out. People will listen to you. They won’t listen to us. Try to get the H.C. Act altered. We’re helpless and can do nothing for ourselves. Don’t forget us.’

After the Movie

After the Movie

A cry comes again from the pavilion.
I was that nurse and that civilian,
I was the song in the carillon.

She sat on a tree trunk; no, a boulder.
I was the heart inside the soldier,
that broken arm — that hand, that shoulder.

Night which is moonless, melancholy.
I was the man who was extraordinary.
But who really knows the real Billy Connolly?

Dawn contra dicts

No Eyes, 2015.

Photographer: Robin Peace.

Dawn contra dicts

4.45 am 25 March 2015
The ‘dawn blessing ceremony’ of “Pukeahu: the National War Memorial Park”

i. Gather

Dressed in morning coats, dark in the dark,
shadows shifting weight on unsure feet.
Five hundred breaths
paused on the intake of ceremony before sun comes.

ii. Move

We exhale.
There is movement now in the warming air.
The easing, shifting forward of a human weight toward
the voice of a man who describes our path:
“We will walk there …“
and he gestures to the beckoned shadow of great sandstone trees
lit enough from below for a show of ochre
on transplanted gums braced for wind.
“And then to there …”
pointing to the far corner boulders from Taranaki, that sit now
with their backshadowed memories not related here.
“And then just a few of us will go there …”
and his arm sweeps up the men in uniform and the people with names
— they know who they are —
to respect the unknown tomb filled to the brim with bones.
“And then we will end there …”
on seats facing the faceless korowai — skinny and stooped
no-eyes she, who turns and stares at what cannot be seen.

We take to the path.
Shoddings on cobbles
afraid of broken ground.

iii. Encounter

Resistance brushes shirt sleeves,
dishevels hair and voice.
A past: an unknown, unspoken, disremembered
ghost from the damp earth,
beats time
whispers of the time
and the time again
when fear led to stealthy flight
in another, earlier, darker, dark.
Women spinning silence.
Children bearing it.

We take to the path.
Past gum trees, ochre towers, and beds laid out with ground roses
petals red black in the dark to be poppy cousins to the dawn.
Shoddings on cobbles
Afraid of this beating past.

iv. Lament

Feet shuffle to stillness in chairs in the darkness.
Wind bites.
Lanyard rattles as
a gull mews, banks, and turns for the dawn.
White feathers rise.
Women’s voices rising in lament.
Clamant songs calling the older past,
calling a cadence of memories
to sorrow the underside of clouds.

Tānga o te kawa

We are not building here a new canoe, or opening a house.
Through sleight of silence we bitter the spirit weighted down with sod.

A diggers’ memorial dug from the clay whose past made bricks.
Bricking: To brick / to convict the kiln / to lay brick on imprisoned brick to build walls and tombs.
Whose?

A service rendered to bless beyond reference to the past.
Blessing: To mark with blood / to make sacred / to invoke the blessing of gods who remake sacrifice.
Whose?

And in the morning we will greet you, we will cry out to you.
Greeting: To call out in the dark / to make ourselves known / to harbour the stranger.
Who?

Murunga hara
Whose?

Drift

Drift

Stephen Burt says snow
makes American poetry American,
and so I wonder if the sea —
let’s just say water —
makes New Zealand poetry New Zealand.

Take the stream that runs
under the carillon — it goes on ringing,
drops flicking against stone and singing,
at night when in the tower the stilled bells
become women in great brass dresses, ascending.

We could hear the stream as
a four or five-note memory
of sky and loss and journeying. An Aotearoa sound
that drifts up from underneath
rather than from a ringing-cold sky
descending.

Inscription on the Bells

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, Frontispiece).

B-K-1212-FRONTIS. Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, page 29).

B-K-1212-29. Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, page 30).

B-K-1212-30. Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, page 33).

B-K-1212-32. Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, page 34).

B-K-1212-34. Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, page 28).

B-K-1212-28. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Image: Main Staircase, National Museum and Art Gallery, Buckle Street, 1996

Main Staircase, National Museum and Art Gallery, Buckle Street, 1996

Photographer: Laurence Aberhart

Naming the Unknown Warrior

Tomb of the Unknown Warrior

Only a few months after our modest, demented memorial was unveiled, tens of thousands of people attended the internment and unveiling ceremonies for the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at the National War Memorial in Buckle Street, Wellington. The first memorial to an unknown World War I soldier was erected in England after that war, and Australia’s unknown soldier was interred in Canberra in 1993. New Zealand’s memorial also contains the remains of an unknown World War I soldier; but its extravagantly bicultural form and title — it contains a warrior, rather than a mere soldier — makes it different from other foreign tombs.

The dead New Zealand man is purposefully without ethnicity. While my family is exploring the deep connections, privileges, responsibilities, silences, losses and gains accorded to us by our indigenous history, the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior seeks to erase or collapse historical difference. It represents an escalation of the process by which non-Māori New Zealanders look to Māori culture for globally-recognisable markers of national cultural difference, a process that might be described as a case of kiwi (both the flightless bird that is the national faunal emblem, and a colloquial term usually associated with a white male New Zealander) robbing iwi (tribes) for a bright new set of feathers.

The haka performed before All Black games is the most obvious example of this. Just as the haka lends both fierceness and mystery to all the rugby players who perform it, the tomb adds a mythic, noble-Māori-warrior strand to the memory of dead Pākehā soldiers, enhancing and enriching the ‘hard man’ stereotype most often associated with the Pākehā at war, the image of a fighter who is a ‘strong and versatile pioneer with gentlemanly morals’.[1] The wisdom or justice of this masculine enhancement can be debated; but what is clearly troubling about the memorial — to me at least — is the way this overtly bicultural tomb ignores New Zealand’s wars of foundation, wars in which the supposedly superior fighting skills of the white male were radically undermined both by the superior military strategies and fighting skills of their Māori opponents, and by the fierceness of their Māori allies, the ‘kupapa’ neutral or friendly troops who were at the forefront of many Crown attacks against Māori.[2] Memories of these complicated foundational wars, including war stories associated with the site on which the tomb has been built, nibble away at this elegant new memorial, diminishing its mana and power.

What are the competing and overlapping desires at work in the Rawinia Buchanan Dementia Wing and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior? It has been argued that all memory work starts with the ‘local’ and the ‘subjective’.[3] Stories connected with our family memorial — an almost private, local and very discreet site — challenge the stories embodied in a public, national and very prominent monument. Whakapapa recovered from the dementia wing of my own family’s Māori past offer new possibilities for memorialising national foundations in a settler nation such as New Zealand, possibilities that go beyond the ‘us’ and ‘them’ framework of tribunal histories.

Writing about the ever-growing cult of Anzac worship in Australia, Marilyn Lake has recently argued that ‘national memory has been powerfully influenced by the militarization of history through the construction of war memorials and the annual commemoration of Anzac and Remembrance days’.[4] In her work on public memory in post-Apartheid South Africa, Annie Coombes has observed that monuments and memorials are ‘animated and reanimated’ by performance.[5] In Australia and New Zealand, the rituals associated with annual Anzac and Armistice Day commemorations enliven war memorials, making them potent sites for public memories of masculine sacrifice, in particular.

The internment and unveiling of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior are believed to have been the largest commemorative project ever in New Zealand. It is now the site for annual commemorative ceremonies. On one level, the tomb continues New Zealand’s long tradition of excessive war memorialisation. Every conflict that New Zealand has ever been involved in, including the nineteenth-century wars of foundation, has been documented in official histories commissioned by the state, paper monuments to the sacrifices of the dead. The memorialisation of foreign wars reached a stupendous apex with the 48 official war history volumes and 24 booklets produced on World War II.[6] The production of war stories about that war and the ones that have followed continues unabated. In 2001, for example, the then Prime Minister Helen Clark announced a major oral history project to gather the stories of New Zealanders who had been imprisoned by the Japanese in World War II.

More recently, as I have already argued, the work of the Waitangi Tribunal is another form of military history, a memorialisation of the many types of Crown violence against Māori. The tribunal’s report on Taranaki tells a story of ‘never-ending war’ in that province, a war whose climax was the invasion of Parihaka.

As a researcher, I found the massive written archive generated by twelve hearings held over five years to be a painful memorial of the ongoing trauma caused by the wars of colonisation in Taranaki. But the tribunal archives are hidden inside storage boxes, accessed only by a few researchers. Tribunal reports make the news for a day or a week, then they too are relatively hidden from public view. Aside from the initial ceremonies to honour the publication of a tribunal report, and the Crown-iwi rituals that mark the settlement of a claim (should such a settlement be achieved), there are no ongoing, national annual rituals of commemoration to specifically mark New Zealand’s wars of foundation. The fragility of national remembrance of foundational wars was demonstrated, perhaps, by the popularity of the conservative National Party’s promise in the 2005 election campaign to govern for ‘kiwis’ rather than ‘iwis’, by ending all Treaty of Waitangi claims by 2010 and wiping out all ‘special treatment’ for Māori.[7]

However, the National Party lost the 2005 election. It won in 2008 with a campaign that was, ostensibly, much less divisive. Its ‘Maori’ policy was far less prominent than three years earlier; but its tone was, perhaps, even more assimilationist. The Party pledged to ‘achieve just and durable settlements of all historic Treaty claims by 2014’. Once claims had been settled, National would begin a ‘constitutional process to abolish the Maori seats. National wishes to see all New Zealanders on the same electoral roll’.[8]

The absence of any reference to New Zealand’s first wars at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, or at the National War Memorial that looms up behind it, suggests that these wars are moving even further from the centre of national collective memory. The wars of foundation are certainly not forgotten; but they remain peripheral, problematic and contested, unable, somehow, to be integrated into popular, bicultural rituals of commemoration.

This ongoing marginality of foundational wars is particularly incongruous since New Zealand is often held up — at least in relation to Australia — as a place that has a superior record in remembering the wars of colonisation, and in honouring the sacrifices made by indigenous and non-indigenous dead in the formation of the nation. For instance, Australian historian Ken Inglis has contrasted the absence of memorials to Australia’s wars of foundation with the supposed proliferation of such memorials in New Zealand, a nation that was able, at least, ‘to legitimate the racial wars by commemoration, and with ever more confidence as memories faded’.[9] Inglis, Henry Reynolds and artist Richard Franklin are among the many who have called for the Australian war Memorial to include some form of commemoration of people killed in wars fought on Australian soil. As many have pointed out, the absence of any acknowledgment of foundational wars in Australia is particularly cruel when the participation of white Australians in the wars against Māori is commemorated there. Inglis contrasts Australia’s forgetting with New Zealand’s superior remembering. His work suggests that the New Zealand countryside is awash with bicultural monuments to the wars of foundation and that brown and white war dead have equal significance. This has not been my experience, either as a historian or as a citizen.

The first Crown memorial to Māori war dead (rather than Pākehā soldiers killed by Māori, or Māori who died fighting for the Crown) was not erected until 2002.[10] This unveiling, in a tiny coastal settlement close to Parihaka, attracted a few dozen spectators — nothing compared with the thousands who attended the preparation and internment ceremonies for the Unknown Warrior.

More than a year and a half of thick bicultural ritual accompanied the creation of the Tomb. For instance, Wellington Te Āti Awa kaumātua (elder), Sam Jackson, blessed the tomb site at the beginning and end of construction in May 2003 and November 2004 respectively. The warrior was accompanied from Longueval, France to New Zealand by members of the New Zealand Defence Forces Māori Cultural Group, an escort that was ‘in keeping with Maori protocol’ that the dead should never be left alone. In France and again in New Zealand, a piper played a special lament for the unknown warrior. The Tudor Consort performed a four-part choral composition at the 11 November internment. The ceremonies indicated a respectful blending of Māori and Pākehā tradition.

The title of the tomb is highly suggestive. While Australia’s monument is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, New Zealand’s commemorates a ‘warrior’, a word that evokes stereotypes about Māori as warrior resisters in the nineteenth century and warrior gang members in the twentieth.[11]

When I visited the tomb in January 2005, I was moved and repelled in equal measure. As I have reflected on this memorial, it has become clear that my repulsion was caused, at least in part, by the way it gestures towards difference on the surface while deep down — in its very bones — the monument seeks to erase historical specificity, to create, through the bones of one of 30,000 Māori and Pākehā soldiers who died in service in overseas wars, a nation founded on the sacrifices of a generic, non-threatening ‘New Zealander’. The tomb contains the remains of one of the 9000 New Zealand soldiers who are buried in unmarked graves or whose remains could never be recovered. The bones, which belong to a man, were ‘chosen by the Commission from the First World War Caterpillar Valley Cemetery in the Somme region of France as this was the area where the greatest number of various New Zealand regiments and battalions are known to have fought’.[12] The bones are purposefully bleached of all identifying markers, including race.

The absence of race in the unknown warrior is especially significant. On the War Memorial website, a list of answers is provided to Frequently Asked Questions. One is: ‘Why not pick one Māori and one non-Māori to return?’ The answer reads:

Because the body is unknown, we will not know who he is except that he is a New Zealander. We will not know his name, rank, regiment, religion or any other detail of his life. The term ‘Warrior’ incorporates all these unknown details. He could be anyone and so represents everyone.

Being a ‘New Zealander’, by this definition, seems to involve an erasure of all markers of cultural or ethnic identity.

While the contents of the tomb are supposedly blank, the exterior is a gorgeous patchwork of extremely specific references to place, language, culture and race, references that are drawn almost exclusively from Māori culture. The tomb is embedded in the final flights of marble steps that lead to the National War Memorial carillon and hall of memories, an imposing singing tower that was opened on Anzac Day, 1932. Its design references the Southern Cross; ‘the choice and treatment of materials, the use of symbols and language, strongly reflect the unique cultural identity of this land and its people’.[13]

The tomb is made from shiny black granite and its sides are etched with dozens of mars that could be crosses or stars. The internment booklet explains that: ‘The Warrior will be guided by the stars of the Southern Cross on his journey back to New Zealand. The distance of the foreign land he leaves behind is represented on the base of the Tomb by a night sky of black granite inlaid with light grey Takaka marble crosses.’

