PO Box 2 Blackball

Singing

I spent the weekend in Motueka with half a dozen community choirs. Singing in four-part harmony with 160 people was good for the soul. Mainly middle-aged Pakeha people with a touch of the hippy. The choir leaders were exceptionally skillful people, able to coax a Georgian song out of the group in thirty minutes.  But as one of them said, You can get to 80% of acceptable standard in 20% of the time; the final 20% takes 80% of the time. And on this sort of occasion 80% was fine. It reminded me of the psycho analyst, Donald Winnicott’s concept of ‘the good enough mother’. As long as mothering is good enough, the kid will be okay. Relax. Things  don’t have to be perfect.

I joined the choir when it first started four years ago because a community choir in Gryemouth/Mawhera seemed like a good idea, to support a mate who leads it and because I wanted to learn to sing in harmony – a skill a Pacific Islander learns with walking and talking. And it is a skill basic to democracy; diversity blending into a whole. No place for control freaks or loose canons, although choir leaders have to be control freaks – to an extent. The song is the song.  In fact leadership, facilitation and who has the skills is the next big question. The party? The charismatic leader? The hard working organizer? The one with the need?Enough. Back to singing.

There’s a joy being in a huddle with thirty basses. Although basses aren’t huddly blokes, rather see themselves as the pillars of society, or the foundation. Something like that, the others adding decoration. Although the sopranos (the high ones) often have the melody, with the basses mere drones in comparison. And then the ones in between. The tenors can provide a low sound when the basses are exploring higher moments and there is a nice cross over of gender in the tenor (to start rhyming). While the alto is something of a mystery, but seem to provide a minor key and occasional dissidence.

And then there’s the question of content; often world music with the Georgians as favourites, closely followed by the South African Zulu. But there’s also Gospel, Celtic, Folk, Maori and Polynesian. But can songs be separated from their culture without becoming commodity and the privileged Westerner a parasite? Does it matter if there’s no money involved? Just people learning other people? Although I do find, within the harmonious blend, moments of greater authenticity, when something is not just good for the soul and body, but goes deeper, a connection of meaning has been found which produces a ‘holy’ space.

Generally, the political is avoided, although South African songs are apt to be political and the rich Israeli tradition is problematic these days, so quietly bypassed. A bit of Scottish nationalism is okay, as is Nga Iwi E. Interestingly enough my choir presented a medley of Brechtian-flavour songs from the play, and these were well received. And then there is the interesting fact that despite the harmonious mixing of voices, at a personal level, the people from other choirs remained strangers compared to one’s own group.

I could find a mirroring of society arising from this, and a model – but best to leave it at this stage – as an occasion good for the soul.

The Nats, faced with a bad press because of the housing crisis, dreamed up a slogan: Predator Free New Zealand by 2050. It goes along with Smoke Free New Zealand by 2025 and so on. But I have concerns about sloganizing of this nature – the historic examples don’t bode well. Mao tried to get rid of flies with disastrous consequences. As for Stalin, there were numerous pests he eradicated.

The model is rather too close to ethnic cleansing to be comfortable, and of course, the arguments are similar: these possums etc are taking our resources and despoiling the nation’s moral health. Clean Green goes along with Nordic purity and tramping trips. As a German from the period remembered, ‘In the songs that we sang, in the poems that we recited, everything was bright, shiny and clear, the sun and earth were ours, and tomorrow so, too, would be the whole world.
And the means of ethnic cleansing are usually unpleasant, from machete wielding mobs to gas chambers. There was always a façade to the gas chamber, a normal railway station  and doctors in white coats. The 1080 drop is preceded by the more benign carrot.

I don’t want to push the metaphor too far (and am probably already in trouble from the pro-Israeli lobby), and there is the other side of the coin, Hitler got the trains to run on time and possums are great breeders and have to be controlled. But eradicated? It’s not our fault some settler clown brought us here (the Fijian Indians were imported by settler clowns as well).

But you can see how the anti-1080 cargo cult has arisen in response, rather like the cabaret under Hitler. Peter Slater’s possum pies were disallowed on food safety grounds. I ate one and experienced no ill effects. It does seem ridiculous to have to import possum fur. Whenever a 1080 drop occurs locally, there is a strange feeling of living alongside a death camp.

