On the island of Lombok, east of Bali, on the other side of the Wallace Line, there exists a religion called Wektu Telu. Devotees think of themselves as Muslim, but aspects of their practice vary considerably from orthodox Islam. For example, they don’t pray five times a day, they don’t make the haj to Mecca, they fast only three days at Ramadam instead of a month, they will eat pork.
Wektu Telu is an amalgam of Islam, Balinese Hinduism, and the animism of the Sasak people who are native to Lombok. Wektu Telu is Sasak and means result (of) three. This refers to the three religions, but also to a series of related trinities: Allah, Mohammed and Adam, who are analagous to the sun, moon and stars, which are in turn related to heaven, earth and water.
Allah is the one true God, Mohammed the link between God and human beings and Adam a being in search of a soul; a further elaboration of threes represents the human head, body, and limbs as creativity, sensitivity and control. Three main duties are encouraged: belief in God, resisting the temptations of the devil and co-operating with others by being helpful and loving people.
A temple at Lingsar, built in 1714, combines both the Balinese Hindu and Wektu Telu faiths. It is divided into two sections on two levels. In the Hindu section, a shrine faces towards Gunung Agung, the sacred volcanic seat of the gods on Bali. In the Wektu Telu section, a pond is home to a population of sacred eels. Visitors make offerings of hard-boiled eggs to these eels. Nearby on an altar there are numerous mirrors donated by Chinese business people to bring good fortune. A number of stones wrapped in strips of cloth, connected with Sasak animism, rest here also.
Wektu Telu believe that during birth, four siblings escape from the womb: blood, egg, placenta, amniotic fluid. The afterbirth has to be treated with care and respect, or else the four siblings might harm the child. Offerings are made and the afterbirth buried, then the child is scattered with ashes. When it is 105 days old there is a ceremony for the cutting of its hair. Later, between the ages of 6 and 11, the boys are circumcised and carried through the streets on wooden horses or on lions with tails made from palm fronds.
After death Wektu Telu bodies are washed in the presence of a holy man, wrapped in white sheets and sackcloth then placed on a platform while the Koran is read and people pray to the spirits of ancestors. In the cemetery the body is interred with the head facing Mecca, while the Koran is read first in Sanskrit, then in Arabic. Carved wood, for a man, and decorative combs, for a woman, are placed on the grave. There are ceremonies on the 3rd, 7th, 40th and 100th day after death. After 1000 days, holy water is sprinkled on the grave and the wooden offerings removed and replaced by stones.
31.8.04
30.8.04
Topasses
About this time last year I became interested in the question as to how the Muslim expansion into South East Asia happened. I found the answer (I think it was there) in C.R. Boxer’s The Portuguese Seaborne Empire; it was relatively straight forward. Arab trading vessels would sail east on the monsoon; wait for the pancoraba or change of monsoon, then sail back with their cargos of Japanese silver, Chinese silks, Indonesian spices, Persian horses, Indian pepper. In the time they spent ashore the sailors would form liaisons with local women; children would be born; and, on some subsequent voyage, an imam would be brought east to educate these children. Mosques were built and Muslim communities thus grew up naturally around trading ports, without any need for aggressive proselytizing or military conquest. The seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor are essentially a history of this early period of Arab voyaging into the Indian Ocean and beyond. Later, Gujarat merchants, also Muslim, continued to transplant their religion into the trading lands.
Something similar happened with the Chinese, who seem to have sailed in southern waters intermittently over a period of a thousand years or more. Zheng He, the 13th century voyager, was of course Muslim himself, but culturally he was Chinese, he was representing a Ming Dynasty emperor, and was in the habit of placing shrines to Tianfei, the Taoist Sea Goddess, at the places he or his admirals touched. There is said to have been one of these shrines at the site where Darwin now stands. Chinese communities grew up around trading ports in the same way the Muslim communities did, with the other religions – Hindu, Buddhist, Animist – accommodating the new faiths. It is fascinating to learn that the port of Malacca which, when the Portuguese took it in 1511, they accounted the richest city they had seen, was at that time only a hundred or so years old; and that, politically, an alliance between the first rulers of Malacca and the Ming Empire was of crucial importance to the survival and growth of the entrepot.
The Chinese voyages ended abruptly about 1433; seventy odd years later, the Portuguese learned how to navigate the Indian Ocean from a renegade Muslim captain on the east African coast and a quite extraordinary campaign of violence was unleashed in an area which until then had remained relatively peaceful; for trade took precedence over every other activity, and religious tolerance was the rule, not the exception. But even the Portuguese adapted. For example: during the 16th century the Dominicans established missions on the island of Solor, off the east coast of Flores in Nusa Tenggara. Communities of Christianized locals who married Portuguese grew up around the Dominican Missions, becoming the people known to themselves as Topasses and to the Dutch as Black Portuguese. The Topasses were active traders, especially in sandalwood, throughout the archipelago and were particularly successful in Timor, where descendent populations survive today, as they do in Darwin itself, which has been a haven for Timorese exiles since 1975.
The derivation of the word Topasses is a matter of some complexity. Tupassi (Topasses), purportedly comes from the Hindu word for hat, topi, because the Topasses regarded themselves as Gente de Chapeo - People of the Hat. They were also known as the Larantuqueiros, from the islands of that name off eastern Flores. The Dutch, whom they fought for several hundred years, called them Swarte Portugueezen in all official documents. In the language of the Atoni Pa Meto population, who had the longest established contact with them on Timor, they were known as Sobe Kase - Foreign Hats. Yet another variant, among the Rotinese, on the small island at the western tip of Timor, was Sapeo Nggeo - Black Hats. Topasses were multilingual. Portuguese was their status language, also used for worship; Malay was their language of trade; and most Topasses spoke, as their mother-tongue, a local language of Flores or Timor.
