‘Unpacking your bags’ – still

Near the beginning of the year I wrote about ‘unpacking your bags’. The term has taken on a literal – but also deeper – meaning for me now. A month ago my father died suddenly and unexpectedly. We’ve since made two extra trips to Karaveer.

In the week of the funeral, my sister unpacked an old suitcase of Dad’s that sat under his desk. She found a photograph album – the stiff, old, black paper variety. Inside were early Dutch photos: Dad’s dignified parents, posing on their farm in their Sunday best; his siblings and friends in the early 1950s as teenagers and young adults. Mostly he featured in a football team – ‘the Teteringen boys’. Then there was his sister who married and emigrated to Canada two days later; his youngest brother Piet ordained as a priest; a cousin who led a troupe on horses performing a guard of honour.

Later we found a scrapbook he kept of 1960 – in particular a long trip back to the Netherlands (via Canada) to be at his brother’s ordination, before returning to New Zealand. A young, single man’s adventure; in the days when flights halfway round the world were still measured in days, not hours.

From my maternal grandmother’s collection, my sister pulled out a 1961 blue aerogramme written by my father’s youngest brother (he wrote the best English). Writing on behalf of the Dutch family, he said they were glad that my father ‘is engaged to a good girl’, and expressed the wish that they would visit New Zealand one day. He noted the family had become international, and that they were glad the two families would be connected. So am I.

The first words of my last post resonate in a different way now: ‘Sometimes you need to go back to go forward.’ Our family has been here 55 years now on my father’s side, and much more on my Mum’s. But there’s still a lot of unpacking to do.

Restoration and return: Matiu and beyond

Sometimes you need to go back to go forward. In the case of Matiu – or Somes Island in the middle of Whanganui a Tara (Wellington Harbour), that’s about 225 million years.

That represents the timeframe of ancestral lineage for one of the species returned to the island: tuatara are a reptile that has remained virtually unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs 225 million years ago. Despite their form, they are not a true lizard – they have no other living relatives.

And their restoration on Matiu is working. After dying out on the island in the 19th century, they were returned in 1998 – 54 of them from Brothers Island in the Cook Strait and Nga Manu Sanctuary, Waikanae.

I do volunteer duties on Matiu – about once a month over summer. If you know where to look, there is usually one guaranteed to be out – ‘Big Mac’ they call him, sitting out just under a large curved macrocarpa trunk. It’s a buzz pointing out live tuatara to visitors.

But on my duty yesterday, for the first time, I spotted two young tuatara. One was a ‘baby’, just 10 cm long, sitting outside a large burrow, a metre off the path. The other was somewhat older: about 25 cm long, though it kept its tail in the burrow. From its location, I think it was Ngake or Whataitai, one of two incubated and hatched on the mainland in 2007, after their eggs were found laid on the island.

The island is special in so many ways – and there are always more discoveries to be made in just 25 hectares. For me, it is a microcosm of New Zealand: past, present – and possibly its future. I wrote on this theme in 2003 – it’s still apt today, so here it is, with some editing, and an update.

Tussles for Control – from the top of Matiu/Somes 

From the highest point, I look across a microcosm of a nation: sheep-cropped slopes, macrocarpa, cabbage trees, brick and wooden buildings, an industrial complex. In the distance lies a darker, solid patch of bush. Where the ground levels out at the base of the hill, a stone wall keeps faith with an older rural past. Snaking up to meet it from the wharf is a sealed road, with disused streetlamps. Out of my sight, past the cemetery, is a field of jonquils and daffodils – in spring.

Even the lone macrocarpa at the summit reminds me of Auckland’s (former) One Tree Hill: the trig is the angular memorial. Raked eastward by the wind, the pine proffers two scraggly arms to the sky, symbolising the tenacity and dominance of European settlers.

Elsewhere on the island, the ubiquitous rural pine competes for attention with pohutukawa, but ecological purists would not have our homegrown Christmas tree here. No one actually knows how Matiu should be clothed, so long has she been under human occupation. However Forest and Bird planters have taken their cue from similar landscapes around Wellington: species such as taupata, tarata, horopito – natives struggling to regain control of territory once in their ‘full, exclusive and undisturbed possession’. 

Most of the plantings are lower down. Here at the summit, only a few clumps of misshapen olive-green muelenbeckia (pohuehue) poke their way through the closely grazed grass. Browsed into submission by the sheep, the shrubs protrude like bits of brain matter from Matiu’s near-bald head. 

