PHOTO
I grew up knowing these stars by another name.
As a boy in Britain, they were the Pleiades: a tiny cluster of blue-white suns sailing high across crisp winter skies. Every telescope was pointed towards them sooner or later. They were simply part of winter.
Then I moved to New Zealand and one of the first things I noticed was that here they seemed almost shy. From Dunedin, they never climb particularly high and in the long twilight of a southern summer, they struggle to be seen at all. Familiar stars had become strangers.
For years, I still thought of them as the Pleiades. Somewhere along the way, they became Matariki.
I can’t tell you when that happened. There wasn’t a moment when I consciously decided to stop using one name and start using the other. It was one of those quiet changes that happen when a place gradually stops feeling like somewhere you live and starts feeling like home.
The new name carried more weight than the old one ever had. It carried a calendar, a new year and a reason to get out of bed before dawn.
So every winter I drive out along the Otago Peninsula before sunrise. The roads are empty. The harbour is usually still.
Photographers call it the blue hour, then the golden hour: first sunlight scattering through the atmosphere, cool blues giving way to amber and rose.
On a calm morning, the harbour gathers every colour. Sky and reflection become almost impossible to tell apart, while the lights of Broad Bay shimmer upside down beneath the real ones. Above the eastern hills, Matariki hangs for a few minutes before daylight washes it away.
I’ve watched dawn break in deserts, from mountain summits and beneath some of the darkest skies on Earth. Yet I struggle to think of anywhere more beautiful than Otago Harbour on a still winter morning, when blue surrenders to gold and the same little cluster of stars rises ahead of the Sun.
Stars whose name now comes to me first in te reo Māori.