Kiwi Tracks (26 page)

Scott tells me: ‘That’s New Zealand’s best selling book.’

Either that or biographies of twenty-year-old rugby players, I think to myself.

‘With all the land claims made by the Maori, who do you think will benefit?’ Scott asks me, rhetorically. ‘Not the average Maori, I can tell you. Just the lawyers and accountants. They’re ripping off their own people. And these Maori businesses they set up with the trust funds? They go bankrupt. Why shouldn’t they? The Maori haven’t worked for it. It’s just a heap of money or land thrown at them. They have no experience handling it. When they go bankrupt owing money, the land they own is untouchable. When it happens to my dad, who is a farmer, he loses everything, including his land.’ He shakes his head. ‘Seems our political leaders are a few thrusts short of an orgasm to be handing all this land back to the Maori.’

‘Few thrusts short of an orgasm? What’s that mean?’

‘Means they’re a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic; a tinnie short of a six-pack; a couple of
kumara
short of a
hangi
.’

New Zealanders have made considerable efforts to redress wrongs perpetrated against the indigenous people of the country
they colonised. They have certainly gone to greater lengths and had greater success than the Australians or Americans. Kiwis have something to be proud of in this respect. As a non-New Zealander, it strikes me as a shame that some Kiwis, like Scott, do not appreciate the extent to which their identity is tied to their Maori heritage.

Lightning flashes and thunder rumbles in the distance, as rain inundates the car. One aspect of hitchhiking is you get to meet all sorts. It is dry and warm in the car; it is pouring with rain outside, and cold. Pragmatism prevails and I keep my opinions to myself.

Return to beginning of chapter

It is Waitangi Day, a national public holiday previously known as New Zealand Day. I read the caption under a photograph on the front page of the newspaper: ‘The most serious incident at the celebrations of the Treaty of Waitangi involved protesters scaling the flag pole, removing the New Zealand flag, the Union Jack and the Navy ensign, and hoisting flags representing Maori sovereignty’.

Inside is a piece:

LET’S RETURN TO WAITANGI, SAYS GOVERNOR-GENERAL

The Governor-General, Sir Michael Hardie Boys, wants to see the Waitangi Day celebrations return to Waitangi, ‘the traditional and proper place’ to celebrate the signing of the treaty. Speaking yesterday at a function at Government House, he said the Wellington location was ‘remote from historical settings’. The official commemorations were transferred to Wellington after diplomats and the then Governor-General, Dame Catherine Tizard, were spat at and abused by protesters at Waitangi in 1995. Many New Zealanders saw the treaty as ‘an ancient paper of no current relevance’, said Sir Michael. But he said justice demanded that the ‘genuine wrongs’ of the past be redressed because their legacy remained, with Maori comprising ‘a substantially disproportionate number of our under-privileged’.

I head to the nearest backpackers lodge in Coromandel Township, passing a bank with muddy gumboots lined up outside and barefoot farmers inside. In the lounge at the backpackers I sit with a cup of tea and read the visitor’s book. In it someone has written:

The TV thing. Part of the backpacker experience is meeting so many different people and exchanging ideas, experiences, making connections, and all that. As soon as you put that little monster in the room, all this goes out the window. People become alpha zombies, interaction stops.

That evening I ignore the little TV monster and the depressing sight of backpackers in a far-off country hypnotised by American sitcoms. It’s sad enough seeing young people letting the lives get sucked out of them at home, but it’s even more tragic when they travel the world to vegetate in front of a TV showing familiar sitcoms. I sit alone outside. It is a cool, breezy evening, dominated by a layered sky, cobalt, mauve, purple pastels merging into one another like the washed-out hues of a watercolour painting. These delicate shades are mirrored in a mercurial sea, which is cut symmetrically by long lines of farmed mussel stands. Ponga palms, silhouetted against an orange horizon, frame a sliver of moon floating above the dark hills.

