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Sir, there is dry rot in the Labour Party

October 13, 2014, 2:28 am
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In the second half of 2010 I spent a few hundred hours in the archives of the University of Auckland library, exploring the forest of Kendrick Smithyman's unpublished poems one tobacco-yellow, wine-stained leaf at a time. I collected several dozen of Smithyman's 'lost' poems in a book called Private Bestiary, but many had to be left in the wilds of the archive. 'Dry Rot in the Labour Party' didn't make my publication list in 2010, but its title has been echoing in my head lately. You can guess why.
Smithyman wrote the poem in 1951, the year when Labour, under the leadership of Stuart Nash's great grandfather, was struggling to remain on the sidelines of the Great Waterfront Lockout, a battle between the National government of Sid Holland and the militant section of the trade union movement led by wharfie Jock Barnes. 
Labour's failure to support Barnes and his comrades had been forseen by a young man named Robert Blake. In 1950 Blake had used an article for Here and Now, a small magazine linked to the Communist Party of New Zealand, to accuse Labour of abandoning its socialist policies in return for political respectability, and of betraying its allies in the trade union movement. Blake's article was called 'Dry Rot in the Labour Party'. 
Smithyman was an occasional contributor to Here and Now, and had espoused communist politics in some of the letters and poems he wrote from various barracks during World War Two. But his poem seems, to me at least, like a satire of Kiwi intellectuals who tried, in the unpropitious conditions of post-war New Zealand, to combine support for communism with a bohemian lifestyle and avant-garde tastes in the arts. As Smithyman takes the mickey out of Robert Blake and co., he offers a portrait of a cultural and political world that disappeared decades ago. 
Leave your interpretations in the comments box. 

Dry Rot in the Labour Party

Sir, I am my own man thinking my own thoughts,
not blown about by merely a popular wind

IS DRY ROT IN THE LABOUR PARTY

I come to my own conclusions without respect
to orthodoxy or heterodoxy, I find my way
believing
Read and relaxation are right for child-bearing
Margaret Mead is right for the anthropologist
political truth somewhere between Burnham and Bukharin's

DRY ROT IN THE LABOUR PARTY DRY ROT PARTY

Landfall is stodgy but Here and Now has purpose,
Weeks is the best painter in New Zealand,
recently I bought Lee-Johnsons, now I buy Patersons,
the Listener film notes aren't what they used to be,
we need ballet and opera and have a Recorded
Music Society to which I do not belong
although it is there if I want to belong to any

PARTY DRY PARTY DRY LABOUR

I discriminate in my jazz: I know some of the names
of some of the cats on the old platters and also
I know Derek who blows a mean licorice stick.
The National Symphony Orchestra? Always
the National Symphony Orchestra even if honestly
sometimes, you know,
                                 I like Cary's novels
but I don't think I should like Carew's novels
because there is
DRY ROT
and Sargeson. Sargeson writes good short stories
though his novels aren't novels and the Labour Party does
not labour.
                Next year I shall probably return to
Trollope since H. James I do not wish to read again -
still there is Eliot and the
Cocktail

            PARTY DRY PARTY

When I'm out at a party I drink beer.
Occasionally I make my own, I am not a brewer's lackey.
In the last three years I have known three interesting
families: Poppelbaum's, Vrcjmskuch's, and mine

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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Spitting on the artist

October 14, 2014, 4:36 pm
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The pressure began almost as soon as the artist had opened his exhibition. Sitting outside the gallery in the sun, he was confronted by a series of angry men and women. Several of them swore at him; one of them spat on him. Other unhappy citizens wrote complaints to the gallery, urging it to repudiate the artist.

On three separate occasions, members of the police force confronted and interrogated the artist. During the last of these grillings, the artist handed his inquisitors a letter from the gallery's manager, which explained the institution's support for his work. A policeman tore the piece of paper up, and the artist decided that the time had come for him to end his show.

The events I've been described didn't occur in Solzhenitsyn's Soviet Union, or in the Ayatollahs' Iran, but in the east Auckland suburb of Pakuranga, where Kalisolaite 'Uhila performed Mo'ui Tukuhausia, or Living Homeless, for two weeks in 2012.

We New Zealanders like to consider ourselves a tolerant, enlightened people. We chuckle when we see the televangelists of America or the mullahs of the Middle East condemn a pop song with naughty lyrics or a film with nude scenes as an insult to the Almighty; we shake our heads when we read about the arrest of demonstrators demanding democracy in China.

When Kalisoliate 'Uhila donned the tattered black uniform of a tramp and took up residence in the grounds of Te Tuhi gallery, though, he soon showed the limits of our tolerance and enlightenment. The sanctity of private property; the separation of our private, embarrassingly intimate, and public, respectable lives; the moral necessity of work: all of these solemn principles of our society seemed mocked by the silent man in black.

This year Mo'ui Tukuhausia was nominated for the Walters Prize, New Zealand's most prestigious art award. At the request of the Auckland City Art Gallery, Kalisoliate 'Uhila has just finished a three month reprise of the work that made him a familiar and sometimes controversial figure on the pavements and in the parks of our central city. In the latest of my series of essays for the online arts journal EyeContact, I've tried to counter the criticisms that 'Uhila has faced, and linked his performances with some of the radical intellectual and artistic traditions of his native Tonga.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

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Legalise P, but ban the Koran? The politics of Act's number six

July 21, 2014, 5:35 am
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Act leader Jamie Whyte has been promising voters that his party can have a stabilising influence on a National-led government. Act will stand solidly beside National, Whyte says, and can work constructively with Peter Dunne's United Future outfit, with the Maori Party, and with Colin Craig's Conservatives.

Whyte might like to check, though, whether all of the candidates on Act's recently-announced party list share his ecumenical philosophy. Stephen Berry, a former deputy leader of the Libertarianz Party who has been awarded the sixth slot on Act's list, has had some less than complimentary things to say about the organisations Whyte wants to work with. In a 2012 post to the Libertarianz-aligned blog Solo Passion, Berry condemned both the National and Maori parties as collections of 'talentless scumbag parasitical busybody politicians' who were forcing an ideology of 'pure fascism' on New Zealanders. Berry had been upset by National's support for Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia's call for more regulation of the tobacco industry.

When he ran as an independent candidate in the 2011 Tamaki byelection, Berry used a press release to promise that, if elected, he would refuse to support any government that included Peter Dunne. For Berry, Dunne's attempts to regulate legal highs made him an 'enemy of freedom'. In a blog post he made last year, when he was running for Auckland's mayoralty, Berry condemned Conservative Party leader Colin Craig as a 'village idiot' and a proponent of 'Big Socialism'.

Even the Act Party has at times seemed too much for Stephen Berry. In a press release written in 2003, when he was a member of the Libertarianz, Berry described Act as 'classically illiberal stinkers' with a 'Nanny-knows-best' attitude to politics. Berry had been outraged by Act MP Muriel Newman's warning that New Zealand was suffering a 'methamphetamine epidemic', and her call for more police resources to be given to the problem. Berry believed that Newman should have been supporting the 'individual freedoms' of P manufacturers and dealers, rather than sending the police after them.

There is a curious contrast between Berry's desire to legalise P and his apparent enthusiasm for a ban on one of the world's most popular books. In a post last year to Solo Passion, Berry mixed metaphors to warn that a 'plague of Islamic poison' was spreading across Europe, and suggested that followers of Mohammed's 'horrendous philosophy' might soon bring 'threats, violence' and 'sharia law' to New Zealand. Berry expressed his solidarity with Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who has famously demanded that the Koran be banned from Europe's libraries and bookshops and that mosques be closed down across the continent.
Islam is not the only religion that Berry considers a threat to freedom-loving Kiwis. In a 2012 blog post he denounced the Catholic church as an 'evil' organisation; in a statement issued during his fight for the seat of Tamaki he praised Guy Fawkes Day, which for centuries involved the burning of effigies of the Pope and the singing of anti-Catholic songs, as a 'celebration' of freedom.

Stephen Berry's sympathies for P dealers and hostility towards Muslims reflect his time in the Libertarianz, a party that has traditionally contested outfits like Democrats for Social Credit and McGillicuddy Serious for last place in New Zealand elections. Now he suddenly has a high spot on Act's list. If the party wins the Epsom electorate and grabs four percent of the vote, then Berry will enter parliament.

There is an embarrassing contradiction between Jamie Whyte's rhetoric about constructive partnership with other parties of the right and Stephen Berry's condemnations of the fascists, idiots, and other enemies of freedom in National, United Future, and even Act.

In different ways, both Whyte's rhetoric and Berry high list spot are products of the crisis of the Act Party over recent years.

As scandals and poor leadership have seen Act plunge in the polls, most of its more moderate, opportunistic members have defected to National or to Colin Craig's Conservatives. The defectors have left a vacuum which has been happily filled by Berry and other libertarians.

But Act's weakness has deprived its leaders of the ability to distance and differentiate themselves from National. With seven or eight members of parliament on his team, an Act leader like Richard Prebble could urge a radically right-wing programme on his National ally. Today, when his party is polling in the margin of error and dependent on National's charity for the seat of Epsom, Act's leader is forced to present himself as a guarantor of stability in a centre-right government.

If he wants his message of moderation to have any credibility, then Jamie Whyte might have to keep Stephen Berry away from the internet.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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Fantasy islands

October 19, 2014, 4:17 pm
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Apostles of digital reality sometimes claim that everything in the world, and a little more besides, exists on the internet, but the web seemed to me a terribly incomplete place - a poor copy of reality, like the shadows that trembled on the wall of Plato's cave - without this map, which I've scanned from Tin Can Island, CR Ramsay's 1938 book about Niuafo'ou, the regularly active volcano in the far, semi-fabulous northern zone of the Kingdom of Tonga.

Ramsay ran Niuafo'ou's store and designed its postal system, which saw muscled young men holding cans full of postcards and letters above the water while they swam to passing cargo ships.

When I look at Ramsay's map of Niuafo'ou, I can't easily separate fact from fantasy. For a distant admirer like me, the island's warm crater lake, which contains islands and an island lake of its own, seem as impossibly marvellous as the cherub who wheezes in the map's northwestern corner.
My older son has his own fantasy island. He is convinced that Rangitoto - or Langitoto, as the Tongans, whose tongues do not like the trill of the letter 'r', call it - is, along with Indonesia's Komodo Island, the chief habitat of the world's relict dinosaurs.

I grew up commanding armies of stunted toy soldiers and fighting with stick guns for the ditch-trenches of the family farm, but my wife has banned me from making our children into militarists. When he sees a gun on television or in a cast-off piece of newspaper, my son has learned to call the strange device a telescope.

When Aneirin and I recently climbed that most fabled and tunneled of Auckland's hills, Maungauika/North Head, and discovered a large gun near the northern summit, pointing towards Rangitoto, he decided, quite reasonably, that it was a telescope made to help visitors 'spy on the dinosaurs' of the nearby island. He looked down the barrel of the instrument and began to describe the fantastic creatures of Rangitoto.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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Art and the Occupy generation

October 22, 2014, 8:29 pm
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My essay about the Tongan-New Zealand performance artist 'Ite 'Uhila, who lived rough on Auckland's streets over winter, has provoked a few discussions since it was published last week at EyeContact. 