Something similar happened with the Chinese, who seem to have sailed in southern waters intermittently over a period of a thousand years or more. Zheng He, the 13th century voyager, was of course Muslim himself, but culturally he was Chinese, he was representing a Ming Dynasty emperor, and was in the habit of placing shrines to Tianfei, the Taoist Sea Goddess, at the places he or his admirals touched. There is said to have been one of these shrines at the site where Darwin now stands. Chinese communities grew up around trading ports in the same way the Muslim communities did, with the other religions – Hindu, Buddhist, Animist – accommodating the new faiths. It is fascinating to learn that the port of Malacca which, when the Portuguese took it in 1511, they accounted the richest city they had seen, was at that time only a hundred or so years old; and that, politically, an alliance between the first rulers of Malacca and the Ming Empire was of crucial importance to the survival and growth of the entrepot.
The Chinese voyages ended abruptly about 1433; seventy odd years later, the Portuguese learned how to navigate the Indian Ocean from a renegade Muslim captain on the east African coast and a quite extraordinary campaign of violence was unleashed in an area which until then had remained relatively peaceful; for trade took precedence over every other activity, and religious tolerance was the rule, not the exception. But even the Portuguese adapted. For example: during the 16th century the Dominicans established missions on the island of Solor, off the east coast of Flores in Nusa Tenggara. Communities of Christianized locals who married Portuguese grew up around the Dominican Missions, becoming the people known to themselves as Topasses and to the Dutch as Black Portuguese. The Topasses were active traders, especially in sandalwood, throughout the archipelago and were particularly successful in Timor, where descendent populations survive today, as they do in Darwin itself, which has been a haven for Timorese exiles since 1975.
The derivation of the word Topasses is a matter of some complexity. Tupassi (Topasses), purportedly comes from the Hindu word for hat, topi, because the Topasses regarded themselves as Gente de Chapeo - People of the Hat. They were also known as the Larantuqueiros, from the islands of that name off eastern Flores. The Dutch, whom they fought for several hundred years, called them Swarte Portugueezen in all official documents. In the language of the Atoni Pa Meto population, who had the longest established contact with them on Timor, they were known as Sobe Kase - Foreign Hats. Yet another variant, among the Rotinese, on the small island at the western tip of Timor, was Sapeo Nggeo - Black Hats. Topasses were multilingual. Portuguese was their status language, also used for worship; Malay was their language of trade; and most Topasses spoke, as their mother-tongue, a local language of Flores or Timor.
27.8.04
The Dutch Discover Australia
It is not a very interesting story. It is, in fact, a story of unsurpassable dryness. We have been told that 'it was the spirit which had cut the dykes that gained the Spice Archipelago for Holland'. But there was very little of 'the spirit of the dykes' in the use which the Dutch made of their gain. The trail of business is over the whole story; indeed the whole story is nothing but a trail of business. Complete and singular is the contrast between the Spaniard and his successor. It is the contrast of the Cathedral full of men with all human virtues and vices, and the Factory wherein is neither virtue nor vice, nor even men, but one thing only, desire to make money. In place of Don Quixote we have a bagman, and by no means an 'inspired bagman'. In place of voyages of knightly mariners, following the gleam of a golden continent, we have a dull story of the gropings, along rocky and barren shores, which cut the utterly uninteresting continent of New Holland out of the beautiful Spanish dream of Terra Incognita. In place of quest of a great 'mine of souls' we have long inventories of things for barter for 'the benefit of the Company'.
from The Discovery of Australia (1922), by G. Arnold Wood, revised (1969) by J. C. Beaglehole
from The Discovery of Australia (1922), by G. Arnold Wood, revised (1969) by J. C. Beaglehole
26.8.04
The Island of Gold
The Lamacheres Fishermen of the Island of Solor, while engaged in fishing, were caught in a storm so fierce that they were quite unable to return to land; so they yielded to the force of the storm, which was such that in five days they were carried to the Island of Gold, which is situated in the Sea off the opposite or outer coast of Timor, which is properly called the Southern coast.
And so the Fishermen reached the land of Gold and attempted to find food, as they had eaten nothing during the period of the storm. They enjoyed such excellent good fortune that while they were raking the earth in search of Yams and Potatoes, they found so much Gold that they filled their Boat until it could carry no more cargo.
After taking in water and provisions necessary for the return journey to their native Country, they waited for another storm in the opposite direction, and when the storm came they went from the said Island of Gold until they reached the Island of Ende Grande, where they discharged all their Gold, much to the envy of the Endes.
In consequence, these same Endes and the Lamacheres Fishermen determined to repeat the voyage, and when they were all about to set out both the Endes and the Lamacheres were overtaken by a fear so great that they did not dare, owing to ignorance, to cross the Sea of Gold.
And it may well seem that the Almighty God desires to entrust this work to Manoel Godinho de Eredia, the Cosmographer, by Order of the most happy Lord Count Admiral, Viceroy of India intra- and extra-Ganges, that the said Eredia may be the instrument of effecting an increase in the new Patrimonies of the Crown of Portugal, and of enriching the said Lord Count and the Lusitanian Nation.
from: Report on the Golden Chersonese or Peninsula and on the Auriferous, Carbuncular and Aromatic Islands, drawn up by Manoel Godinho de Eredia, Cosmographer, 1597-1600.