At the northern tip of the Coromandel Peninsula, I stare up at vertical pinnacle rocks and watch formations of gannets glide by. They hitchhike effortlessly on unseen currents of wind, their wings rigid as kites. Lying prone and horizontal on the rocks, my perspective of an overhead puff of cloud drifting by gives the optical illusion that the rock cliff is falling on top of me, as if the clouds were stationary. I sit up to regain a sense of perspective and notice beyond the rocks a pod of dolphins swimming by the headland. First in pairs, then in larger groups, the procession passes by, moving with the wind and the waves. Hundreds, perhaps even a thousand, glistening, smooth backs break the surface
of the water in a long line over a kilometre long. I guess these are bottlenose dolphins by their size and shape. They swim past the pinnacle rocks to the calmer waters on the lee side, only a couple of hundred metres offshore, where they appear to be in a holding pattern, perhaps waiting for the others.

Spurred on by Ingrid’s stories of swimming with dolphins, I run along the rocks as close as I can get to the dolphins before stripping naked and diving into the water. The ocean is cold. I reach the first dolphins and start singing underwater, with a loud, high-pitched voice. Three dolphins approach me. They are considerably bigger than the duskies. Although their shapes are visible, without goggles they are indistinct, and intimidating as they circle me. The water is chilly and saps my energy. Sensing also that I am being tugged out to sea, I swim against the current sucking me away from shore. There is not much out there to stop me drifting away to the Americas. The rip is strong and faster than I can swim against and I realise with a rising sense of panic that I am being swept out to sea.

My mind grapples with the fact that if I drown, I will have the added ignominy of being plucked out of the frigid water naked. If anyone finds me, that is. I change direction and rather than swim directly against the current, swim obliquely towards shore. Using the swell of the ocean, I coordinate my assault on land with an incoming wave and pull myself up onto the seaweed-covered rocks. Exhausted, I sprawl on the slimy boulders examining scrapes on my knees and shins, which begin to bleed. A little in shock at how close I came to being sucked out to sea, I watch the dolphins jumping out of the water, falling with a splash onto their sides. Hundreds more swim past the tip of the peninsula. When I recover my breath, I walk back on tender bare feet to retrieve my clothes and sandals, exhausted from the exertion of swimming against the current in the cold water.

In the evening, dressed warmly and sitting safely on a rock at the top of a hill, I listen to the breeze. The horizon out at sea is a slightly convex razor edge, broken by Great Barrier Island, Little
Barrier Island and, far to the north, other islands. The sharp evening light reminds me of the light in southern Africa, except that there is no sense of danger. Here, no predators lurk menacingly in the bush, unless you count seventy million possums munching through thousands of tons of greens every night.

The pasture below me is green and very pretty, grazed to resemble a manicured golf course by sheep and cows. But what was it like when this same hillside was covered in kauri forest? Magnificent trees, thousands of years old, cut down so grass can grow to feed domestic animals.

When it gets cold, I retreat down to the hut and notice for the first time a newspaper clipping thumb-tacked to the inside of the front door, obviously placed there as a warning. It is about a fisherman who slipped off the rocks here. He was swept away in the current and never seen again.

Return to beginning of chapter

So many immigrants wanted their quarter-acre section of the ‘Promised Land’ that it seems to take hours bypassing Auckland’s suburban sprawl on the way north. I disembark at the Bay of Islands, where the initial contact between white settlers and the Maori was most intense, and where the Waitangi Treaty was signed. Adjacent tourist-ridden Paihia has 1500-horsepower cigar-shaped motor boats, whisking Japanese visitors on a tight schedule through the marine national park. The rooster tails behind these marine rockets, their almighty roar and the town’s prefabricated waterfront motels persuade me to hitchhike further, to a farm hostel just outside Kerikeri.

Claes, a Swede, welcomes me into his beautiful home. He reminds me of one of Santa’s helpers, with his pale complexion, white hair and half-moon reading glasses.