'Uhila's street performance, which was called Mo'ui Tukuhausia, was one of the four artworks to make the shortlist for this year's Walters' Prize, but missed out to Luke Willis Thompson's equally controversial inthisholeonthisislandwhereiam.

Thompson's work saw visitors to a gallery space being led by a security guard down a long corridor and delivered to a taxi driver, who in turn took them to the home of the artist's mother, where they were invited to look about. 

Over on facebook, one commenter used my essay to draw a contrast between 'Uhila and Thompson. According to her, Thompson's work was 'weak and washed out' compared to Mo'ui Tukuhausia, and only won the Walters Prize because of the racism of the New Zealand art world. 

Here's the response I made on facebook: 

I agree that there is a lack of knowledge about the cultural and historical contexts in which many Tongan artists work amongst Pakeha who visit galleries and museums, and I think that this lack of knowledge probably contributed to the failure of 'Ite to win the Walters. There's an irony in the way that Pakeha interested in the arts, as students or practitioners of critics, will devour difficult, often convoluted texts by European intellectuals - Derrida and Zizek and Baudrillard and so on - but won't consider the work of Pasifika intellectuals like, say, Futa Helu or Epeli Hau'ofa, or learn about the traditions within which, say, ngatu artists work, because that stuff is - to quote the sort of words I've heard used - too 'alien' or 'esoteric'! I understand these contradictory attitudes, because I used to harbour them myself. 

I'm not sure I agree with you, though, when you try to make a dichotomy between 'Uhila and Luke Willis Thompson, and suggest that Thompson was much less deserving of the Walters than 'Ite. 

It seems to me that 'Ite and Thompson's shortlisted works had several things in common. Both were attempts to steer their audiences away from the art gallery, both were questioning where the boundary between art and the rest of the world lies, and both seemed, to me at least, to be making critical statements about the way Niu Sila society operates. 

'Ite threw away the artist's normal repertoire of tricks, abandoned the gallery, became a haua, and tried to show that some of the virtues we see in artists, and in other esteemed members of society, are also present in the despised homeless on our streets, if only we would look. 

For his part, Thompson forced visitors out of the safe, antiseptic space of the gallery, led them to a cool, slightly rundown, and eerily empty home, and seemed to ask them to meditate on the relationship between the everyday world in which we live and the tidied up, beautified world of art and the art gallery. 

I think that 'Ite and Thompson are both artists who belong to a generation that is questioning, in a perhaps inchoate way, the verities of market capitalism and runaway technology, and seeking some more authentic way of being in the world. We might perhaps, call theirs the 'Occupy Generation', after the protesters who tried to bring direct human interaction to the alienated wildernesses of our central cities. I certainly see something of the idealism of the Occupy protesters in the methods of both 'Ite and Thompson. Both seem to want to break down the walls between artist and audience and art and life, and substitute human intimacy for the formal operations of galleries and the art market. 
In the discussion thread underneath my piece about 'Ite for EyeContact, I've argued that there are some risks involved in trying to get rid of the distinctions between art and life and artist and audience. As you can see, Daniel Webby disagrees with me. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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Islands sailing away

October 28, 2014, 3:44 pm
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[I 'm grateful to be one of the first two recipients of the D'Arcy Residency, which has been established encourage the writing of long essays about New Zealand's cultural history. Beginning next September, I'll be hunkering down for three months in the D'Arcy cottage on Waiheke Island, and turning out a ten thousand word essay - the core of a book - on New Zealand's role in the nineteenth century Pacific slave trade. I've chosen to head to Waiheke towards the end of next year because I want to get back to the tropical Pacific, and listen again to the kava circles and archives there, before beginning my book.
Here are a couple of excerpts from the synopsis I sent to the committee that awarded the D'Arcy Residencies for 2015, along with some hyperlinks to posts on this blog that have discussed my research into New Zealand's slaving history.] 
One day in the winter of 1863, a strange boat anchored off ‘Ata, a tiny, reefless, rocky island at the southern end of the Kingdom of Tonga. Although it had spent most of its career hunting whales in the cold waters around southern New Zealand, the Grecian had recently been painted black and white, so that it looked like a man ‘o war. 
The Grecian's captain, Thomas McGrath, shouted that he wished to trade with the inhabitants of ‘Ata, and invited them aboard his vessel. McGrath was an Australian who had settled in New Zealand, and his crew, a mixture of Pakeha and Maori, had been recruited in the Chatham Islands.
One hundred and thirty-three 'Atans - almost half of the population of the island - took up McGrath’s offer, sliding expertly down cliffs, pushing through the surf, and climbing the side of the Grecian. They would never see their homeland again. McGrath and his crew locked the 'Atans in the hold of the Grecian and sailed to the northern Cook Islands, where they sold their cargo to slavers bound for Peru.
When he learned of the raid by the Grecian, Tonga's king ordered the evacuation of 'Ata, and despatched a boat to carry the remaining 'Atans to the much larger, more northerly island of 'Eua. In a clearing cut from 'Eua's bush, the 'Atans established a settlement that they named Kolomaile, after the only village on their lost homeland. 
Last year, when I was teaching in Tonga, I visited Kolomaile in the company of Taniela Vao, a lay minister in the Free Wesleyan church and long-time scholar of his country’s history. As Taniela and I drank kava, the inhabitants of Kolomaile told stories about the tragedy of 1863, and described their longing to visit the island where their ancestors are buried. 
The raid on 'Ata was only one episode in a decades-long slave trade. Peru had banned the importing of slaves by the middle of the 1860s, but before the end of the nineteenth century hundreds of vessels carried captives from scores of Pacific islands to places like Fiji, Queensland, Samoa, and Tahiti. The traffickers were often called 'blackbirders' or, more euphemistically, 'labour traders'. Huge and profitable sugar, tobacco, coffee, and cotton plantations were made from their labours. 
The similarities between the vanquished American Confederacy and the colonial plantations of the South Pacific were not coincidental. After the defeat of the Confederate army and the emancipation of southern slaves in 1865, plantation owners in the south were ruined. Thousands of them fled to Mexico, South America, and the Pacific and sought to recreate the society they had lost. By the end of the 1860s more than two hundred Americans, many of them former Confederates, were living in Fiji, where they formed a branch of the Ku Klux Klan and put new slaves to work on new plantations. Other ex-Confederates became blackbirders, and worked closely with their New Zealand peers.
'Bully' Hayes, the most famous of all the blackbirders, was born in America but frequently used New Zealand as his base. Hayes boasted of his 'adventures' cruising the tropics seizing slaves and raping women and girls, but he was never molested by New Zealand authorities, even after he sailed out of Lyttleton in 1869 and kidnapped one hundred and fifty Niueans to sell to cotton farmers on Fiji... 
In May 1870 the slave trade reached the shores of New Zealand, as the schooner Lulu arrived in Auckland with a cargo of twenty-seven men from the New Hebridean island of Efate...
The slave raids of the nineteenth century are remembered by storytellers and singers in Kolomaile, and in many other Pacific villages, but they have been forgotten in New Zealand. No statue or plaque memorialises the tragedies of islands like 'Ata, or the sufferings of the slaves who landed on the Lulu. Many Australian historians have written about the importance of blackbirding to Queensland's economic development, but few Kiwi scholars have discussed our country's slaving history.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though, New Zealand's popular culture was full of references to men like Bully Hayes. The raids that Hayes and his peers made on tropical islands and the battles they sometime fought with islanders were romanticised and celebrated in songs, poems, and popular histories. Louis Becke wrote bestselling accounts of the life of Hayes; WB Churchward's Blackbirding in the South Pacific appalled and titillated Victorian audiences with its gore. 
By putting the stories told by the people of Kolomaile and other Pacific communities alongside the forgotten texts produced in nineteenth century New Zealand, I want to view this sad and salutary chapter in our history from two sides. After describing the most important events in the blackbirding era and introducing some of the actors in the drama, I want to explain the ways that both the storytellers of villages like Kolomaile and the palangi writers of the Victorian era perceived and presented events like the raid on 'Ata... 
The slave trade of the nineteenth century finds eerie echoes in the twenty-first century. The Recognised Seasonal Employment Scheme, which has in recent years seen thousands of Tongans and other Pacific Islanders come to New Zealand and Australia to work for low wages without offering them any chance of permanent residency, has been condemned by some Polynesian leaders as racist and exploitative. In a television debate held during New Zealand’s 2014 election campaign, Hone Harawira characterised the scheme as a form of ‘slavery’.
In a series of articles that were published in the Sunday Star Times in 2011 and eventually prompted a government investigation and legislation, journalist and historian Michael Field revealed that the Asian and Pacific Island crews of some ships fishing in New Zealand’s territorial waters were being beaten, denied adequate food, and paid derisory wages. Field likened the workers on these ships to slaves.
When we realise that New Zealand was deeply involved in a nineteenth century slave trade, then the abuses documented by Simon Field and the restrictions placed on contemporary migrant labourers can be seen in a new perspective. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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Marching and fighting

November 2, 2014, 2:06 pm
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[My essay 'Marching and Fighting in the Friendly Islands' was a runner-up in this year's Landfall Essay Competition, and has been published in the latest, 228th issue of New Zealand's oldest surviving cultural journal. The essay was my attempt to understand the school-on-school violence that troubled Tongatapu last year, and sometime made parts of the island's only city feel like a riot zone. 

Here are some excerpts from my essay, along with some photographs I took while I was researching it. Buy Landfall 228 and get the full text, as well as the work of the other finalists in this year's competition.]

Every year students from the schools of Tongatapu assemble in Nuku’alofa, and march through the centre of the city to the Tongan royal palace and the country's parliament. After wandering down to Taufa’ahau Road to join the crowds celebrating School Parade Day, I was confronted by the Liahona High School brass marching band.

Liahona is a village in the centre of Tongatapu that is famous for its emormous Mormon temple, which comes complete with a faux-gold steeple, and for the large SPEAK ENGLISH ONLY PLEASE signs that are nailed to its bus stop. The Mormons are regularly accused of wanting to turn Tonga into a replica of that latter-day Zion, Salt Lake City. Fifteen thousand Mormon converts from the Friendly Islands have settled in the capital of Utah, with the assistance of the American church, and wags insist that the green colour of the Liahona school flag and uniform is a reference to the green card that all Tongan Mormons allegedly covet.

The band I encountered on Taufa’ahau Road took their inspiration not from the staid streets of Salt Lake City but from the vulgar and lively city of New Orleans. Led by a young man wearing a gold crown and the sort of white and gold suit that James Brown appropriated from southern Baptist preachers fifty years ago, the Mormons alternated fusillades of jazz with casually synchronised dance moves. They might have line stepped off the set of Treme, David Simon’s post-Katrina tele-portrait of New Orleans’ embattled but joyous dancers and singers. 
The Mormons were followed down Taufa’ahau Road by members of the Anglican St Andrews school, who carried a Scottish flag and thumped on outsized drums. The Anglicans had chosen austere blue uniforms, but students of Apifo’ou College, the huge Catholic institution on Nuku’alofa’s swampy eastern margins, showed off reds and oranges and were led by a young man twirling a rainbow-coloured cane.

