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April 2018

Anzac Day

Each year there’s a sweet commemoration in Blackball, with the army, the mayor, the local service people and the church attending. The war memorial is in the school grounds and crosses are placed for each of the Blackball men killed in battle. As part of the wreath laying, children put posies on each cross. There used to be a rifle salute and the sound echoing around the hills was a powerful symbol. That’s been stopped for some reason. But the flag is lowered and the last post played. A crowd of around hundred is normal.

I go as part of the St John presence, but the problem remains: what is this really about? I suspect the problem is felt by others for the speeches subtlely change year by year. It is no longer the simple slogan: These men died fighting for the freedom which we now enjoy. With regard to WW1 the knowledge that this was a slaughtering of working class men because of a European capitalist squabble over markets, colonies and resources is generally accepted, if not articulated quite as bluntly. And the Gallipoli campaign is acknowledged as the military cock up and disaster that it was. It is okay to commemorate men killed by a botchup of the bosses, to feel the mix of anger, sadness and regret that accompanies the realisation of wasted lives – Pike is like that. There is often at least a nod in this direction at Anzac services of late.

But with Gallipoli there is an additional current; that this was the coming of age of the colonial nations of Australia and New Zealand; that it gave birth to a sense of nationhood and pride. It wasn’t that the families involved were aware of the botchup and demanded a thorough investigation and for heads to roll as has happened with Pike, the families thereby coming of age as a group and asserting their need for justice. It would be interesting if this had occurred, after all the Russian revolution had this as one of its inspirations. But in the Anzac tradition there is no national judgement of the Pommy leaders, it is more that the warrior culture came of age, that Kiwis and Aussies proved themselves as warriors as they showed courage, bravery and resilience on the battlefield.

But that in turn cannot be simply stated and celebrated, for the warrior culture is a little suspect after being mediated by feminism. Common sense judges the culture for the damage it has caused and continues to cause – think Sarajevo, think ethnic cleansing – so this impulse has to exist as sub text.

Of course the scope of Anzac widens to include WW11 (more explicable the fight against fascism), except that WW11 evolved from WW1. And then there is Korea and Vietnam, problematic battles against Communism, and certainly in the case of Vietnam a botchup by a new batch of foreign masters.

This year, the army representative introduced a new theme, that of soldiers serving to uphold a fragile world order as embodied by the United Nations and its covenants. This can require participating in a conflict but more often involves restricting conflict by playing a peacekeeping followed by a development role – still dangerous work and sometimes fatal. This ‘line’, this point of view is attractive but if it reaches back to encompass Vietnam and even the two world wars, it begins to be a rewriting of history.

Last year the Turks were brought into it, they were after all also fighting for nationhood and the theme could then be one or reconciliation through mutual national suffering. Another ‘line’.

I would love someone to speak of these ideological problems as part of the service.

There are of course increasing numbers of young people turning out for Anzac Day ceremonies, participating in the solemn performance, exploring their family links with these wars. What does it mean for them? Another coming of age ritual?

I was perhaps the only one there bothered by this complexity. For the rest the military ritual sufficed, a sort of solemn sharing of ‘something’ before the routine of meeting mates over a beer.

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Neat and tidy

I remember visiting a farm in the Hakataramea Valley during the crisis of the 1980s, when farming subsidies were dropped. The valley had experienced a drought and a Greenie renegade had sold his sheep after the first year because the land needed a breather. He’d  invested the money in the booming share market, then sold his shares just before the 1987 crash and returned to sheep. Smart cookie. He didn’t bother with weed control. Sheep will eat weeds, he told me. He was of the belief that the average Kiwi farmer had a suburban neat-and-tidy outlook. A lot of farming was about having everything looking under control. It’s a continuation of the need-to-conquer-nature attitude of the colonist.

Blackball has a high rainfall and back in the day, the miners dug drainage ditches along each street in order to get rid of excess water.  The network of ditches flows into the creek systems below the plateau and they work remarkably well. Sometimes they need cleaning of debris. Kids love them, for there’ll be crawlies and there’s mud. Occasionally some watercress grows. Backing out of driveways requires some caution and ‘ditch parking’ as it is colloquially referred to, has been known to occur, especially with visitors. Drunks have also had an intimate relationship with a ditch. So there is history and stories attached.

But now, with the approaching Paparoa Great Walk, the Council has decided the ditches are untidy and archaic. Visitors need to be greeted with something more upbeat as they arrive along the main entrance road, something smooth and tidy. Ranginui’s excessive tears need to be hidden. Accordingly, a team of workers have been digging out the ditches and inserting pipes and manholes. Layers of fill and gravel are compacted by diggers, graders, rollers and trucks working in a sort of frenzy to eradicate detail and story. I’m not criticising the work crew, they’re doing their job efficiently and in good heart – it’s the ethos behind this endeavour: to make it neat and tidy, to put things underground and lay the surface with tarseal and concrete, to conquer the earth so that human beings feel untouched and omnipotent.

Luckily, the exercise is expensive, $100,000 or thereabouts and will be reserved for the main road and the tourists. The rest of us will continue to enjoy our ditches and the stories of a bygone era.

