Landfall Review Online

New Zealand books in review

A Father’s Rights

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Brett Lupton
Settlers’ Creek, by Carl Nixon 
(Random House, 2010), 330 pp. $29.99.

I have been an admirer of Carl Nixon ever since, some years ago, I read his short story ‘My Father Running with a Dead Boy’. Settler’s Creek is Nixon’s second novel and, having read this, I want very much to seek out his first, Rocking Horse Road, written in 2007.

The story in Settler’s Creek is told through the third-person perspective of Box Saxton, a man devastated by the sudden death of his stepson. Worse, the boy’s biological father, a Maori elder, takes the body without consent to be buried in ancestral land. Through his shock and grief, and memories of his own unfortunate family life, Box is compelled to set out to recover the son he has lost.

Nixon obviously recognises that much of the emotional power is already in the material and through tasteful changes of tense, from past to present, he adds additional focus as needed. All of which culminates in a simple but evocative style of prose that subtly reinforces themes and provides insight into the lives of the characters and how they may later react.


Box looked at the tools left hanging on the walls of the shed. A lot of them were missing now …. When he was very young Box hadn’t understood that his grandfather had drawn around each tool in here with a heavy marker and then painted in the outline in black on the wall. Back then, Box, the boy, had believed  … that the tool had left behind its shadow … He looked at the black marks now, faded but still visible. Surrounded by the smells of linseed and earth, he stood for a long time and stared at the wall of lost shadows.


Yet despite the relative simplicity of plot and style, the issues Settler’s Creek addresses are certainly not so simple. In fact its cluster of thematic concerns are so snarly and gnarly, it took some thought to decide what this novel is really about. An ambivalent book for an ambivalent time: because it hugs the centre of a road that traces the nation’s bicultural faultline, as if testing territoriality, I am sure this book will mean different things to different people.

Initially the main concern appears to be the obvious clash of opposing world-views. And Nixon devotes much of the novel to developing this dynamic: the European equivalent of tangata whenua symbolised by a family bible; the dual cultural background of his stepson Stephen/Tipene; several examples of the inability of both sides to communicate effectively. He clearly wants a balanced view of both cultures. 

But this is also where the novel occasionally wavers. Exactly because both sides of the argument have validity, and there are no readily apparent solutions, Nixon must act as a kind of facilitator — an explainer and ameliorator. As a result, there is sometimes the palpable sense of being led by a firm and insistent (‘fatherly’) hand through the issues. I feel the intentions of the story, and the storyteller, would be better served by allowing the reader the same space to think about the events as that which they’re allowed for emotional reaction — otherwise, paradoxically, the novel,  wanting to maintain an even keel (overly concerned with everyone getting ‘a fair hearing’), is in danger of tipping into melodrama, bathos, or worse.

Balancing the cultural issues also distracts from what I feel is the novel’s true thematic focus: not the larger issue of social politics, but the ostensibly smaller – but no less important – question of what constitutes true fatherhood? This is where the novel derives its true power and purpose, and this is primarily why, I think, the author elects to tell the story through the suddenly bereft protagonist. Nixon is at his best when writing directly about Box and his experiences.

And when at his best, all concerns for the political issues that tend to divide us as a nation are swept away by what really matters, the immediacy of personal experience:


Now, looking at the damage, Box couldn’t help imagining latex hands cracking open his son’s chest. He felt a surge of anger. What the hell were they looking for anyway? Wasn’t it obvious that it was hanging from his neck that had killed the kid? Box imagined them reaching into the excavated chest and lifting out the boy’s heart. They would have held it up, turned it towards the light and slowly rolled it over for closer inspection. How much had it weighed? he wondered.


Notwithstanding the odd stumble, Settler’s Creek, with its exploration of contemporary moral complexities, and with its evocation of a particular time and place, lingers in the mind as a fine novel. And, despite my not having read his Rocking Horse Road (a situation soon to be rectified), this novel, in my estimation, is a necessary and successful step forward for this award-winning short-story exponent in getting to grips with the technical complexities of the larger form. It seems obvious to me that, from the luminous and careful crafting of this novel, and his dedication to building on that craft, Carl Nixon is destined to become one of New Zealand’s leading writers.