As school after school marched past I remembered a recent suggestion by Lose Miller-Helu, who was one of my colleagues at the ‘Atenisi Institute, a doggedly liberal little school on the outskirts of Nuku’alofa. Lose believed that ‘Atenisi should send a detachment to the parade. “The whole of Tongatapu will be there” she had told one of our staff meetings. “People will notice. We could beat on drums, one of the students could blow a flute, we could all dress up, and march in lines…”

When I asked them, though, ‘Atenisi’s students were unimpressed by the prospect of becoming footsoldiers in Lose’s army.

“That parade is very tiresome”, Tevita Manu’atu had said, looking up from the volume of Nietzsche he was reading in a corner of the classroom and scratching his Afro. “You’ll think it’s impressive because you will not have seen it before. But every year is the same. The same banners, uniforms, slogans. No change. No development.”  Other students simply laughed or sniggered when I asked for volunteers for a march down Taufa’ahau Road. 
A day or so later, at one of the gatherings where ‘Atenisians drink kava, gossip, sing Tongan poems, and argue about subjects like pre-Socratic philosophy and local politics, the poet and dramaturge Murray Edmond, who was visiting our institution, tried to reconcile Lose’s and Tevita’s positions. “Think of it in a Zen way” he urged. “You’re participating by not participating. You make your contribution by being absent.”

Now that I was watching the parade I was pleased that ‘Atenisi hadn’t attempted to join it. How could we compete with the dance moves and jazz solos of the Mormons, or the sartorial splendour of those Catholic schoolboys?

The crowd that stood on the pavements of Taufa’ahau Road – thick concrete pavements laid a couple of years ago, by the Chinese coolies imported to rebuild downtown Nuku’alofa after the riot of 2006, but already cracked and tilted – was applauding loudly, but many of the marchers appeared both solemn and subdued. An hour or so later, as I walked westward towards the ‘Atenisi campus, I saw handfuls of them waiting for buses in the shade of coconut trees that craned their necks curiously over the iron fences of Nuku’alofa’s suburban front yards. A Liahona student had thrown his puffy white hat onto the roadside dust; a tuba sat, snout-down, in the lap of a yawning classmate. An inmate of Lavengamalie, the school of the fissiparous, wildly Pentecostal Tokaikolo Fellowship, was pulling at the brass buttons of his waistcoat, loosening his tie, and sucking in the hot afternoon air.

Looking at these handsomely and uncomfortably dressed young men, I remembered a story that a senior New Zealand trade unionist told me about a journey he had made to Cuba. Not content with wearing a T shirt adorned by Che Guevara’s glare, the trade unionist had gotten a tattoo of Che on an intimate part of his body. When he was finally able to visit the nation he admired, he took the opportunity of joining a huge march held to celebrate May Day.

As they stomped through downtown Havana the marchers chanted slogans against imperialism and for socialism, and waved placards decorated with portraits of Che and Fidel Castro. Walking home after the march, though, the Kiwi friend of the Cuban revolution noticed hundreds of abandoned placards. Once they had appeased party bosses by performing their annual ritual, the marchers had dumped Che and Fidel into the nearest gutter. I wondered whether the student paraders of Nuku’alofa were motivated by the same sort of dull duty as the reluctant marchers of Havana.

Back at ‘Atenisi I found Tevita Manu’atu lying on a long bench in the sun, reading Facebook rather than philosophy. When I offered him my theory about the motives of the school marchers, Tevita recovered his Nietzschean querulousness. “They have passion for their school, but they show it in their own way” he insisted. “They show it by fighting. Go downtown late on Friday night – you’ll see students from different schools facing off, fighting. They use fists, but sometimes also bush knives. Sometimes petrol bombs get thrown.”...

A month or so after School Parades Day fighting between Tongan schoolboys made the news in Australia and New Zealand, and kicked off a tearful public debate in the Friendly Islands.

Tupou College and Tonga College are the country’s two oldest and most prestigious schools. They also have a long history of warring. One night in June, in revenge for some previous act of violence, hundreds of Tupou College students piled into a truck and other vehicles and descended on the home of a Tonga College student in Ma’ufanga, an eastern suburb of Nuku’alofa. By the end of the evening one hundred and fifty Tonga College students were in hospital, and one hundred and fifty Tupou College students had been stuffed into the cells of Nuku’alofa’s central police station. 

The principals of both schools were soon crying and praying on television, and Tonga’s Police Commissioner, a grave, gaunt palangi mysteriously transferred from his beat in New Zealand, told a radio station that his force could not solve the problem of schoolboy warfare. Letter writers to Tonga’s newspapers called for the closure of both Tupou and Tonga colleges.

A week after the riot in Ma'ufanga ‘Atenisi held a kava session in honour of the veteran Pacific journalist Tony Haas, who was keen to talk about the problems of the Friendly Islands. Between downing cups of the sacred brown liquid and singing – or, in my case, uncertainly humming – the poems of Queen Salote, we discussed Tonga’s schoolboy wars.

Tevita Manu’atu was in no doubt about the cause of the latest violence. He pointed out that the rivalry between Tupou and Tonga colleges went back to the 1880s, when King Tupou I had founded the Free Wesleyan Church to free his country from what he considered the imperialist influence of the London-based international Methodist movement. Tupou’s mentor was Shirley Baker, a former Methodist missionary turned Tongan nationalist, and Baker’s great enemy was John Moulton, an ‘orthodox’ Methodist who opposed the establishment of the Free Wesleyan church and maintained close relations with the British High Commissioner for the Western Pacific. 
Encouraged by Moulton, thousands of Tongans refused to join the new church; these dissidents, who became known as the fakaongo, suffered imprisonment and beatings. One night in 1887 a band of Moulton’s disciples tried to assassinate Shirley Baker as he rode his horse along Nuku’alofa’s waterfront. Baker dodged the bullets, but hundreds of fakaongo were exiled to a small Fijian island. Eventually the outcasts were recalled to Tonga, and allowed to form their own Church of Tonga.

While Tupou College is run by the Free Wesleyan Church, Tonga College is a government school, and has always been hospitable to students from Church of Tonga families. Tevita Manu’atu sees the recent battles between the students of the two schools as a recurrence of the struggles of the 1880s. “They’ve fought each other ever since then” he said, “and they’re not going to stop”. 
Maikolo Horowitz, a long-time staff member at the ‘Atenisi Institute, had a different perspective on the schoolboy warfare. “Has anyone noticed”, he asked the kava circle, “that only the Protestant schools are at war? Apifo’ou College has no problems with violence. The Catholics don’t fight.”

Maikolo grew up in a Jewish section of New York City with a kabbalist father and a Trotskyist mother, and has always been interested in the sociology of religion. He discussed Emile Durkheim’s famous contrast between the high suicide rate in Protestant northern Europe and the relatively low rate in Catholic southern Europe. “Protestants are tightly wound” Maikolo insisted. “The Protestant internalises violence through repression and then externalises it.”

The Tongan-Waikato sculptor and scholar Visesio Siasau could not accept Maikolo’s dichotomy. Visesio grew up in an intensely Catholic family, and attended Apifo’ou College, but has begun to create astonishing artworks which juxtapose and sometimes fuse the symbols of Christianity with the imagery of traditional Tongan religion. He has shown the ancient artisan-God Tangaloa Tufunga writhing on a cross, and Hiku’leo, the overseer of Pulotu, the Tongan land of the dead, befriending Mary and Joseph. 
“Catholicism works subtly” Visesio said, “but its doctrine is more powerful because of its subtlety. It is a total system, a total view of the world, totalitarian”. Visesio could not see Tonga’s Catholic minority, which has been excluded from power by the Tupou dynasty and helped to found the pro-democracy movement in the 1980s and ‘90s, as a bastion of liberalism and pluralism. His syncretic artworks, with their implicit appeal for religious tolerance, have not always delighted his family.

Visesio wondered whether Tonga’s warlike schoolboys weren’t simply aping the behaviour of their elders. “There is violence at every level of Tongan education” he said. “Teachers beat senior students. Senior students, prefects, beat younger students. This is all legal, legal and expected. Is it any surprise students go out and fight their peers?”

‘Opeti Taliai, the Dean of ‘Atenisi, didn’t disagree with Visesio, but cited boredom as an additional reason for schoolboy warfare. “These schools are stuck out in the countryside” he pointed out. “These boys sit in the bush without any stimulus. They aren’t taught how to use their minds. They don’t read, think.” ‘Opeti noted that old boys of many schools are involved in the violence. “They finish school and go back to their villages and have nothing to do” he said. “They can’t take part in the agricultural economy, either because they don’t have the skills or because of a lack of land. They are surplus labour. They find it hard to marry. Their school is what they have.”

‘Opeti’s comments made me think of the role that the geography of Tonga’s largest island might play in its social problems.

From the air, Tongatapu looks like a small place. As they fold their trays and click their seatbelts, passengers on incoming jets can glance out their windows and take in the whole island, from the beach-lined curve of Hihifo peninsula in the far west to the sun-struck rooves of Nuku’alofa in the north to the big plantations of the southeast. With its flat fields of crops framed by coconut trees as straight and pale as the pillars of Greek temples, the island looks both orderly and inviting.

On the ground, though, Tongatapu is more complicated. The smoothest and widest road in Tonga connects the airport, in the southeast corner of the island, with Nuku’alofa. Paved roads strike out hopefully from the airport route, only to decline, in a few metres or kilometres, into muddy tracks shelled by coconuts and tormented by sharp turns. The plantations that looked like tracts of savannah from the air turn out to be tangles of chest-high tapioca or vanilla. Creepers studded with thorns and thistles guard ancient sunken pathways between the fields. The traveller’s eye looks for relief toward the horizon, with its empty stretches of ocean, but is blocked by those walls of coconut trees. 
Unlike rural New Zealanders, with their penchant for isolated farmhouses and lifestyle blocks, Tongans countryfolk live together in tight little villages. Only outcasts, madmen, and the odd palangi hermit live in the stretches of bush that lie like a sea between official settlements.

The broken roads, claustrophobic fields, and uninhabited zones of the Tongatapu countryside can make visitors very lonely very quickly.

With its English-speaking population, its colonies of Chinese and palangi, its cafes, bars, and supermarkets, Nuku’alofa is a place apart from the rest of Tongatapu. Some Nuku’alofans refer to the inhabitants of the villages beyond their town as ‘fakapoule’, or the ‘the unenlightened ones’. Many wealthier Nuku’alofans are more familiar with Sydney and Auckland than with the outer villages of their own island. The self-consciously modern village of Liahona is an exception to the rule of the countryside. 


The riot that destroyed a third of downtown Nuku’alofa in 2006 was blamed on Tonga’s pro-democracy movement, but it was teenagers from Tongatapu’s remote villages who did much of the burning and looting. ‘Iliasa Helu, the son of ‘Atenisi’s late founder Futa Helu and the keeper of the institution’s library, told me that he saw cars speeding up and down Taufa’ahau Road, through the smoke from the ruins of Chinese-owned stores and the city’s cinema. “They were opening their doors and leaning out the windows and shouting at us” ‘Iliasa remembered. “They were shouting ‘The capital will return to Lapaha!”

Built on the shore of Fanga’uta lagoon in the east of Tongatapu, Lapaha was the seat of the ancient Tu’i Tonga dynasty, which dominated the country until being pushed aside by Tupou I in the nineteenth century. Today Lapaha is a village of overgrown stone monuments and dried-up moats, whose Catholic inhabitants complain of neglect at the hands of Tonga’s establishment. For some of these marginalised Tongans, the 2006 riot was a chance for revenge.