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On not meeting Barack Obama

I saw a French film a long time ago about the Sun King, Louis XIV, also known as Louis the God-Given or Louis the Great. There was a scene of Louis as a child being told sternly to never touch his face. The incident has stayed with me. Here was a boy and then a man who never touched his face in public. Touching of the face is usually a childish act of reassurance, to make contact with the oral centre. A king doesn’t require reassurance. There would be other behavioural matters of speech, dress and so on, and to be king required Louis to learn this public image.

Obama became, and remains, a public image, that of the first Afro-American (albeit a recent migrant) to become president. This required him to be extra presidential, to stay calm, to never, no matter what the provocation, no matter what the failures, to show grief or anger. And the provocations and the failures were huge: Netanyahu humiliating him, the Republicans refusing to be reasonable, Palestine remaining a mess, Guantanamo not closing, having to bail out the bankers rather than the mortgagees, Syria erupting, Afghanistan remaining problematic, Medicare scraping through in diluted form, gun control failing… And he killed a lot of people through drone strikes and expelled more illegal immigrants than his predecessor. But he stayed cool. He never touched his face. He was obedient to the system. (His successor, Trump, is a disobedient lunatic, losing the plot on every occasion.)

Now Obama has become a charismatic figure. He can’t speak about politics or judge his replacement. Instead, he has become royalty, above it all.  The playing of golf by these leaders, is, it is reported, a chance to escape the immediate presence of their security people, who, given the spaciousness of the golf course, have to resort to hanging out in trees and other possible places of concealment.

Obama and John Key seem to genuinely get on. They were both brought up by their mothers and both have a migrant parent. John Key as well, never got angry or sad, never touched his face as it were. He’d learned not to need reassurance. Obama has written two books and is a literate man. Both books are explorations of the migrant child. In the first he searches for his Kenyan father and details the struggles of the white solo mother with a coloured child. The other book is a study of senate politics and I was impressed by the migrant boy’s willingness to learn the ropes and play the game. Key’s mother was a Jewish refugee and he in turn learned to play the broker game, then the political game. I suspect that neither, in fact, had a particular ideology to push, neither had  a passion. They suspected such extremity. Obama, as writer, enjoyed the oratorical and oratory plays a role in US politics far more than it does in NZ. Key never indulged in verbal flights of fancy.

But having done their stint they now stand, like royalty, above the fray. Earning big bucks is easy: $400,000 an appearance for the orator; the broker can sit on boards. Not touching the face has its rewards.

It’s interesting to compare this with the experience of the Cuban revolutionaries who earned their mana though fighting in the mountains, through long marches in rain and mud, tormented by mosquitoes and asthma, depending on the peasantry for a meagre diet, wounded and exhausted but finally victorious, driven by anger and grief at injustice. Touching the face was not an issue. Liberty or death was the issue.

Royalty disdains such melodrama.

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Easter Journey

We went north for Easter, myself, Caroline and Te Whaea, drove to Picton, left the car, caught the ferry, had a night in Wellington, hired a car, drove to Ohau to scatter my brother’s ashes, then dropped Whaea off at her Mum’s in Palmerston North, before continuing to Napier to spend a night with my nephew from my adopted family,  whose mother recently died.

It was great not to fly.  Airplanes and airports are tedious, a fatal disaster the only possibility of excitement. On a car and boat journey, you experience change in the landscape, you see things and people: are disturbed as the procession of churchgoers with their cross walk through the pleasure-seeking crowd in Picton, over hear conversations, have time to ponder the blind girl and her friend, watch the white stick unfold and snap open, wonder about the man incessantly pacing the terminal, doze as you traverse the strait, watch the ramp come down ever so slowly and the bright light of the capital intrude.

The family gathering was healing. For the first time my brother and sister spoke their stories of the family disintegration, their middle-aged children weeping as the traffic on SH1 flowed past in the distance. The ashes were heavy and ready to form clay.  For the first time we seemed to exist as a family unit, a disjointed and edgy one, but that was okay. We’d  had to wait until old age for it to happen, but that was also okay.

From there to one of those Californian houses, large and lush, the adopted family having progressed from an ex-state house to this in two generations. It’s why Mexicans keep crossing the border, for they can see that the dream can happen; for these are ordinary working people living in these suburbs. I pondered the recent photos of my sister in law. She’d shrunk into the physical archetype of an old lady on a marae, become a kuia. They’d bought this house so she could have the flat that was attached. She was already frail and an infection in the pancreas quickly invaded and they’d had to make the painful decision to switch off the life support.

I remembered her first appearance at the ex-state house in Palmerston North. She’d been a girl with life in her and as she refused Pakeha puritanism, was a welcome change. I remembered the loving, close physical relationship she had with her infant son. I remembered her sadness when she witnessed my daughter’s growing facility with te reo and her telling us of her regret at not learning the language from her native-speaker father when she was a child. I remembered these things. I hadn’t seen her for ten years and now she had become memory. Remnants of my brother will still lie in the river bed.

My nephew and his wife took us to the local Indian restaurant for dinner. In the morning he showed me his Harley and I took their dog for a walk. The last night of the trip we stayed with Omar and Serena in Wellington. On their wall is a map of Palestine before the creation of Israel, a document lovingly prepared, the Arabic writing a graceful commentary.

It was the most political image I’ve seen for a very long time.

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