And so the Fishermen reached the land of Gold and attempted to find food, as they had eaten nothing during the period of the storm. They enjoyed such excellent good fortune that while they were raking the earth in search of Yams and Potatoes, they found so much Gold that they filled their Boat until it could carry no more cargo.
After taking in water and provisions necessary for the return journey to their native Country, they waited for another storm in the opposite direction, and when the storm came they went from the said Island of Gold until they reached the Island of Ende Grande, where they discharged all their Gold, much to the envy of the Endes.
In consequence, these same Endes and the Lamacheres Fishermen determined to repeat the voyage, and when they were all about to set out both the Endes and the Lamacheres were overtaken by a fear so great that they did not dare, owing to ignorance, to cross the Sea of Gold.
And it may well seem that the Almighty God desires to entrust this work to Manoel Godinho de Eredia, the Cosmographer, by Order of the most happy Lord Count Admiral, Viceroy of India intra- and extra-Ganges, that the said Eredia may be the instrument of effecting an increase in the new Patrimonies of the Crown of Portugal, and of enriching the said Lord Count and the Lusitanian Nation.
from: Report on the Golden Chersonese or Peninsula and on the Auriferous, Carbuncular and Aromatic Islands, drawn up by Manoel Godinho de Eredia, Cosmographer, 1597-1600.
23.8.04
Mabo (Un)Explained
Dampier’s Cape Mabo is a misreading of Tasman’s Cape Maba, derived in turn from the 1616 voyage of Le Maire and Schouten which rounded and named Cape Horn and then crossed the Pacific looking for islands of trade outside the voracious purview of the Dutch East India Company.
Their ships were sequestered by said company upon arrival in Batavia, en route to which they passed along the north coast of New Guinea and saw the northern and eastern coasts of Halmahera, where Cape Maba is, or was. There is still a town, and a provincial district, called Maba on Halmahera and the people of this area – the northern coast of the south eastern peninsular – speak an Austronesian language also known as Maba. The name of the cape would thus seem to originate in local usage.
The Mer Islands, where Eddie Mabo came from, are a world away to the east; they are in fact the most easterly of the Torres Strait Islands, volcanic remnants where the people speak a non-Austronesian language related to those of mainland eastern Papua to the north. There is a form of ancestor worship in the Mer, or Murray, Islands called the Eastern Malo Cult after the originating ancestor; but it is a long stretch to imagine how the labial could have morphed into a voiced plosive.
The Celtic goddess Mabo Mabona, the ‘true lost word’, is in some recensions identifed as masculine, the Irish Apollo, god of music, sports and sex, named in ogam, like his female equivalent, as Mabo or Mabona. In this version of the tradition, his symbol is the phallus, and he is a god of youth. Lost word, god of youth, ancestor, precursor of justice, name, name ...
Their ships were sequestered by said company upon arrival in Batavia, en route to which they passed along the north coast of New Guinea and saw the northern and eastern coasts of Halmahera, where Cape Maba is, or was. There is still a town, and a provincial district, called Maba on Halmahera and the people of this area – the northern coast of the south eastern peninsular – speak an Austronesian language also known as Maba. The name of the cape would thus seem to originate in local usage.
The Mer Islands, where Eddie Mabo came from, are a world away to the east; they are in fact the most easterly of the Torres Strait Islands, volcanic remnants where the people speak a non-Austronesian language related to those of mainland eastern Papua to the north. There is a form of ancestor worship in the Mer, or Murray, Islands called the Eastern Malo Cult after the originating ancestor; but it is a long stretch to imagine how the labial could have morphed into a voiced plosive.
The Celtic goddess Mabo Mabona, the ‘true lost word’, is in some recensions identifed as masculine, the Irish Apollo, god of music, sports and sex, named in ogam, like his female equivalent, as Mabo or Mabona. In this version of the tradition, his symbol is the phallus, and he is a god of youth. Lost word, god of youth, ancestor, precursor of justice, name, name ...
20.8.04
non
Last night a bookseller told me that, when the current scandal broke, Norma Khouri had just delivered a second book to her publishers; this book will not now be published, at least not by Transworld. What kind of book is it? I asked. In the style of the last one, she said. Non fiction.
19.8.04
Is that 'oui' or 'non'?
I’m currently fascinated by three stories running in the press, all with a characteristically Australian ambiguity with regard to the distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’:
The first is the Norma Khouri saga, which gets stranger and stranger. I heard her publisher at Transworld, an Englishman, say this morning on the radio: You know, if the book is non-fiction, everything within it has to be true. Whereas Norma herself was quoted in yesterday’s press saying that, although her book included inventions, she would never call it a fiction or a novel. There’s a huge area for speculation here. My question is: what does the ‘non’ in non-fiction actually mean? (NB Khouri’s book was withdrawn from sale in Australia; in France, the publishers ordered the printers to prepare another edition.)
The second is the latest twist in the Children Overboard imbroglio, wherein it seems John Howard (aka Little Johnny Jackboot) may finally get some sort of comeuppance for lying to the Australian people in the cause of his re-election in 2001. Photographs of refugees in the water after their ship had sunk were said to be pictures of children thrown overboard from a different ship by other refugees as blackmail for getting entry into Australia. Howard and his cohorts milked this issue for every last vote, despite advice from both military and civil service personnel that the claims were false.