Some Nuku’alofans have seen the recent schoolboy riot in Ma’ufanga as another invasion from the countryside, and another hint of the future. The uniformed young men and women who strode so smartly through Nuku’alofa on School Parade Day may return, in different dress, to conquer the city. 
I drove out to Tupou College one warm afternoon with ‘Opeti Taliai and the Kiwi architect Andrew Alcorn, who was looking for an antique fale-church – a dome of light, handcut logs lashed together with thousands of coconut fibres – which had stood on Mount Zion, the Nuku’alofa fort that had been the besieged stronghold of Christianity on Tongatapu, before being moved somewhere inland. We turned off the road around Fanga’uta, the shallow muddy lagoon that takes a bite out of northern Tongatapu, and drove south, into the centre of the island, past fields filled with burning elephant grass. 

A great circle of wooden cottages radiated from a concrete office block on which a hermit crab, the emblem of Tupou College, had been painted in blue. The cottages belonged to teachers, ‘Opeti explained: staff, as well as students, are obliged to live on this remote campus. The Dean of ‘Atenisi gestured at a large concrete house that sat on a grassy mound. “That mound was built a long time ago, for the fale of a local chief” he said. “It’s a sign of status. They’ve built the headmaster’s house there.”

The students lived and studied in a complex of rectangular, low-rooved buildings behind the office. Further back still was a wall of coconut trunks. “There’s a big plantation out there” ‘Opeti said. “It goes all the way to the airport. The students grow a lot of food. The school tries to be self-sufficient.” 
As we walked across the campus, searching for the curving walls of the Mount Zion fale, ‘Opeti pointed at the wire grill fitted tightly across a window. Faces smiled through the wire, and somewhere behind them a deep, bush preacher’s voice recited a series of prime numbers so slowly and reverently that it might have been reading the Lord’s Prayer. “I’m afraid they’ll grab us and put us in the Tupou uniform”, ‘Opeti whispered.

An unsmiling teacher wearing a blue tupenu, a white shirt, and a blue tie eventually emerged from the office to tell us that the fale from Mount Zion stood on the other side of the island, in the grounds of the Wesleyan theological college. ‘Opeti asked him whether we might make a short presentation to any senior students who were not in class. “They might like to know about ‘Atenisi, in case they’d like to study there next year” he explained. The teacher, who still hadn’t introduced himself, produced a tiny key, unlocked a large metal door, and ushered us into a dim room filled with rectangular tables. We stood in the gloom and waited, until half a dozen students filed in, smiling tightly. They were wearing blue tupenu and white shirts, but they lacked ties.

‘Opeti spoke to the students in Tongan. I sat down on a stool and listened hard, but could only understand his introduction and the occasional palangi proper noun: Heraclitus, Kant, Hegel. The students listened mutely. 

Shortly after ‘Opeti dropped the mysterious name Heidegger, a rat ran across the floor towards me, skipped over my feet, which had not had time to recoil, and disappeared through a fist-sized piece of rust in the bottom of the door. When we were back outside, in the bright and suddenly comforting afternoon light, I told ‘Opeti and Andrew about the rodent. ‘Opeti, who grew up in the Tongatapu countryside, began to laugh. “What did you expect it to do?” he asked. “Did you think it was going to raise a paw, and ask to go to the bathroom?”

...Before I can ask any more questions a bell rings.  A fat man is standing under the administration building’s hermit crab, waving his hands. Without looking at me, the students hurry off in his direction. “They probably have work duties” ‘Opeti tells me, as I walk back towards his car. “Lots of work in that plantation. We should get back to town.”

We drove back through the circle of teachers’ homes, down the long road to the lagoon.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]



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The perils of reading

November 6, 2014, 7:49 pm
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I have just been reading the United Nations'list of International Days, and have noted that two very important dates are fast approaching.

November the 19th is World Toilet Day; November the 20th is World Philosophy Day. I think that the United Nations' juxtaposition of the scatological and the epistemological is appropriate: as that dodgy Greek Diogenes acknowledged thousands of years ago, the art of thinking closely approximates the art of crapping.

If I have gotten rid of my hangovers from the shindigs on the 19th and the 20th of November, then I'll have to remember to celebrate International Day of the Bible on November the 24th. If a group of American evangelicals have their way, then the world's people will spend the 24th reading and discussing passages from the Old and New Testaments, in the sort of mass study session that Mao used to organise for fans of his Little Red Book.

I've never been a reliable churchgoer - I went nearly every week when I lived in Tonga last year, out of a mixture of loneliness, anthropological curiosity, and delight at hearing the singing and seeing the beautiful costumes of other worshippers, but I would switch denominations and venues constantly - and the Bible is, along with Joyce's Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow, one of those great books that I have always chosen, out of a mixture of cowardice and laziness, to read as a collection of fragments.

Yet when my Christian friends talk about the perils and puzzles of Biblical exegeses and theological argument, though, I feel a certain affinity them, because I spent years opening and closing the sacred and profane books of Marxist theory. I'm not sure if any scholar of the Book of Revelations or the Kabbala can rival Althusser or Bordiga for either exegetical pedantry or eschatological fury.

Whether they are studying the Bible or Das Kapital or old bus timetables, scholars of texts have to struggle with and against the exasperating and wonderful capacity of words, sentences, and chapters to change their meanings. Every time a book is opened the words are the same, and yet different. New contexts and new readers scramble and reassemble their codes.

The International Day of the Bible is supposed to create peace and understanding; given the nature of reading, I think that is more likely to foster vociferous disagreement. Let me offer some doggerel, as an advance contribution to the event.

Three Poems for the International Day of the Bible

1. Surplus Value

When Marx died
his books rebelled.
Letters, words, chapters
in Das Kapital
tapped to one another
like prisoners
in adjacent cells.
They crawled across the page,
changed places
and shapes.
Money became yeoman,
bourgeoisie turned to embarkation,
surplus was succubus.

2. Note on Some Remarks on Early Martyrs of the Church, Illustrated by Woodcuts

Tissue paper on the engravings
like bandages:

the book is old
its wounds won't heal

3. Hermeneutics in Tonga

In the centre
of Palenapa's fale:
the Bible lies
under a long-handled
bush knife,
as if the Lord's word
were a whetstone.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]





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For and against Islamism: the West's hypocritical war in Iraq

November 9, 2014, 3:00 pm
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[This is a comment I made during a recent facebook discussion about the endless war in Iraq.]

After condemning the violently sectarian politics of the Islamist outfit ISIS, John Key has announced that members of the New Zealand army will be sent to Baghdad to help train Iraq's army. It is hard to think of any gesture less likely to lead to the defeat of Islamism in the Middle East. 

Iraq's government is controlled, after all, by a collection of parties that practice Islamist politics. Where ISIS presents itself as the representative of Sunni Muslims, and kills or enslaves members of other religious groups, the Dawa Party and its allies in the Iraqi government present themselves as the representatives of Shi'a Muslims, and persecute Sunnis and others. Behind the Iraqi government stands Iran, which has been ruled by Shi'a Islamists for three and a half decades.

Dawa and the other Shi'a parties maintain their own militia, which they use to enforce their primitivist interpretation of Islam. Women who dress immodestly, shopkeepers who sell alcohol, and Christian who take communion have all been victims of the militia. The Iraqi army collapsed in the middle of this year, as ISIS conquered much of the north of the country. As troops deserted, they were replaced by members of the Shi'a militia. It is these men that Kiwis troops will be training.

In the name of fighting Islamism, then, John Key is sending New Zealand troops to support an Islamist government in Baghdad and train the armed thugs of this government. Like its American and Australian allies, New Zealand has made a de facto alliance with Shi'a fundamentalism and with the Iranian government.

Such an alliance is, of course, very ironic, because for decades America and most other Western nations have been enemies of the Iranian regime. America took the side of Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in the 1980s, and in recent years it has imposed a range of sanctions on the country in an effort to stop Tehran developing nuclear weapons.

To understand why America and its allies have now aligned themselves with Iran, we have to consider the disastrous consequences of George Bush's invasion of Iraq.

When he sent troops across the Iraqi border in 2003, Bush talked about replacing Saddam Hussein with a secular government that would have no truck with Islamist politics. He wanted to create an ally of America in the heart of the Middle East, secure cheap access to the country's oil, and put the Islamist government of Iran under pressure.

But Bush's plan quickly failed, as Iraqis refused to support the pro-Western leaders he wanted to foist upon them. Protesters from Iraq's Sunni community took to the streets with guns. Desperate to find an ally against a resistance movement that was taking dozens of American lives every week, Bush turned to the Shi'a Islamists, and allowed them to take control of the Iraqi state. As America's influence in Iraq has declined, the influence of Iran has grown. Today Obama sees Iran and its allies in the Iraqi government as the only force that can stop ISIS.

But it is another force that is doing most of the fighting against ISIS. In both Iraq and neighbouring Syria, the Kurdish militia known as peshmerga have been defending towns and villages against ISIS's attacks. The Kurds live on the mountainous borderlands between Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, and have been fighting for independence from the governments of all of those countries for decades.

Unlike the gangs of thugs run by the Iraqi government, the Kurdish peshmerga are secularists. They have defended the Yezidi religious minority against ISIS; they have passed a law calling for the equality of men and women in the region of northern Syria they control. 
America has given some support to the Kurds fighting ISIS. American airplanes, for instance, have bombed ISIS troops besieging the Kurdish town of Kobane.

But America has helped prevent the most powerful of all the Kurdish armies, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, from joining the fight against ISIS.

The PKK is based in Turkey, and wants to send some of its thousands of fighters into Syria and Iraq, so that they can confront ISIS. But the Turkish government has bombed and shelled PKK to keep them from crossing the border. America and many other Western nations, including New Zealand, classify the PKK as a terrorist organisation. They have refused to speak out against Turkey's recent attacks on the PKK. Western governments oppose the PKK because they fear offending Turkey, which hosts important American military bases and is an important trading partner for Europe.

If John Key opposed violent sectarianism in Iraq, then he would not support the Islamist government in Baghdad. With its persecution of religious minorities and its roving militia, the Baghdad regime is a Shi'a mirror image of the Sunni ISIS. Key would look to the north of Iraq, and offer New Zealand support to the Kurdish peshmerga. Key would send New Zealand troops to work with the peshmerga, and would condemn Turkey for holding back the fight against ISIS by attacking the PKK.

Sadly, though, John Key is, like Helen Clark before him, more interested in keeping New Zealand on good terms with America than in helping deal with the problems of Iraq and the Middle East.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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Taking it to the bridge

November 13, 2014, 4:12 pm
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[Like the Pink Floyd, CROSTOPI has been away for a while. Back in 2009 the Committee for the Reconstruction of Space and Time on Pig Island published a manifesto on this blog; the same text turned up later in the little literary journal brief, and on the trunks of certain trees in the Auckland Domain.

Not everyone treated CROSTOPI seriously. One old friend ridiculed the notion that the text had been produced by a committee of real live human beings, rather than by an isolated individual. "Face it, Hamilton" the friend barked at me at one party, "you're a one man literary movement! Your CROSTOPI is the intellectual equivalent of the United Future Party! You're Peter Dunne without the hair!"