BRETT LUPTON is a writer and musician who lives in Dunedin. He is currently completing a PG (dip) Arts in English at the University of Otago.

The Unsuspecting Huia

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Tim Jones
Mr Allbones’ Ferrets: An historical pastoral satirical scientifical romance, with mustelids, by Fiona Farrell (Vintage, 2007), 217 pp., $27.99.

Growing up in rural Southland, I was aware of a powerful and supposedly benevolent body called the Acclimatisation Society, which – so I gathered – had the job of ensuring that river, stream and field were stocked with the fish and game best suited to delight the nation’s anglers and hunters. As I grew older, I learned that these benevolent overlords of the natural world were not, in fact, so benevolent after all, and that the story of ‘acclimatisation’ was a story of disaster after disaster, as wave after wave of English fauna was imported and let loose on native ecosystems ill suited to receive the aggressive intruders.
First the accidental releases of rats, mice, cats — then the deliberate; surely the rabbit, so charming on an English sward, would prove no less charming hopping about on a New Zealand meadow? When the rabbit proved to be an all too successful immigrant, threatening the pasture on which the colonists depended, then an even more fateful decision was made: to import their natural predators, the weasels, stoats and ferrets, to control them.
The Acclimatisation Societies are all Fish and Game Councils now, and wiser with it, but the consequences of their past diligence are all around us, in silent forests and empty nests. Therefore, it was a bit of a stretch for me to take on the task of reviewing a novel, set in the 1880s, in which the protagonist is a man whose job it is to catch ferrets and transport them safely to New Zealand to control the rabbit problem. But I have read and enjoyed books about unpleasant professions before — Gene Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer, for one — and I enjoyed Mr Allbones’ Ferrets too.
The novel does pretty much what it says on the tin: it’s historical, it’s pastoral (at least initially), there is science afoot, there is a romance, and, by George, there are mustelids aplenty. I didn’t really notice the satire, but there are strong doses of dramatic irony. To fit all that in 217 pages is a challenging assignment for any author, but Fiona Farrell’s assured command of literary technique means that Mr Allbones’ Ferrets rises to the challenge, though not always without strain.
It’s not a criticism of this novel to say that the most memorable characters are the ferrets. The novel opens with a marvellous set-piece in which we see Walter Allbones going about his business, and his favourite ferret going about hers, in a happy if risky concord. For Walter Allbones is a poacher; he poaches rabbits, and Pinky the ferret is his chosen implement. In a scene so vivid it will stay with me long after the plot of the novel has grown hazy in my memory, we learn how poacher and ferret work together to lay pink, juicy rabbit on the table. By the end of this scene, I was on the side — for the duration of the novel — of Allbones and his ferrets, and also confident that I was in very good authorial hands.
Then, on his way home with his spoils, Allbones runs into trouble, and that trouble leads him, all spit and polish, to the door of the big house at two o’clock on a sunny afternoon. Mr Pitford, a gentleman, has need of a man who knows his way around a mustelid, for Mr Pitford is in the business of acclimatisation, and the colonists in distant New Zealand are crying out for help with their rabbit problem.
And Mr Pitford has a granddaughter called Eugenia — a young, beautiful, granddaughter, with whom Allbones is smitten, and who in turn does not seem entirely immune to his rustic charms.
And this is where I went ‘uh-oh’, for in a thousand novels and films Ken Shabby, the tramp/poacher/gamekeeper, has lusted after Rosemary, the virginal daughter of the manor; and in a good proportion of those, Rosemary has raised his station or lowered hers. How could Fiona Farrell bring anything new to this well-worn trope? To make life even tougher for Eugenia, she is also Exposition Girl, tasked with bringing Allbones up to speed on the Theory of Evolution and the inevitable extinction of weaker species, and in general to show Allbones and we, the readers, how the Victorians rebranded Darwin’s work as a moral justification for their own rapacious colonialism.
So, after the vividness of the opening scenes, I found this section of a novel something of a let-down. Of all the major characters — Allbones the poacher, his rival/tormentor/reluctant ally Metcalf, Pitford the paterfamilias — it was Eugenia I found the least convincing. Nevertheless, developments late in the novel do provide a retrospective explanation for much of her behaviour and her character. Her given name is surely no accident.
But then the chief dramatis personae and their horde of ferrets take ship for New Zealand, and we get the second of the great set pieces — set pieces which, though it is high praise indeed, reminded me in their intensity and vividness of the great mowing scene in Anna Karenina. Fiona Farrell gives us a panorama of the colonists boarding the Adam and Eve, 999 tons and bound for Wellington direct, with the rich well-housed, the poor crammed into narrow berths, and the ferrets, securely caged, standing between them.
The terrors and pleasures of the journey to New Zealand are well described, but what stuck with me most vividly was the sense that, on such a voyage, the social order was being overturned as well as the seasons. In a new land, the poor may rise, but so too the rich may fall. Chance, circumstance, and old sins brought to light can lead to new dispositions.
In all the human drama of the voyage and its aftermath, I feared that the ferrets would be forgotten, but the novel ends as it should. Walter Allbones and his new bride are riding upcountry from Wellington in the gig that will take them to their new home carved out from the bush. Caged in the wagon behind them rides Pinky the ferret, pregnant with her next litter, and eager for release:

Her pink nose whiffles as she smells the sweet deep soil of her new home. She smells feathers and flesh and warm blood. She hears thousands upon thousands of birds singing songs new to her: korimako and tui. Piopio, miromiro, matata, hihi, kakariki, kaka and unsuspecting huia. (213)


Walter Allbones and his kin have faded into archival records, old photos, and genealogy, while Pinky’s descendants are very much with us. Well done, that man!
In Australia, I once stayed in a house run by ferret breeders. A ferret tried to get into my sleeping bag. I had to leap in the air and shriek before it saw reason. I don’t like ferrets very much. I did like this novel.


TIM JONES is a Wellington-based poet, writer and editor. His second collection of short stories, Transported (Random House, Auckland, 2008), was longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He blogs at: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/

Two Women in Berlin

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Dieter Riemenschneider

I Am Always With You, by Philip Temple (Random House, 2006), 447 pp., $36.99; Hand Me Down World, by Lloyd Jones (Penguin NZ, 2010), 313 pp., $40.00.

The title of this review might very well have been ‘Two Men in Berlin’, since the writing of both novels was obviously closely connected to their authors’ stay in the city as guests of Creative New Zealand’s Berlin Writers Residency, respectively in 2003–04 and 2007–08. Yet if their choice of Berlin as the stage of action was almost inevitable, they must have decided on good reasons for placing women at the centre of their stories.
Philip Temple’s sculptor Hermann Blumenthal in his last letter from the war in August 1942 to his wife Maria in Berlin reassuringly closes with ‘I am always with you’. These words gradually begin haunting his widow in her dreams and finally, in the postwar years, she begins to hallucinate her husband’s actual physical presence. Maria, only just forty years old, gentle, sensitive, once a budding writer and the mother of two very young boys, loses her grasp on reality and finally gives way. This is Temple’s first theme.
Though Sarah Quigley in her Listener review of 2006 complained with good reason about Temple’s failure to merge the documentary and the fictional, it seems feasible to me to judge his achievement from a less literary-critical angle, especially because I belong to the author’s own age group. The psychological, economic and financial problems experienced by a young widow with children during and after the war years are not at all unfamiliar to me. The novel succeeds in narrating the fate of this small family, and in the unfolding process of Maria’s inability to bear her burden – in spite of the support extended to her by her husband’s artist colleagues and her women friends, and in spite of her sense of responsibility to her sons.
In the end, the many losses she is made to suffer – of her husband, of her three siblings and of her mother, as well as of her childhood home, the deprivations of the war and postwar years in Berlin – combined with her resignation of never having the time and strength to fulfil her deepest wish to become a writer – prove too much. It is a fate Maria shared with so many of her female contemporaries.