The third is the on-going story of the outback murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio, whose body has never been found. Various people – about ten in all – have claimed to have seen the missing man since the murder. In a section of committal hearing transcript published in today’s NZ Herald a policeman asked a defence counsel if any of these people had also spotted Elvis. We have no reports of Elvis sightings, he replied.
The first is the Norma Khouri saga, which gets stranger and stranger. I heard her publisher at Transworld, an Englishman, say this morning on the radio: You know, if the book is non-fiction, everything within it has to be true. Whereas Norma herself was quoted in yesterday’s press saying that, although her book included inventions, she would never call it a fiction or a novel. There’s a huge area for speculation here. My question is: what does the ‘non’ in non-fiction actually mean? (NB Khouri’s book was withdrawn from sale in Australia; in France, the publishers ordered the printers to prepare another edition.)
The second is the latest twist in the Children Overboard imbroglio, wherein it seems John Howard (aka Little Johnny Jackboot) may finally get some sort of comeuppance for lying to the Australian people in the cause of his re-election in 2001. Photographs of refugees in the water after their ship had sunk were said to be pictures of children thrown overboard from a different ship by other refugees as blackmail for getting entry into Australia. Howard and his cohorts milked this issue for every last vote, despite advice from both military and civil service personnel that the claims were false.
The third is the on-going story of the outback murder of British backpacker Peter Falconio, whose body has never been found. Various people – about ten in all – have claimed to have seen the missing man since the murder. In a section of committal hearing transcript published in today’s NZ Herald a policeman asked a defence counsel if any of these people had also spotted Elvis. We have no reports of Elvis sightings, he replied.
18.8.04
Cabo Mabo
Have been searching for other early references to Cape Mabo, so far without success. The word does not appear to be Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or French. Dampier, who says the name was Dutch usage, was following charts laid down by Abel Tasman. Tasman made two voyages through the northern Australia-New Guinea area, one in 1642-3 (when he 'discovered' Aotearoa), which took him, on his way back from Tonga to Batavia, along the north coast of New Guinea, and another the following year, when, coming from the west to seek a way through to the Pacific, he assiduously mapped the coast of northern Australia from the western side of the Gulf of Carpentaria as far as Port Hedland, without, however, sailing through Torres Strait or perhaps even realising the passage was there. If he originated the name Cape Mabo, it was likely that he did so on his first voyage, since it appears to be (or to have been) on the western extremity of the north coast of New Guinea. Andrew Sharp's 1968 edition of the Voyages of Abel Janszoon Tasman apparently includes a detailed concordance of Tasman's place names; but both copies are presently out of the library. Like this blog, my search is frozen or at least on hold.
14.8.04
Mabo
Was browsing last night through William Dampier's account of his 1699 visit to west Australia and parts north and east when I came across this sentence:
"We passed by many small islands, and among many dangerous shoals without any remarkable occurrence till the 4th of February, when we got within three leagues of the north-west cape of New Guinea, called by the Dutch Cape Mabo."
Mabo in Australia has a significance equal to that of Waitangi in Aotearoa; it was a case pursued through the courts by one Eddie Mabo, a Murray Islander from Torres Strait, for ten years which finally saw the overthrow, in 1992, of the British doctrine of terra nullius, which alleged the whole country to be empty of civilized humans and therefore denying Aborigines land rights.
What kind of word is Mabo, I wonder? Surely not Dutch: is it then one they picked up from local usage? Eddie Mabo grew up as Eddie Sambo, but took the name of his Uncle and Aunt who adopted him during his adolesence. But the word ... where does the word come from?
"We passed by many small islands, and among many dangerous shoals without any remarkable occurrence till the 4th of February, when we got within three leagues of the north-west cape of New Guinea, called by the Dutch Cape Mabo."
Mabo in Australia has a significance equal to that of Waitangi in Aotearoa; it was a case pursued through the courts by one Eddie Mabo, a Murray Islander from Torres Strait, for ten years which finally saw the overthrow, in 1992, of the British doctrine of terra nullius, which alleged the whole country to be empty of civilized humans and therefore denying Aborigines land rights.
What kind of word is Mabo, I wonder? Surely not Dutch: is it then one they picked up from local usage? Eddie Mabo grew up as Eddie Sambo, but took the name of his Uncle and Aunt who adopted him during his adolesence. But the word ... where does the word come from?
13.8.04
friday 13th
something weird going on here - have recovered my blog but find that all my links are in limbo, frozen in the state of my last visit to whichever one it was ... some hoodoooooo
What's going on?
My latest post refuses to appear on the main screen ... but it's up there somewhere. Will see if this one makes it ... how distracting!!
12.8.04
A man likes not to be ignored even by a railway accident.
W.N.P. Barbellion
I’ve always felt a special relationship with the Tangiwai disaster, merely because it happened not far from where we lived. We knew people who died. My father went out to see what he could do to help – he was waiting at the station for a family friend, Bruce Tabb, to arrive from Auckland on the south bound train and heard the news there. When he got to Tangiwai, he found the road bridge had gone down as well and that all those who needed helped were on the far bank of the river. His contribution was to drive a local doctor, Doctor Jordan by name, right around Ruapehu via National Park and the Desert Road to Waiouru and thence to Tangiwai, a journey of some fifty miles in the middle of the night. I often wonder what he did then, but have no way of knowing now. I think I must have forgotten to ask him. I still feel I ‘own’ the disaster, but in fact it had nothing to do with me. I was not even two years old at the time.