The tomb is covered by a bronze ‘mantle’ or ‘cloak’ inlaid with four pounamu (greenstone) crosses. (The crosses were carved by my cousin Maryanne’s husband, Steve Myre). The crosses reference the Southern Cross on the national flag; but the use of the word ‘cloak’ to describe the bronze tomb top recalls tangi (funeral) rituals in which a feather cloak would be laid over the body of a dead person. ‘Cloak’ also suggests the precious ceremonial garments worn by Māori men and women of high standing. Further, the symbolism of a warrior’s body being guided home by a compass of stars links the journey of this anonymous serviceman with the great foundational migrations of Māori from Hawaikinui to New Zealand about 800 years ago, epic journeys made by waka guided only by stars.[14] Chiefly mana, celestial guides, physical strength, tenacity and endurance as well as ancient funeral rituals, not to mention the coveted title of warrior … this unknown ‘New Zealander’ appears to have gained most of his ‘unique cultural identity’ from Māori history and tradition.

The karanga inscribed around the base of the tomb also gains its potency from the way it brings to mind the wailing karanga sung by kuia to call manuhiri on to a marae, a practice most New Zealanders would either have heard in person or seen on television at official events. I have heard many karanga and these calls, sung in a single breath, often by a woman who is very elderly, never fail to send shivers through my whole body. The tomb’s karanga says:

Te mamae nei a te pouri nui
The great pain we feel
Tenei ra e te tau
Is for you who were our future
Aue hoki mai ra ki te kainga tuturu
Come back return home,
E tatari atu nei ki a koutou
We have waited for you
Nga tau roa
Through the long years
I ngaro atu ai te aroha
You were away. Sorrow
E ngau kino nie(sic) i ahau aue taukuri e
Aches within me.

The Māori and English words, so perfectly chosen and composed, evoke the same ache contained in painter Ralph Hotere’s Sangro paintings and the poetry of Cilla McQueen that is incorporated into these works. The art of Hotere and McQueen mourned the death of Hotere’s brother who was killed on the Western Front in World War I, and the pain his people continued to feel at his distant burial place, his far-ness from his place and his people.[15] This pain of distance is felt by all Māori and Pākehā whose loved ones died while serving in overseas wars; but it is especially acute in Māori communities where the two world wars claimed the lives of so many young men who had been ordained as future tribal leaders.[16]

It is appropriate that the distant deaths of so many young Māori and Pākehā people be commemorated through a beautiful and poetic monument such as the new Tomb. It would be an unfeeling visitor, indeed, who could fail to be moved by the sentiments expressed in the tomb’s karanga. But my sadness was not so much for what was there as for what was not. There are many other bodies — brown and white — waiting to be called home to the centre of national remembrance, waiting to be tracked and treasured and honoured with a mantle of bronze and greenstone, a skirt of stars.

Naming the Unknown Warriors

The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior was unveiled in the very year when the linking of my grandmother’s name with a Māori land trust development had shifted our family, quite irrevocably, from a state of uneasy kiwi-ness to one much closer to the more difficult but satisfying position of iwi-ness. My doctoral research on Parihaka has contributed, in small part, to this process.

Many of the men who lived at Parihaka had been famous military adversaries of the Crown. But at Parihaka residents had rejected violence as a way of fighting colonisers. The community’s non-violent strategy was partly pragmatic — by the 1870s Māori were greatly outnumbered by Pākehā, so military victory was unlikely; but it was also ideological, growing from a sophisticated pacifist culture developed by Parihaka leaders.

The men and women and children expressed resistance in a firm but gentle manner, through actions that are the opposite of the Māori warrior mystique embedded in phrases such as ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior’. In the twentieth century, there has been a noble tradition of non-warrior behaviour among both Māori and Pākehā. For instance, poet James K. Baxter’s father Archibald was a conscientious objector who was tortured for refusing to join up in World War I. Sedition, Russell Campbell’s film about pacifists during World War II, documents the suffering and beliefs of those who refused to fight a generation later. In 1977, Ngāti Whātua and their Māori and Pākehā supporters invoked the non-violent legacy of Parihaka during their 507-day-occupation of Bastion Point, Auckland. The tradition has continued. Under the leadership of Helen Clark, New Zealand shifted its military spending from war to peacekeeping operations.

It has occurred to me that New Zealand could express its cultural difference in a radical way now — before a local and global audience — by erecting a bicultural ‘Tomb of the Known Non-Warrior’ at its national war memorial. My ancestors, Mohi and Awhi Parai, could be named on such a memorial. Like hundreds of others, Mohi and Awhi were arrested for ploughing and fencing land around Parihaka and sent, without trial, to prison-exile in the South Island. Prisoners en route from Taranaki to the South Island were held in Wellington while they waited for their transport ship to arrive. The men were locked up in the barracks built by Governor Hobson in the 1840s on Te Āti Awa land at Pukeahau (which he called Mount Cook).[17]

The barracks, which could house 200 troops, was built to withstand Maori attack that never came. The barracks were demolished in 1882, and replaced with a prison built by prisoners from bricks made from clay taken from Pukeahau. In 1894, another smaller red-brick barracks was built. This building still stands, an office for a kitchen design firm. Five cells, with grille doors and prison bell, remain intact but disused at the rear.

This building is at the corner of a large pohutukawa-covered rectangle of land between Tasman and Taranaki Streets. The site, fronted by Buckle Street, is a palimpsest of competing histories and uses. Most of it is occupied by the National War Memorial, an enormous carillon housing 52 inscribed bells of varying shape and weight, built atop a ‘hall of memories’, and by the former National Art Gallery and Museum, which is now leased by Massey University from the Wellington Tenths Trust, and used as a design and art school.

The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior is on the steps in front of the carillon. After lying in state at Parliament, the remains of the unknown soldier were put in the tomb in a bicultural ceremony that began with the carillon’s largest bell, Peace Rangimārie, being tolled eleven times (to mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of November, Armistice Day). Peace Rangimārie is the heaviest of four new bells cast to mark fifty years since the end of World War II. Indeed, at 3 metres wide and weighing 12.25 tonnes, it is the heaviest bell to be cast anywhere in the world since 1934. It was hung, in 1995, along with Grace Aroha, Hope Tūmanako and Remembrance Whakamaharatanga. Peace, Hope, Grace and Remembrance toll for all the newly unknown warriors of New Zealand’s foreign wars; but for the participants in the wars of colonisation, they remain silent.

There are many other war stories connected with the site on which the unknown warrior is buried. In my family, those stories concern ‘warriors’ or ‘non-warriors’ called Awhi and Mohi and their father Hemi. They concern Hemi’s daughter Arapera, who married a Pākehā settler, William Ellerslie Wallace. They concern Charles (Tare) and his European wife Margaret. They concern my great-grandmother Hannah and her daughter Rawinia. They concern my dad and me. In 1987, I learnt to do the karanga in a prefab polytech building on Buckle Street, opposite the war memorial. The Kaumātua of Kuratini, as the school was known, was Te Huirangi Waikerepu.

Even so, I can't argue that Hemi and Mohi and Te Awhi and their descendants are totally forgotten at the National War Memorial. Up at the back of the site, far from the magnificent and ostentatious tomb, is a modest memorial erected in 2001 by the Wellington Tenths Trust. The memorial depicts a prisoner standing with his head bowed, wrapped in a blanket. It is made from grey stones and white pebbles. The grey stones, gathered from Taranaki streams, represent each of the prisoners who passed through Wellington in the late nineteenth century on their way to prisons in the South Island. The pebbles refer to ‘the lost genealogy’ of the men taken who ‘died in prisons’.

My family’s ‘hall of memories’ shows that what was lost can be found, what was foreign can become familiar. New Zealand’s unknown warriors have names, ranks, regiments, religions and race. They died in the back paddock, not some foreign field. They do not need pipes and stars to guide them home. They are already there, waiting to be released from the dementia wing of history, the bony archive beneath our feet.

The Land of Tara

Maori artifacts, particularly waka (canoes) and pataka (storehouses), inside the Maori Hall at the Dominion Museum, Buckle Street, Wellington, c.1936

Photographer: Unidentified.
1/1-003855-G. Alexander Turnbull Library

Mua-upoko arrived at the time the kowhai (Sophora tetraptera) was in bloom. When the force arrived at the summit of Te Wharau (the range above Kaiwharawhara village, north side), the members thereof saw fires burning at Te Wai-hirere, Te Aka-tarewa, Uruhau, Te Whetu-kairangi, Pae-kawakawa, Motu-haku, Makure-rua, and Wai-komaru, the last two being the fortified villages of Tu-kapua of the Ngati-Mamoe tribe. These two places were in the vicinity of Te Rimurapa (Sinclair Head).

Tamatea-kopiri enquired: — ‘To which one of the fires we see burning shall we direct our way?’

And it was said: — ‘Let us keep to the clear way of the far spread region,’ that is the part where the people dwelt in scattered communities. To this the party agreed.

Now, during the night of quite a different day, Kauhika, who was an aunt of Te Rangi-kai-kore, and a dreamer of dreams, had a vision. In a dream she saw Te Wharau ridge occupied by men: — ‘The fire kindled there cast its glow here to Uruhau, and I was alarmed and awoke.’

Te Rangi-kai-kore said: — ‘Let a person go to Te Wharau, and there stay on the eastern side of the main ridge, where the crest of the spur of Te Wharau breaks down suddenly, there to lurk aside from the path, to see if we cannot light upon a solution of the dream of the old woman.’

So Mohuia and Kaipara were sent, and on arriving at the place advised by Te Rangi-kai-kore, remained there. When the sun became suspended over the bounds of night, the invaders were seen advancing along the Wharau ridge. The scouts returned, and reported: — ‘There is a hostile force at Te Wharau examining the appearance of the burning of the fires.’ Te Rangi at once commanded: — ‘Go to Te Aka-tarewa and Uruhau in order that the women and children may be sent to Te Whetu-kairangi. Send a person to Para-ngarehu (fortified village at Pencarrow Head) to advise them of the hostile force at Te Wharau that is examining the country.’

Even so Mahuia went to Te Whetu-kairangi, and Kaipara went to Te Aka-tarewa and as far as Uruhau. The canoes of the local people were taken across to Motu-kairangi (Miramar Island), while certain persons went to watch the main ridge extending from Te Wharau by way of the spur extending towards the south. A man was despatched to Puke-ahu (Mt. Cook), above Hauwai (Basin Reserve), for it is said to have been a moonlight night. The enemy was now seen advancing along the beach at Kumu-toto (Woodward Street). The scouts of Puke-ahu returned and reported the rear of the force as passing Waititi (foot of Charlotte Street) while the head was at Kumu-toto. ‘The men are ranked as close together as trees in a forest grove.’ The scouts then remained at Kaipapa (site of Vice-regal residence), on the eastern side of Hauwai, there to await developments, and to note which fort the enemy made for. It was then seen that the force was moving directly on Uruhau to deliver an attack.

When the stars of the morning were high up, the people of Te Wai-hirere (at Point Jerningham) marched out and joined the people of Te Aka-tarewa. Then the people of Uruhau began to move out. One division of the invading force made for the sea beach below the Uruhau fortress, while the other division occupied the ridge; thus they invested the fort. Pahau, the chief of Uruhau, was now convinced that the enemy would be defeated by him, and he also knew that the men of Te Wai-hirere and Te Aka-tarewa were outside the fort waiting for him to sally forth. There also were Tara and Tautoki, who had ascended the ridge at Orongo (ridge extending from signal station to eastern head of Lyall Bay), a name given by Tamatea-ariki on his arrival at Te Whetu-kairangi. He ascended that ridge to obtain a view of the Great Harbour of Tara, also of the other island. ‘Takitumu’ (his vessel) was below, at Te Awa-a-Taia, being relashed as to her top-strakes, and having gum of the houhou (Nothopanax arboreum) worked into the lashing holes, and, when this was done, ‘Takitumu’ went to Arapawa, that is to Te Wai-pounamu (the South Island). It was Kupe who gave this name to that island; and by him also was the first greenstone found at Ara-hura, on the west side of that island.

However, Tara and Tautoki ascended that ridge at Orongo, there to await the attack of the enemy on Uruhau. As the light of morn came the enemy force was seen on the beach below the fort of Uruhau, and the men of the land had moved out of Uruhau, as was denoted by the voice of Pakau being heard shouting out, ‘Charge! Charge!’ Some of the local braves had diverged by the track to the beach, where fighting had commenced, while those of Te Wai-hirere and Te Aka-tarewa joined the Uruhau men. Te Rangi-kai-kore cried out: — ‘O Pakau! Attack! Join in!’ On hearing this the enemy fled to the forest to the west of Uruhau. Then fighting was carried on at the seaward side, and Te Toko, one of the chiefs of the enemy force, was slain in a fight at Waitaha, on the beach at the promontory on the western side of Te Awa-a-Taia.

When night fell, the people of this part, the clan Ngati-Hinewai, bethought them that the enemy might turn to and dig up their seed kumara, which had been planted and were sprouting, so they pulled them up during the night. This act was the cause of the name Ngati-hutihuti-po (The Night pullers) being assigned to the clan Ngati-Hinewai.

This task completed, all crossed over the channel and entered Te Whetu-kairangi. When Te Rangi-kai-kore, Pakau and Te Piki-kotuku, the chiefs of the forts of the mainland, arrived, the women, children and old men had crossed over to Para-ngarehu, where they were then staying. Dwelling within Te Whetu-kairangi nought remained save weapon-wielding braves; the fort was well manned, for Ngati-Tara numbered six (? hundred) twice told at that time, while the enemy force of Ngati-Ruanui and Mua-upoko was four hundred once told.

That night the bodies of Te Toko and Whakatau (two slain chiefs of the invaders) were burned with fire in Hoewai (Houghton Bay), west of Te Rae-haihau (western headland of Lyall Bay) on the coast.