And these sloganised campaigns are always firmly attached to nationalism: TB free, smoke-free, predator free, nuclear free (the last one’s beginning to be inconvenient).

Yes, our flag in triumph nobly flies!
Yes, our flag is reaching toward the sky!
To the ends of the Earth, and the last of our breath…

If only we were free trade free, late capitalism free, climate change free, income inequality free, child poverty free…

On a different note, we had a great Labour weekend with a history seminar on the Labour Party in Runanga on Sunday and on Monday,  an event to christen the new town square in Greymouth as a political gathering place.

I had a couple of experiences which made me think about education at the secondary level. I’ve done a couple of sessions on workplace rights at the local high school. Generally, kids spend at least fourteen thousand hours in the classroom, yet not one of those hours educates them about workplace relations and rights, which given that most people spend a third of their adult lives working, is patently ridiculous.

The first class I spoke to were more academic kids by the look of them. None of them had heard of trade unions, which left me gob-smacked. They listened well enough but without real intuitive understanding.

The second class were less academic, at first sight had a feeling of the irascible, but they were onto it straight away. They were aware of unions and of the importance of solidarity, asked intelligent questions and so on. When I spoke to Te Whaea about it, she said, Their families have probably experienced poverty, so the kids know about the world.

When I taught at the school I’d always wondered what would happen if the motivational talks at assembly had been based on working class values rather than the  set-your-goals-and- achieve-them cliches of neo-liberalism.

The second experience was interviewing Harvey for an exhibition we’re doing on Blackball blokes.  During his early adolescent years Harvey caused a bit of trouble locally. But since he got a regular job he’s settled. Here’s his explanation:

High school didn’t suit you?

No.

Why?

I don’t really know. I’d rather be out doing stuff rather than pen and paper. I got into a bit of trouble around town and that. Silly stuff. I used to break into the Hilton and  a few other things.

Why was that?

I was just young. Didn’t have the right ideas.

Hormones?

Yeh. Then I travelled up to Motueka to my grandma’s and got a job in an orchard. Stayed up there to keep away from the trouble.  Done that for a while. Came back here, a bit of work with Tiger, then I finally got my job with Coast Glass. Been there a bit over two years now. It’s keeping  me busy.

What’s good about working?

If you want money you need to work. If you want to go away and do stuff, go on a holiday, get out of wherever, go and check out new places, you need to be working. Can’t do it on the dole. I’d get quite bored if I didn’t go to work. And that’s how you end up getting silly ideas. Doing silly stuff. Work gives you a bit of stability.

A purpose in life?

Yeh. I feel good when I do a good job and people are happy with it. Now I go out with my four wheel drive or my motorbike.

Long term ambitions?

I’m not really sure. Still sorting things out. Just keeping at my job and getting better at it. Then I could go anywhere.

(Tiger the scaffolder had given him work to keep him out of trouble and then the local glazier got him the job; takes him to work each morning. So simple.)

Girlfriend?

Yeh. That’s all pretty good. It sort of – you got to put a bit of effort into it. It keeps me out of trouble that’s for sure.  Someone to tell me off.

You gonna get married and have kids?

Ultimately. See how things go I suppose. You never know when you’re young.

How old are you?

Eighteen.

Values?

My own personal values? Lots. Like being generous sometimes. Helping people out with jobs and stuff. And my family, that’s a big one. Wilhem needs a good role model. Just be hard working. Not going to get anywhere sitting around.

Spiritual views?

Not really. Sort of of – I dunno about that one. Do believe some things. Hard one that one.

Anything bigger than you?

Yeh. I do think so. Not gods and stuff, but there is energies out there.

Cities?

No, I’d hate that. I’d rather be out where I can hear birds and have fresh air. You don’t get that in the cities. Not like out here. I’d always rather be in the more rural side of things. Even out in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t be a worry.

You’ve had experience of death eh? One of your peer group died.

Yeh, it was pretty hard to deal with. We were only young. I was only fourteen.