But CROSTOPI did attract some supporters. After reading the manifesto's denunciation of the notion of New Zealand as a 'clean, green paradise' inhabited by happy hobbit-folk, and its call for the opening of grubby 'quarantined' regions like Limestone Country and Takanini Strait to the imagination, Paul Janman contacted me and suggested we make a documentary movie about Auckland's Great South Road. Our movie hasn't made it to the screens, or even an editing suite, but it has gotten us involved in some interesting sideprojects, like an exhibition at the Papakura Art Gallery earlier this year. Out at Papakura we filled a table with artefacts from the history of the Great South Road, and hid more treasures in geocaches that we stashed in roadside landscapes. 

When Paul was asked to contribute to the Others Waters festival, which is designed to document and celebrate the history of Mangere Bridge and Onehunga, he decided to return to geocaching and to revive the name CROSTOPI. After creating a special 'Fabrication Faction' of the committee, which consists of an engineer, a welder, and two very enthusiastic children, he has begun (re)construction work on Mangere Bridge. 

Here's the statement that CROSTOPI has contributed to the catalogue for the Other Waters festival: 

With the help of abseiling engineers, CROSTOPI will install a periscope and geocache in the pedestrian underpass of Mangere's bridge. Besides providing mirror-assisted views of the bridge's foundations and surroundings, the installation will hold documents related to the two and a half year strike staged by the bridge's builders at the end of the 1970s. 

Like the anti-Springbok protesters and the occupiers of Bastion Point, Mangere's builders were confronting Rob Muldoon's National regime. For many Kiwis Mangere's unfinished bridge symbolised the breakdown in relationships - between employers and workers, between state and subjects, between the possible and the actual - common across New Zealand and the West during the revolutionary '70s. By occupying the bridge and setting up continuous pickets, the strikers proposed their own solution to this crisis. Like the occupiers of Bastion Point, they wanted sovereignty over their rohe. The strike eventually ended, and the bridge was finished. 

Standing on the underpass, listening to the endless rush of fixed capital, visitors are invited to ponder the miracle of collective labour.  

You can find out about the Other Waters festival here. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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A Peeriscope, in theory and practice

November 17, 2014, 2:29 pm
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While I was drinking coffee with Tongan artists in the Waikato, Paul Janman and the other members of the Fabrication Faction of the Committee for the Reconstruction of Space and Time on Pig Island spent the weekend in the perpetual gloom of the pedestrian underpass of the Mangere Bridge, where they are building a 'peeriscope' that will be offered to the public as part of the Other Waters exhibition.
Over at the Other Waters website, Paul has uploaded a detailed and enigmatic diagram of the peeriscope. He's also sent this me this guilt-inducing report on his labours:
Our Faction has been hard at work on the peeriscope...We are hoping to do the install early next Sunday morning. Our engineer Stefan will be abseiling off the bridge to attach the device and a friend will be recording events from a kayak in the harbour. I'm going to make a little film. A guided walk across the underpass and related events will be held the following weekend. 
If all goes well - if Stefan doesn't fall into the cold waters of the Manukau - then visitors to the underpass will be able to haul a geocache up from empty space between the bridge and the harbour, and examine a collection of artefacts of the epic strike that delayed the construction of Mangere's bridge for two and a half years at the end of the 1970s. 
Paul and I are collecting material for our cache, which will resemble the boxes we left up and down the Great South Road earlier this year. We're keen to hear from folks who were directly or indirectly involved in the great strike. We'll be visiting the small archives room at the Mangere Bridge public library this week to examine newspaper clippings, and hitting the Special Collections of the University of Auckland library to search the literary remains of Bill McAra and other New Zealand socialists who supported the striking construction workers. 
[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

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Towards the ancient future: three notes on Brett Graham's Uru

November 20, 2014, 2:21 pm
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[This post is part of an ongoing series of pieces about Brett Graham - earlier installments can be found here and here.]

A dark pool

Titirangi's new art gallery has big windows filled with trees and sea. The gallery is called Te Uru, or the West, and its inaugural exhibition includes a sculpture by Brett Graham named Uru. Graham has turned a dark, ovate piece of beechwood - a warrior's shield, or a kava bowl, or the shell of a particularly large turtle - on its side, and attached it to a whitewashed wall. When we step close to the work, we notice the dozens of grooves that run to its smooth edges.

At the centre of Uru, where the cuts Graham has made converge, is a smudged circle of grey light. Sometimes the circle swells and brightens, so that Uru seems for a moment like a dark pool in which a spectral face is emerging.

Brett Graham's father Fred is famous for his attempts to introduce the high modernist minimalism of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth to Maori art. In the 1960s and '70s, Graham snr erased many of the traditional decorative motifs from his sculptures, as he searched for the simplified 'essential forms' that Moore insisted were the true stuff of art.

The young Brett Graham rebelled against his father. He rediscovered the motifs Fred had eschewed, and left them in strange places. In his 2008 exhibition Campaign Rooms, Graham fantasised about a secret Maori weapons factory, and showed a stealth bomber with Tainui markings on its wings. In an interview with the New Zealand Herald, Graham explained works like this by arguing that his father had thrown away 'the baby with the bathwater' when he forsook the 'surface patterning' so important to classical Maori carving. The old patterns had to reemerge.
For his 2013 show Plot 150 Graham traced the bleakly geometric outlines of the series of redoubts British soldiers raised during their conquest of the Waikato Kingdom in the 1860s. Graham seemed to enjoy depicting these eroding, almost forgotten monuments of the British empire using the modernist style that was once so confidently exported from Europe to cultural colonies like New Zealand by men like Moore.

Lines and journeys

Uru, which was first shown in 2012, is another minimalist work, but its style belongs to the Pacific rather than to Europe. With its fluid, abstract, almost undifferentiated lines, the sculpture looks beyond the baroque patterning and careful symbolism of classical Maori carving to some of the earliest artworks made in Aotearoa.

The complexity and scale of the carvings we see on great waka and wharenui only became possible once humans had established large, permanent settlements in Aotearoa. Fed by big kumara gardens and patronised by chiefs, a caste of full-time carvers could prosper.

In the centuries before the creation of great centres of culture like Tamaki Makaurau and the middle Waikato, though, the ancestors of the Maori obsessively explored the eastern and southern regions of the Pacific, sailing from island to island and catching their meals in the sea and in forests. For these pioneers, social hierarchy and specialised labour were luxuries. Gaps between chiefs and commoners, and artists and non-artists, closed.

When they arrived here about a thousand years ago, the ancestors of the Maori quickly built villages along the coasts of both large islands, and dispatched expeditions to even remoter and colder parts of the Pacific, like the Chatham and Auckland islands. Some of them were stranded on the Chathams, and became Moriori.

The mobile, improvisatory people who discovered and settled Aotearoa left us artworks that are formally simple but astonishingly graceful. The lines of Uru recall the fluent paintings that early travellers made in the caves of Te Wai Pounamu, and the dancing figures on the trunks of the wind-bent kopi trees of the Chathams.
The simple forms of the ancient art of Aotearoa have always lingered, deep inside the elaborate carvings on pouwhenua and waka, in the same way that the simple meters of medieval English poets like Langland and Gower have always sounded behind the complex rhythms of Shakespeare. In the work of some contemporary Maori artists, the ancient forms irrupt into prominence. In Emare Karaka's massive, magnificent 1983 painting Planting, Searching, Rising: Taupiri is the Mountain, Waikato is the River, for example, the crouching or 'hocker' figure that recurs on the carved trees of the Chathams floats mysteriously over the sacred maunga of the Tainui people.

With its many lines travelling over a curved horizon, Uru alludes to ancient journeys across the Pacific, from the warm, safe lagoons of Polynesian strongholds like Tonga to the gales and frosts of the south and the vast barrier of South America in the far east.

The centre of Uru, where the sculpture's journey-lines end and begin, might represent Hawai'iki or its western Polynesian equivalent Pulotu: a paradise and underworld from which souls and ships depart, and to which they return. It might be Kawhia, the place where Brett Graham's ancestors buried their waka and raised the first Tainui village.

Towards the ancient future

Graham's sculpture evokes recent as well as distant journeys. Its grooves might remind us of the tracking lines that record the movements of ships and planes on computerised maps in coastguard stations and airport control towers. In his great essay 'Our Sea of Islands' Epeli Hau'ofa presented the Pacific Islanders who ride passenger jets above the tundra of Pacific clouds as successors to the navigators who discovered and populated lands like Aotearoa. For the author of Tales of the Tikongs, the journeys of islanders to jobs and schools in continents like Australia and the Americas were not evidence of dependency or decadence, but rather a reassertion of ancestral habits.

Hau'ofa is not the only writer to see the peoples who settled the Pacific as both ancient and futuristic. Karl Marx believed that the egalitarianism of the Pacific societies that relied upon fishing and hunting could offer lessons to a socialist Europe. Paul Theroux has compared the Polynesian explorers to the spaceship pilots of science fiction: both have crossed vast and dark distances by following stars. Today the lifeways of the ancient settlers of Eastern and outlier Polynesia are being studied by ecologists, who believe the societies that not only survived but burgeoned on tiny islands like Tikopia and Pukapuka offer lessons in sustainability and efficiency to the world of the twenty-first century.

Uru is both a minimal and vastly suggestive work. Once again, Brett Graham is looking backwards as well as forwards in time and in space.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

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War and peace: arguing with Chris Trotter and John Key

November 25, 2014, 12:18 am
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[John Key doesn't worry about anything, so I don't suppose he'll be fazed by the fact that many of this country's intellectuals have been twittering scornfully about his recent claim that New Zealand was 'settled peacefully' in the nineteenth century.* 

Key made his foray into historiography after being asked about the Waitangi Tribunal's recent report on Nga Puhi's Treaty claim. The Tribunal has decided that, when they signed on the dotted line in 1840, Nga Puhi chiefs did not believe they were giving away their sovereignty to the British Empire.

Chris Trotter is no friend of John Key but, as he explains in this blog post, he didn't join in the recent cries of derision on twitter. Chris believes that, by and large, the colonisation of New Zealand was remarkably peaceful. Over the years I've argued repeatedly - here, here, and here, at least - against Chris' interpretation of New Zealand's nineteenth century wars, so it's no surprise that I don't agree with his latest words on the subject. Here are some comments I left under his blog post.]