Next morning the invaders burned the forts of Uruhau, Te Aka-tarewa and Te Wai-hirere, the huts in all the cultivation grounds at Pae-kawakawa and all other cultivations of the mainland. The raiders then betook themselves to the making of rafts, whereby to cross over to Motu-kairangi. Having all assembled on Motu-kairangi, they then invested the Whetu-kairangi fort. One hundred were stationed at Takapuna, one hundred at Kirikiri-tatangi (Seatoun), one hundred at Te Mirimiri, and one hundred at the side toward Kaiwaka, the lagoon on the western side of Te Whetu-kairangi, thus was Te Whetu-kairangi invested. Fern was obtained from the mainland wherewith to set fire to the stockade defences of the fortress, to be kindled when wind sprang up. A contention ensued in the rolling of bundles of fern against the defences, which did not reach them, so energetic were the men in the fort in casting whip-spears from the fighting stages of the fort. Seven men were slain by the garrison by means of these spears slung with a whip from the elevated platforms. This weapon was of this form: one end was brought to a point and deeply notched behind the point; when this notched end pierced a person, it broke off in his body. (It is said that some of these rough spears had two such notches, and, when a man was pierced with one, and a person endeavoured to pull it out, then it broke at the second notch, the one nearest the point, which end piece was left in the wound, and would assuredly cause death.)

It is said that the investing force camped out in the open, and on a certain night came on a southerly storm accompanied by rain, whereupon the invaders were greatly distressed by the rain and cold, even to the next day. Also they suffered for want of food, for they had consumed all the kumara sets they had dug up in the cultivation grounds. The food supplies of the ocean, and paua (Haliotis), Kuku (Mytilus), and pipi (Chione) of Te Awa-a-Taia were unprocurable on account of the storm.

Then Tara said to his warriors: — ‘To-morrow, in broad daylight, let us issue forth, and let three men challenge the company, while those behind press on and cover them. Grant them no rest; ere the fight has raged long, they will be wearied on account of their hunger and exposure to the storm.’

All the people within Te Whetu-kairangi agreed to this action. In the dead of night they prepared food; as they were eating it day came. Then Te Whetu-kairangi poured forth its braves. On account of the heavy fall of snow of the previous night continuing until the sortie was made by the warriors, when the enemy realised their action the whole six hundred once told had issued forth from the fort.

The invaders fled to the western side of Te Awa-a-Taia; some reached it in safety, others, owing to the flood tide, perished in the waters, while yet others were slain by the local folk. Tamatea-kopiri and Marohia were the only chiefs killed; one of the chiefs perished in the waters and his body was cast on shore. The story is that many escaped, that is they crossed the channel of Te Awa-a-Taia, floated across it, and when the pursuers arrived at the shore of Te Awa-a-Taia, the majority had already crossed. This was known by the number of dead, which amounted to one hundred odd. It is said that most of the dead were of Mua-upoko. Here ended this fight.

Arrows

‘ As if, by coming up with metaphors for it, they might be able to say what it was. ’ —Elizabeth Knox, Dreamquake

In reading about a sense of place I keep falling over this word. Autochthon. A beautiful word. Just articulating it is new muscular territory for me. I am autochthonous. I am of my own earth. Stephanie Pride talks about it in her thesis on writers who write themselves into relationship with a place.

I think that when I go anywhere, when I try anything new, and when I write a story, I am guided by the longing for home.

I’ve been reading books to try to find Pukeahu. What does it mean, what is this place? There are glimpses in poems, old histories. It’s like lifting bricks to peer at their undersides. I discover the traces of hidden stories. Unremembered things. In Patricia Grace’s Cousins the unborn twin, kept secret by his great-aunt, never known to his family, narrates a thread of the story. What are the stories I am not hearing? What is forgotten in the shadow of the war memorial, the hulking grandiosity of the museum on the hill?

The silences, the darkness, the blind spots, the forgetting, these are the cost of the reign of one official narrative of a place, or as Doreen Massey says, the ‘long, internalised, linear history’. And the silences are like holes we can fall down. Blind spots are empty spaces in the world. The stories that are lost.

Thinking about Doreen Massey; she reflects that if human identity is multiple, faceted, even contradictory, then a place is too. Indeed, as I grow older I see that viable identity, for myself, is a process of reflection and revision of who I have been, who and what I have believed myself to be, and who is responsible for making me who I am. And finally, what I make of it all now at this intersection of time and space.

When I first came to the Wellington campus of Massey, our class went for a walk around Pukeahu. We passed men at work in a great pit in the ground, installing underground cables. The walls of the pit reached two storeys down through layers of the hill. We left the campus and walked along the road toward Buckle Street. The memorial rose above us on ground hemmed in from the street by a wall of red bricks with arrows embossed into them. They were the robust, visceral red of old volcanic soil. The prisoners who made them were real people who had lives before being in prison. The arrows on the bricks were tiny memorials to their makers.

Te Kuratini Marae, Massey University Wellington, 2015.

Photographer: Rosie Percival.

We were welcomed onto the marae, Te Marae o te Kuratini, and marae manager Dale-Maree Morgan said it was now our place. The karanga is a call to bring the newcomers to the house. The ritual whaikorero are exchanged to find connections, overlap, shared genealogy. To establish a dialogue of community, not colony.

Now I have been here for months, turning over bricks. Time is collapsing in my walks through Mount Cook streets. They are peopled with the work gangs making bricks; the early English immigrant arrivals crammed into the barracks; the Taranaki prisoners marching with their hands tied toward Pukeahu (tui atu tui mai o tāua nei ringaringa), conscientious objectors shipped off to the front, the Ngāti Hinewai kūmara growers in the Basin Reserve, pulling up their crops in the night before invaders come. Displaced, misplaced people, people stripped of identity and home, wander with me.

In my roaming through found texts, explorations that have become a mental amplifier of my walks through the physical dimension of Mount Cook, I begin to stumble on recollections of Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamhunter books. In these novels she writes of the Place, an invisible territory accessible to few. Like a mind in itself, the Place holds memories, or dreams, with which it communicates with the people who are able to pass through it. The dreamhunters catch the dreams and convey them to the people. The Place reveals itself through them, like a mind becoming conscious of itself. Perhaps it is not so strange that, scouring the landscape of this suburb for clues as to its nature, searching archives and books for memories that will reveal its character and illuminate the corners of its history, I have a growing sense of having walked into Knox’s story. So in the midst of my wanderings I find Dreamhunter at the University library and read it again. The interaction of text and life and history intensifies for me when the story’s main character, Laura, discovers a hidden plot within the official narrative of a dream from the Place, in which she meets a work gang of convicts with arrows printed on their clothes, making bricks that they are marking with arrowheads. One of the convicts gives her a fragment of a letter, which leads to the revelations of a suppressed history and of the true nature of the Place.

Somewhere in Prince of Wales Park, high above the roofs of Mount Cook, there’s a miniature house, one of the little experiments in public spaces by the artists Kemi Niko & Co. My friend Emma and I go hunting for it. On our second venture through the park, near Bell Road, we spot the bluegreen eaves peeping above the low gorse. It’s made of flattened tin cans nailed to a frame and painted to look like a bach. It’s big enough to sit in with our legs hanging out. Someone has considerately left tea bags and a plastic wine cup. There’s a child’s book tucked into a wall recess. Below, I can see the carillon and the University and lots of ant-like cars. I sit there and feel full of possibilities, as I did in a hut made of blankets when I was small.

If I was more forward I wouldn't have to look back, 2015.

Photographer: Thomas Aitken.

I walk through a service alley in Hopper Street and I find the back ends of warehouses made into living quarters, rows of letter boxes lined up at the entranceways. A drain running past the low doors and proud layers of graffiti on the outer walls. Scrawled tags, stencils of John Key with horns, half-finished pastel figures by the street artists Pie-rats, and a BMD work across two walls with a dissected dog-like animal and the metre-high words If I was more forward I wouldn’t have to look back. An old sofa on its end, an empty beer bottle and a looped bale of number 8 wire. A brown-haired girl sits in a doorway painting on canvas. I pause, wondering whether to ask her about her work. I wonder if she lives there and if the landscape inspires her. The cracks in the concrete, the flaking walls, the weeds in the asphalt. All the dirt swept under the city’s carpet. The street is an organism; unhygienic, but alive and moving.

She’s painting a picture of the carillon on a red hill. The hill (we will remember them) is the colour of poppies, of pohutukawa blooms. If I step back, the real carillon can be seen above the warehouse roofs. The words coming out of the painted tower are not the pealing of bells but a waiata, Tui atu tui mai o taaua nei ringaringa i mauhere ai ki Pukeahu.

When I leave the girl in the doorway it seems she says something. I look back. She wants to show me her painting.

I remember when I was five. One day I saw him kissing my babysitter in a wrong way. When I asked him about it he said, that never happened. That was in your imagination. If you tell anyone they will laugh at you.

She has painted a river under the ground, far beneath the bell tower. Prisoners dig the red hill. Their faces are tattooed with lines like arrows.

I was afraid of seeing something that wasn’t there. Forever afterwards, I was afraid to believe what I saw. I thought people would laugh at me. I could not speak of what I saw. And so it became part of an invisible region that was still there, but not really there.

Under the painted ground beside the tower, an empty, coffin-shaped darkness.

‘Have to go,’ I tell her as I step down from her doorstep and turn away, and the dog-creature watches over my shoulder. I’m late. I walk past the upturned couch and the beer empties, the snarls of graffiti, the cracks and the weeds, and turn the corner. Two stencilled silhouettes on the wall look like they’re running for their lives.

But I think this might have been a dream.

Ten metres up the road, I’m walking toward the demolition site where the Beaglehole house used to be, and pushing the door into the welcoming smells of Coffee Supreme. An English guy in a soccer jacket is reading out the trivia questions in the paper. ‘Muezzin, that’s the guy who does the call to prayer,’ I tell him helpfully, hoisting myself onto a stool. The host, Richard, smiles over the machine. He has a curled moustache and he makes a cracker of a brew.

Ka aro au (Cuba Street song)

Ka aro au (Cuba Street song)

Ka aro atu au ki Ahumairangi
Ko te maunga tērā ko Matairangi, e
Ka huri atu au ki Pukeahu
Ki Tapu-te-Ranga e tū tonu, ē
Ka waiata ahau mō Ngāti Mutunga
Ngāti Tama, Ruanui, Taranaki, e
He mihi tēnei ki Te Āti Awa
Ki te Whanga-nui-a-Tara

I turn to face Ahumairangi (Tinakori Hill)
There, too, is Matairangi (Mt Victoria)
I turn to Pukeahu (Mt Cook)
And to where Tapu-te-Ranga stands — (the Island, Island Bay)
I sing of Ngāti Mutunga
Ngāti Tama, Ruanui and Taranaki
I pay tribute to you, Te Āti Awa
Here in the Great Bay of Tara (Wellington)

Image: Orca skull, Taranaki St, Wellington, 4 October 1995

Orca Skull, Taranaki St, Wellington 4 October 1995.

Photographer: Laurence Aberhart.

Performing the Personal Essay: Encounters with Pukeahu

Walk with me, 2014.

Photographer: Angela Kilford.

On the southern edge of Buckle Street, the fleeting sounds of birds and singing cicadas clash with the metal on metal of the construction site. Adding to the suite of temporal notes is the convivial voice of a 42-year-old artist conversing with her tour participants. Above and below, the pohutukawa trees, anchored deeply in the ground by tendrils wrapped firmly around the old munitions buried a century before.

Ko Takitimu te Waka
Ko Rongopai te Marae
Ko Maungatapere, me Okahuiatiu, me Maunga Haumi, nga maunga tapu
Ko Waipaoa, me Repongaere, me Waikakariki nga awa
Ko Whanau A Kai te hapu
Ko Te Aitanga a Mahaki te iwi
Ko Wi Pere te tangata
Ko Angela Kilford ahau
Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa

The Māori practice of reciting mihimihi or pepeha describes the connections between a person, their tipuna and the land. The pepeha recorded at the beginning of this essay refers to physical features of the landscape that are of particular significance to my family. Of broader significance is the connection that Māori hold with the land and also with spiritual ancestors who embody the physical landscape. The word for land, ‘whenua’, has more than one meaning. Most commonly whenua refers to land or earth, but it also stands for placenta or afterbirth. It is Māori tradition to bury the whenua in the ground to replenish the earth in return for the nourishment and shelter it provides. Ranginui Walker, author of Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End, explains that burying the whenua also acts to strengthen the bond between a person and their place of belonging. It was a feeling of unease and even fascination that drew me to investigate Puke Ahu, a place being offered as a national site for remembrance.

Geographically, Puke Ahu is a small hill between two rivers.

A stream runs down the path of Taranaki Street and now passes underneath the hill.

Another stream begins near the hospital and flows along Adelaide Road and although it is now covered, it runs all the way to the sea.

Local Māori once cultivated their gardens on this land.

The view from Puke Ahu would have been lush and green.

When the early settlers arrived in the 1840s, Puke Ahu would have been the most logical site to establish military defence, a vantage point for setting up a military barracks, police station, and even a gaol.

In 1882 a huge prison was built on Puke Ahu. The prison was four stories high and had 381 Cells, two watchtowers and an exercise yard.

The prison brickworks produced 18 million bricks to build the prison using clay from Puke Ahu and the prisoners provided free labour.

The ideas of pepeha, whakapapa and whenua are important as they emphasise a valuing of land that is not connected to money or ownership. Sir Hirini Mead describes tikanga Māori as practices and laws that exist in order to negotiate situations and events. Tikanga are formed through responses to matauranga Māori, a body of knowledge that is passed down through generations. This knowledge is organised as whakapapa and can be traced back to the time before there was light in the world, before there was darkness, to a time where all that existed was potentiality.

The prison was repurposed as a military barracks and later demolished to make way for the Dominion Museum and Art Gallery, which opened in 1936.

However, it wasn’t long before the military occupied that building too. Due to WWII the RNZAF moved into the Museum and Art Gallery from 1942–1947. It was reopened as a Museum in September 1949.

In April 2015 the military will once again have a presence on Puke Ahu when the WW1 Temporary Commemorative exhibition opens.