In the course of narrating her story, Temple moves away from the perspective of an observer, and instead lets an inner voice speak to the reader – and here I disagree with Quigley’s comment. On the contrary, interior monologue and stream of consciousness do not replace the narrator, but rather in Maria’s last years they relate more and more closely to the tone and content of her letters to a female friend and in this way almost take over her story.
Temple’s second major concern is his wish to reconsider his own (and also that of many of his non-German readers) deeply ingrained conviction about the evil nature of all Germans lumped together, a view the author’s generation had adopted – and was made to adopt as the accepted wisdom – during and after World War II. Counterpointing Maria’s more or less fictionalised life story, Temple the historian retells the story of the group of artists to which Blumenthal belonged, the Ateliergemeinschaft Klosterstrasse, who worked and lived in Berlin between 1933 and 1945 — and whose story, unfortunately, is not at all well known in Germany. Wishing to reassess their views and convictions vis-à-vis the Nazi regime, and possibly their roles as the proverbial monkeys who did not see, hear or speak evil — and perhaps even their active collaboration in criminal deeds — Temple brings to the fore the problematic of a group of people as averse to racism as to Nazi rule. Their failure, if any, lies in realising too late where the country had been taken by a dictatorial regime that gradually unfolded its true totalitarian and anti-Semitic nature, and in their guilt at having been unable to live other than by withdrawing into inner emigration. They weighed the alternative of open resistance against their need to survive, and decided on the latter, not least, as one of the artists put it, to enable them to spread the ideas of freedom, equality and peace to future generations.
As one who belongs to Temple’s generation, I have reproached my elders for their lack of foresight and reason as much as for their cowardice, but I gradually learned of people who had behaved in a similar way to most of the Ateliergemeinschaft artists; and yet, with others of my generation we hardly dared refer to them (and to those who had helped Jews to survive) lest this sounded like an easy excuse, to be interpreted as relativising or even minimising our guilt and the atrocities committed by so many of our countrymen. Only in recent years, and with a generation historically removed from the past, has a more differentiating approach been developed. It is to Temple’s credit as a non-German fiction writer and historian that he has confronted a dilemma deeply disturbing to so many of our generation and reached ‘the end of [his] journey of understanding, acceptance and reconciliation’ (443).

By contrast, Jones’s woman in Berlin is an illegal migrant from North Africa who has found her way to the city to search for her son that her lover – an African-American-German – had abducted more than three years before from a hotel where she had worked and met him. Having been helped to find out his address, she makes arrangements with him to see her boy, though only irregularly and for just one hour each time. Moreover, she is made to pay for this ‘favour’, which forces her to borrow money from, and pawn the belongings of, the blind man she works for as a domestic aide and carer.