W.N.P. Barbellion
I’ve always felt a special relationship with the Tangiwai disaster, merely because it happened not far from where we lived. We knew people who died. My father went out to see what he could do to help – he was waiting at the station for a family friend, Bruce Tabb, to arrive from Auckland on the south bound train and heard the news there. When he got to Tangiwai, he found the road bridge had gone down as well and that all those who needed helped were on the far bank of the river. His contribution was to drive a local doctor, Doctor Jordan by name, right around Ruapehu via National Park and the Desert Road to Waiouru and thence to Tangiwai, a journey of some fifty miles in the middle of the night. I often wonder what he did then, but have no way of knowing now. I think I must have forgotten to ask him. I still feel I ‘own’ the disaster, but in fact it had nothing to do with me. I was not even two years old at the time.
11.8.04
Waitangi / Tangiwai
The stream is called Waitangi, my friend said. Later I asked him what the difference is between Waitangi and Tangiwai? He replied obliquely, writing in the subject line of the email: waitangitangiwai.
Waitangi and Tangiwai are both words with a certain resonance for Aotearoans; the first because that is the name of the place where the Treaty between Maori and the British Crown was signed in 1840, the second because of the railway crash at the place of that name on Christmas Eve, 1953.
The Treaty of Waitangi was honoured more in the breach than the observance until, in the late 1980s, as the government attempted to alter the legal status of various crown assets (privatisation), a court challenge established that the Treaty does in fact have force in law. The ramifications of this are still unfolding.
Tangiwai was one of Aotearoa’s biggest civil disasters. The water in the crater lake on Ruapehu heated up, melting ice caves on the south eastern rim, which collapsed, discharging tonnes of ice, boulders, silt and mud into the Whangaehu river.
The lahar carried away a pylon on the rail bridge at Tangiwai just as the northbound limited express was approaching. The rest of the bridge disintegrated as the train moved onto it. 151 people died that night. Some twenty bodies were never found; it was presumed they were carried out to sea, many miles south.
Wai = water; tangi = weeping; hence, water weeping / weeping water; though it may be the association here is less with grief than with the sound water makes as it runs over a stream or river bed. Or is the sound of water running over stones always the sound of people crying?
To tangi is to cry out, to mourn; a tangi is a funeral; whether it is Waitangi or Tangiwai, the mourning in the words, in the water, will not go away. Yet Tangiwai always seems to have the sadder sound.
Waitangi and Tangiwai are both words with a certain resonance for Aotearoans; the first because that is the name of the place where the Treaty between Maori and the British Crown was signed in 1840, the second because of the railway crash at the place of that name on Christmas Eve, 1953.
The Treaty of Waitangi was honoured more in the breach than the observance until, in the late 1980s, as the government attempted to alter the legal status of various crown assets (privatisation), a court challenge established that the Treaty does in fact have force in law. The ramifications of this are still unfolding.
Tangiwai was one of Aotearoa’s biggest civil disasters. The water in the crater lake on Ruapehu heated up, melting ice caves on the south eastern rim, which collapsed, discharging tonnes of ice, boulders, silt and mud into the Whangaehu river.
The lahar carried away a pylon on the rail bridge at Tangiwai just as the northbound limited express was approaching. The rest of the bridge disintegrated as the train moved onto it. 151 people died that night. Some twenty bodies were never found; it was presumed they were carried out to sea, many miles south.
Wai = water; tangi = weeping; hence, water weeping / weeping water; though it may be the association here is less with grief than with the sound water makes as it runs over a stream or river bed. Or is the sound of water running over stones always the sound of people crying?
To tangi is to cry out, to mourn; a tangi is a funeral; whether it is Waitangi or Tangiwai, the mourning in the words, in the water, will not go away. Yet Tangiwai always seems to have the sadder sound.
9.8.04
Utamaro at Waitangi
There’s one other part of our trip up the North Island I want to write about, while at the same time feeling nervous about doing so ... identities need to be protected here, there are equivocal events involved, perhaps the story is not mine to tell. But I will give a version of it anyway.
We were staying with friends in the Thermal District, so called – that part of New Zealand where the crust of the earth thins and hot mud, hot steam, hot water, geysers erupt or seep or bubble from underground. Our friends live in a small village at a bay on one of the lesser lakes. Near their place is a hot stream, where we went to bathe the night we arrived.
A house used to stand here, and the residents had partially walled the deepest pool; below that is a race of smooth rock with hot water running over it. You can slide down this on your back, on your front, facing forward, facing backward. Jesse did it again and again – at the end you just splash into yet another warm pool.
Further down is a pool with a bottom of hot mud which we scooped up and slapped on our bodies; further up, the water becomes so hot you can scarcely lie in it. This is where I went, crawling like a lizard in the shallow water, to soak, while Jesse played on the slide and my friend looked after Liamh.
The stream, which seemed empty when we got there – it was a cold, dark, starry night – was home to loving couples, sitting face to face, speaking softly and embracing just like the couples you see carved here and there in wood or jade. There was a sense of antiquity, lovers have been coming here at night like this for hundreds of years.