A monument is positioned on the northwestern corner of the land that the Old Museum Building, Tokomaru, is built on. This memorial acknowledges the peaceful protestors of Parihaka who were held in a prison at the same site in the 1880s. The rock cairn memorial is humble in comparison to the 50 metre high, concrete and stone construction of the National War Memorial, which was dedicated on Anzac Day in 1932. The Parihaka Memorial tells part of the story of a displaced people and is the only recognition of the foundation wars of New Zealand at the site. The Parihaka Memorial sits slightly apart from the National War Memorial on land owned by Te Atiawa Iwi. This is a reminder of the Tangata Whenua of Wellington and brings forth a Māori understanding of land and the significant role of myth as contributing to a sense of national identity.

We’re on quite a tight time schedule, but we could probably take a look at the Parihaka Memorial.

Parihaka was a pacifist community in Taranaki in the 1800s.

This memorial honours the peaceful protestors that were taken from Parihaka and imprisoned unlawfully before being shipped further south as slave labour.

The tangata whenua of Wellington, Te Atiawa originally came from Taranaki and own this piece of land (under the Wellington Tenths Trust) along with the land that the museum building is sitting on. That’s why the Parihaka Memorial is on that particular corner of land. As a memorial it acknowledges the foundation wars of New Zealand.

The building of monuments and memorials is a way for a nation to construct a desired narrative for an observing public. The constructed narrative, according to A.S. Byatt, is reinforced by the use of flags, the naming of civic buildings and parks and also the ritual ceremonies organised by government institutions. These different aspects of remembrance are termed by French theorist, Pierre Nora, as realms of memory or les lieux de mémoire. Every aspect of embodied memory whether material, symbolic, or functional exists to form les lieux de mémoire. In the case of the National War Memorial, these realms of memory contribute to an historical awareness of what it is to be a New Zealander and provide a context for a national identity to emerge.

Myth is important to both Pakeha and Māori in the forming of a collective or national identity. The foundational myth of Māori, though not promoted to the extent of the myths associated with war commemoration, is central to a Māori understanding of the world. In the spirit of oral histories I will now relay the Māori story of creation in my own words:

In the beginning there was nothing,

Te Kore.

Then there was the energy, the power of potential,

Te Po.

From the energy and darkness emerged Ranginui the sky and Papatuanuku the earth.

Many sons came from within their close embrace.

The sons grew restless trapped between the forms of their father and mother.

Eventually Tanemahuta, with his head and hands butting against his mother pushed his legs upwards to lever Ranginui and Papatuanuku apart,

Te Ao Marama.

In the world of light the sons fought.

Tawhirimatea eventually retreated to reside with Ranginui.

Haumiatiketike and Rongomatane stayed with Papatuanuku, where they were protected

Tangaroa, is Atua of the sea and all of its creatures.

Tumatauenga turned on his brothers and became the Atua of war.

Tanemahuta, Atua of birds and forests, formed the first human from the Earth, Hineahuone.

The Māori story of creation demonstrates a connection to the land through whakapapa, which can be traced back through the realms of the Atua to Papatuanuku, the earth mother, and Ranginui, the sky father. Walker describes the love that Papatuanuku received from her children, as a love that all nurtured children would have for a mother. This story characterises Māori as people deeply affiliated to the land and affects the practices of Māori when interacting with the natural world, as the intangible realm of the Atua are intrinsically related to the realm of the living. It is through the whakapapa illustrated in the story that Māori are connected to the Atua and also the land. The fact that Māori are related to Papatuanuku through whakapapa seriously affects their treatment of the land and has further implications when considering any interaction with it. From the planting of new crops to the excavation of large areas, the relationship to Papatuanuku is always considered and acknowledged.

Top of Carillon, 2013.

Photographer: Angela Kilford.

When visiting a new city memorials and monuments are often at the top of the list of places to visit and as of 25th April 2015 our new memorial park will be no exception.

What are we looking at? Remember Buckle Street?

The project partners use a cut and cover technique. It’s just like cutting a wedge of cake really. A slice of earth 300m long, 18m wide, 12m. The cost is approximately $120 million.

Normally it would take about two years to process the consents for the underpass and twice as long to build it.

There is a 90m steel sheet pile wall to hold back the water table and stabilize the ground.

35,000m3 of soil gouged out of the hill.

7,500 m3 of concrete and 2,598 tonnes of steel reinforcing replace the soil.

558 ground anchors; each 13m long are stabbed through the concrete and into the rock.

16,000 bags of cement to hold the ground anchors in place

95 concrete piles are pummelled 30 metres into the greywacke stone.

Angela Walking, 2013.

Photographer: Angela Kilford.

From the first day that I visited the site with my camera with the intention of documenting the initial stages of excavation, I was in awe of how a landscape I thought I knew could swiftly change. On this day I was involved in an accident on the site as a barrier fence fell and trapped me beneath it. As I lay face down with my camera lens pushed into my ribs, head to one side and hands flattened against the cold bitumen, pieces of aggregate embossed my skin. I pushed up naively unaware of the steel pole lodged between my shoulder blades. Panic swelled then dispersed from my stomach up to my face, like a fine lace of emotion. The thought that there might be more steel, another blow yet to come spurred me to cry out for help. From that moment, I felt connected to the site by the trauma of the event and from the displacement associated with a rapidly changing environment. The need to come to terms with the ruthless excavation of a sacred hill steeped in memory, has enabled me to persistently scour the site for traces of memory until I could feel that I genuinely knew the story of that place.

Conscientious objectors to the First World War walked this path in 1917.

They were marched through the centre of Wellington, then along here on their way to the Prison brickworks. Here they were ordered to work. They refused to work under military orders and were punished accordingly.

They were imprisoned for three days without mattresses and just bread to eat. Archie Baxter reported that he could see all of Wellington from his cell on the 4th floor.

To Puke Ahu I offer this song of peace.

Te aroha
Te whakapono
Me te rangimarie
Tatou tatou e

Visual Imprints

Wellington Harbour — from road leading to the Barracks, 1852.
E-455-f-034-1. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Pupils and teachers outside Mount Cook Infant School, Wellington, 1877.
Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. EP/1975/3057/21. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Shows a view over the lower slopes of Brooklyn of the Mount Cook / Te Aro area, 1888.
Illustrator: Drew, T. A-303-019. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Photographic copy of a part of the New Zealand Mail, 1904, including a photograph of Haining Street, Wellington.
1/2-C-012470-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Looking south west over Wellington City from Mount Victoria. Taken between 1909 and 1916.
Photographer: Unidentified. PAColl-5744-15. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Looking down Nairn Steet with the spires of St Peter's and St John's Churches in Willis Street, the Terrace clearly visible and the houses and wharves of Wellington stretching into the distance, 1905.
Artist: Frederic Schell. Engraver: Carl Schwarzburger. A-109-009. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Sleeping quarters for Special Mounted Police, at Alexandra Barracks, Mount Cook, Wellington, during the 1913 waterfront strike.
Photographer: Sydney Charles Smith. 1/1-019684-G. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Special Mounted Police horses at Alexandra Barracks, Mount Cook, Wellington, 1913.
Photographer: Sydney Charles Smith. 1/2-048784-G. Alexander Turnbull Library.

View of Te Aro, Wellington, looking towards Mount Cook, 1924.
Photographer: Ivor Berg. 1/4-060176-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.

View of Alexandra Barracks, Mount Cook, Wellington shortly before it was demolished in 1929.
Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. EP-3276-1/2-G. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Wellington Winter Show and exhibition of N.Z. manufactures. Brighter and better than ever. Come and bring the family, 1929.
Eph-E-SHOW-1929-01. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Overlooking Wellington city, looking west across the Mount Cook area, c. 1930. The Basin Reserve, Mount Cook Prison and Wellington High School are clearly visible
Photographer: Unidentified. 1/2-160110-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Dominion Museum, Mount Cook, Wellington, under construction, 1934.
Photographer: Unidentified. 1/2-053016-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, Frontispiece).
B-K-1212-FRONTIS. Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, page 29).
B-K-1212-29. Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, page 30).
B-K-1212-30, Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, page 33).
B-K-1212-33, Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, page 34).
B-K-1212-34, Alexander Turnbull Library.

National War Memorial and Carillon, Wellington, New Zealand (1932, page 28).
B-K-1212-32, Alexander Turnbull Library.

Maori artifacts, particularly waka (canoes) and pataka (storehouses), inside the Māori Hall at the Dominion Museum, Buckle Street, Wellington, c. 1936.
Photographer unidentified. 1/1-003855-G. Alexander Turnbull Library.

House in Haining Street, Wellington, 1937.
Photographer: Bruce Elwyn. PAColl-6013-3-01. Alexander Turnbull Library.

A crowd gathers to look at a collision. The accident took place in front of the Mount Cook Barracks and the Salvation Army at the intersection of Tasman and Buckle Streets in Wellington, 1950.
Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. 114/175/06-G. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Former Mount Cook Police Station, Buckle Street, Wellington, 1956.
Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. EP/1956/1396-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.

King Street, Mt Cook, Wellington, 1957.
Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. EP/1957/3388-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Children in the playground of Mount Cook School, Te Aro, Wellington, 1975.
Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. EP/1975/3058/24-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.

75,77 Wallace St, 1984.
Drawing: Grant Tilly.

Cricket at the Basin, 1991.
Photographer: Derek Smith.

Cuba St, 1991.
Photographer: Derek Smith.

Cuba St, 1992.
Photographer: Derek Smith.

Mount Cook, 1992.
Photographer: Derek Smith.

Nairn Street, 1992.
Photographer: Derek Smith.

Moreporks (Bird Skins Room # 2), Taranaki St, Wellington, 3 October 1995.
Photographer: Laurence Aberhart.

Orca Skull, Taranaki St, Wellington 4 October 1995.
Photographer: Laurence Aberhart.

Albatross (Bird Skins Room #6), Taranaki St, Wellington, 3 October 1995.
Photographer: Laurence Aberhart.

Mounted albatross, Taranaki St, Wellington, 2 February 1996.
Photographer: Laurence Aberhart.

Main Staircase, National Museum and Art Gallery, Buckle Street, 1996.
Photographer: Laurence Aberhart.

Tonks Avenue, Wellington, looks towards Arthur Street, 2000.
Photographer: Phillip Barton. PA12-1824-02. Alexander Turnbull Library.

The William Wakefield Memorial, 2011.
Photographer: Thomas Beard.

Capitalism cannot last — Basin Reserve graffiti, 2011.
Photographer: Thomas Beard.

Statue inside the National War Memorial, 2011.
Photographer: Thomas Beard.

Karo Drive, 2011.
Photographer: Thomas Beard.

Angela Walking, 2013.
Photographer: Angela Kilford.

Top of Carillon, 2013.
Photographer: Angela Kilford.

Walk with me, 2014.
Photographer: Angela Kilford.

No Eyes, 2015.
Photographer: Robin Peace.

Untitled, 2015.
Drawing: Thomas Aitken.

If I was more forward I wouldn't have to look back, 2015.
Photographer: Thomas Aitken.

Check out your herstory, 2015.
Photographer: Thomas Aitken.

Hopper Street by night, 2015.
Photographer: Thomas Aitken.

Ian Curtis, 2015.
Photographer: Thomas Aitken.

Colonial Cottage, Nairn Street, 2015.
Photographer: Thomas Aitken.

Colonial Cottage, Nairn Street (detail), 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

Bidwell Street (detail), 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

Mount Cook Police Barracks, 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

Tasman Street church, 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

Home for Boys, Tasman Street, 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

Te Kuratini Marae, Massey Campus, Wellington, 2015.
Photographer: Rosie Percival.

Te Kōhanga Reo National Trust, Hankey Street, 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

National War Memorial, 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

12 sandstone columns at the Australian Memorial, Pukeahu National War Memorial Park, 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

Tasman Street brick wall, 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

Arrows in the bricks, Tasman Street, 2015.
Photographer: Rosie Percival.

View above Mount Cook, 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

View looking down Thompson Street, 2015.
Photographer: Alicia Tolley.

A Shilling

Photographic copy of a part of the New Zealand Mail, 1904, including a photograph of Haining Street, Wellington.

1/2-C-012470-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.

They had just turned into Tory Street, past Mount Cook Police Station, Chung-shun and his younger brother Chung-yung, on their way to Haining Street for soupy wontons and noodles. A late Sunday morning, the sun shining with the heat of ripening fruit, the wind for once not too vigorous. Yung whistled some folk ditty, oblivious to gweilo rules that made whistling, singing anything but hymns, and playing the piano on Sundays frowned upon. Shun merely frowned. His leg ached and made him lose all appreciation of the one day of the week when the shop was closed. He did not notice the calmness of the day, the lack of dust and grit swirling from the road to assail their eyes and coat their skin and clothes and hair. He did not notice the man approach them.

Yung saw the man coming. Even from a distance there was something strange about the way he walked, an ambling stiffness. As they got closer, Yung saw the man’s eyes focus upon him, saw his face spread into a toothless grin. He watched as the man walked up to them, stood too close (the stink of stale piss and unwashed clothes) and said through sunken cheeks, ‘Gif me a shilling.’

Yung held his breath and stepped back, looked the man over. He was a good four inches shorter and very thin, and there was something wrong with his eyes. His hands were hidden in the pockets of his dirty oversized coat, and for a moment Yung considered whether he might be concealing a weapon.

‘What for?’ he asked.

Yung could see him thinking. ‘Haaaf you aaany muun-neee?’ the man said slowly, his face loose, his lips hollowing into his gums. ‘Muun-neeee.’

Yung smiled. ‘I haaf muuneee,’ he said. He slapped his pocket, rattling the coins.

The man pulled his hands out of his pockets, held up his fists. ‘Gif it to me or I’ll…’

Yung laughed. Muuneee.

He turned and walked back towards the police station. He hummed. He liked the solid red brick building, the black and white brickwork forming arches above the windows and doors, the imprints of arrows stamped into the bricks. If he didn’t think about the prisoners who’d made them, then he found it amusing, the way the bricks were placed so randomly, sometimes with the arrow facing inwards and hidden from sight, sometimes out, sometimes pointing to the left, sometimes to the right. They were like clues left behind at the scene of a crime, a scene that had been contaminated by reporters, curious onlookers, bumbling policemen.