Hi Chris,
I appreciate the way you interrupt your analyses of quotidian political life to consider the deep history of our country. In twenty-first century New Zealand, it's rare to find a political commentator with such respect for the past. 
I have to disagree, though, with your interpretation of the motivations of the Maori signatories of the treaty, which seems to me to owe much less to the scholarship of our historians than it does to the press releases of Muriel Newman, John Ansell, and some of their friends on the far right of the political spectrum.
I agree with you that the Musket Wars devastated many iwi and redrew the map of the North Island.   But the notion that Maori turned to British power to help them end the Musket Wars ignores the fact that the wars had almost petered out by the 1830s, as iwi achieved military parity, as traditional methods of peacemaking achieved results (consider the peace that Te Wherowhero brokered between the iwi of the upper and middle North Island), and as Maori interpretations of Christian ideology spread. 
By the end of his life Hongi Hika, the chief had once led raiding parties of thousands across the country, had become a lonely anachronism, whose calls for new campaigns of plunder were scorned by younger Nga Puhi. When, in the middle of the 1830s, two northern Taranaki iwi decided to wage a war of conquest they found so few prospects in our two main islands that they had to sail off to the Chathams. 
Far from being exhausted by the Musket Wars, northern Maori showed that they were capable of stalemating an imported British army just a few years after 1840. 
There's also the difficult fact that, in 1840 and for many years afterwards, representatives of the British crown had almost no way of imposing their will on their fellow Pakeha, let alone Maori.
When Muriel Newman and her ilk claim that the Crown was able to step into the breach and prevent one iwi attacking another, and thereby prevent the supposedly imminent extinction of much of the Maori people, they are falsely imagining that the Hobson and his comrades possessed the resources of a modern state, like a standing army and a police force. All the British really had in 1840 was a printing press and the seal of their faraway monarch. 
I think Matthew Wright's book Guns and Utugives a very credible picture of the balance of political and military forces in New Zealand at the end of the Musket Wars period. Wright ridicules the notion that the British had much agency in New Zealand in the early 1840s, but he also criticises ideas that anything like a unified Maori nation existed back then. Wright warns against a tendency to see the signatories of the Treaty, whether Maori or Pakeha, as far-sighted nation-builders rather than as small-time opportunists fixated on accumulating money and mana.
Another of Wright's arguments is relevant to this discussion. He points out that the Treaty of Waitangi cannot in any way be equated with the settling of New Zealand. In 1840 only a tiny number of Pakeha existed, and no Maori could have possibly imagined the tens of thousands who would arrive, courtesy of Wakefield and other impresarios of imperialism, later in the nineteenth century. 
But it seems to me that, while discussions about the signing of the Treaty are obviously interesting and important, they're not really relevant to John Key's claim that New Zealand was settled peacefully.
As the history of imperialism and the histories of the various parts of the Pacific show, there is an enormous difference between symbolic acts like running up a flag and making marks on an official document and the real work of settling new lands. 
Even if your interpretation of the Treaty were correct, then Key's claim would still be very problematic, because almost as soon as it began the settling of New Zealand provoked bloodshed. From the Wairau affray of 1843, which saw some of the first would-be settlers dying on the blades of Te Rauparaha's men, to the invasion of the Waikato by a British army controlled by Auckland property investors in 1863, to the shootout at Rua Kenana's headquarters in the Ureweras in 1916,
the attempts of Pakeha settlers to acquire, build on and farm land again and again provoked conflict.
It is battlefields like Rangiriri, Orakau and Te Porere, and not a few marks made on a piece of paper in 1840, that offer a verdict on Key's claim that these islands were settled peacefully.
You anticipate some of these criticisms, of course, by acknowledging the conflicts between Maori and the Crown, and by arguing that the death toll they produced was relatively modest.  
You say that thirty thousand Maori were killed or exiled as a result of the Musket Wars, and contrast that figure with the four thousand Maori and Pakeha who died in battles between Maori and the Crown between 1845 and 1872.  
I don't think that either of those figures sounds too inaccurate, and I don't doubt that more fighters died during the Musket Wars than in the conflicts between the Crown and iwi that followed the era of Hongi Hika. 
But it seems odd to me that you include the Maori exiled from their rohe by fighting when you give figures for the victims of the Musket Wars, but that you do not count the refugees from the wars between the Crown and iwi when you give figures for the victims of those wars.
After all, the wars in the Taranaki, the Waikato, and on the East Coast produced large numbers of refugees. Most of them were Maori, but more than a few were Pakeha.
A very large portion of the people of the Waikato were driven from their homes into the hills and gorges of the central North Island by the invasion of 1863. Many of them died in exile, or only returned after the making of peace two decades later.
The Waikato War also emptied a series of fledgling Pakeha villages and towns. Like Waikato civilians, Pakeha who fled the war often lost their possessions. After the town of Raglan was abandoned by settlers afraid of Maori attack, it was 'secured' by a garrison of drunken imperial soldiers who looted and burned its empty homes.
The conflict in the Taranaki famously sent hundreds of prisoners south to Lyttleton and Dunedin, and the war on the East Coast saw hundreds of members of iwi like Rongawhakaata and Ngati Porou ending up in places like Te Rohe Potae and the Coromandel.
I suspect that, in all, tens of thousands of people were displaced by the series of conflicts between the 1840s and 1870s.
You compare the average yearly death toll from the wars 1845 and 1872 with today's road toll, and suggest that these wars were fairly small-scale affairs. But such comparison can easily be misleading, because New Zealand's population is so much greater today than it was in the nineteenth century.
When the Waikato War, the largest of the conflicts between Maori and the Crown, was fought in 1863-64, New Zealand's total population was only about 170,000. Pakeha slightly outnumbered Maori. 
James Belich has pointed out that, in the context of such a small population, the Waikato War was a huge mobilisation of men and resources.
On Anzac Day, the appalling cost of World War One to New Zealand is often recalled. We lost sixteen thousand soldiers in pointless battles for the mud of Europe and Turkey, at a time when our total population was little more than a million.
But the fact that Maori suffered the same terribly high death rate during the Waikato War is seldom mentioned. Something like twelve hundred of their fighters died during 1863 and '64. When we consider such a loss together with the mass exile of civilians and the confiscation of three million acres by the Crown in 1865 we can begin to appreciate that, for the peoples of the Waikato and their allies, the war against the Pakeha was every bit as traumatic as the earlier clashes with Hongi Hika's musket-armed raiders. 

*I was honoured to see that several of Key's detractors had linked to old posts on this blog about colonialism and war, like my discussion of Peria, the utopian Maori settlement close to the site of present-day Hobbiton that was destroyed by the Pakeha Orcs who invaded the Waikato. I like to think of this blog as a sort of archive.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton] 
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Anzac's monument

November 28, 2014, 2:01 am
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At the beginning of The Bridge. A Story of Men in Dispute, Merata Mita's alternately fesity and melancholy documentary about New Zealand's strike, Anzac Wallace ponders the islands of steel and concrete strewn across the Manukau harbour between the suburbs of Onehunga and Mangere. The half-finished bridge is 'hanging out there like a monument', Wallace thinks. It should be 'a modernist sculpture' called 'the Redundancy Bridge'. He wonders whether it will ever be finished.

Wallace was a gangster who made a fifteen year tour of New Zealand's prison system before he found a job with the carpentry crew on the Mangere bridge. When he and his militant co-workers were locked out by their employers, with the connivance of the Muldoon government, Wallace flourished as a picket line orator. Shortly after starring in Mita's film, he would play opposite Bruno Lawrence in Geoff Murphy's Utu, a revered depiction of racial feuding in nineteenth century New Zealand that might also be a parable for industrial relations in the turbulent first years of the 1980s.
Merata Mita's film deserves to be as famous as Utu, and the Mangere Bridge, which was eventually finished in 1983, after the workers had ended their two and a half year blockade, deserves to be considered one of New Zealand's great monuments. It was intended as a symbol of the nation's confidence and prosperity, a link between the burgeoning suburbs of South Auckland and their international airport and the city's central business district. It became a sign of the country's economic malaise and social divisions, and is happily invoked by right-wing politicians who like to scare their audiences with horror stories about hubristic trade unions.

This weekend Paul Janman and I and other members of the Committee for the Reconstruction of Space and Time on Pig Island will be giving two guided tours of the pedestrian underpass of the Mangere bridge, as part of our contribution to the Other Waters festival, which is designed to celebrate the history and aesthetics of Onehunga, Mangere, and the harbour that both links and separates them.

You can join us at two o'clock tomorrow afternoon, and at ten o'clock on Sunday morning, as we follow the underpass' modernist curve high above the harbour, push peeriscopes through convenient holes to get a view of the bridge's foundations, and examine a geocache filled with old texts - accounts of the epic strike, but also texts that document other neglected parts of local history. There are newspaper articles about subjects like opium deals and dens in Mangere, officials' attempts to make the old Mangere bridge a whites' only zone, and a raid on Onehunga's greengrocer by cops who were looking for Bolshevik literature rather than courgettes.

Ian Powell will be filming proceedings with one of his antique, suitcase-sized cameras.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

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Jumping in the drink: Kiwi poets in Tonga

December 1, 2014, 1:30 pm
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[It's a year tomorrow since I arrived back in Auckland after a stint teaching at Tonga's 'Atenisi Institute. My body may have spent 2014 in Niu Sila, but my mind has often gone back to the Friendly Islands. 

I've written about Tongan art for EyeContact and about Tongan marching bands for Landfall, and in the latest issue of Poetry New Zealand I have an essay about the visits that Murray Edmond and Richard von Sturmer made to 'Atenisi last year, the adventures they had in the seas and streets of Tonga, and the friendships they made around kava bowls. The first seven hundred or so words of 'Jumping in the Drink'turned up on this blog back in July; here are they are again, along with rest of the text.] 
In 1931, when he was twenty-six years old and had already published a couple of volumes of poetry, RAK Mason visited the Kingdom of Tonga on the Tofua, a steamship that connected Auckland with the ports of the tropical Pacific. 

Then as now, Tonga teemed with punake, or poets, whose works, which typically feature dance and music as well as lyrics, were performed around kava bowls and at events like weddings and festivals. Punake were part of the ornate culture that had developed over the three thousand years since humans had settled the Tongan archipelago. (1)
Although Mason enjoyed his short stay in Tonga - in letters home he described the kingdom as a 'delightful place', and reckoned that its people were 'the happiest' in the world - he does not seem to have sampled the local literary culture. (2)
It is fascinating to wonder what Mason might have made of his Tongan counterparts, had he encountered them at a kava circle or festival. Frustrated by his distance from the literary centres of Europe and by the indifference of his countrymen to his books, the young Auckland poet had often complained that he was trapped in a remote and philistine corner of the world - a 'perilous hostile place' at the 'friendless outer edge of space'. (3) 

In the late 1930s and the '40s, Mason's vision of the South Pacific as a remote, rawly new, and philistine region would be accepted and advertised by younger writers like Allen Curnow, Charles Brasch, and Monty Holcroft; by the 1950s it would be an orthodoxy. 
Might the history of New Zealand literature have been different, if Mason had been ushered into a kava shack on the shore of a Tongan lagoon, and found the work of the kingdom's esteemed caste of punake being performed there? Might the young poet's conviction that he lived in a remote and philistine corner of the world have melted, as he drank bowls of narcotics in the warm Tongan evening, and joined the clapping and foot-stomping that often accompanies kava songs? Might he have realised that a rich and highly valued literary culture could be found not just in faraway Europe, but in New Zealand's nearest neighbour? And might the punake of Tonga, rather than the Georgian poets of England or the verse propagandists of the Soviet Union, have become Mason's literary models? 
Tonga is a place that prompts this sort of counterfactual speculation. The only piece of the Pacific to avoid colonisation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it has evolved unusual and surprisingly robust economic and political systems. The kingdom's constitution bans the sale of land, and most of its people still work small farms land granted to them by the state. From the air even Tongatapu, the largest and by far the most populous island of the archipelago, resembles a forest of coconut, banana and mango trees. Palangi make up only a sliver of the Tongan population. 
A visit to Tonga can feel, then, like a journey into an alternative version of New Zealand history, where Polynesians were never robbed of their land and language, and where Wakefield never planted capitalism. 
In the 1950s some of Tonga's top students began to arrive at universities in Australia and New Zealand. The anthropologist and novelist 'Epeli Hau'ofa, the classicist and philosopher Futa Helu, and the poet and educationalist Konai Helu Thaman all began dialogues, in their texts and in their teaching, between Tongan and palangi cultures. 
In the 1960s Futa Helu returned to his homeland and founded the 'Atenisi, or Athens, Institute on the waterlogged outskirts of Nuku'alofa, Tonga's capital and only city. Helu's school soon attracted hundreds of students, and became a sort of borderland between Tonga and the rest of the world, where the gods, philosophers, and poets of Polynesia, Europe, and Asia were equally revered, and where scholars and students from New Zealand and many more distant nations were welcomed. 