Afterwards we went back to the house, put the kids to bed and sat up talking and listening to music for a couple of hours. I was to sleep in a small guesthouse halfway up the hill at the back. A bare wooden hut with a bed, a candle, a bookshelf, an old school desk, a chair – and an Utamaro print on the wall.
This print, showing a kneeling woman combing the hair of another woman kneeling in front of her, had been stolen out of a touring exhibition of Japanese art from a New Zealand gallery some fifteen or twenty years before. It was taken for a particular reason. The thief had recently seen, in company with several other radical Maori, Kenji Mizoguchi's film Utamaro and his Five Women.
They had all felt a sense of identity with the artist, whose censorship by the Japanese authorities in the early 1800s seemed to them reminiscent of the ways Maori have been treated in this country; they felt that Utamaro was a kind of Maori, or perhaps that they, as Maori, were a kind of Japanese (the reasoning may be dubious, the power of the emotional identification cannot be doubted).
Therefore, when one of these saw, just a week later, the exhibition of Japanese art, he felt he had a right to take an Utamaro. He chose the one he wanted, removed it from its frame, threw the frame away, folded the print, concealed it under his clothes and left with it. Later he gave the print, which still has fold marks on it, away to an artist friend. She had just given it to my friend and only that week had it found its home, pinned on the wall of the whare manuhiri where I was sleeping.
I won’t try to describe it; I couldn’t do it justice. All I can really say is that its beauty and subtlety, especially of the colours, was of an order you simply do not see in reproductions in books. To sleep with it over the bed was to dream in another world – Ukiyo-e, the floating world, but equally, the hot pools at Waitangi where lovers murmured to each other.
When I woke at dawn next morning, everything outside was white with frost, there was ice on the small veranda of the hut and I could hear the children crying out from the house: Dad, dad, the grass is frozen!
We were staying with friends in the Thermal District, so called – that part of New Zealand where the crust of the earth thins and hot mud, hot steam, hot water, geysers erupt or seep or bubble from underground. Our friends live in a small village at a bay on one of the lesser lakes. Near their place is a hot stream, where we went to bathe the night we arrived.
A house used to stand here, and the residents had partially walled the deepest pool; below that is a race of smooth rock with hot water running over it. You can slide down this on your back, on your front, facing forward, facing backward. Jesse did it again and again – at the end you just splash into yet another warm pool.
Further down is a pool with a bottom of hot mud which we scooped up and slapped on our bodies; further up, the water becomes so hot you can scarcely lie in it. This is where I went, crawling like a lizard in the shallow water, to soak, while Jesse played on the slide and my friend looked after Liamh.
The stream, which seemed empty when we got there – it was a cold, dark, starry night – was home to loving couples, sitting face to face, speaking softly and embracing just like the couples you see carved here and there in wood or jade. There was a sense of antiquity, lovers have been coming here at night like this for hundreds of years.
Afterwards we went back to the house, put the kids to bed and sat up talking and listening to music for a couple of hours. I was to sleep in a small guesthouse halfway up the hill at the back. A bare wooden hut with a bed, a candle, a bookshelf, an old school desk, a chair – and an Utamaro print on the wall.
This print, showing a kneeling woman combing the hair of another woman kneeling in front of her, had been stolen out of a touring exhibition of Japanese art from a New Zealand gallery some fifteen or twenty years before. It was taken for a particular reason. The thief had recently seen, in company with several other radical Maori, Kenji Mizoguchi's film Utamaro and his Five Women.
They had all felt a sense of identity with the artist, whose censorship by the Japanese authorities in the early 1800s seemed to them reminiscent of the ways Maori have been treated in this country; they felt that Utamaro was a kind of Maori, or perhaps that they, as Maori, were a kind of Japanese (the reasoning may be dubious, the power of the emotional identification cannot be doubted).
Therefore, when one of these saw, just a week later, the exhibition of Japanese art, he felt he had a right to take an Utamaro. He chose the one he wanted, removed it from its frame, threw the frame away, folded the print, concealed it under his clothes and left with it. Later he gave the print, which still has fold marks on it, away to an artist friend. She had just given it to my friend and only that week had it found its home, pinned on the wall of the whare manuhiri where I was sleeping.
I won’t try to describe it; I couldn’t do it justice. All I can really say is that its beauty and subtlety, especially of the colours, was of an order you simply do not see in reproductions in books. To sleep with it over the bed was to dream in another world – Ukiyo-e, the floating world, but equally, the hot pools at Waitangi where lovers murmured to each other.
When I woke at dawn next morning, everything outside was white with frost, there was ice on the small veranda of the hut and I could hear the children crying out from the house: Dad, dad, the grass is frozen!
6.8.04
Under the House
Later on our trip we visited my Uncle Brian and Auntie Shirley in Hamilton. I had not seen Brian since my father’s funeral in 1990, and Shirley for even longer. She found the cartoon channel for the kids to watch while we sat in the sunroom having a pre-lunch drink. It was a Saturday. Fine. Hot inside, but cool out.
Shirley told me a story from the late 1950s or early 1960s. They were driving down to Wanganui, and decided, on the spur of the moment, to drop in to visit us in Burns Street, Ohakune. They had not telephoned, telegrammed or otherwise said they were coming.
Our house had a big high hedge in front of it, an enormous beech tree, a beautiful overgrown garden, with fruit trees and vegetables out the back, the river running behind. I can see Brian and Shirley going through the gate, past the lilac and the snowball on the front lawn, down the side of the house where pansies and sweet william grew, and round the back.
