One Good Tern Deserves a Plover
I have endured some good-natured teasing from friends and acquaintances this week over a photograph of myself and Sylvia that appeared in Tuesday’s Guardian. If you did not see it – and I hope you didn’t – it shows us ankle-deep in the Ashburton River, dressed in gaiters, tramping shorts and (in my case) my daughter’s wide-brimmed school sunhat. Sylvia is peering through binoculars at an imagined point of focus somewhere off to the right, while I gesture wildly with out-flung arm, like Michelangelo’s Adam straining towards God.
A nineteenth century portrait artist would have painted out the river and invested the pose with a heroic Byronesque quality. In reality it was more like one of those satirical greeting cards. I imagine the caption: “after being lost for weeks in the wilderness Sylvia and Peter were astonished to see the same costume-hire shop they’d started from.”
Let me say that the photograph had a more serious purpose than simply to display us as objects of ridicule. We were on the Ashburton river to help with the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society’s annual bird count. I must also add that the photograph is completely fraudulent. At that time our involvement with Forest and Bird had been all of five minutes. We turned up to help with the bird count purely on a whim only to find ourselves hustled into the limelight by Ashburton’s merciless paparazzi.
Neither are we ornithological by nature. Any interest I had in birds was extinguished by a childhood in poultry. My father kept hundreds of hens, to whom I was enslaved as egg-collector, muck-raker and slaughterer; an experience that scarred me for life. Sylvia, growing up in the shadow of Liverpool’s docks, believed wildlife existed only in picture books until she came to New Zealand.
But we are fond of the outdoors and we joined the bird count mainly for the pleasure of spending a day strolling down the river. My expectations of actually counting birds were very low. Years of tramping have taught me that there are few birds in New Zealand’s great outdoors. There is a gulf between the iconic image of New Zealand as a country teeming with exotic bird life and the reality of bush and mountain landscapes where nothing moves or twitters except the occasional wood pigeon or fantail.
Like many who enjoy the mountains and bush my imagination has been captured at times by stories from early settlers in New Zealand describing vast flocks of wildfowl, forests shaking with birdlife and the deafening peal of the dawn chorus. A childhood hero was Richard Henry, New Zealand’s first genuine wildlife ranger, who fought the rising tide of rats and stoats in a doomed effort to save the kakapo of Dusky Sound.
For years I foolishly allowed myself to believe that the decimation of our native birdlife was firmly in the past. The publicity attached to heroic “snatched from the jaws of extinction” stories of the takahe, the kakapo and the Chatham Islands Robin suckered me into believing our wildlife’s darkest days were over.
Only recently, when I realised it has been years since I saw tui on Banks Peninsula, did I discover that life for our native bird populations is as bad as it has ever been – and often worse.
And we – humans – are the problem. We’re not always the immediate cause of birdlife decline - I believe the tuis of Banks Peninsula were devastated by the big snow of ’92 – but our activities, especially the destruction of habitat and food sources, are behind all the disasters.
Nowhere is this more true than in Canterbury where only tiny scraps of indigenous habitat remain and native birds eke out a poor existence on the fringes of highly modified environments. Efforts to revive and extend native ecosystems, creating ‘islands’ of bush and wetland that enable remnant populations of birds to connect, are taking shape and need urgent support.
With all this in mind we were delighted to find that the Ashburton River bed, while not exactly teeming with birdlife, is home to more varieties of birds than I imagined. By the end of the day I had recorded 19 species of birds, some in quite large numbers.
I enjoyed myself. I can now tell a tern from a plover, a stilt from an oystercatcher. I know that blue herons are really called white-faced herons and that a dotterel is not a thrush.
I discovered too that on a fine spring day, with wildflowers abundant and the sound of birdsong in the air, the Ashburton River bed possesses greater charm than I imagined. It will never become a tourist attraction but it’s a fine place to spend a little time, even in a silly hat and gaiters.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Monday, November 19, 2007
The Passionless People?
17th November 2007
Thirty years ago the New Zealand journalist and broadcaster Gordon McLauchlan wrote a book called The Passionless People in which, with surgical precision, he laid bare our shortcomings and rubbed salt into them.
‘The outstanding characteristics of the New Zealander,’ McLauchlan spat, ‘are his drab sameness and his emotional numbness, his inability to relate one to another with warmth, and his fear, even horror, of change.’ Don’t feel smug, girls, he meant you too.
McLauchlan castigated us for having no moral or social philosophy and no dreams beyond a slavish devotion to materialism. Our society was wholly divided among factional pressure groups ‘which exert their power almost exclusively for selfish needs without any sense of a total community.’