What happened?

Nirvana got a job fishing. He was sixteen. He was out there loving it, then Tiger and Dan said, there’s been a mishap. We all went to Dan and Sharon’s and they told us what had happened.

He went missing?

Yeh, the boat sunk and they didn’t find anyone.

What was the feeling?

Maybe a bit empty. That was the feeling. You’re waiting for him to come back. We used to go out the front and light candles and put them out on the fence post there, as a bit of a guide for him. For him to come back.

But he didn’t

No, he didn’t. There wasn’t a lot we could do about it. We were bummed out. We looked after each other.

What did you do?

We’d get together and hang out. Make sure everyone was alright.

And then the funeral.

A sort of memorial service. We all went along to that. It brought us all together.

Hard at that age?

Yeh, it was hard. Usually I deal with it good- relatives and that. Nowadays I can deal with it pretty good. Just life eh. No one lives for ever. Just have to be careful sometimes.

What are the most life-giving experiences, when you feel most alive?

When you’re out doing something you like. I feel like that when I’m out fishing or out driving through the mud. Just out there in the bush, clears your mind. Everyone’s different. You, you go for your run in the morning. Gets you ready for your day.

(I’d wrapped it up but then thought I’d see what he had in mind about politics.)

Any opinion about the way society’s ordered?

I have some big ones about that. I don’t like the way, I suppose, some of the rules, you can only do this… we don’t get a say, a chance to say. It’s getting worse and worse.

Why don’t we get a chance?

I don’t know. I guess they just do what they want to do. Them sort of people up there, they don’t worry what we’ve got to say.

Who are they?

The government.

Any government?

Most governments in the world.

Any differences?

There are small differences, but in the end, the person in charge, what they say goes.

What about the rich poor thing?

Yeh that’s about it. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. There’s no equality.

What are you going to do about it?

I’m just going to tick along in my own way.

Is there anything the rest of us could do?

We could ignore them and boycott them and do our own way of doing things I suppose. There isn’t much people behind it. Everyone doesn’t have the same idea.  They watch tv and think everything’s alright. Not to worry.

Overseas they call your age-group the millennials. People under thirty getting a raw deal… But Sanders and Corbyn have come along. Can you see something like that happening here?

Depends. It could be possible. We’ll see.

If someone came along saying the right things? What would they be saying?

Just a bit more fairer for people who aren’t wealthy.

I left feeling that if I’d interviewed an eighteen year old on his way to university, the answers would not be any more coherent. Is education a matter of who’s asking the questions – and what the questions are?

I recently did a survey of local small businesses to gauge their response to a new development. It was like entering sites of paranoia and anxiety. Probably, I reflected, most small businesses are like that: precarious, risky, cash flow issues, profitability issues, government regulations, staff problems, competition… I realised anew, that the social relations generated are toxic, permeating into housing and the private capitalism of accumulated possession.

When businesses get bigger the same paranoia and anxieties are experienced as management, shareholder, branding, investment and takeover games, rather than individual. Although the franchise system returns them to the individual space.

A cleaning franchise has moved through the pass into Greymouth/Mawhera, picking up a hotel chain cleaning contract. The franchise employs mainly Asian people on working holiday visas – a perfect solution to the fluctuating cleaning required with variable occupancy rates. But local people miss out on jobs, which are few and far between at the moment.  The situation of the Asian workers is probably not wonderful either. It doesn’t do much for race relations. Who knows the ultimate owners of the hotel chain? This franchise is trying to pick up other contracts.  Once again the social relations generated are awful.

I remember that this is why the film business ultimately proved disenchanting: trying to sell a script to a possible market, the investment games, the anxiety and paranoia generated, the social relations of the business. Of course, this could be preciousness, a refusal to get my hands dirty with ‘reality’. And it is a highly productive system – you have to grant it that. But then, one remembers that this system and its awful social relations are leading to the destruction of the planet. Caroline, my partner,  commented as we discussed this: Capitalism has no soul.