There was no-one home. We had all gone away for our summer holiday. The washing machine was full of dirty water and half-washed clothes, the vacuum cleaner was sitting in the hallway, still plugged in, the back door was wide open and on the mat was the mummified body of a cat.
Shirley said that, afterwards, when she talked to my parents, she found out what had happened. Everyone was in the car, waiting to go, when they noticed I was missing. They called. And called. And then I crawled out from under the house with – the dead cat. I was a young boy, less than ten years old.
I can picture the scene. My father has packed all the camping gear into the trailer and is standing out by the car smoking, impatient to get going. My mother is part way through any number of mundane household tasks, also getting us kids ready but, beyond that, fatally distracted by some preoccupation of her own, some imaginative construction of events probably yet – or never – to happen. My sisters, all five of them, are somehow arranged in the car: three in the back and the two little ones in the front, perhaps. And I am under the house.
Though I have no memory of this event, I recognise myself in it. That fascination with dark places, the wonderful discovery of the mummy, the joy I would have felt in showing the others ... as I write I seem to touch again the fine brown dirt under my hands, feel the knobbly feeling of the floor beams and boards just above my backbone, smell the cobwebby, dry, dusty odour of under-the-house ... while ahead of me, just out of reach, there’s something lying, some marvel ...
Shirley told me a story from the late 1950s or early 1960s. They were driving down to Wanganui, and decided, on the spur of the moment, to drop in to visit us in Burns Street, Ohakune. They had not telephoned, telegrammed or otherwise said they were coming.
Our house had a big high hedge in front of it, an enormous beech tree, a beautiful overgrown garden, with fruit trees and vegetables out the back, the river running behind. I can see Brian and Shirley going through the gate, past the lilac and the snowball on the front lawn, down the side of the house where pansies and sweet william grew, and round the back.
There was no-one home. We had all gone away for our summer holiday. The washing machine was full of dirty water and half-washed clothes, the vacuum cleaner was sitting in the hallway, still plugged in, the back door was wide open and on the mat was the mummified body of a cat.
Shirley said that, afterwards, when she talked to my parents, she found out what had happened. Everyone was in the car, waiting to go, when they noticed I was missing. They called. And called. And then I crawled out from under the house with – the dead cat. I was a young boy, less than ten years old.
I can picture the scene. My father has packed all the camping gear into the trailer and is standing out by the car smoking, impatient to get going. My mother is part way through any number of mundane household tasks, also getting us kids ready but, beyond that, fatally distracted by some preoccupation of her own, some imaginative construction of events probably yet – or never – to happen. My sisters, all five of them, are somehow arranged in the car: three in the back and the two little ones in the front, perhaps. And I am under the house.
Though I have no memory of this event, I recognise myself in it. That fascination with dark places, the wonderful discovery of the mummy, the joy I would have felt in showing the others ... as I write I seem to touch again the fine brown dirt under my hands, feel the knobbly feeling of the floor beams and boards just above my backbone, smell the cobwebby, dry, dusty odour of under-the-house ... while ahead of me, just out of reach, there’s something lying, some marvel ...
4.8.04
Night in Ohakune
Ohakune is the town where I was born and grew up. It’s a small mountain village. Elevation 2000 feet, under a volcano. I go back there every chance I get. This time I came up from the south with my two sons, Jesse aged 7, Liamh aged 4. We arrived about 3.30 on a clear July afternoon and drove straight up Ruapehu. It had snowed on the weekend, the air was brisk and cold, the mountain a dazzled white jewel against the blue sky. We threw snowballs at each other and made a snow dwarf, with no arms and one eye, on a small hill where the drifts were knee-deep; then got back in the car with red chafed hands and sodden feet.
That night, after Liamh had gone to sleep, Jesse asked if we could go for a walk. We stepped out the door and heard music coming from the Waimarino Brass Band hall opposite the Mountain View Motel – a little old white wooden weatherboard building with a red peaked roof and frosted windows which have lettering and notes of music in the glass. I had never heard music coming from there before. This was free-form, unclassifiable, but brass – certainly brass.
As soon as we started walking towards the hall, the music stopped. When we reached the window, very quietly, I lifted Jesse - in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers - up so we could look inside. In the centre of the hall, surrounded by a clutter of chairs and music stands, three people sat close together facing one another. Two men and a woman, young middle-aged, wearing non-descript winter clothes. The men held a trumpet and a trombone, respectively; the woman a French horn. They were leaning forward, deep in thought, as if communicating telepathically. I put Jesse down and we tiptoed away.
We went the other way and, on the corner of Burns Street and the Tohunga Road, in a small grassy gully I’d never noticed before, Jesse pointed out a standing stone. This looked like it had been placed there a long time ago, like the kind of stone that might have a spiral carved onto it, like a mauri stone. We looked at it shining in the rainy night under the light of five tall streetlamps. We could hear the Mangawhero beyond, and the other river behind us. (Ohakune stands at the confluence of the Mangawhero and Mangateitei streams.)
We went back to check that Liamh was alright and then out again, this time to cross the road and hang over the white rail on the banks of the Mangateitei, running below us through a stand of remnant beech forest, black water shifting beneath black trees. While we were there the music started up again. It was indescribably beautiful, an improvisation around a theme, structured like a raga, full of invention, but, in its feeling, shy, wild, and yet somehow intimate as well.