To read his book today is a slap in the eye for aging liberals like me who hark back to pre-Rogernomics New Zealand as a place of social justice and equal opportunities. ‘It all went wrong in the dreadful 80s,’ we whine, ‘when we sold our souls to the market place and pawned our ideals for the quick fix of consumerism.’ To believe McLauchlan we were as venal and self-centred thirty years ago as we are today.
McLauchlan’s writings from the 70s, and my own misgivings about the state of society today, may be nothing more than the lurch as one hits the downdraft of middle age. I notice in myself how thinning hair and narrowing prospects slide easily into cynicism.
But I’m intrigued by the word ‘passion.’ Are we a passionless people? In my memory the 70s brimmed with passion, usually in the back seats of cars. There we casually flipped the noun into a verb. We pashed.
Today we claim passion in all things. I have attended three secondary school prize-givings in the past week where speaker after speaker has exhorted our school leavers to embrace life with passion.
The message is getting through. The CVs I’ve been reading from beginning teachers ooze passion at every pore. These brave young people are passionate about all sorts of things: netball, snowboarding, various educational theorists, their cats, children and, mercifully, teaching.
This is commendable but I don’t think it’s what McLauchlan meant. He would say we have become too glib with the word, harnessing it to serve ego and ambition. In his mind the passion we lack as a people is not the passion of individual pursuits but of engaging with others at a level that transforms relationships and, eventually, society. According to McLauchlan we need to become ‘people-orientated’ and ‘express our emotions.’
McLauchlan is not the first or most recent person to chide kiwis for lacking strong emotions. But while we are not usually comfortable with those among us who lay their feelings bare, as Tame Iti would vouch, I find it hard to accept that we do not possess strong emotions nor find ways to express these to the common good.
Here’s a case in point. I visited the Christchurch A&P Show on Thursday and found myself, as usual, absorbed by the wood-chopping. As a spectator sport wood-chopping has remained unchanged since my youth, except that the singlets are now blue where once they were black. It is everything McLauchlan complained about: pragmatic, physical and monosyllabic – an emotion-free zone. The focus is firmly on log and axe, human interaction is minimal, victory is largely unremarked.
But for me wood-chopping oozes passion; you just have to look carefully for the signs. There is passion in the total focus on the task and the close camaraderie of a common purpose. Above all, there is passion in the relationship between man, axe and log. These large, rough men handle their axes with gentleness and reverence. They treat the logs with the respect accorded to a worthy adversary. When the whistle blows and the call is made to ‘step to your logs’ they lay the edge of the axe to the wood so tenderly. Then the count, heft and swing; the arc of the blade through the air and the first bite into the grain.
In a different culture these axemen would be bullfighters. They would wear tight, sequinned bolero jackets and small pointy shoes. They would pirouette and twirl their red capes, every movement perfectly balanced and crackling with emotion.
Gordon McLauchlan yearned for immigrants from rich and self-confident cultures whose influence would presumably arouse some passion in us and make us better than we are. Thirty years later his solution seems naïve. We look out at a world where even the oldest and most self-assured cultures are just as capable as ourselves at messing things up. Often those societies that seem most passionate are also the most destructive.
As a society we may continually struggle to express ourselves. We may seem dull compared to more flamboyant communities. But to say we are passionless is to confuse decoration with substance.
17th November 2007
Thirty years ago the New Zealand journalist and broadcaster Gordon McLauchlan wrote a book called The Passionless People in which, with surgical precision, he laid bare our shortcomings and rubbed salt into them.
‘The outstanding characteristics of the New Zealander,’ McLauchlan spat, ‘are his drab sameness and his emotional numbness, his inability to relate one to another with warmth, and his fear, even horror, of change.’ Don’t feel smug, girls, he meant you too.
McLauchlan castigated us for having no moral or social philosophy and no dreams beyond a slavish devotion to materialism. Our society was wholly divided among factional pressure groups ‘which exert their power almost exclusively for selfish needs without any sense of a total community.’
To read his book today is a slap in the eye for aging liberals like me who hark back to pre-Rogernomics New Zealand as a place of social justice and equal opportunities. ‘It all went wrong in the dreadful 80s,’ we whine, ‘when we sold our souls to the market place and pawned our ideals for the quick fix of consumerism.’ To believe McLauchlan we were as venal and self-centred thirty years ago as we are today.
McLauchlan’s writings from the 70s, and my own misgivings about the state of society today, may be nothing more than the lurch as one hits the downdraft of middle age. I notice in myself how thinning hair and narrowing prospects slide easily into cynicism.