And Matiu’s head is exposed. It’s last seven metres erased in 1942 to make way for four anti-aircraft guns to protect the land from the Japanese. 

(Later, a friend says, ‘It’s kind of been decapitated, hasn’t it,’ not realising that a Maori woman’s headless body had been cremated and buried on the island, shortly before the last resident Maori population – Ngati Mutunga – fled for the safer shores of the Chathams. Taranaki migrants Te Atiawa gained control in 1835 before handing the island on to British settlers in the 1839 purchase of Wellington.) 

Since then – 170 years later (in 2009), the island was officially returned to the Taranaki Whanui (incorporating Te Atiawa) as part of a Treaty of Waitangi settlement. 

Walking down from the summit at the south end, I see the East-West ferry providing passengers with a roller-coaster ride – exhilarating, but safe. I pass an untamed pinus radiata that has found a place here. It spreads its branches carefree everywhere, unseen by its strait-laced mainland cousins. Matiu seems a place for growing mildly wild. 

Matiu – daughter of Kupe, or Somes Island after the New Zealand Company deputy: it depends on your point of view. Either way, it’s a strange place for a sanctuary, this city-encircled island with a harbour moat for protection, home to our most ancient creature.

'Being Kiwi'

I referred in my earlier post to being a ‘Dutch Kiwi’. But to be honest, I’m a bit uncomfortable with the label ‘Kiwi’. Not because it was first bestowed on us by Aussie soldiers in World War I. But it just seems to be tempting fate to call ourselves after a species that’s threatened with extinction, not least because the whole planet seems under threat from our own misguided use of resources.

According to the New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DoC), the total number of this unique New Zealand bird is probably less than 70,000, and expected to decline to about 63,500 by 2018.

However, it’s kind of encouraging to learn that the rarest – the rowi and Haast tokoeka, at about 350 birds each – are among those predicted to increase in number. Along with the Northland and Coromandel brown kiwi, which are more greatly represented.

My family picked up a sighting of two Northland brown kiwi earlier this week – albeit courtesy of the Kiwi North – Whangarei Museum kiwi house just outside of Whangarei. It was the first time my two youngest daughters had seen a live kiwi. Up close and personal they were – only a foot away from my youngest 5-year-old daughter through the glass enclosure. A treasure.

We’ve all yet to see one in the wild. But even on this aspect, it was gratifying to see in central Whangarei, just off State Highway One, a ‘kiwi trail’ sign alerting people to their (potential) presence in bush on the edge of the city. Admittedly, the main purpose was to alert dog owners to the need to keep dogs on a leash, but it was still a positive sign that this endangered bird can be seen (if you’re lucky) so close to an urban area.

Only last September, DoC launched a new campaign raising awareness of the threats kiwi face from free-roaming dogs.

I end this post with a video of another fondly-remembered kiwi – from the days before 24-hour TV. Let’s hope that ‘goodnight kiwi’ is not a prophetic phrase.

Have you unpacked your bags?

It’s about ‘unpacking your bags,’ Piripi said to me years ago. He was talking about New Zealanders of European origin who keep heading overseas or look to overseas to make their mark. Elaborating, he said, ‘Are you committed to this place? Have you decided to stay?’ I’m still wrestling with the questions.

I guess this blog is about me ‘unpacking my bags’, as a representative of newer arrivals to these shores. Unfolding what gifts, talents, perspectives I have, in the context of the modern land of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Sharing what I’ve got, and seeing what gives.

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My mother wrote recently:

My father came from India where his seafaring British grandfather settled; my mother was born in Aotearoa, third generation. Both called Britain ‘home’, although they’d never been there.

These grandparents were of the New Zealand Pākehā generation that looked to ‘Mother Britain’ for their identity. But for both my mother and me, ‘home’ is clearly here – Aotearoa, ‘a land of bush and beaches’, as my mother wrote. I feel closest to this land in the bush – that’s when I feel most like ‘being a New Zealander’.

But that is only half the story. My father was born in the Netherlands, emigrating to New Zealand when he was 21. So I have this strong Dutch affinity – and sometimes describe myself as a Dutch Kiwi. Whether that affinity comes from something in the blood, or from two trips to the Netherlands – once when I was 13, and once as an adult – I do not know. But on my last trip there – travelling around on a 70-year-old bike, conversing in a halting, Brabant-flavoured Dutch – I did feel ‘at home’, that this was my ‘second home’.