He walked into the coolness of the building, across the geometric tiled floor, past the staircase, to the room where Constable Walters sat in the depths of the building. They knew each other well. The constable often passed by the shop on his nightly patrol and Yung would offer him a banana or a ripe pear, taking comfort from knowing the police were around.

Constable Walters rose from his desk, and as they came back out onto the street they saw the man hurry in the opposite direction and disappear down Frederick Street. The constable followed but soon lost him.

When he returned, red faced and breathing heavily, he asked what the man had looked like. Yung described a man in his forties, no, thirties (gweilo always look older than Tongyan), about this high — he motioned with his hand — light hair, no teeth … Shun described the man’s big red nose.

‘Shun Goh,’ Yung said, addressing him politely as elder brother, ‘all gweilo have big red noses.’ He turned back to the constable. ‘Nose just like you,’ he said, ‘and here…’ He touched the right side of his jaw, trying to describe a scar but not knowing the words. ‘He velly stupid,’ he added.

After the constable had gone, Shun berated his brother, throwing his hands in the air. Why tell the gweilo he had money la? Why shake his pockets? Was he mad? After he walked off the gweilo harassed him for money too!

Yung wanted to laugh but he had to show respect. He tried to explain — after all the man was harmless, a simpleton, no more — but Shun wasn’t listening. How come Yung was so stupid? Just two months ago Ah Chan was beaten up in the street. Didn’t he know how dangerous it was?

Yung closed his ears. Already he was dreaming up a couplet. About a man with no teeth and half a mind, about a confusion of arrows and no idea which way to go.

Alice in the Eighties: The Wellington Years

Alice in the Eighties: The Wellington Years

i.
Alice moves into a flat by the Basin Reserve. There are lesbians
living next door and a three-legged cat who visits. One week,
Alice and her flatmates decide to spend the kitty money on
alcohol instead of food, a different beverage for each night of
the week. On one of these evenings, Alice swallows several live
goldfish.* They look remarkably like tinned mandarin segments.
In syrup.

ii.
Alice and her flatmates have a party. One of the flatmates acquires
some long tubes of plastic — elongated rubbish bag cylinders
before they have been segmented into actual rubbish bag-sized
sections. They attach one to the vacuum cleaner at the top of the
stairs so that there is a permanently inflated tube of air snaking
down the stairs and into the lounge. There are other sheets of
plastic draped across doorways and over walls.

The party is gate-crashed by a group of punks. Alice watches a
punk woman trying to persuade one of the guys she came with to
tell her which of them fucked her the night before when she was
too far out of it to know what she was doing. She is saying, I just
want to know which ones it was. He doesn’t tell her.

iii.
Alice goes to see some bands off Cuba Street. It’s a good night,
good dancing. Alice dances in front of the stage, on her own.
She doesn’t mind being the first one up to dance. She wanders
outside to find a toilet. While she is queuing, she watches a
woman wrapping a leather belt around her friend’s arm, tapping
for a vein.

iv.
For a while, everyone lives in warehouses, spacious open-plan
living where you can also be an artist/bone-carver/musician
which is what everyone fancies themselves as, including the ones
with jobs in law firms. It is the height of cool. Alice does not live
in a warehouse. She likes having a door she can close behind her.

*No animals were harmed in the making of this poem.

Tonks Avenue, Wellington. Looks towards Arthur Street, 2000.

Photographer: Phillip Barton. PA12-1824-02. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Childhood and Youth

John was often the bearer of notes from his mother, and was remembered by the family of his cousin Amy Denton for such an occasion when he was ten. John was hanging around, eating apples but not saying much, while Amy’s mother cooked. Finally she ventured, ‘What time does your mother want you home, dear?’ She was kneeling at the oven putting in a tray of rock cakes. ‘What time do the rocks come out?’ John asked. It became a family saying. The Beaglehole boys were all said to have great appetites; none of them shared their mother’s vegetarian principles, which seem to have left them feeling hungry. Large appetites may have run in the male members of the family. A story tells of someone looking out of the window at Hopper Street during afternoon tea and suddenly crying out, ‘Hide the cake under the sofa, here comes Joe!’

The extended family moved around to one another’s houses for parties with music or charades, occasions of great jollity and youthful high spirits. Ern showed a lighter side, teasing the girls. He clearly adored them and would have liked a daughter. A young relative met him one morning, very dapper, on his way to work. ‘Whither away fair maid, whither away’, he greeted her. He ‘had some very flowery language’. In the charades Uncle Will Jackson was a star, and Alan Paterson made his mark early, portraying a reformed sinner who had taken the pledge — a live issue, as most of the older generation were strong temperance supporters. Alan also showed an early talent for drawing, a foretaste of his career as a cartoonist on the Dominion. His gifts for drawing, acting and writing were all to flourish during his later membership of the Wellington Savage Club. John went to dancing classes conducted by Miss Moore, ‘incredibly frizzed and rouged’. A cousin later recalled dancing with him ‘when Miss Moore called out: “Jack and Amy, relax your muscles”, and you muttered into my ear, “Good God, how are we supposed to do that?” and I said, “You ass, you know how to relax you muscles, don’t you?” And your memorable reply was: “Gosh, I thought the woman said bustles.”’ In the summer there were picnics at Scorching Bay, reached after a good walk from the end of the newly opened Seatoun tramline.

Pupils and teachers outside Mount Cook Infant School, Wellington, 1877.

Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. EP/1975/3057/21. Alexander Turnbull Library.

The boys went to Mount Cook School. John began in 1906, when he turned five; Geoffrey had already been there for three years and Keith started two years later. The school, opened in 1875 as a development of the Buckle Street Girls’ School, was run by a Mrs Wilkinson and her daughter. The Mount Cook district was something of a social mix. The homes of the better-off were on Willis Street, where Dr Bennett lived and had her rooms, and climbed the hills to the south, where the Kirkcaldie mansion at the top of Thompson Street looked down on many fine houses. On the Te Aro flat, which included Hopper Street, the houses were the much more modest dwellings of manual workers and the unemployed. The Mount Cook School grew rapidly at first, reaching a roll of 598 in 1897, before declining to 384 in 1907 and 330 in 1913. This decline followed the suburban development that was closely linked to the construction of the new electric tramway system. In 1904 the trams began running down Hopper Street, crashing and swaying within a few metres of the Beaglehole house. Surely one day, the boys hoped and feared, one would fail to take the corner into Webb Street and would hurtle into Burbidge’s greengrocery, spraying fruit and vegetables everywhere.

Mount Cook School when the Beaglehole boys were there was in three separate parts: the infants’ school (under Miss Watson) and the girls’ school in Buckle Street, the boys’ school in Taranaki Street. By this time the neighbouring Mount Cook prison had become the home of the permanent artillery (the prison having moved to The Terrace, from whence prisoners were marched through the city each morning to work in the brickworks still on the site of the old prison). This, along with the barracks and defence stores on Buckle Street, gave a military air to the area, and created interest, particularly to those at the boys’ school. This was housed in a rather forbidding Gothic building erected in 1878, which by the turn of the century was somewhat the worse for wear. School logbooks and the minute books of the school committee give glimpses of the school and its activities at this time. The drains were a long-standing problem as the original ones were open and a constant health hazard; with the site subject to flooding in the winter they also occasionally overflowed. Finally in 1907, John’s second year, the Education Board built a new toilet block. In 1913, his final year, the inspectors reported the rooms to be ‘rather dark and badly lighted … the asphalt requires renewing in places, as in wet weather pools of water settle in front of the building. The floors were fairly clean but the windows more especially those at the back of the building were very dirty and some were broken.’ The schoolwork done by the standard six pupils, however, was said to be very good.

During the waterfront strike in 1913 the school was taken over to house the special constables and was closed from 3 to 18 November, after which the rooms used by the ‘specials’ were scrubbed out and disinfected. The standard six classes, with exams imminent, spent some of that time working at Te Aro school in Willis Street. Even after the school reopened the back playground was kept until early December for police horses. On 27 and 28 November John sat the examinations for those finishing primary school. He was placed thirtieth on the Wellington district list, with 497 marks out of a possible 800 (top of the list was Doreen Mary Britland with 611 marks). This placing qualified him for a ‘Junior free place’, tenable for two years at a state secondary school. He was the only successful Mount Cook pupil that year, but his achievement was matched by his three brothers.

Children in the playground of Mount Cook School, Te Aro, Wellington, 1975.

Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. EP/1975/3058/24-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Hopper Street Tram Crash

Side view of a Wellington tram. A tram conductor is inside on the right, c. 1920s.

Photographer: Gordon Burt. 1/1-015436-G. Alexander Turnbull Library.

I was painting our house on the corner of Hopper and Arlington Streets. It was an old place that came straight off the street. It had been a shop. The shop part had been our bedroom. I was standing on the footpath with my back to the road and was painting away there when a tram came hurtling down Hopper Street. It shook the house. They all shook everybody’s house. They came down at a hellva belt because the street was quite steep. At the bottom they turned into Webb Street and then turned again into Cuba Street. As it passed I thought to myself that it was going faster than usual. I looked around and instead of turning the corner the tram went straight on into a shop, a third of the way in. Bang! Glass and everything flying.

I dropped the paintbrush and ran down the road to see ‘what the hell’. There were lots of girls in the tram. They had been playing basketball (now called netball). They were gradually getting out of the tram and sitting in the gutter, bewildered, and a little bit knocked about. Some of them were crying. I passed the girls and went into the side of the shop. I knew the shop and the owners, the Kwoks. They were in a back room, the Chinese people, and they came into the shop with me. They had just put in glass shelves (there had been wooden ones for years) so there was glass from the shelves, glass from the window panes and glass from the tram’s windows. All glass everywhere. There were pumpkins, apples, cucumbers, melons: everything with big hunks of glass sticking in them.

There was a woman lying there. The ambulance men were trying to get in but couldn’t because the tram was occupying all the front of the shop. I told them to come around the back way and they brought a stretcher. They laid the stretcher on pumpkins and apples and every other thing. There was glass everywhere. It was a hellva mess. I gave them a hand to lift the woman up. One bloke got one end of her and another got the other end but her leg stayed on the ground. The one thing keeping it on her body was her stocking. So I lifted it up and put it beside the woman.

The woman in question would have been Mrs Ellen Sawell. According to the Evening Post (21 June), she heroically tried to revive the unconscious motorman, who had had a heart attack, and apply the handbrake. She died shortly after being admitted to Wellington Hospital. A plaque should be placed in Hopper Street in recognition of Mrs Sawell’s bravery and that of another passenger, Miss Jessie Ewing, who also tried to stop the tram. She was seriously injured but survived. The motorman, William McCullogh (56) father of seven was dead on arrival at the hospital. The conductor and eight members of the netball team were treated for shock and minor injuries.

Little Houses

John’s swearing started at Melrose. Carly said it was awful, but the children were fascinated by it, though Carly afterwards spent distracted hours warning Sandra, ‘You mustn’t ever say that, or the Devil will get you.’

‘Damn and blast your bicycles,’ he shouted, ‘I’m sick of riding your damn-and-blasted bicycles. Damn and blast your hills. I won’t go on living on a precipice to please you. We’re going down to the flat.’

‘Before your own children. . .’

‘Damn and blast my children. I didn’t ask to have children.’

Augusta changed her tack. ‘We can’t live in town. You know perfectly well the rents are too high.’

‘Then we can live in Newtown.’

‘That slum . . . I suppose I can bring your children up in a hovel, with a public-house next door, and a lot of dirty, drunken loafers hanging over your gate. Or perhaps you’d like Haining Street? The hill air’s healthy for your children.’

‘Then bring up your children on your damn-and-blasted precipice. I’m going out.’

Slam of a door, and John was gone; during these quarrels, Carly, Eliza and Sandra automatically became ‘your children’ to both sides. Augusta said dramatically, ‘You’re responsible for bringing them into this world,’ and their father, darkly, ‘Oh, I am, am I?’

House in Haining Street, Wellington, 1937.

Photographer: Bruce Elwyn. PAColl-6013-3-01. Alexander Turnbull Library.

‘Where’s Haining Street?’ Eliza asked Carly. Carly looked important and nervous.

‘It’s the place where the Chinese dens are. Don’t tell Mummy I told you. We’re not supposed to talk about it.’

‘What’s a Chinese den?’

‘Don’t talk so loud. You always go and blurt everything out.’ Carly was on the verge of tears, so Eliza said, ‘Oh, all right,’ and sauntered away, trying to imagine the man who came round at the back door, selling French beans and wilted lettuces, sitting on a concrete floor like a lion with slim steel bars blackening his face. She found Carly’s doll, Mrs Trimble, lying on the steps above the wallflower patch, and shook it gently, so that its round scarred head wagged from side to side. ‘Damn and blast my children,’ she said, ‘I didn’t ask to have children.’ But she said it softly; Augusta would use the hairbrush if she knew.

Strife among the Hannays made the illuminated texts rattle, and little Mr Hostler, in his meek and mild way, protested to John. That gave him the excuse he was looking for. He wouldn’t stay another day under a roof where he’d been insulted. He looked fierce, all red and thin and flamy-eyed, when he was in this mood, and Augusta gave in.

Immediately John was charming again. Carly, Eliza, and Sandra were ‘the children’, and even ‘our children’, and he said happily that in Newtown he could take them to the Zoo and the pictures.

‘And bring home a lot of germs. And where’s the money for pictures coming from, may I ask?’

‘Oh, look on the bright side for once,’ demanded John, impatiently. Again Eliza felt secretly that he was right, and hoped they were going to live in Haining Street, among the Chinese dens. But there were no Chinese at all in Newbold Street. Rows and rows of grimy little streets and terraces, mostly very flat, crawled listlessly from the shopping centre and the big concrete block of the hospital to the green garment’s hem of the bay. Newtown in its half-century of life had contrived to get itself very dirty: and it was static, nothing there would change. Always little houses, little shops, the tramway sheds, the Heddington Arms, with a tower on the top and orange paper flowers showing through unwashed windows. Where it fused with Town, near the Basin Reserve which had been under water until an earthquake tossed it up, it was a melting-pot of Asiatic shops and quarters, narrow wooden houses in which old Chinese smoked opium and cut greasy cards, or thin-legged, great-eye Hindoos carried on their business as small fruiterers, ripening bananas under their beds. The Orientals were merely Oriental, and too poor for elaboration; white slatterns had settled down among them, like a covey of gulls on ship’s waste.