            The reader first comes to know Ines — a pseudonym that she has adopted — through the eyes of people who had met her when she lived in Africa, during her journey through Italy, and in Berlin. Thereafter she talks about her experiences from a prison cell in Italy, and here we face a very different person from the one described by others. To them she had appeared a woman difficult to place, a taciturn person who often did not, or did not want to, understand their language, or who was plainly unwilling to share her thoughts and feelings with them –  as long as they had not found out more about her. Yet through her own story we come to know an extremely articulate speaker who is intelligent, who has much foresight and, depending on the occasion, is adaptable and capable, and a schemer in her near-obsessive desire to be reunited with her child. Who should the reader believe? And who should the Police Inspector believe, while re-tracing her trail?
            My own response to Jones’s novel is one of perplexity about many aspects. The multi-voiced narrative rarely draws me in mentally or emotionally, which is due mainly to the disconcerting medley of stories told by various characters whose importance to the main plot seems at times too slight — e.g. Ralph’s, the Inspector’s or Abebi’s — and at others too weighty — especially Defoe’s — whose narrative takes up a fifth of the novel.
            I also can’t cope with a plot filled with so many improbabilities: Ines, hardly a swimmer, dog-paddles from a buoy to a beach in Sicily for more than a day and a night. She encounters only trusting, selfless and helpful people, while never for a moment facing the danger of being discovered, let alone arrested, as a highly visible illegal migrant in Italy with its overflow of newcomers from Africa. Also hardly believable is the sequence of lucky circumstances that enable her to easily shoulder the physically strenuous journey of several hundred kilometres from Sicily to the Italian mainland, and on foot across the Alps into Austria. Finally, there’s Berlin, which is presented as a city of trains, stations, bridges and a zoo. Ines’s world is crowded with beggars and alcoholics hanging out at the suburban stations, and with homeless people, the down-and-outs, some of whom have found a temporary abode in an empty warehouse. Almost all of them prove harmless, many are kind and helpful. There is just the odd bad person, especially Jermayne, the boy’s father who stole her away from him, whose relentless badness sticks out like a sore thumb.
            Certainly, all these people including Ines, are meant to be presented to us as living in a ‘hand-me-down world’, but Jones’s tale, in spite of its stylistic breadth and deliberate structural composition, fails to invoke my empathy for its people’s fate as presented in its pages. Instead I read it as a melodramatic mélange of characters, events and locations that does not really grasp the dramatic, even tragic, destiny of North African migrants risking their lives to escape to Southern Europe.


DIETER RIEMENSCHNEIDER was formerly Professor of English Language Literatures at the University of Frankfurt (1972–99); he has written widely on Indian, African, Maori and Australian-Aboriginal-literatures-in-English. More recent books include The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934–2004 (2005), and Wildes Licht (a bilingual anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand poetry) (2010).

School of Saint Augustine

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Chris Else
August, by Bernard Beckett (Text Publishing, 2011, $30.00)

A book that is billed as ‘a philosophical thriller’ poses unusual questions. We don’t judge science fiction by the accuracy of its science. Nor do we require historical novels to adhere strictly to the facts. In both cases, perhaps, we would want the writer to be aware of the accepted consensus and to take account of it but the whole point of fiction is that it involves an invented reality. Shadbolt’s Season of the Jew, for example, is a novel first and history second. How then should we approach a fiction that is centred round a philosophical problem? Does it really matter if the analysis of that problem is unsound or incomplete? Should one forget the philosophy and talk about the fiction or should one criticise the philosophy and the fiction? The answer, I suppose, is that it depends on the book.