They played for about twenty minutes without stopping; we listened outside until we got too cold, then went back to the motel and listened from there. Jesse, who often has trouble getting to sleep, dropped off while they were still playing. It was about half past nine on a Tuesday night. Slight rain drifted past the streetlamps. A big semi trailer with the word LILBURN on its side passed on the road, going north. Then another that said COMMERCIAL. For the moment, I was home again.
That night, after Liamh had gone to sleep, Jesse asked if we could go for a walk. We stepped out the door and heard music coming from the Waimarino Brass Band hall opposite the Mountain View Motel – a little old white wooden weatherboard building with a red peaked roof and frosted windows which have lettering and notes of music in the glass. I had never heard music coming from there before. This was free-form, unclassifiable, but brass – certainly brass.
As soon as we started walking towards the hall, the music stopped. When we reached the window, very quietly, I lifted Jesse - in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers - up so we could look inside. In the centre of the hall, surrounded by a clutter of chairs and music stands, three people sat close together facing one another. Two men and a woman, young middle-aged, wearing non-descript winter clothes. The men held a trumpet and a trombone, respectively; the woman a French horn. They were leaning forward, deep in thought, as if communicating telepathically. I put Jesse down and we tiptoed away.
We went the other way and, on the corner of Burns Street and the Tohunga Road, in a small grassy gully I’d never noticed before, Jesse pointed out a standing stone. This looked like it had been placed there a long time ago, like the kind of stone that might have a spiral carved onto it, like a mauri stone. We looked at it shining in the rainy night under the light of five tall streetlamps. We could hear the Mangawhero beyond, and the other river behind us. (Ohakune stands at the confluence of the Mangawhero and Mangateitei streams.)
We went back to check that Liamh was alright and then out again, this time to cross the road and hang over the white rail on the banks of the Mangateitei, running below us through a stand of remnant beech forest, black water shifting beneath black trees. While we were there the music started up again. It was indescribably beautiful, an improvisation around a theme, structured like a raga, full of invention, but, in its feeling, shy, wild, and yet somehow intimate as well.
They played for about twenty minutes without stopping; we listened outside until we got too cold, then went back to the motel and listened from there. Jesse, who often has trouble getting to sleep, dropped off while they were still playing. It was about half past nine on a Tuesday night. Slight rain drifted past the streetlamps. A big semi trailer with the word LILBURN on its side passed on the road, going north. Then another that said COMMERCIAL. For the moment, I was home again.
2.8.04
What I meant to say to the novel-writing class
Prose walks, poetry dances – Paul Valery
This was probably meant to be disparaging to prose but perhaps can be seen another way: when we dance, we usually dance, if not on the spot, then in a restricted space - unless we are dancing in the street.
But when we walk, we walk with purpose, we are going somewhere; even when we’re just going for a walk, we still have some kind of end in mind, some point where we will turn around to come back.
What is it about a walk? You have a destination, but unless you’ve been there before, you don’t know what it looks like and, even if you have, you still don’t know what you will encounter along the way.
A successful walk requires stamina, persistence, a goal, and also, if you are going to write about it, the ability to observe whatever happens along the way. This observation must also be directed at the self, even if you walk – or write – to forget yourself.
Afterwards you come back: that is the process of revision, of preparing for publication, the processes of publication itself.
Fiction writing is a journey in search of a world, which the reader can then enter. The best fiction is that which, in your recall, you think of as real, a place you have actually been, people you got to know, a story that is true.
How does fiction differ from, say, memoir? Memoir fulfils the primary criterion, it makes a world, even if that world is one of so-called facts.
What is the place of invention in memoir-writing? That is like asking what is the place of memory in writing. Memory is itself a kind of fiction, one we take to be real. Invention begins where memory fails.
Which leads to the question of voice. The voice of the author is the truest guide to the fiction, if fiction it be, just as it is to so-called non-fiction, at least as the term is used to describe memoir.
You must make a world and, however private that world is, it must be one others can enter, live in for a while, and then leave with memories of where they have been: reading, too, is a walk, but a walk with a guide.
This was probably meant to be disparaging to prose but perhaps can be seen another way: when we dance, we usually dance, if not on the spot, then in a restricted space - unless we are dancing in the street.
But when we walk, we walk with purpose, we are going somewhere; even when we’re just going for a walk, we still have some kind of end in mind, some point where we will turn around to come back.
What is it about a walk? You have a destination, but unless you’ve been there before, you don’t know what it looks like and, even if you have, you still don’t know what you will encounter along the way.
A successful walk requires stamina, persistence, a goal, and also, if you are going to write about it, the ability to observe whatever happens along the way. This observation must also be directed at the self, even if you walk – or write – to forget yourself.
Afterwards you come back: that is the process of revision, of preparing for publication, the processes of publication itself.
Fiction writing is a journey in search of a world, which the reader can then enter. The best fiction is that which, in your recall, you think of as real, a place you have actually been, people you got to know, a story that is true.
How does fiction differ from, say, memoir? Memoir fulfils the primary criterion, it makes a world, even if that world is one of so-called facts.
What is the place of invention in memoir-writing? That is like asking what is the place of memory in writing. Memory is itself a kind of fiction, one we take to be real. Invention begins where memory fails.
Which leads to the question of voice. The voice of the author is the truest guide to the fiction, if fiction it be, just as it is to so-called non-fiction, at least as the term is used to describe memoir.
You must make a world and, however private that world is, it must be one others can enter, live in for a while, and then leave with memories of where they have been: reading, too, is a walk, but a walk with a guide.
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