In 2012 a feature-length documentary film about Futa Helu prompted new interest in 'Atenisi, and in 2013, when I worked at the school, I was able to get several New Zealand intellectuals, including the distinguished poets Murray Edmond and Richard von Sturmer, to visit. (4)

Edmond and von Sturmer spent a week each in Tonga. During his visit in June, Edmond mentored my Creative Writing students and members of 'Atenisi's performing arts group, gave a public lecture about the history and literature of his native Waikato, offered a workshop on drama writing and acting to sixty excited students from local high schools, and read his poem 'End Wall' on national television. 
When von Sturmer visited in September, most of 'Atenisi's students were away on a short-notice tour of America. Tonga's Baha'i community, though, organised a series of lectures and workshops where von Sturmer instructed their members in Zen Buddhism, meditation, and haiku writing. Von Sturmer also befriended members of Nuku'alofa's thriving visual arts scene, like the sculptor Visesio Siasau and the painter Tevita Latu. 

Siasau brought von Sturmer to his workshop, and showed off the crucified Tangaloas and hermaphroditic Virgin Marys he was sculpting from glass and painting on tapa; later he took his guest on a tour of the sites of Tongatapu's ancient pagan godhouses. 
A few days after he'd returned to the cold latitudes of New Zealand, Murray Edmond e mailed me a series of ten texts he had titled 'Tongatapu Dream Choruses'. With their loose lines connected by sound as much as sense, the 'Choruses' might have been a response to the musicality of Tongan poetry. 
When Richard von Sturmer arrived in Tonga, I showed him Edmond's 'Dream Choruses'. I joked that Tongan poets had traditionally engaged in verbal battles with one another - the senior court punake Fineasi Malukava, for instance, famously exchanged insults with a boastful young rival named Fakatava at the beginning of the twentieth century - and suggested that he and Murray might like to emulate that pattern. Richard is far too good-natured to engage in verbal duels, but I think that the precedent of the 'Tongatapu Dream Choruses' encouraged him to write poetry of his own during his time in Tonga. 
At a kava gathering held the night before his departure from the kingdom, von Sturmer read some of a series of poems he had recently written into his notebook, and had given the title 'Tonga'. Although they were constructed in the tight, Zen-inspired forms that von Sturmer has long favoured, the poems were full of images of Tongatapu – there were pigs and whales and coconuts and, of course, kava. 
I want to mention four themes that I find in Murray Edmond's 'Tongatapu Dream Choruses' and in Richard von Sturmer's 'Tonga'. 

Churching
Tonga teems with churches. Theological dispute is incessant, and sects regularly split, as the losers of an argument about the nature of the trinity or the proper interpretation of a hymn declare their organisational independence and eternal righteousness. (5)
Both Murray Edmond and Richard von Sturmer were fascinated by Tonga's fractious religious life. The second of Edmond's 'Tongatapu Dream Choruses' records the visit that a young would-be church-builder made to an 'Atenisi kava gathering. As Edmond nodded neutrally, the young man, who claimed to have cracked a mathematical code hidden in the Bible, explained that Tongatapu had been the site of the garden of Eden, and that Tongans were god's chosen people. More confusingly, he insisted that Adam and Eve were both men, and had only been able to reproduce because of a miraculous improvisation by the Holy Ghost:
a mystery
claimed by history
Adam met Eve
Eve turned out
to be a man
if you'll drink
to that
you'll drink to
any thing
On a Sunday we drove Edmond to the village of Folaha, which sits on a peninsula in the Fanga'uta Lagoon, Tongatapu's warm, shallow, and very polluted inland sea. We had been invited to a service at the Folaha branch of the Church of Tonga, one of the kingdom's dozen or so Wesleyan sects. The church's black-suited priest delivered a long sermon at high volume from a high pulpit, giving particular emphasis to the nouns tevolo (devil), vale (fool), and Setani (Satan). 
Edmond decided we should recover from the sermon by moving on to Oholei Beach Resort, which has a bar built into a large cave and a special license that allows it to sell alcohol to palangi tourists and other degenerates on Sundays. We arrived to find a band playing loudly from a stage set up in the middle of the cave. Edmond, my wife and I were sipping beers and forgetting about god when the bandleader, who happened to be the owner of Oholei resort, silenced his musicians and began to preach. "I worship the lord in my own way" he told us. "Mine is the church of rock and roll." Oholei's owner spent the next hour singing old Wesleyan hymns, while his guitarist leaned on a wah wah pedal and his drummer played jazz rolls. 
Murray Edmond was delighted by the concert in the cave, which reminded him of the chaotic, competitive jams that poets and musicians held on New Zealand stages in the 1970s. The eighth of his 'Tongatapu Dream Choruses' honours Oholei's Sunday service:
Church of Jesus Christ of
Rock'n Roll save your soul
immortal Jelly Roll
Richard Von Sturmer's studies of Buddhism have taken him to Chinese cave-temples and American monasteries, but he is interested in all religious traditions, and shortly after arriving in Tonga he asked to be taken to a church. "I’d like to visit the most fire and brimstone of them all", he said, with the defiant look of a diner who has just insisted on ordering the hottest curry on a restaurant menu. When we ended up sitting through another loud peroration at another branch of the Church of Tonga, von Sturmer used his training in meditation to make the escape he described in this tanka:
when the long sermon begins
I go into the rafters
into the dusty
cross-beams
to hang out with the spiders

Big Mama's island
Writing from the Tofua, RAK Mason explained that Tongan ports were 'so difficult' they could only be entered 'by daylight'. Nuku'alofa's harbour is decorated by dozens of coral atolls and sandbars. Wrecked steamers and yachts lie on strips of coral; buoys and wooden crosses attempt to distinguish safe channels from sand. Maps produced by palaeoclimatologists show the ground where Nuku'alofa now stands covered by sea, and a medieval Tongan poet's description of the harbour mentions several islands that have since drowned. 
The little archipelago in Nuku'alofa harbour has been favoured by invaders, traders, and exiles. Pangaimotu, which sits only a couple of kilometres off the coast of Tongatapu, was a base for Cook and a refuge, nearly seven decades later, for Bishop Pompallier, whose Catholic faith and French allies were unpopular with the rulers of Tongatapu.  
Today the island is the home of Carl Emberson, a lean, brown-skinned Dane who was a favourite at the king of Tonga's card table in the 1960s. Carl and his wife Ana, who hails from the northern Niuan islands and is known throughout Tonga as Big Mama, run a sand-floored bar whose walls are covered with yacht flags, polaroids, erotic graffiti, and exotic banknotes left by generations of visitors. A few feet from this sanctuary, the hull of a wrecked ship rears out of Pangaimotu's warm, shallow lagoon. A couple of hundred feet in the other direction is the foundation mound of an ancient godhouse, where shaman-priests drank hallucinogenic kava and channeled voices from Pulotu, an island over the western horizon inhabited by spirits. (6)
With its lovely but sea-eaten coast and its reminders of a ruined past, Pangaimotu can both delight and discomfort visitors. Von Sturmer's writing has always been both grateful for and sadly aware of the transitory nature of earthly pleasures. For him, the fish that cruise Pangaimotu's lagoon have become part of the island, and will share its fate: 
undulating sunlight,
in the shallows
sand-coloured fish
accompanied
by their shadows.
In the ‘Tongatapu Dream Choruses’, Murray Edmond makes a more jocular reference to aquatic adventures in Nuku'alofa's harbour:
when you're feeling full of beans
plunge in the brinnie
jump in the drink

The ruins of Nuku'alofa
Nuku'alofa is not an especially old place - it was only a minor settlement before the first modern ruler of Tonga, the Wesleyan warlord Taufa'ahau, chose a site for his capital in the middle of the nineteenth century - but it is full of ruins. Humidity and termites have rotted and collapsed scores of the city’s wooden buildings, while poor-quality concrete and self-taught architects have ensured the dereliction of many of its newer structures. The riot of November 2006 saw arsonists and looters add to Nuku'alofa's stock of ruins. 
Richard von Sturmer is a film maker and actor - he first visited Western Polynesia in the late '80s, when he co-starred in Martyn Sanderson's adaption of Albert Wendt's Flying Fox in a Freedom Tree - as well as a poet, and last September he spent hours wandering Nuku'alofa with a camera. His poems record visits to a couple of the city's ailing buildings. 
On Hala Mateialana (hala is the Tongan word for road), just east of the Nuku'alofa's central business district, von Sturmer discovered the half dozen termite-tormented cottages that serve as the city's public mortuary. In Tonga, the dead are usually prepared for burial at the home of family members. Inevitably, though, some of the dead are unable to find hospitality in a private home. Although it lacks the high-tech freezers of its New Zealand equivalents, the mortuary on Hala Mateialana provides a place where these people can await burial. After talking with the supervisor of the mortuary, von Sturmer was allowed to look around the site. Like the unstable archipelago of Nuku'alofa harbour, the warm bodies lying on termite-ridden wood make the poet fearful:
I don't want to end up
in the mortuary
on Hala Mateialona.
It would be lonely
with only the dogs
to bury my bones...
Already the silk coffin
is filled with yellow wasps. 
One of Nuku'alofa's more spectacular ruins is the Meseia (Messiah) Plaza, a sprawling concrete building in the city's central business district. The Plaza was opened in 1980 by the Tokaikolo Fellowship, a recently expelled faction of Tonga's state-endorsed Free Wesleyan Church. Tokaikolo's founder and first leader was Senituli Koloi, a thin, charismatic faith healer who held huge open air meetings in the Tongatapu countryside where he denounced modern medicine as an insult to God. Koloi urged his followers to prove their faith by fasting; he died the year the Meseia Plaza was opened, after refusing food for eighteen days. 
If Koloi was a Tongan Cathar, then his successor, the long-reigning, bloated Liufau Saulala, resembles one of the debauched Popes of the fourteenth century. Under Saulala's leadership, Tokaikolo has run up big debts and suffered big splits. The Meseia building was supposed to brim with shops and offices, but when Richard von Sturmer squeezed through a smashed window and explored its dim and dank interior the only occupants he discovered were lying in sleeping bags on the concrete floors of empty rooms. Von Sturmer eventually found his way to the Plaza's abandoned rooftop, which for a while housed a popular restaurant and nightclub: 
On the roof of
concrete beach umbrellas 
no one answers your prayers. 
Each umbrella 
has tumbled over
to become
an ancient satellite dish. 