Stepping down from the hills was a blow from which Augusta took years to recover. It used up all her softness, all she had in hand besides fortitude and pride. Whenever she won some little advantage, a neighbour who could be called ‘nice,’ a patch of lawn, a few yards of garden which John refused to dig, something went wrong; and the furniture-van, drawn by the sage old heavy-breathing horses, pulled up outside their doors again. Sparrows picked at the heaps of manure, children bright-eyed and feckless as sparrows ran past with bare legs and drippy noses, while Augusta stood on the pavement shrieking, ‘Mind that table!’ John lost the bicycle, but on the flats caught rheumatism, bibliomania and politics, none of which he could afford. Augusta’s children were never slum children: she dominated John where his pay envelopes were concerned, though it cost her her youth. They caught minor diseases, measles and scarlartina, and Eliza cried terribly at the slightest pain. But Augusta, usually severe with them, could not bring herself to shut Eliza’s mouth with a strap.

Image: Moreporks (Bird Skins Room # 2), Taranaki St, Wellington, 3 October 1995

Moreporks (Bird Skins Room # 2), Taranaki St, Wellington, 3 October 1995.

Photographer: Laurence Aberhart.

Mount Cook

75,77 Wallace St, 1984.

Drawing: Grant Tilly.

We were warned when we moved to Wellington’s Mount Cook area. “Don’t use the address ‘Mount Cook’,” they said. “Your mail will only go down south to the real Mount Cook.” Logically, that could imply we had come to live in a place that was unreal — sort of a local equivalent of Brigadoon. Was that so bad? The people of Brigadoon had made strangers welcome, shown them hospitality, drawn them into their community. We could say the same. Within a very short time we felt quite at home in Mount Cook.

I am a native of Wellington (a rare species, as I am frequently told), but my habitat was the northern part of the city. What was it A.A. Milne wrote? “You must never go down to the end of town without consulting me.” In the poem, the child forbade his mother. For me it was the other way round. When I was very small mothers still talked in hushed tones of Haining Street and its neighbourhood in a way that put it quite out of bounds. Mrs Dupree (mother of J.J.M.M.W.G.) had deliberately disobeyed her son — and had never been seen again. That sufficed. The south end of Cuba Street — Webb Street, Wallace Street, Hanson Street — I ventured there only once a year, in a family party, for the Winter Show. Ah, Mount Cook was a place of wonder then! But of the district itself I still knew very little.

As I grew up the Carillon and the Dominion Museum and Art Gallery were being built on Mount Cook. To my parents, it had been the site of the prison and the brickworks — inseparably joined because the convicts made the bricks, marked with the sign of the arrow. They found it hard to adjust to years of hard labour making way for culture and remembrance. Yet it certainly raised the status of all that lay around. In my youth I began to enter the forbidden territory. What had always been made to seem faintly disreputable proved, on closer inspection, to have a character of its own. Different, yes — but not necessarily dubious. With my dog I walked through Aro Street, up Nairn Street, down Hankey Street, into Taranaki Street, back along the wharves. I liked what I saw.

Now I live in Mount Cook, hardly a stone’s throw from the grey grandeur of the Museum, the austere loneliness of the Carillon. Summer Saturdays can echo with the roar of grandstanders watching cricket at the Basin Reserve. In the mornings I can look down across a harbour that glitters in the sunshine or foams angrily under the lash of the wind. The Tararuas loom in the distance. In the foreground, Te Aro flat offers endless points of interest for the inveterate identifier of landmarks — or even for those who simply enjoy looking down on a lifesize Monopoly board.

Within walking distance are the Mount Cook Café (for inner satisfaction), Central Park (for exercise) and the Nairn Street Colonial Cottage (for remembrance of things past). Further off, but still comparatively close at hand, are the Penthouse Cinema (a Mecca for the film faithful) and beyond it what the city council calls euphemistically “the landfill”. Life isn’t all a matter of gracious living, and in today’s throwaway society it helps to have the tip more or less at your back door.

All in all, I like being in Mount Cook. It may not have the spectacular appeal of its tourist-oriented southern namesake; but then, nor does it have the climate and the inaccessibility of the “real thing”. As an urban creature I find it very comforting to be able to say that I live in Mount Cook knowing that I can walk home without crampons or climbing boots. But I must say, looking northwards over Thorndon from my southerly vantage point, I often wonder what my mother would have thought.

Wellington Winter Show and exhibition of N.Z. manufactures. Brighter and better than ever. Come and bring the family, 1929.

Eph-E-SHOW-1929-01. Alexander Turnbull Library.

On the Corner

I lived on Tasman Street for a year last year. Whenever I’d bike to the bottom where the old Police Barracks lies strong on the corner, I’d wait alongside cars and trucks as a road worker ushered us through with one of those stop and go paddles. I was often unsure about those paddles, waiting for the day the paddle-holder slipped up on his eight-hour shift of turning his wrist and I’d ride around the corner and into the unfortunate path of some colossal truck.

I’m stopped at the same corner now and there are automated traffic lights instead of people with paddles but the Barrack’s bricks still appear strong as ever. My back faces them as I lean on the seat of my bike beside a rubbish bin. Cars, bikes, and trucks come down from what used to be Buckle Street in front of the memorial tower turning right into Tasman. They wait for the red of a traffic light to turn green then flow past what used to be the Salvation Army in controlled order.

A crowd gathers to look at a collision. The accident took place in front of the Mount Cook Barracks and the Salvation Army at the intersection of Tasman and Buckle Streets in Wellington, 1950.

Photographer: Unidentified for the Evening Post. 114/175/06-G. Alexander Turnbull Library.

On the 24th of July, 1950, at that same corner, outside the same strong bricks and what was at the time the Salvation Army, a beautiful but expensive looking Delage car owned by John McMillan collided into a Ford truck that had ‘A J Walling, Eastbourne, Wellington Transport’ branded on the door. Judging from the picture taken by an Evening Post staff photographer, it seems McMillan was turning left up Tasman while whoever was driving the Ford truck with ‘A J Walling, Eastbourne, Wellington Transport’ branded on the door, was turning right. Maybe someone’s brakes weren’t working, maybe McMillan was looking around to see if anyone was admiring his beautiful but expensive looking Delage, or maybe he dropped ash on his lap. Either way it seems he slammed into the left side of the Ford truck with ‘A J Walling, Eastbourne, Wellington Transport’ branded on the door, wedging his beautiful but expensive-looking Delage beneath it. A crowd of rubberneckers stand amused around the crash site, and one young-looking man leaning on the seat of his bike could be talking to McMillan while the now broken door of his Delage traps him inside. I picture him saying something brilliantly patronising like: ‘That’s a beautiful but expensive looking car there sir,’ then, as he looks down at his untarnished bike, ‘I prefer two wheels myself.’

To the Woman who Bought my House

Virginia, queen of the real
estate agents, introduces us,
and I smile and shake her hand
but my smile doesn’t touch the sides.
She asks if the area has changed.
Yes. She wouldn’t have bought this house
then, in the good old days when drugs
were discovered carefully hidden
in the toilet cistern of the Tram-
ways Hotel close by, where murderers
drank before heading off to murder,
and the brothel was on that corner,
and punks who chopped up their
furniture for firewood lived next door.

Virginia says the first offer
can be the best, it is an old real
estate saying apparently,
and they have enough of those.

So, to the woman who bought my house,
I wonder if you found the secret
trapdoor? By the way, one hot summer
we had to bury our old dead cat
in the garden, and it is okay
with me if you paint right over
the pictures my son drew on the back
bedroom wall. This was a good house,
a loved house, although I warn you
it makes noise, it creaks and yawns,
it is like those labels attached
to Third World rugs: any flaws
are part of the natural fibre.
Virginia assured me
there is another home for any
one and everyone, and while this
house will not shelter me any more,
nevertheless, I bless it for you.
I bless it for you.

Image: Wellington Harbour — from road leading to the Barracks, 1852

Wellington Harbour — from road leading to the Barracks, 1852.

E-455-f-034-1. Alexander Turnbull Library.

Culvert: the slipperiness of place

The story of Māori writing has roots in New Zealand St, a small residential road that stretches along the edge of a small ridge up from the Parramatta River where Samuel Marsden had a seminary for young Māori men in the early nineteenth century. New Zealand St is in Poihākena; New Zealand St is in Parramatta, now a mere sub-city in the sprawl of Sydney, but Parramatta is really the Darug place known as Burramatta, the gathering place of eels.

I don’t live in New Zealand St; I also don’t live in New Zealand. When people ask where I’m from, I tell them Wellington; when they ask where I’m from from, they think I’ll give them an answer from another place, but I give them an answer from another time: we were there before Wellington was there. Some people can’t see how you can be in an Indigenous place and a city at the same time. Darug people understand.

This is the third time I’ve left New Zealand; like Hinemoana’s eels — ‘salt fresh salt / the opposite of salmon’ — people like me keep crossing oceans and finding other rivers. I keep moving home with the intention of staying — honest I do — but then off I go again. This time I live right next to the Burramatta in a third floor apartment where I write stories about Māori writing; stories about Māori writing are always stories about Māori. This is one of them. (One story. One Māori.)

There’s a link between Burramatta and Puke Ahu: eels. A Pākehā scholar at home, Richard Manning, has written about the need for secondary school history teaching in Wellington to include some aspect of local histories. For his doctoral research, Manning brought together high school history teachers and local iwi representatives to talk about the difference between Local, Māori and New Zealand histories. He writes about their visit to Waitangi Park where the former Waitangi lagoon was mightily disrupted by two events: the major 1855 Wellington earthquake, and the laying of pipes during the nineteenth and twentieth century projects of public works which means the Waitangi stream now exists almost entirely underground through human-made pipes. Much of Wellington city was erected on land that was partially reclaimed and partly drained.

But water always goes somewhere. Water that is diverted under the ground through pipes is called a culvert. This is a story written by Burramatta about a culvert that’s really a world.

Manning focuses on the Waitangi stream which used to run from the harbour, past Waitangi (no, not that Waitangi) Park next to the national museum, all the way up through Te Aro valley which was planted and built in a way that made it a large village or pā. He cites a Te Ātiawa interviewee who relates, ‘People were also quite surprised to find that though there’s no stream, because it’s all in an underground pipe now, there’s still a large quantity of eels living in the Waitangi stream.’ The Waitangi stream, although no longer visible, still flows under the land and up the valley — it’s just that now it flows in pipes. And, because the stream was always a specific gathering place of eels, when the water started to flow in pipes instead of above ground, the eels kept on swimming up and down the valley just like they always had.

The Waitangi stream still runs beneath some parts of the city, and it’s not the only one. When I say this I can’t help but recall an elder of my own who came to visit me in my office when I started a job in the English department at Vic and she pointed out to the street which lay there heavy and grey nine floors down from my office and said ‘that’s the Kumutoto stream — whenever you’re here remember this is Kumutoto and it runs down the hill and out to the harbour.’

Manning spotted the watery metaphor: the history of Wellington needs to be resurfaced. But I also like the slippery metaphor. ‘No one told them’ joked the elder, referring to the eels. No one told the eels to start acting differently just because the environment was unrecognizable and the banks of the stream were now uniformly curved. When the interviewee says, ‘They hadn’t learned the history of that stream or that the stream’s now in a pipe’, Manning assumes the interviewee is referring to the people who hadn’t learned these things, but it seems to me this could equally mean the eels.

No one told the eels to stop acting like eels, not when we found our lives were radically changed by two hundred years of turbulent change; no one told the eels to stop acting like eels, even though our usual pathways have become more narrow than before; no one told the eels to stop acting like eels, when we found ourselves in and around other rivers that are gathering places for our kind.

Maybe we produce our Indigenous worlds by our various modes of continuity. Maybe there’s a way that finding out about our own eels and pathways can give us ways to see the ones in other places. Like Burramatta. Maybe Māori writing makes visible these worlds that, for some, are unknown because they’re happening in pipes that are really rivers. No one told the eels to stop acting like eels just because the world had changed, but maybe the inverse is also true: as long as the eels keep acting like eels and connecting like eels (as long as they keep swimming up the pipes and then heading off on ocean-wide migrations and returning home again) maybe the world hasn’t changed so much after all. You can’t beat Wellington on a good day… but you can swim underneath, around and beyond it.

Ka aro au (Cuba Street song)

Ka aro au (Cuba Street song)

Image: Mounted albatross, Taranaki St, Wellington, 2 February 1996

Mounted albatross, Taranaki St, Wellington, 2 February 1996.

Photographer: Laurence Aberhart.

Notional Significance: Resistance

I weave through concrete islands and metal barriers to the edge of the Basin Reserve. Just inside the fence is a monument to William Wakefield: as an abduction accomplice, mercenary, principled duelist and city father, he was the marginally more respectable of the Wakefield boys. The memorial is supposed to suggest a Grecian temple, but on a shrunken scale, and the geometry could just as well evoke rural water towers or alien octopodes. Far from symbolising timeless dignity, its history is as dubious and peripatetic as its namesake. After shipping out from the mother country, it languished for decades in the corporation yard before its first installation, and has continued to shift in and out of the grounds ever since.

The William Wakefield Memorial, 2011.

Photographer: Thomas Beard.

The Basin itself is a site of compromise and thwarted ambitions. The 1855 earthquake kaiboshed any hopes of a grand inland harbour surrounded by docks and factories, and ever since the Mt Cook convicts drained the remnant swamps and flattened them into playing fields, the reserve has been subjected to shrinking and nibbling, as the noble ideals of civic recreation adjust to the demands of movement. The sharp edges have been shaved off, first to suit the turning radii of trams, then to appease the ever-hungry highway that now encircles it in an asphalt tourniquet.