And I remembered being struck, as a youth, by Wordsworth’s poem (and it is a poem that has remained with me):

The world is too much with us, late and soon

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;-

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not…

So, a week of having a ‘romantic’ reaction to capitalism. But it ended on a better note: a phone call from Mario, the Cuban ambassador, driving his family to an engagement further south and calling in to Blackball. A lovely encounter with his wife and children (fast becoming kiwi), before a meal of raw fish with Whaea and Darcy.

And not a franchise in sight.

Possum Wayne has sold his house and left the village. In my childhood he would have been described as ‘not quite the full quid’. That was how mental dysfunction was perceived. Or someone like Jessie, my adopted mother would say, ‘he suffered from the nerves’. She suffered from the nerves. Although, on further thought, it was mainly women who got the nerves. Men were ‘a few bob short’. Influences of patriarchy and the Great Depression?

We first met Wayne when we used to come down to Blackball for Mayday. After he lost his job he hung around the local Unemployed Workers’ Rights Group (hard to know where to put the apostrophe). He’d worked for some tourist attraction and had seen a document which revealed that his boss was getting paid a lot more than him, so he urinated in the goldfish tank and killed the fish. He got the sack of course. Thereafter he was focused on injustice and it drove him paranoid, or depressed, or both.

He was homeless and after we bought this old house and were still in Wellington, coming down here for the holidays to renovate, we let Wayne live here. His was a simple life. He didn’t bother about heating. He trapped possums, walking off into the hills in his bare feet. He lived off possum stew and water cress (a pretty good diet); that’s how he got possum attached to his name. At night he listened to his Heavy Metal records, He was into conspiracy theories. Then the possum supply dried up thanks to 1080 and he started to bring stuff home from the dump. That proved problematic – as the rubbish accumulated.

He comes from a farming family so had a trust fund. When we moved here he bought himself a house on the main road. The old lady who had lived there had been a miner’s wife and was a bit paranoid that people would steal her ton of coal which was delivered each year free of charge. She’d also sent away a young woman doing the genealogy thing when she came knocking, for the family had been ‘bloody scabs’. Maybe paranoia infected the house, for Wayne became increasingly ‘unwell’ when he shifted to the main road. He felt exposed I suppose. He’d no longer say hello. He had a dog which was becoming old and Wayne would stride through the field staring fixedly ahead, the dog trying to keep up.

Then he attacked a neighbour who owned several roosters and that involved a court case. One Christmas he took to standing in the middle of road staring through binoculars. That seemed odd enough to warrant a visit. He told us to f-off but stopped standing in the middle of the road.

He rode his bicycle into town a couple of times a week, then took to riding on the wrong side of the road. He would veer back at the last moment. A death wish or playing chicken?

I worried that he would do something really crazy. Thank God there is no easy gun access in this country. But it never happened. He held it together. He spent an awful lot of time inside his own head.

Anyway, now he’s sold his house and has gone off with his eighty grand. No one knows where.

In a curious way, we’ll miss him.

Finishing a season of a play is always a complex moment: there’s relief, sadness, plus a certain emptiness. Praxis (having a meaningful project in the world) disappears. Back to the humdrum of normal life. The wonderful presentness of theatre, like a brief but intense love affair in a foreign country, recedes.

The Measure Taken has been a special project. A play with the unlikely topic of the transition economy, it has involved a cast of twenty to thirty people, needed a creative collaboration, and been received with enthusiasm. A need is there. But how to sustain that need in real life?

The performances revealed the micro cultures of the Coast. Greymouth is unclear, a mix of health, education, bureaucrat and franchise business people, plus a couple of working class suburbs, tending toward the urban, but not big enough to gel, except in small pockets. Yet large enough to justify several performances. Hokitika is more arty and life style confident, but underneath there’s the suburban lurking. Westport is serious, with greenie-extractive conflict and survival an issue. And last Saturday, we were in Reefton, a small town devoted to its heritage.

We played the Oddfellows Hall, in which nothing seems to have changed since 1870, other than the toilets. It’s musty, long and narrow, a rough stage at one end, with lodge paraphernalia on the walls and impressively high narrow doors. There was a drum kit on the stage and a remarkable mix of chairs. I’d been to have a look at it and spent the succeeding days brooding on how to stage the play in there. There was no obvious solution.

