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Why build a fort?
'Ata is a tiny, remote island with virtually no reef and almost impossibly sheer cliffs. Why, then, would its inhabitants build a fort? Archaeologist David Burley is one of the few living humans to...
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Amendments
Along Awhitu's coast, south of the Manukau, the sea has eaten millions of tonnes of clay, of cliff. The red soil ends up on the north side of the harbour, where a new land as flat & perfect as a...
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I've been writing for the Spinoff about Philipism and RSA racism, and talking to Radio New Zealand about a slaver.
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The empty chapel
EP Thompson once met the last member of the Muggletonian religion, a Kentish fruit farmer named Noakes. As he expounded on Muggletonian doctrine, Noakes repeatedly said ‘We believe’, then looked...
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I've written for the Spinoff about Don Bassett's decline into white supremacism.
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Yanks
I have a column about New Zealand's strange and sometimes nightmarish history of contacts with America in the new issue of North & South.
View ArticleIn Patagonia
In percentage terms, the most devastating genocide of the 20th century didn't occur in Hitler's Europe or Rwanda - it happened at the bottom of South America, and NZers were partly responsible. I'm...
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Chaffing
I've got a piece about nude trampers and poetic mountaineers in the new North and South. Read it with your kit off.
View ArticleWords
Sam Russell from Lindin thinks that it is wrong for the Maori Party's co-leader to use the word 'Holocaust' in the context of New Zealand history. I've disagreed in this twitter thread.
View ArticleTomorrow
It was a pleasure to speak at the launch of MK Joseph's long-lost anti-fascist novel Tomorrow the World last weekend. Jack Ross has written about the launch on his blog. Ross has for years been trying...
View ArticleDark enlightenment
She's probably got bigger things to worry about right now, but I've queried the suddenly notorious Olivia Pierson's understanding of the Enlightenment in this twitter thread.
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Weka Pass
Last week I tramped to Weka Pass Cave, where people made art with charcoal and ochre five hundred or more years ago. Now I wonder: was that iron fence by the cave's limestone overhang intended to keep...
View ArticleWarriors in wood
I've written about the syncretic and subversive sculpture of Whare Joseph Thompson for EyeContact.
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The old gods
Some conservative older Pakeha are complaining about Labour's promise to make Matariki, or Maori New Year, a public holiday. They say Matariki was never part of their childhoods in the '60s or '70s....
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Influence
Many critics say that Rothko is outdated, irrelevant, that his blocks of layered colours & mystical ambitions represent a cul de sac in art history. What do they know? On the walls of the...
View ArticleA wormhole
Aucklanders may not be able to move far in space, but the realm of time is still open. A wormhole took me back to 1887. I wrote about the journey for EyeContact.
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Lockdown reading
When I was ten years old Khmer refugees arrived at my school, & my parents took me to see The Killing Fields at St James cinema. Since then I've been fascinated by Pol Pot & the Khmer Rouge;...
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Rekohu notes
19/7In one day Rekohu/Chatham/Wharekauri gave us five rainbows. I kept thinking of the back cover of Binney's great biography of Te Kooti, which shows a rainbow over Te Whanga Lagoon. The prophet &...
View ArticleFor empty plinths
A lot of Pakeha think that warmongers & land-grabbers are the only forebears we have, but history's more complex than that. At the Spinoff I've suggested four nineteenth century Pakeha heroes who...
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Five theses on the non-existence of the present
1 Wars are fought first in the imagination. The invasion of the Waikato was planned in Auckland; the city's toponyms record its guilt. Pt Chevalier had a firing range; the suburb is named after a top...
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