But I’m intrigued by the word ‘passion.’ Are we a passionless people? In my memory the 70s brimmed with passion, usually in the back seats of cars. There we casually flipped the noun into a verb. We pashed.
Today we claim passion in all things. I have attended three secondary school prize-givings in the past week where speaker after speaker has exhorted our school leavers to embrace life with passion.
The message is getting through. The CVs I’ve been reading from beginning teachers ooze passion at every pore. These brave young people are passionate about all sorts of things: netball, snowboarding, various educational theorists, their cats, children and, mercifully, teaching.
This is commendable but I don’t think it’s what McLauchlan meant. He would say we have become too glib with the word, harnessing it to serve ego and ambition. In his mind the passion we lack as a people is not the passion of individual pursuits but of engaging with others at a level that transforms relationships and, eventually, society. According to McLauchlan we need to become ‘people-orientated’ and ‘express our emotions.’
McLauchlan is not the first or most recent person to chide kiwis for lacking strong emotions. But while we are not usually comfortable with those among us who lay their feelings bare, as Tame Iti would vouch, I find it hard to accept that we do not possess strong emotions nor find ways to express these to the common good.
Here’s a case in point. I visited the Christchurch A&P Show on Thursday and found myself, as usual, absorbed by the wood-chopping. As a spectator sport wood-chopping has remained unchanged since my youth, except that the singlets are now blue where once they were black. It is everything McLauchlan complained about: pragmatic, physical and monosyllabic – an emotion-free zone. The focus is firmly on log and axe, human interaction is minimal, victory is largely unremarked.
But for me wood-chopping oozes passion; you just have to look carefully for the signs. There is passion in the total focus on the task and the close camaraderie of a common purpose. Above all, there is passion in the relationship between man, axe and log. These large, rough men handle their axes with gentleness and reverence. They treat the logs with the respect accorded to a worthy adversary. When the whistle blows and the call is made to ‘step to your logs’ they lay the edge of the axe to the wood so tenderly. Then the count, heft and swing; the arc of the blade through the air and the first bite into the grain.
In a different culture these axemen would be bullfighters. They would wear tight, sequinned bolero jackets and small pointy shoes. They would pirouette and twirl their red capes, every movement perfectly balanced and crackling with emotion.
Gordon McLauchlan yearned for immigrants from rich and self-confident cultures whose influence would presumably arouse some passion in us and make us better than we are. Thirty years later his solution seems naïve. We look out at a world where even the oldest and most self-assured cultures are just as capable as ourselves at messing things up. Often those societies that seem most passionate are also the most destructive.
As a society we may continually struggle to express ourselves. We may seem dull compared to more flamboyant communities. But to say we are passionless is to confuse decoration with substance.
Trevor Mallard – From Dead Duck to Albatross
3rd November 2007
I have never thrown a punch in anger and have only been on the receiving end once. That was when I eleven and had been a smart arse to Bruce Brown at school.
He said he’d sort me out and at the end of the day he invited me, this is true, around the back of the bike shed. I followed him around the back, a bit bemused by it all, and copped his fist full in the face.
I sat down in consternation and started crying. So did Bruce – he’d connected with my cheekbone and I think it hurt him more than me. There we sat, looking at each other, tears streaming down our faces. After a while we got to our feet and went off to our respective homes. We were so embarrassed neither of us ever said a word about it to anybody else.
Oh, how Trevor Mallard must be wishing he’d chosen a quiet bike shed or a bit of long grass where he and Tau could indulge their tie-grappling and face punching.
Like most stupid behaviour, it is not the action itself that does the damage. Trevor, I imagine, quietly replays that left hook to Tau’s head with a degree of satisfaction. No, it is being caught that brings shame. Even accepting that adrenalin triumphed over reason in those few critical moments in the parliamentary lobby it is still inconceivable that Mallard would do something quite so stupid in the least private place in New Zealand.
He could hardly deny it and, to his credit I suppose, he hasn’t tried to deny or even defend the act. A week ago he must have thought, as we did, that he was a dead duck, his political career finished. If you punch somebody at work you get the sack, right? There was no way Helen Clark could keep him in cabinet, and possibly even in caucus. Surely she would send him down the road in the footsteps of David Benson-Pope, Taito Philip Field and John Tamihere. She would reason that Mallard’s presence would open Labour to ongoing ridicule and do untold harm to her government’s remaining credibility.
But we were wrong. This week Mallard is resurrected. The cabinet is reshuffled, the deck is dealt and, crikey! there are the same old cards and, grinning up like the joker, is Mallard himself, down from seventh place to tenth but still in the game.
The opposition must be delighted. Mallard’s continued presence in the cabinet, where they can take potshots at him to their heart’s content, simply adds strength to their bow ahead of next year’s election.