In Tim Corballis’s Measurement the protagonist goes through a rite of passage that involves a confrontation with a philosophical text. To the initiated, the text described is a thinly disguised version of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. To the uninitiated this barely matters. The novel is not about whether Wittgenstein is right or wrong but about a particular character for whom the fictional text, with its pseudo-Wittgensteinian theses, is a reflection of a personal life view.
Beckett does not operate in quite this way. At the centre of his earlier novel, Genesis, is the question of whether or not computers could ever be considered conscious beings. Characters and plot are subservient to or aspects of the argument around this question, which involves the nature of mind and the relationship of mind and body. Beckett makes a fair fist of weighing up the standard theories as to whether or not the mind is anything other than the brain and he provides a clever twist towards the end that not only turns one of the reader’s key assumptions on its head but also nudges the argument towards a conclusion. Genesis was labelled as a young adult novel and it gave me the sense that Beckett, a secondary school teacher, was driven to write it by motives that were partly pedagogical. Such a book invites or even demands that its argument be a major focus of a critical response.
August takes a similar approach. This time the question is whether or not human beings have free will. Generally, philosophical questions resolve themselves into opposing positions. Cast them in fictional form, and this tendency results in some sort of contest or trial. In Genesis, the main protagonist is subject to examination by a tribunal. In August, there are two confrontations. In the narrative present, the hero, Tristan, is trapped in a wrecked car with Grace, a girl he is in love with despite having met her only once before. They recount their stories to one another: parallel and contrasting tales that offer reflections on the central argument. Grace has been brought up in a convent where strict conformity to a set of rules has governed her life, and from which she has been expelled because her feelings for her fellow human beings have led her into disobedience.
Tristan, whose story is more central to the book, has been cloistered in a school devoted to scholastic reasoning around the work of St Augustine. Here the second confrontation takes place, between Tristan and the Rector – the mentor and father figure who teaches, tempts and tests. Central to the discussion is a religious paradox. If God is omniscient then he knows the future. If he knows the future, a person’s actions are determined. But if behaviour is determined, people do not have free will and therefore God cannot hold them responsible for their actions.
In one sense, as Grace points out, this question has no bearing on a moral life. Whether or not actions are predetermined is irrelevant to the business of deciding what to do. Tristan and the Rector move beyond this point, however, and agree on a test: can the Rector predict what Tristan will do in a complex game that involves interaction with two other people and seems to offer a vast range of possible outcomes? Tristan, who believes that he has free will, bets that he cannot. The Rector believes otherwise. Tristan fails and discovers that, against all his expectations, prior to the contest, the Rector has written down a precise description of his actions.
The first observation that this scene suggests is that, if Tristan’s actions are predetermined so is the Rector’s prediction. To the extent that Tristan was not free, the Rector was not right. A second observation is that neither the Rector nor Tristan had any choice in what they did because they are the way Beckett wrote them. In a work of fiction the free will of all of the characters is, well, a fiction. This might suggest that a novel is a particularly unsuitable vehicle for exploring such philosophical terrain. Only real life is meaningful when it comes to questions of free will. If Beckett had taken the opposite course and written the scene so that the Rector failed, then the action, determined by the author, would have proved that Tristan had free will.
The question of free will versus determinism divides the world into two classes of people, the observers and the observed. From the point of view of the observer, the observed may or may not have free will. It is arguable that they don’t, at least to the extent that behaviour is initiated by neurological processes that can be observed in the brain before the person whose brain it is becomes conscious of them. From a scientific perspective, one that focuses on physical explanations, human behaviour is, in principle, reducible to processes that are either random or caused. If they are caused, then they are, again in principle, predictable. If they are random, they aren’t. Free will, on the other hand, operates within a point of view where thoughts are thought and decisions are made. Thus, no matter what conclusions we draw about the observed person, the observer always has free will. The behaviour of the characters is determined by the free will of the author. There are metafictional opportunities here that Beckett does not take up. Instead, he limits himself by continuing to work within the classical frame of the argument.
Tristan is crippled by the thought that he does not have free will and the cunning twist at the end turns on his last desperate attempt to prove his freedom. The relationship between the various layers of the plot is subtle and carefully worked. The various storylines are skilfully handled and offer a series of surprises as the reader gradually discovers that not only the characters themselves but also the whole world of the novel is not what it seems. In the end I felt disappointed that writing of this quality was devoted to such a limited exposition of the philosophical question. August, I felt, was a better novel than Genesis but poorer philosophy.

CHRIS ELSE is a novelist, and a partner in TFS Literary Agency and Assessment Service. He lives in Wellington.

Holding the Baby

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Vaughan Rapatahana 
Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, by Tina Makereti (Huia Publishers, 2010)