The TV news depicts a massacre near National Park, where a man had shot several friends and relatives in a bloody rampage.
Claes says: ‘Violence comes from America: it’s exported through TV, videos, films.’

‘That’s why we left the United States,’ adds his wife, who is American. ‘I met Claes when he was in Florida working as a shipwright.’ He is some twenty years older than her.

‘The whole value system is screwed up there,’ Claes continues. ‘If you have money, you are made, and everyone looks up to you. In America, they reward material success. If you are not successful, you are nothing. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Family values are disappearing.’

‘Isn’t it getting that way here?’ I ask. New Zealand used to have a socialised economy, which has changed in recent years to a user-pays system. ‘Hasn’t New Zealand’s egalitarian society changed to a meritocracy where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?’

I hit a sore spot with that comment. He nods. ‘New Zealand no longer seems so different from the capitalist world of North America.’

‘You weren’t tempted to go back to Sweden?’ I ask. If he wants a welfare state, he could always go home to his native country.

‘Sweden?’ He shakes his head. ‘The grey society. It’s OK in the summertime, but in September the skies turn grey, they put on grey suits, wear grey expressions and rush about from job to home, home to job.’

His wife joins in again: ‘At school in Florida, our kids had to go through metal detectors, so that the teachers could take knives and guns off eleven-year-olds. That’s why we left the US, for our children’s sake. It’s a lot safer here. But now I feel so cut off, so far away from home.’ She becomes emotional, as she thinks about her family.

I understand the feeling. Sometimes it seems that the more choices you have, the more difficult it becomes to find a place to call home.

Claes adds: ‘Now it’s not so easy any more for our friends to come and visit us.’ He pushes the reading glasses up his nose.
‘But we like it here.’ He glances at his wife, who is wiping a tear from her cheek, then puts his arm comfortingly around her shoulder. ‘There’s a lot of good things about New Zealand. The climate is nicer than Florida. It’s not so hot here.’ He is determined to put a positive spin on their move.

I discreetly leave them to sort out their emotions, and explore the farm. At the end of the apple orchard my explorations are impeded by an electric fence. I gingerly touch the bright orange tape with the tip of my finger, to confirm whether the current is switched on or off. No shock, no current. I straddle the fence to get a closer look at some gum trees on the other side and am astride the flimsy barrier when thousands of volts zap my family jewels. I scream in genuine agony. This is a pulse electric fence; testing it quickly with my fingers I had been lucky and missed the shock, but in straddling it for a little longer, I had pushed my luck. I stand there immobilised, as if important parts of me have fused to the fence. I detect a burning odour, and then get zapped again. Defying the forces of gravity, I catapult off the ground and clear the electrified wire before I get seared good and proper.

I limp back to the farmhouse. A backpacker sits on the porch watching me. She has long, fair hair pulled back in a ponytail, clear of her freckled face, and wire-rim spectacles, which give her a bookish appearance.

‘Are you OK?’ she asks.

‘Just a minor discomfort,’ I reply, nonchalantly. I climb the steps to the porch, faking a smile. Standing in front of her, I am decidedly bow-legged, as if I had just ridden a horse for a week.

‘Are you sure?’ she asks again.

‘Why, are you a doctor?’

‘No, a marine-biology student. I am doing my PhD.’ She studies me carefully. ‘Are you certain you are all right? You look awful.’

‘No, no, I’ll be fine.’ My voice sounds strange.

‘My name is Lisa.’

‘From Holland?’

‘How did you know?’

‘I’m good at detecting accents.’ I reach out my hand, still not fully recovered. ‘My name is Andrew.’

‘English?’

‘Born in Canada,’ I reply, lowering myself tenderly on a hammock. I still feel nauseous and shift my weight, discreetly spreading my legs apart until I can get reasonably comfortable. Still feeling faint, I brush the top of my head with a hand to see if my hair is standing on end.