The move to keep Mallard is so bizarre I wonder if a more subtle strategy is at work here. I was in England in 2001 when the deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, thumped a young detractor during an election campaign. The media gasped, Tony Blair’s government held its breath and – their ratings went through the roof. Does Helen think Trevor’s tiff will give her government the same bounce? It’s hard to imagine.
Or is there a dark logic in Helen’s choice of portfolios for Trevor in the cabinet reshuffle? Does she think the Environment, Broadcasting and Labour ministries need a pugilistic rev up? Will we see Trevor descend, fists flailing, into the greenie protest movement? He’d probably win a few votes as long as he doesn’t deck a giant snail or tuatara. Broadcasting of course cries out for biffo. Trevor will be itching to take on the journos after recent events and we have a fine tradition of politicians thumping reporters – remember Bob Jones?
But these are frivolous thoughts. In reality, the Prime Minister will rue her decision to stick with Mallard.
In Samuel Coleridge’s great poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a sailor who kills an albatross brings a curse upon his ship and its crew. He is doomed to watch his crewmates die, tormented by thirst and demons. They in turn condemn him to hell on earth by hanging the dead albatross around his neck.
Helen Clark may find she has resurrected her dead duck only to discover she has an albatross hanging around the neck of the Labour government from here to the election.
3rd November 2007
I have never thrown a punch in anger and have only been on the receiving end once. That was when I eleven and had been a smart arse to Bruce Brown at school.
He said he’d sort me out and at the end of the day he invited me, this is true, around the back of the bike shed. I followed him around the back, a bit bemused by it all, and copped his fist full in the face.
I sat down in consternation and started crying. So did Bruce – he’d connected with my cheekbone and I think it hurt him more than me. There we sat, looking at each other, tears streaming down our faces. After a while we got to our feet and went off to our respective homes. We were so embarrassed neither of us ever said a word about it to anybody else.
Oh, how Trevor Mallard must be wishing he’d chosen a quiet bike shed or a bit of long grass where he and Tau could indulge their tie-grappling and face punching.
Like most stupid behaviour, it is not the action itself that does the damage. Trevor, I imagine, quietly replays that left hook to Tau’s head with a degree of satisfaction. No, it is being caught that brings shame. Even accepting that adrenalin triumphed over reason in those few critical moments in the parliamentary lobby it is still inconceivable that Mallard would do something quite so stupid in the least private place in New Zealand.
He could hardly deny it and, to his credit I suppose, he hasn’t tried to deny or even defend the act. A week ago he must have thought, as we did, that he was a dead duck, his political career finished. If you punch somebody at work you get the sack, right? There was no way Helen Clark could keep him in cabinet, and possibly even in caucus. Surely she would send him down the road in the footsteps of David Benson-Pope, Taito Philip Field and John Tamihere. She would reason that Mallard’s presence would open Labour to ongoing ridicule and do untold harm to her government’s remaining credibility.
But we were wrong. This week Mallard is resurrected. The cabinet is reshuffled, the deck is dealt and, crikey! there are the same old cards and, grinning up like the joker, is Mallard himself, down from seventh place to tenth but still in the game.
The opposition must be delighted. Mallard’s continued presence in the cabinet, where they can take potshots at him to their heart’s content, simply adds strength to their bow ahead of next year’s election.
The move to keep Mallard is so bizarre I wonder if a more subtle strategy is at work here. I was in England in 2001 when the deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, thumped a young detractor during an election campaign. The media gasped, Tony Blair’s government held its breath and – their ratings went through the roof. Does Helen think Trevor’s tiff will give her government the same bounce? It’s hard to imagine.
Or is there a dark logic in Helen’s choice of portfolios for Trevor in the cabinet reshuffle? Does she think the Environment, Broadcasting and Labour ministries need a pugilistic rev up? Will we see Trevor descend, fists flailing, into the greenie protest movement? He’d probably win a few votes as long as he doesn’t deck a giant snail or tuatara. Broadcasting of course cries out for biffo. Trevor will be itching to take on the journos after recent events and we have a fine tradition of politicians thumping reporters – remember Bob Jones?
But these are frivolous thoughts. In reality, the Prime Minister will rue her decision to stick with Mallard.
In Samuel Coleridge’s great poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a sailor who kills an albatross brings a curse upon his ship and its crew. He is doomed to watch his crewmates die, tormented by thirst and demons. They in turn condemn him to hell on earth by hanging the dead albatross around his neck.
Helen Clark may find she has resurrected her dead duck only to discover she has an albatross hanging around the neck of the Labour government from here to the election.
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