We arrived and tried the rostra in various arrangements – to no avail. And then the penny dropped. Reverse the spatial arrangement, stage at the back of the playing area with the audience having to enter through the set. It worked. There was a good crowd and a sense that the hall came to life again. Afterward, local artist, Alison Hale, told us that the hall was where the miners had their relief depot during strikes.

The play is interesting culturally, for after moving through Coast history, selecting some key moments, it moves into the current world, with stories of migrant workers and refugees, before including progressive Coast voices. The trajectory works, for without this perspective, this changing of the spatial arrangement, Coast heritage is as routine as the old photograph and reminiscence to be found weekly in the community newspaper. Sartre called this dead weight of the past, the practico inert.

I am reminded of a theatre project in Tokelau during the 1990s. In Tokelau, the main cultural format is the faitele, which consists of two groups challenging each other in song and dance performance. The songs always start slowly, then get faster, moving to a rousing conclusion. After a couple of occasions it started to seem routine. But when we did a play first, a play about current issues facing Tokelau, after the discussion a faitele would inevitably follow, the cast being challenged by the locals. Now the traditional performance had a new vitality, because those present had tackled the issues.

A play leaves a memory, that’s all. That is one of the virtues of theatre, it doesn’t contribute much to the practico inert.  But after each performance of Measures we interviewed members of the audience about the economic programme which was suggested. There was ambivalence about regional independence, but remarkable consensus about the need for a Universal Basic Income, organic dairying, a hemp industry, growing our own food, having our own energy supply, processing raw materials here, a Living Wage and welcoming refugees.

Why is this programme not out there, being more widely discussed? This is where Sartre’s concept becomes resonant, for it is the practico inert (and neo-liberalism is now a key element of the practice inert) which stops the praxis which is necessary for a healthy society and a healthy planet.

– You say we should have organic dairying, and grow and process hemp, and tax the tourist and invite refugees and have horticulture and our own food supply and our own energy supply; but you have to have people wanting to farm organically, or grow hemp. You have to have people wanting to produce local food and people wanting to buy it. At the moment, the neo-liberal option is simpler, gives the easiest bang for the buck, has a vast propaganda machine behind it.

-So, you just go along with the crisis, the boom/bust of extraction. If the price of coal goes up, dependent of course on China, the Indians take over Bathurst and have control of our coal. They dig it up 24/7, there’s some well-paid short term jobs for a while, then the bust. That’s it?

-You have to work with the community. What do they want? Achieve some local things. Give them pride.

-Win a Trustpower Award?

-What else do you do?

-There’s no alternative?

-Doesn’t seem like it.

Pause

-This is why we need the party, so that left activity is not just resistant protest but is preparing a new economy, a solidarity economy, is prefigurative, revealing what we are heading toward, making it clearer.

-A General Union of —- whatever you want to call it?

-So there is clarity. Otherwise we are in for it. A third of the world’s farmland is stuffed. Proper farming sequesters carbon, is part of the solution to climate change. We need equality, fair trade, co-operatives to change the relations of the workplace, Universal Basic Income, Financial Transaction Tax, stopping the tax dodging multinationals, on it goes. Plus the specific regional issues. But an agreed ideology and tactics, the party as one thinker among others, taking that thought into the unions, into the community organisation, into local politics, voicing that which has to be done.

-And the problems of parties: power relations, squabbles, factions, secrecy…

-Have to be faced. Otherwise we are left with charity and Trustpower Awards.

-Unions?

-Embedded in contractual relations with capital.

-Embedded?

Pause

-The white bait are threatened with extinction.

-Another canary in the mine.

-Lots of them.

-A flock of canaries.

-There needs to be a ban on white baiting plus riparian planting of waterways. Urgently. Next week.

-Organisation… likely?

-Cuba would sort it tomorrow.

A long pause. One of the people having the conversation’s phone goes. He looks at it. Ignores it. Silence continues.

-Like Waiting for Godot?

They stare into the distance.

The lights fade.

Applause?

Warming up before the show