Kia ora mo tenei pukapuka Tina. Ka nui te pai tau pakiwaitara kei konei.
 I enjoyed this initial collection of tales by Tina Makereti. It’s refreshing, rarely boring, easy to read. The stories rebound and resound with echoes from one to the other, motifs recur as time and legend intertwine in a patterning of melded possibilities and possible meldings.
The quick stick label is ‘magic realism’: Makereti’s craft is in veneering extra-sensory perceptions and other-worldliness onto quotidian contingency. Her quotidian, in turn, is permeated with marginalisations of ethnicity and gender. There is a Borges-like quality to some tales – as in Eli’s massive polyglottism in the god child, which brings to mind Funes the Memorious. Eli also hears the sounds of thoughts. There is the synaesthesia of seeing colour in words in off-beat; while Rosie listens to the talk of inanimate objects in blink. The analogue of Kirlian photography – the suggestion of ghostly auras – segues everywhere in this collection; that is, there is an ambient aura around many of the main protagonists, while dream-like states also billow within narratives, flowing through, for example, top-knot and shapeshifter.
Maori mythology is ever-present, albeit in contemporaneous settings (in Maoritanga, past and present are all one anyway), as for example the way in which the mountains and rivers animate the kuia, her tipuna, her mokopuna in kaitiaki. Everything integrates ki te ao o nga iwi Maori; it’s only the one-dimensional Pakeha boyfriends sketched into these stories who are given to prate such lines as, ‘Perhaps there are things humanity is not aware of’, and ‘It’s just, the world’s so huge, you know? The universe is a freakin’ crazy place and I know nothing about it.’ Tina Makereti senses and depicts the Other as always here. Her magic realism is actually our true diurnal ethos. In effect, she is more a mirror to the Maori experience than she is a second-hand Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Carlos Fuentes. She is one who senses the atua as well as the kehua everywhere. Her stories transmogrify into purakau. The marginal becomes mainstream.
So Maui-Tikitiki-a-Taranga is always around the corner here: as in the tales top-knot, ahi, mokomoko – maybe also via the lizard king allusions in blink. Pania of the Reef scores her own anthropomorphic role in shapeshifter. And, of course, the lead-off piece is a clever reciting/re-siting of Tane Mahuta claymaking Hineahuone, after his schisms with Tumatauenga, in skin and bones. Tihei mauriora indeed: a heart-starter to get the collection pumping, eh.
So also, the whanau situations – growing up in broken homes, broken in more ways than one. Lack of pingers. Lack of love. Lack of food. Violence. Too much piss being drunk. Being a whangai. Being a solo Mum. Losing babies. Loser (Pakeha) boyfriends with grabby hands and grubby potential-to-impregnate. Lack of many male role-models. Multi-generational fluxes and flows. Dying with whanau me whanaunga around, and then the tangi. Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa is essentially about growing up Maori. Just bite into what men do. Savour kaitiaki. Taste the textures in the order of things. Chew on in the end – which, of course, just has to be the last tale in this book, detailing the tangential aspects of tangi.
And what after death but to begin again? After all: ‘There was a woman and a man/there was a man and a woman’ are the words, the thematic words, which not only fuse the cycle of the single story the order of things, but also iterate the cyclical nature of the entire collection.
Furthermore, this is a woman’s book, making it all the more powerful. By this I mean that the book is about female-centred experience: babies, birth, sex (frustrated or enjoyed), best friends (as in off-beat for example), best friends as (twin) sisters in mokomoko and tree, the rabbit and the moon – and the strong bonding thus involved. But even more crucial than all this is the blight and plight of male–female relationships – where the woman, all too often, is left – quite literally – holding the baby, though sometimes voluntarily. For, as Pania reflects: ‘Sometimes I think men just take what they want.’ Which is also why some stories meander, dribble into flaccidity; the relationship entailed was also going nowhere, and it is the woman left staunch or staunching.
All this combined thematic interplay is manifested most clearly in mokomoko, where the strands of Maori wahine in relation to Maui, of madness in relation to men (husband-fathers), of birth/death in relation to dreaming, all weave together. The underlying viewpoint of Makereti’s whole anthology is the one Hine-nui-te-po articulates: ‘There would always be this thing between men and women, both grappling with their fear, both loving and maiming and making a mess of it all. Even the gods made mistakes.’
One sister here learns how to exist again from her twin talking Hine’s story – just as Makereti talks tales, so as to reveal that their telling might indicate states of mind beyond just blather: ‘there was a way of understanding the world that went beyond words … the quiet place … was more real than all the words uttered in Babel.’ In the end, it is Makereti’s gift that her pakiwaitara convey the possibility of a transcendent silence.
Kia ora ano mo te taonga.

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA is a poet and writer from Aotearoa New Zealand currently living and teaching in Hong Kong.