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Half-way round the world from my father’s country of origin, I feel I’m undertaking a dual journey: deepening the Dutch connection, and at the same time exploring my place in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

In terms of ‘unpacking my bags’, I guess I’m still sorting through the assorted luggage various forebears have left me, not to mention what I’ve acquired myself.

Remnants along the ridge

A half-hour walk in the bush today – and stepping back in time, ever so briefly, several hundred years. With an hour to fill before delivering a Canadian cousin to a bus, we drove to the summit of Mt Parihaka (name corrected from Parahaki in 2005). From there, we walked down to where one of three pā once occupied the ramparts of this 240-metre volcanic peak, that established itself here round 20 million years ago.

My family have been living in this area since 1978. Only now I discover the hill is the site of what was once the largest Māori pā in the country! I feel ashamed and ignorant. But is it all my fault? It was never mentioned in my schooling at the local boys’ high school (ok, so I didn’t take history, but ...). And the fact doesn’t receive top – nor even prominent – billing as a tourist drawcard to Whangarei. Yet, it is within half an hour’s walk of the Town Centre.

However, I feel pleased that I can point out easily identifiable kumara pits to my Canadian cousin. And we recognise a defensive wall, thanks to a plaque that details the features of human occupation that once decorated a 3-kilometre stretch of ridge line, now largely hidden by regenerating bush. We need the skilled eyes of an archaeologist, or the helpful explanation of an interpretation panel, to see them today.

The tourist briefs also refer to it being ‘the site of a significant battle and massacre in the 1700s’. I wonder if that was the time when the hill was abandoned as a place of settlement? There is more to be found out. Another time, another place.

Oceans and oil

Today I walked with two Canadian cousins along the white sand beach of Bream Bay, from the north near Marsden Point oil refinery to what is left of Marsden B – an oil-fired power station that never fired, conceived before the big oil hikes of the late 1970s. It is now almost dismantled, to be sent to India to burn coal or oil.

Marsden Pt oil refinery with Bream Bay on the right.

We’d just visited the refinery, where we learnt of the mechanisms for refining crude oil into fuel to power our current lifestyles. And the care that the company takes to minimise its impact, such that dotterel birds nest not only next to the refinery, but even ‘inside its fences’. And people fish from the adjacent jetty.

Standing guard, watchful across the narrow harbour entrance, are the irregular, craggy peaks of Whangarei Heads and Mt Manaia. I took them for granted when my family moved here at the end of the ‘70s – they were just part of the landscape. But they’ve grown on me – and I love seeing them in the distance on the down road from Maunu into Whangarei; and (on a clear day), spotting them as you top the Brynderwyn Hills coming into Northland from the south.

The craggy hills are the eroded remnants of old andesitic volcanoes (like those of the North Island’s central plateau), that exploded into being during the Miocene period, more than 15 million years ago.

They stand imposing yet tame now, no longer a threat to locals.

Naming places

To name a place gives us power over it, some say. Naming is certainly tied up with identity, and what significance a place has for us.

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The place I’m starting out from in writing this blog is the place I am now – Karaveer, my parents’ home on five hectares in rural Northland.

‘Kara’ after the locality where they live, 10 kilometres west of Whangarei. ‘Veer’ – from Dutch, my father’s language. It means a spring (as in a water source or fountain), also a ferry, or a jumping off point to a new direction - like the English word ‘veer’.

The Māori word ‘kara’ is a transliteration of ‘colour’, and is used as the word for ‘flag’. It’s apt then that I start from this place – running up my colours, and taking my writing life in a new direction.

This is also the place I spent my last year of high school, and first year in full-time work, before going to university. I return to Karaveer almost every year, round Christmas/New Year, now with own family of three girls. It still remains a ‘home’.

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It occurred to me while sailing recently between New Zealand’s two main islands – ‘North’ and ‘South’ – that they’re pretty bland names. Sure, they’re practical, and at least you know where you are; but they don’t do much for the imagination. On 4 December, approaching Tory Channel, I wrote:

It is not the ‘South Island’. That is too boring and straightforward a name.

It is ‘Te Wai Pounamu’.

– a name that signifies the meaning and value of the island to Māori. The waters of the pounamu, or greenstone. It is a far more colourful name – in any language.

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Similarly, the waterway near where I live was first named Te Awa Kairangi – the river of great value – by the Ngāi Tara, the first inhabitants of the river valley. The English name for it – the Hutt River - derives from someone who never set foot here: one of the directors of the New Zealand Company that ‘organised’ (so they say) European settlement here.