My grandfather, Jim, spent some of his childhood in Clyde and Cromwell. He was living in a tent with his whānau because his father was part of the scheme set up during the Great Depression, so people out of work had something "meaningful" to do. And of course, building a road is meaningful, which is where his father went every day with his lunch pail. The emerging road was right beside the Clutha River when it was still a proper gorge and before Lake Dunstan was created to feed the dam. A road that made me feel carsick as a child. My grandparents would put The Limeliters in the tape deck of the Datsun to try to distract me. My favourite was the song about Grace Darling because the audience was invited to shout, "Help! Help!". Which I did from the backseat with raucous glee.
My grandfather talked about his childhood in the ’30s like it was an idyll, there was a piano inside their tent and his baby sister put bottle tops on the soles of her shoes so she could tap dance like Shirley Temple on a wooden board. He said it was so cold in winter he would warm his feet in cow pats on the way to school. This is also where he learned to ride a bike. It was a community. It was a fun place for a kid to grow up, maybe even because of all the tents.
When the old part of Cromwell town was drowned by the new lake he was devastated, everything he remembered about that idyll was under water. This is how he described it to me when I was small. He made that life in a tent sound beautiful. I remember almost envying it.
Last year, I was reading the unpublished book he wrote about his life, it was more of a family history than a memoir because my grandfather was a genealogist. There is a description of his mother in it which made me rethink his first stories about Cromwell to me. In the book he describes finding her once sitting outside the tent holding his baby sister. The flapping sound of their canvas whare was doing her head in, so she sat outside it in the cold to escape the constant noise when it was windy. This is how he found her when he got home from school. Being stoic in the cold.
My grandfather was not tangata whenua, I am. His tipuna was the first blacksmith in Clyde, yet the way he talked about the landscape wasn’t proprietary, even when he dragged us around Pākehā urupā to show us our dead relatives. He loved this country. But he also went to night classes in the ’80s so he could learn some reo. When I asked him why he said it was so he could learn his granddaughter’s language. I am understating it when I say my grandfather was a good man. As much as he loved this country, he never talked about it like it was his. His sense of belonging wasn’t anxious. Or racist. Or maybe it was just less so than most.
I’m mentioning all this because I read an article recently about Grahame Sydney, who has resided in Maniototo for a long time, painting flat, too real incarnations of it. He was upset that so many wilding pines are being introduced to "his" part of Central Otago. His main concern was that the trees would destroy his view, which was described as a vista. He also mentioned the environmental degradation when the Maniototo hasn’t always looked how he imagines it either. He never once mentioned tangata whenua.
Fifteen years ago, he and his artist and poet friends were upset there were plans to build a wind farm. There was more talk of it destroying their view. I went to a poetry reading where a man stood up to read a short piece to protest the impending turbines. He repeated the name of the mountain range that was about to be "destroyed" by the wind farm. He recited the word Lammermoor over and over and over like it would have an incantatory effect. It wasn’t a good poem, it was arrogant and lazy. Behind the Maniototo’s back over in Cromwell the old dry country was being irrigated for dairy and other farming conversions. When I drive through parts of Central Otago now I don’t recognise the whenua my grandfather loved. It seems unnaturally green. Not with the dense bush that used to cover it when Māori first arrived in Aotearoa, but with these massive agricultural lawns and the viticulture that looks low impact but also affects the awa.
Last week this paper published a full page ad about the impending three waters scheme that made me wince. The ad was racist. It was meant to provoke anxieties about Māori taking over the place, which quite frankly is a place that was taken from tangata whenua. For a pittance. I know other Māori who saw that ad and did more than wince. It made them feel hurt and angry. Here was another representation of us as thieves. But how do you steal your own whenua? Besides, Māori don’t think about the whenua as something that belongs to us. When we recite our pepeha we are describing the whenua’s claim on us. This is why the word for placenta is also whenua. And why we bury our placenta in the whenua, or leave it too long in the freezer beside the frozen peas waiting to take it home.
The ad made me equivocate about whether I still want to write a monthly column for this newspaper, and I decided that I do. The Otago Daily Times reminds me of my grandfather reading it every morning in the caravan on our holidays at Glendhu Bay, I feel sentimentally attached to it, plus I love the court news and births, deaths and marriages. But also, I want Māori to be able to read positive stories about themselves. Kāi Tahu are mana whenua in Otago, but there are also Māori like me, who are nga hau e wha, from the four winds, and have chosen to make this place our home. I was born here in Dunedin, at Queen Mary hospital, but in a Māori sense, I am not of here.
Pākehā don’t tend to conceive of Central Otago as a Māori place, they don’t think of the amazing jade and blue of the Clutha River as being a Māori awa. But it is. It’s first name was Mata-au. I was so irritated by the article in Newsroom about Grahame Sydney and his great upset about the pines I went on the Kāi Tahu atlas kahurumanu.co.nz to exercise my annoyance. There is an interactive map feature on the site that names all the old names for these places Sydney thinks of as a vista. The Lammermoor range was known as Te Papanui. Even the Southern Alps bear the names of their old gods. Mt Cook was known as Aoraki for centuries. As I hovered over the little green markers each one revealed a story. The real name for the Old Man Range is Kopuwai. He was a giant who swallowed a river trying to catch a woman Kaiamio. These stories make the whenua swell into life.
They are also proof of how ancient the Māori connection to the whenua is, as ancient here as it is in the North Island. People make or break a place. And to imagine the whenua and the awa as something you can just take from, or that it is just there for a few irrelevant Pākehā artists to look at is part of the reason our rivers are such a mess. Even the name Maniototo is a butchering. It was originally called Māniatoto, which describes the way the eerie country could resemble a field of blood.
The ad was wrong. The cup we are drinking from was held by tangata whenua first, it is up to Pākehā to learn how to ask for a drink, or at least hand it back so we can both look after the wai.