The changes have not all been smooth, and the Basin has seen its share of revolt. The grounds were stormed by unionists during the Great Strike of 1913, making it a brief symbolic centre for resistance — in a way, the wharves did come to the Basin for a while. Side-street graffiti continues the struggle, though the words seem more strident than effectual: POWER CORRUPTS! SOD THE STREETS! CAPITALISM CANNOT LAST. Is the barren site behind, earmarked for a brand new supermarket, a sign of capitalism’s fatal stumble? Or is the great weary beast just taking a breather before getting back to its feet and back into trampling mode?

Capitalism cannot last — Basin Reserve graffiti, 2011.

Photographer: Thomas Beard.

The road keeps snaking on, leaving an awkward geometry of concave triangles and apologetic landscaping. Among the fumes, the sticky, shimmering asphalt and the brazen architectural mediocrity of motels and hostels, a small crenellated building strikes an anomalous note of embattled whimsy. The defensive architecture seems at odds with its history as Mother Aubert’s Home of Compassion, but perhaps it will indeed have to dig itself in for another siege. While NZTA are tight-lipped about current flyover options, it seems likely that this bijoux castle will be (literally) in the road. As St Pat’s college got the elbow in the 60s, exiled to Kilbirnie to make way for a stillborn motorway, perhaps this last remnant will also be shoved aside. With its context so mutable, what’s to keep it rooted to this particular piece of earth?

Buckle St unbuckles, straightens, and brings itself to a stop at the Tory St intersection. This is the first intersection of the journey that retains the geometry of William Mein Smith’s original town plan: since the tunnel, every other corner has been tweaked and twisted to unkink the highway. Now I’m standing at the edge of the Te Aro grid, the rectilinear order that marks the beginning of the true city. A grid plan is at the heart of most planned cities, not just from the rationalist Greeks and Romans to the speculative subdividers of the New World, but in Babylon, China and ancient Mexico as well. Occult psychogeographers scour maps for earth magic, ley lines and cabbalistic alignments; mediaeval towns reveal traces of old grazing paths and hilltop defences; but for planned settlements on flat land, the geometric DNA of the future city is most often conceived by a surveyor with a set square.

Perhaps there’s more to it. A grid is a given, but why this alignment? North-south streets don’t quite run north to south, and the shadows in the west-east streets often catch you unaware when the sun sets further south than you’d imagine. For Mein Smith, crouched in his leaky hut, trying to cram the mandated town acres onto a confined and folded land, certain features must have set the ground rules. To the west, the base of the Terrace escarpment running north to Clay Point; high to the east, the long ridge of Tangi Te Keo; Waitangi Stream running from Newtown to the sea along the line of what was to become Cambridge and Kent Terraces. Once the y-axis was set, the rest of the grid fell into place. But what created that arrangement of parallel geologies? As usual, the answer is seismic: a series of small, inactive faults run across Te Aro, parallel to what are now the major streets between Willis St and Kent Tce. Who needs the imagined forces of ley lines, when we have the very real force of fault lines defining the skeleton of the city?

Another fault now defines the east-west alignments — tensions compounding over decades — with signs that the pent-up energy is finally ready to burst: the highway. The north edge of Buckle St now bristles with sheds, machinery, heavy metal fences. The earthmoving is about to begin, attempting to bring at least temporary resolution to the conflict between two incompatible visions of “National Significance”: the tradition of defining our nationhood by remembering those who died for us in distant lands; and the hunger for movement, the ceaseless drive towards elsewhere. The stillness of memory versus the motion of commerce. Each of them in its own way eludes the here and now, yet the concepts of memorial pomp and diurnal commuting seem irreconcilable. No-one’s being told the eventual resolution. Will the street buckle northwards, will it be subducted beneath Memorial Park, or will the highway, almost inconceivably, be hushed a few times a year for pre-ordained rituals of remembrance? For now, the cracks will be plastered over with lime chip and phalanxes of temporary nurseries: tensions unrelieved.

This corner abounds with such contradictions. To the north: Mt Cook School, divorced from its eponymous mountain; and a block or so away the former milk depot, a reminder of the days of benignly patronising municipal socialism when a Council-owned dairy farm in Otaki would provide for the fat and calcium requirements of urban urchins. To the south: the Police barracks with their telltale prison bricks, a reminder of the old Mt Cook Gaol that used to lour over Te Aro. Among its prisoners were the “ploughmen from Parihaka”, rewarded with deportation and incarceration for their peaceful resistance to colonial encroachment.

The tangled currents swirl on down the street. The benign institutions of university, museum and memorial hide unmapped air-raid shelters, a botched panopticon, forced labour, a decapitated mountain and long-lost Pukeahu Pa. Streets now decorated with gentle knitted graffiti once saw machine-guns stationed on barricades to intimidate strikers, and in St Martin’s Square rioters smashed the windows of Muldoon’s SIS snoop HQ. Unknown warriors.

Statue inside the National War Memorial, 2011.

Photographer: Thomas Beard.

Arthur Street provides a respite from the density of history. It may be grim (“temporary” gravel traps, segregated sliplanes, Chinese canteens, light-industrial brothels), but it allows the psychogeographer’s overheated brain a time to decompress from Buckle Street’s militaristic overload. One step after another; sun and asphalt; the vehicular pulse. It’s a welcome breather before the tangled knots of the Cuba Street corner.

Thistle Hall announces that it’s “looking to the future with progressive ideals”, but the names of the new (second hand) shops that are slowly re-inhabiting this damaged intersection betray a more ambivalent attitude to time’s arrow: Aeon, Particles of Time. Erasure in the guise of preservation: shops and cottages were shunted, refurbished and in some cases rebuilt to form a “heritage precinct”, but it’s a blinkered “heritage” that celebrates colonialism while whitewashing living history. Transit’s twee little potted histories, now vanishing from the windows as urban life returns, petered out in the early twentieth century, passing over the politics, culture, art and struggles of the Upper Cuba most of us remember. Only the former Freedom Shop retained signs of that resistance: on an interior wall that was yet to be sanded clean, a few stickers remained, including the infamous black bloc chant “Capitalism? No thanks! We will burn your fucking banks!” That too is now gone.

On the other corner of what was once Tonks Ave, graffiti has been painted over in brown, only to be swiftly re-tagged in white. Few now would recognise the graffito that stood here for years, except as the name of a new band: “WILL TOBIAS”. Fewer still would remember the full text, extending down across the road. Not a name but a question — “WILL TOBIAS DEFECT?” — wondering whether “token” black Springbok Errol Tobias would make a run for it in 1981. The words lingered long after the question had been answered (in the negative), and though the text and its meaning have finally vanished, the walls still conjure the language of the streets.

Karo Drive takes off on its arrogant bend, slashing through the grid of all this Local Insignificance, sending houses scuttling away from its jagged edge. Marooned between an empty nano-park and the atavism of Tonks’ Well (bricks and weeds festering below glass), Regan Gentry’s installation Subject to Change is more aptly named than its creator could have imagined. Originally intended for the Arthur St corner (unwanted by Thistle Hall), and then for Willis St (rejected by Transit), it ended up here after a long chain of compromises. Which just underlines the subversiveness of this intentionally skewed pastiche of local architectural tropes: empty, functionless, skeletal, subtly yet fatally failing to connect with either vanished grid or new-hewn path — in a place such as this, what could be more site-specific than a sculpture that was intended for elsewhere?

Karo Drive, 2011.

Photographer: Thomas Beard.

The Drive passes acoustic barriers, barely-exorcised ghost towns, the gutted shell of an inconvenient cottage. It’s still a raw gash in the urban flesh, and the sky pours in through its breach. The arterial openness is alien to Wellington: it could be the outskirts of Tauranga or Christchurch, a peri-urban flatland. Where the half-arsed highway collides with Victoria St (Wellington’s original Frankenstein St, bodged together from the severed limbs of unrelated streets) the results were always bound to be messy, and the carnage has reduced parts of Willis and Abel Smith Streets to bleeding stumps. Behind the remnants of a community garden, a stencilled Darth Vader puzzles over Rubik’s Cube.

After a day’s hot trek together, the highway and I have to part. As the bypass swoops down into its concrete trench, those travelling under mere human power are nudged out onto side paths. From here on, it will be a matter of weaving around, over and sometimes under the road, striking a balance between the designated National Significance of State Highway 1 and the unsignposted significant notions that gather around its margins.

Thinking about Waves

Undated — early in 2011: This morning I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I was talking with a woman of my own age, from my own country, but whom I don’t know very well, about the Holocaust. Any conversation about the Holocaust is a bit uncomfortable. Sometimes silences occur in these conversations which no one knows how to end. One of these silences grew between me and a German friend in 2002 and it has not been broken yet. Increasingly these days I try to avoid these conversations, finding that my views on the topic are too Jewish for non-Jewish company but not Jewish enough for my Jewish friends.

This particular conversation started when the woman asked me about my upcoming trip to visit museums in Australia and New Zealand which have Holocaust exhibits, as background for my latest writing project. The conversation went quickly to a bus tour this woman had been on which included Auschwitz as part of the package. After a few minutes of descriptions of heritage sites and monuments, she stopped talking and looked away, downwards and to the right. After just a minute, the woman raised her eyes, looked at me again and told me how shocked and surprised she had been when, in the 1970s, she met two middle aged people in Lower Hutt who had been in the camps.

Around the same time as the conversation about monuments, a Jewish friend, who speaks five languages and reads several more, told me it would not be possible to write about the Holocaust from New Zealand. There’s so little to say here, she said. You should go to Europe.

But this is where I am, I said. That is the problem. This is where I am from, this is who I am, and this is where I am.

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER arrived in New Zealand in 1878, probably from what is now Poland or Russia. He said different things about where he was from, according to the audience. We do not know the names of his relatives in Europe or the villages they lived in — there is no one left now who knows these things.

On arrival in Wellington, an official wrote ‘Cardiff’ for his departure point and ‘Hebrew’ for his religion, and that was enough to get him off the docks and into town. We know he started his new life in New Zealand quickly, marrying a Jewish woman from the same ship, and making a large family. For whatever reasons, Isaac (that was his English name) did not apply for New Zealand citizenship, which meant that in the 1930s, when Jews everywhere worried about their safety, he was not a New Zealand citizen. Bed-ridden, Isaac banged his walking stick on the wooden floor of his upstairs bedroom to call attention to his needs. This noise terrorised his children and was still spoken of during my childhood.

I sometimes imagine Isaac listening to the radio in his living room in Aro Valley, hearing about Kristallnacht or the Nuremberg laws. Once I went as far as to imagine him receiving a letter, in Yiddish, from a sister, telling him how and when his parents died, where they are buried, and asking for him to sponsor her son and his family to come to New Zealand. She doesn’t care about herself, his sister says, but he should help the children if he can. He rages and cries and bangs his walking stick on the wooden floor and tells no one about the letter, not his children and not his wife. Perhaps he is ashamed of not having money to help them, or perhaps he is angry because he thought he had left them all far enough behind that no claims could ever be made. In my teens, when I was first starting to learn about the Holocaust, I remember being preoccupied with the problem of how I would know when it was time to leave New Zealand. I would read about people whose lives were deeply rooted in a certain place in Europe — more deeply rooted than mine felt here in New Zealand. I saw pictures taken of these people in 1932 or 1936, as they walked in pairs along a street they knew well. This is Before.

I looked and looked at Before photographs of Jewish people, trying to see if they knew it was time to leave. I thought there would be something obvious, a darkening in people’s faces, or perhaps a solemnity that said they knew it was already too late. But there wasn’t. Or maybe there was, but I didn’t recognise their expression. ‘Backshadowing’, or reading the past backwards, is one word for what I was doing.

As far as I can see, nothing answers the question of how Jews were supposed to know when it was time to leave Europe. I think this unanswerable question is the reason that I have inherited a sensitivity, common among Jewish people, to suitcases.

November 2011: I visited four museum exhibits related to the Holocaust, two in Australia, two in New Zealand. On my return, my skeptical friend asks gently whether my visit was satisfying. I think for a while and then I say yes. She asks me what exactly I saw. I tell her that I met six people who had survived the Holocaust, and that until then no survivors had ever looked me straight in the eye and told me their story. She looks at me for a moment without speaking.

I tell her that they all said I could ask questions. One man said ‘you can ask me any questions’.

Why do you do this? I asked. ‘To warn everyone’, the man replied. His answer has a different quality from the rest of what he says. It is very direct. His voice is in a low register.

‘What do you think Australia should do about the boatloads of illegal immigrants arriving every week?’ I ask.

He says it is a difficult matter. He has great sympathy for them, coming with their families and risking their lives. His eyes water as he says this. But the state has to do what it needs to, he says. If the government did nothing, millions of immigrants would come from Asia. The government should do what is necessary he says, but they shouldn’t be cruel. That is the important thing.

September 10, 2013: Waves keep arriving. No need to say any more about that.

The sound of waves is like the sound inside a shell — meaningless, and strangely consoling. I learned that from six years of walking by the sea.

Through the sound of the waves, you can hear voices. I thought that was the case but now I am sure.

Books, museums, art galleries and taxis help us detect faint signals. Think of a trumpet, narrow at your ear, and opening wide towards the world.

Wellington in the wake of ANZAC day

My brushes with ANZAC day have been few and far between. As a kid I often visited the Wright’s Hill Fortress in Karori, but that was less about commemoration and more about playing army with real dress ups. I guess there was my final year of high school where I was appointed to lay a wreath on behalf of my school, but that almost went sour when I went out the night before and nearly trampled the wreath left in my porch coming home from town. Luckily it was an easy fix up and I quickly discovered that a hangover is an excellent way to achieve the sombre look so desired at these events.

This year, however, felt different. Mainly because the 100th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, the millions of dollars spent on the new Pukeahu War Memorial Park and Peter Jackson’s Great War Exhibition seemed to have culminated in a nationwide debate on the topic. Was it glorification of an unnecessary and avoidable war? Or was it appropriate commemoration for those who gave their lives for our freedom? Either way, an infinite number of synthetic poppies had been sourced for the occasion, an audio visual extravaganza was to be projected onto the War Memorial, and Westpac Stadium was desperately trying to fill seats for their much publicised ANZAC day Aussie Rules game.

I had to work through most of the celebratory palava — but, having found myself at a loose end in Newtown that night, I decided to stroll into the city and soak up the ANZAC vibes. As I walked along Adelaide Road, past the Basin Reserve and down Cambridge Terrace I found no shortage of nationalistic antics.

‘Oi! Go back to your own country you fuckin’ chinks!’ Looking up I made out a shirtless man in a third storey window of the Cambridge Hotel. At ground level a group of Asian men collectively eyed the pavement and shuffled through the throng of smokers gathered outside the pub. An alcohol gargled ‘We don’t want you in our country!’ followed, accompanied by the sound of smashing glass, and I too averted my gaze.

I often get the feeling that history settles over locations in layers; at times leaving physical imprints like bricks and monuments, and at other times leaving nothing more than a feeling hanging in the air. A hundred years ago, when the imposing Mount Cook Prison stood atop Pukeahu, the streets at its feet formed the infamous slums of Chinatown. Despite being one of the earliest migrant groups in New Zealand the Chinese were subject to heavy racial discrimination, leading to a neighbourhood riddled with opium and illegal gambling. Some of these sentiments still linger over these streets, and for a moment I wondered if this was the reason the government had opted for synthetic poppies.

Beyond Cambridge Terrace I turned left on to Courtenay Place, where the poppies lined the gutters red along with more broken glass, pie wrappers, religious pamphlets and free vouchers to strip bars. Around three a.m. now, the bars were beginning to close, leaving revellers from Saturday night’s celebrations disoriented on the streets. Outside the St. James Theatre I came across a man engaged in a heated discussion with a street character affectionately known as Papa Smurf (on account of his sage demeanour and impressive beard). On this particular night his brown cardboard sign read ‘I bet you $1 you’ll read this sign’ and seemed to have attracted a heated discussion.

Wildly gesticulating in front of him was an impassioned shaggy-haired man who, from what I could gather, had been working with Weta Workshop on their installation of the Great War Exhibition. Intrigued, I took a seat on the pavement and listened as he engaged with whoever else would listen about what ANZAC day meant as a New Zealander. Through his work on the heavily graphic interpretations of World War One, he said he had discovered that the ANZACs weren’t always the heroes they are painted as.

‘I mean what do you guys think about all of this pomp and hype about ANZAC day huh?’

Shit, here we go again.

Papa Smurf, being a self-proclaimed bastard grandchild of a Maori soldier and a Greek woman (probably without consent he hinted), had spent much of his life on the streets and therefore felt fairly indifferent about dwelling on histories. But I suppose I had entered the conversation too and thought I’d humour the guy. I had after all spent most of my summer researching Wellington history.

‘Yeah it’s fucked. And did you ever think that more people died in the New Zealand Musket Wars than New Zealanders died in WWI? I mean where’s their parade?’

He seemed a little caught off guard by this remark, so I decided to lay it on a little stronger.

‘Maybe you should go and check out the Parihaka Memorial that’s in the carpark outside the exhibition you’ve been working on. Did you know they held peaceful protestors in a prison that stood where the museum building is now? I mean it’s easily missed but if you’re into uncovering the untold stories of New Zealand history then that might be up your alley…’

The guy seemed genuinely taken aback by this and it was at that point that a passing man, having obviously been outsmarted by Papa Smurf’s sign, stopped and began to berate us.

‘What is it you want? You want money? Go out and get a job!’ From his accent he was possibly South African and probably quite drunk.

‘No no no, you’ve got it wrong,’ replied the impassioned young man. ‘We’re just having a discussion about what ANZAC day means. I mean you’re South African right? Surely you know all about how the British treated others in times of war?’

‘Yeah yeah mate, they were running concentration camps in South Africa long before Hitler, but you don’t hear us harping on about it! The problem with you Kiwis is you’ve gotten into history so recently that there’s nothing to talk about. Your country is too young mate! Too much talk and not enough history!’

‘But my point is even though we do have a “young” history, the way that we’re teaching it is completely glorifying these potentially racist soldiers and repressing what really happened!’ The Weta guy seemed to be really pushing this argument, and fair enough I thought. I’d probably be venting drunken frustrations too, had I spent hours of my life painting miniature figurines only to conclude that they were perpetuating some kind of false nationalist agenda.

To keep him honest I chimed in with a, ‘Now you’ve realised, what can you do to change it.’ But we had obviously exhausted the South African’s patience and he was already sloppily drawing conclusions.

‘Look, the past is in the past for a reason you know? It’s history. It’s already happened you know? Here we are in the present. We’re not going to war. Our words won’t change anything. So how about we find somewhere to get a drink and forget about it all huh? Let’s get off the street and I’ll buy us a round! …And you…! You want some food or something?’ he added as an afterthought, gesturing at Papa Smurf.

‘Oh yeah, if you’re offering…’ drawled the beard, looking pleasantly surprised. ‘But you’re out of luck on the drink front. It’s just gone four. The bars all shut five minutes ago.’

‘You could get yourself a non-alcoholic beer at Dreamgirls across the road,’ I suggested, handing him a free entry voucher from the gutter. ‘Strip clubs and takeaways are pretty much the only places open at this hour.’

‘Bloody Kiwis!’ He muttered storming off into the distance, voucher in hand and leaving the three of us a little bemused. By this point the discussion seemed to have run its course and shortly after, the noticeably calmer Weta employee bade us both farewell.

‘Gentlemen, it’s been very enlightening and an absolute pleasure, and if you have the time, then I highly recommend you check out this exhibition up the hill. It might not tell all the aspects of the story, but it’s free and tells a pretty brutal account of some of the shit that went down in the First World War. And I’ll definitely check out that Parihaka Memorial, though I’m not quite sure how I’ve missed it.’

‘Oh it’s pretty missable, next to that big old War Memorial,’ I replied. ‘Check out the bricks on Tasman Street while you’re there too. If they’ve got an arrow on them it means they were made in the Prison brickworks. Mount Cook’d be a helluva lot taller if they hadn’t got the prisoners to make bricks out of the clay.’

‘Ha, really? Shit. I’ll have to check it out… Nice to meet you guys,’ he added, flicking some coins into the hat.

‘Churr Brudda. Happy ANZAC day,’ grinned Papa Smurf.

‘Haha sure. Happy ANZAC day.’

Untitled, 2015.

Drawing: Thomas Aitken.

Welcome

by Ingrid

‘ They are already there, waiting to be released from the dementia wing of history, the bony archive beneath our feet. ’ — Rachel Buchanan

Since the mid-nineteenth century Pukeahu has been the location of a prison and a gaol where men from Parihaka and later conscientious objectors during World War I were confined, of a Chinese community, of an early police station, an army barracks, Mount Cook School, a school of design, a technical college, the Dominion Museum and National Art Gallery, the National War Memorial and Carillon, the New Zealand Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, Wellington High School, Wellington Polytechnic (which included a pioneering Māori language immersion school), Polyhigh Childcare Centre, and Massey University. Most recently, with construction and then commemoration going on all around us as we finished putting together this anthology, it has become the site of the new Pukeahu National War Memorial Park, opened on the centennial Anzac Day 2015.

Pukeahu is the name given by Ngāi Tara to the small hill in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, that rises between the Waitangi and the Waimāpihi streams. The area and its surrounding slopes stretching down to the harbour were once the site of extensive kainga /gardens. The hill itself may have been the location of a pā. Morris Te Whiti Love (Te Atiawa, Taranaki, Ngāti Ruanui), Chair of the Wellington Tenths Trust, tells us that Pukeahu (‘sacred mound’ or Tuahu), may have also been a burial site or spiritual place with no human habitation.

Pukeahu has also been lowered 25 metres, having been literally dug away at in two major building and excavation projects in 1848 and 1883. Where I am writing from now would have once been inside the body of the earth.

The Pukeahu project, of which this anthology forms a part, seeks to engage with some of the complexities of one particular place. Those involved, led by human geographer Robin Peace, set out to ask how experience of a particular place might be ‘deepened’ or ‘thickened’ by making connections to that place’s contested histories, its topographies, its inhabitations and uses, and above all, its stories. It is not quite a local history project, which might suggest a fixed, stable location and a chronological account of events that have occurred over time. Nor have we sought to set up Pukeahu as a representative microcosm of the wider nation. Rather, we have approached Pukeahu as a place made from multiple constellations of activities, meetings, and movements, and ‘place’ as something always under construction, always being re-imagined, always in the process of becoming.

Pukeahu: An Exploratory Anthology presents some of the writings and stories about and from this place. It follows on from a semester of writing and walking as part of a third year paper on creative nonfiction I teach on Massey’s Wellington campus. At the end of the paper we wanted to keep going. A small group were given Pukeahu Awards to curate a collection of new and historical writing as well as to create new work of their own. Two creative nonfiction students, Lena Fransham and Thomas Aitken, were joined by design student, Rosie Percival, while writer Lynn Davidson, then completing a creative writing PhD, was appointed to help supervise and develop the project.

What we found were writing of all sorts connecting to this place. Some works, such as the selections from Robin Hyde and Katherine Mansfield, come from inhabiting the place or writing the everyday walking of its streets; others, such as those by Archibald Baxter and Witi Ihimaera, come from experience or stories of imprisonment here. Elsdon Best’s work is deeply involved in recording histories of this location, while Rachel Buchanan places Pukeahu at the centre of contested histories, challenging what has been memorialised and showing us how very much is still left out. The piece by Angela Kilford, the artist who took us all on one of our later walks, as well as those by Lena, Thomas, Lynn, Robin, and Alice Te Punga Somerville, were all written in direct response to the anthology project, and are alive with the complex memories of this place.

The anthology as a whole works by juxtaposition and layering rather than chronology, evoking snippets of stories and moments of memory rather than a clear or singular history. It opens with three new pieces of writing that we hope will help to welcome and orientate the reader. By assembling a collection of voices and stories we wanted to evoke a sense of one particular place as mobile and living, and of the unsettled imaginaries of those who have moved through it. We hope that such unsettlement might also provoke readers to pause, breathe, and then find some ‘ways in’, not just to encountering this place, but other places as well.

Ingrid Horrocks, Massey University, Wellington, June 2015

by Lynn

‘ When I write, I don’t feel like a craftsman influenced by earlier craftsmen who were themselves influenced by earlier craftsmen. I feel like a member of a single, large virtual community, in which I have dynamic relationships with other members of the community, most of whom are no longer living. ’ — Jonathan Franzen

One remarkable aspect of working with the research team on this anthology was sharing our discoveries of what is here, on this elevated piece of land in Wellington. And it is a sense of what is here, not what was here. Histories, even if they are redirected underground for a while, are still present and influential. Histories that are memorialised so determinedly that the memorial becomes a landmark, are still fluid and impressionable. This is something that novels, essays and poems understand, easily or uneasily; they understand the dynamic relationship between present and past.

The researchers I supervised (Lena, Thomas and Rosie) were ahead of me in their knowledge of the histories and versions of Pukeahu / Mount Cook, having already walked the area and discussed its histories. Quite early on in the researching process Thomas took me on a walk around Mount Cook to orient me in a place he had come to know well. We walked up the steep Rolleston street off Wallace Street and then further up to Prince of Wales Park where we could see a panorama of the city, including Victoria and Massey Universities, the harbour and the hospital. From there we walked along Nairn and Hankey Streets and over to Mount Cook School (traversing construction sites) to look at their beautifully illustrated Pukeahu War Memorial Park timeline. Thomas knew the place by foot. He knew its crazily steep streets, its colourful histories, the architectures of some of the older buildings and their crisscrossing, intersecting and layered stories. Thomas brought his walking knowledge of Pukeahu / Mount Cook to the group. Lena pointed to where the Mount Cook Prison had been and we looked at and through the Dominion Museum building to imagine the even more imposing edifice of Mt Cook Prison looming gloomily over Wellington. A structure still gothically present in Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘Ole Underwood’ and in Witi Ihimaera’s The Parihaka Woman. Lena stood still and listened out, bringing an intelligent empathy to her research, uncovering stories and their intersections. Rosie, our web designer, was part of the project from its beginning. She took enthusiastic part in discussions and debates, taking on board the idea of a dynamic multiplicity of history and, after trialling various templates, reflected the anthology’s developing kaupapa in a beautifully clean and simple design of interactive layers.

The process was to an extent organic. As we gathered material we looked at the changing shape of the story of place that we were telling. We reflected on what each new element meant for our understanding, or understandings of the area. We noticed what a difference placement made; how setting certain pieces of work side by side created something else, a third presence, that we initially did not expect, but over time we began to anticipate. We saw how ‘conversations’ about place emerge. Sitting Elsdon Best and Rachel Buchanan’s pieces side by side in the ‘Contesting Histories’ section was one of our last arrangements of material. We held several of our meetings in Te Kuratini Marae on campus. In one of our last meetings we spread out the collected poems, stories, articles and essays on the floor of the Marae. We needed to ‘see’ them, literally, and move them around. We created section headings and arranged the material under the headings. Lena, Thomas and Rosie walked around and around the spread-out material. They knelt down and shifted an excerpt from Witi Ihimaera’s The Parihaka Woman to a different section heading, they moved Janis Freegard’s poem ‘Alice in the Eighties’ into close proximity with Vivienne Plumb’s ‘To the Woman who Bought my House’. We changed the arrangement of the work right up until the last minute. What began as a kind of chronological order turned into clusters of work about contested histories, confinement, inhabitation and migration. We wished we’d managed to get more early Māori stories of the area. We let a piece go because we couldn’t track down the author, she had moved to another country. Different people would have arranged things differently.

We believe that this anthology is dynamic and fluid and each reader will make their own unique way through the material. We anticipate that Pukeahu: An Exploratory Anthology will evolve and grow as new students and new readers and writers get to explore Pukeahu / Mount Cook and find other stories, poems, art and articles to add to this opening conversation.

Lynn Davidson, June 2015