Swingman
Swingman, whose real name is Siua Ongosia, was Tonga's first hip hop star. About a decade ago he began rapping in Tongan over beats and samples that were sometimes supplied by other members of the Ongosia family, like his brother Jimmy. Then, as now, Swingman's lyrics were held together by insistent rhymes, rather than by linear narrative or argument. Swingman can throw bizarre images at this audience, begin and break off anecdotes, boast about or bemoan his love life, and tell long jokes that appear to lack punchlines, but his ramblings are always contained within strict, hypnotic rhyme schemes.  After a period of success, when he was employed by the government to rap about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and recorded a series of videos that became youtube hits, Swingman developed a reputation for odd behaviour. He was seen beside Nuku'alofa main drag, waving his arms about as if he were flying; he took the stage at a music festival in the countryside, but refused to open his mouth, preferring to entertain the audience with a series of enigmatic hand gestures. 
As his live appearances and new recordings dwindled, Swingman could often be found on Railway Road, which follows the route of an old tramline between downtown Nuku'alofa and the dirty lagoon on the city's southern fringe. Railway Road runs past the ruins of many buildings that were torched during the 2006 riot, as well as stores full of pirated DVDs, kava shacks, barber's shops, and the headquarters of the Fakaletti Association, which looks after the needs of Tonga's increasingly oppressed trans-sexual community. Railway Road is a popular site for drug sales; during the night fakaletti solicit from its burnt-out lots. 
The young people who gather on Railway Road are alienated from Tonga's traditional village-based life. Often, though, petty criminal convictions and a lack of cash mean they cannot leave Tonga. They spent their time getting stoned on marijuana grown in the Tongatapu bush, on crack cocaine pulled off ships from America, and on anti-psychotics stolen from Nuku'alofa's hospital. 
A kilometre or so from Railway Road, in a lagoonside kava shack, the painter Tevita Latu has founded the Seleka Club, where he mentors some of the Nuku'alofa's youth and teaches them the intricacies of drawing and collage. The Seleka Club is a determinedly rebellious institution - its name is an anagram of the Tongan word for shitting, its members drink kava from a toilet bowl, and its stereo blasts death metal and hip hop into the Nuku'alofa night - and it has provided a refuge for Swingman, and for some of the other casualties of Tongan society. If he is not on Railway Road or in prison, the rapper can often be found at the Seleka Club. (7) 
I was introduced to Swingman's music by 'Atenisi students Miko Tohi and ‘Alokoulu ‘Ulukivaiola, who have been shooting footage of the rapper for what they hope will develop into a documentary movie, as well as translating some of his lyrics into English. Both Tohi and 'Ulukivaiola consider Swingman a genius, and are depressed by the way that other, lesser rappers, like Junior Fakatava, a descendant of the boastful Fakatava who confronted Fineasi Malukava more than a century ago, have usurped his place in Tonga's music scene. (8) 
Not everyone shares Tohi and 'Ulukivaiola’s enthusiasm for Siua Ongosia. Many conservative Tongans believe that his strange music and drug-assisted antics symbolise the decadence of Nuku'alofan youth. 
In certain ways, though, Swingman can perhaps be considered a traditional Tongan poet. Like many previous punake, he relies on rhyme to hold together long, essentially unmetered lines, couples his words with music and dance moves, and duels verbally with his rivals. Even Swingman's interest in drugs is arguably traditional: in pre-Christian Tonga poets, as well as priests, would use hallucinogenic kava to receive inspiration from the spirits in Pulotu. 
Both Murray Edmond and Richard von Sturmer were fascinated by the stories they heard about Swingman, and excited by his work. Swingman makes an appearance at the end of the 'Tongatapu Dream Choruses':
dream Tongatapu
is a giant bell
swinging in
Pacific wind
Swingman walks
Streets at night
With its use of rhyme and half-rhyme to connect sometimes absurdly divergent thoughts, Edmond’s sequence reminds me of the Tongan rapper. 
When von Sturmer performed some of his Tongan poems at the kava gathering held to mark his last night in the kingdom, the audience was delighted by his surreal imagery. Tevita Latu, who was a part of Richard's audience, remarked that the images in the following lines could have come straight from Swingman: 
And the dogs are barking
in a forest
in a forest of bells
and I'm listening
with a green ear
an ear as large
as a taro leaf.

And a giant hand
takes off its glove
and strikes the land
with the full force
with the force
of a hurricane.

And tiny pigs fly past
with bats
between their teeth,
bats as ripe as figs
plopped into the mouth
of  a green hurricane. 
I like to think of the poems that Murray Edmond and Richard von Sturmer wrote in Tonga last year as belated correctives to the indifference that palangi New Zealand writers have shown towards their nearest neighbour. Edmond and von Sturmer have taken the opportunity that RAK Mason missed back in 1931. I hope others will follow them. 

(1)                        Eric Shumway’s essay ‘Ko E Kakalangilangi: The Eulogistic Function of the Tongan Poet’, which was published in the Journal of Pacific Studies in 1977, provides a detailed introduction to traditional Tongan-language poetry, but is influenced by its author’s very conservative politics. Wendy Pond’s essay ‘Wry Comment from the Outback: Songs of Protest from the Niua Islands, Tonga’, which was first published in the Journal of Oral Tradition in 1990, analyses several songs and dances created in the 1960s and ‘70s, and shows the political complaints that are half-hidden in their imagery and in their historical allusions. In 2012 Atuanui Books published On Tongan Poetry, a group of articles that Futa Helu wrote in the early 1980s about the various genres in which punake work.
(2)                        RAK Mason’s adventures in the tropical Pacific are described in Rachel Barrowman’s Mason: A Life, which was published by Victoria University Press in 2003, and in John Caselberg’s Poet Triumphant: the Life of Writings of RAK Mason, which was published by Steel Roberts in 2002.
(3)                        The phrases come from Mason’s ‘Sonnet of Brotherhood’, which he wrote seven years before his visit to Tonga.
(4)                        For information about Tongan Ark, which draws on its director Paul Janman’s experiences as a teacher at ‘Atenisi in the early noughties, visit this webpage.
(5)                        Anthropologists Ernest and Pearl Beaglehole, who visited Tonga at the end of the 1930s, decided that the country’s religious diversity was, paradoxically enough, a source of social cohesion. In their short book Pangai: a Village in Tonga, which was published by the Polynesian Society in 1941, they argue that the variety of churches allowed individual Tongans to express a sense of difference or register a protest without venturing into the largely proscribed realm of politics. The Beagleholes cite the example of a Tongan with eccentric but passionate theological views, who moved from one church to another as he tested the tolerance of fellow worshippers, and talk of men who felt disempowered by the kingdom’s Wesleyan establishment and so joined its Catholic community as a sort of protest. Not everyone agrees with the Beagleholes’ sanguine view of Tonga’s religious disunity. For Maikolo Horowitz, an American sociologist who taught at ‘Atenisi for many years, Tonga is the ‘Texas of the South Pacific’ because of the inability of its people to agree about theological, as well as secular, matters. Other scholars, like ‘Opeti Talia, note the ritualised brawling by students of schools run by Tonga’s rival churches. I blogged about the different analyses of Tonga’s religious disunity here.
(6)                        Niel Gunson, a missionary turned scholar of religious history at the Australian National University, has written repeatedly about Tonga’s ancient godhouses and the priests who performed inside them. In ‘A Note on Oceanic Shamanism’, which was published in the Journal of the Polynesian Society in 2009, Gunson summarises his findings and defends them from critics. Gunson’s excavation of Tonga’s pre-Christian religious history has greatly influenced some of the kingdom’s artists and intellectuals, including Sio Siasau.
(7)                        I have written about Tevita Latu and his extraordinary club here. 
(8)                        To give some idea of Swingman’s style, here are some lines from Ulukivaiola and Tohi’s the translation of  ‘Taahine Kaka’ (‘Cheating Girl’), a song that can be found on youtube:
“Aloha, Paula Zulu”
I am about to weep
Over my love for your flock of hair
I am half-caste
And I throw the discus
I often ride the bus and play music.
Lia it’s me Vili
My fan is broken
I’m begging you to make a family with me
Trust me, I’m getting wirier
Join with me for I have a tractor…
Someone show some love
Asisi is all alone
Bring her here to spank
Spank it until it’s bare
Even though I have no lover
I have soap
Brought from the shop
To wash away the smell.


[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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Te Puoho's weird war

December 4, 2014, 4:38 pm
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[Over at Chris Trotter's blog, the debate that I started last week about the New Zealand Wars and the meaning of the Treaty of the Waitangi sputters on. Here's a comment I made about one of the most fascinating characters in our nineteenth century history.]
Charles claims that the Treaty of Waitangi was designed to subject Maori as well as Pakeha to the laws of Britain. He insists that the arrival of beneficent British law ended warfare between Maori in the South Island. But Te Wai Pounamu's last armed inter-iwi conflict - a bizarre and pathetic but very instructive affair - occurred in 1836 and '37, when the Treaty was not even a twinkle in Hobson's eye. 
The south's last armed conflict was provoked by Te Puoho, a rangatira from the Ngati Tama iwi, whose members had been driven from their traditional north Taranaki rohe to Port Nicholson by the Musket Wars. Te Puoho decided that the iwi should make a new and permanent home in the South Island. In a series of meetings with dubious relatives, he announced plans to lead an army the length of the island, storm the trading and whaling stations that Kai Tahu had established on the Fouveaux Strait, and put the members of that iwi to work as slaves. 
When more cautious members of Ngati Tama noted the huge size of Kai Tahu's territory, Te Puoho claimed that, by hitting the iwi's southern strongholds unexpectedly, he would 'skin the whole eel' in one stroke, and make resistance further north impractical. Kai Tahu would surrender, and Ngati Tama would be transformed from a small and landless iwi to the masters of most of Aotearoa. 
Te Puoho won less than a hundred men to his cause. He exhausted his little army by marching it down the South Island's West Coast and across the Southern Alps. Eventually Te Puoho and his warriors came across a small and almost empty Kai Tahu kainga: they stormed its pig pen, and pulled up and devoured some half-ripe kumara. While they were sleeping off their exhaustion in a hut near the conquered pigsty, Te Puoho and his comrades were ambushed and despatched by a much larger Kai Tahu war party.
The story of the 'war' of 1836 and '37, which the young Atholl Anderson told in his 1986 book Te Puoho's Last Raid,  reminds us of the changes that were occurring in New Zealand during the decade before the treaty of Waitangi was signed. 
Te Puoho was both an anachronism and an innovator. His faith in the musket made him a throwback to raiders of the 1820s, like the Nga Puhi chief Hongi Hika, who returned from visits to London and Sydney with an arsenal of guns that he quickly tested in the territories of his iwi's traditional enemies. 
By the 1830s other iwi had acquired guns, and what Chris Trotter calls 'a balance of terror' was achieved, as chiefs realised that new armed expeditions would likely be costly and futile. Kai Tahu were trading and interbreeding with the whalers and sealers of the Fouveaux Strait, and had accumulated muskets, money, and mana. It is not surprising that most of Te Puoho's relatives were reluctant to join his adventure. 
The fate of Te Puoho's invasion shows us how anachronistic and ineffectual inter-iwi warfare had become in New Zealand's main islands by the middle of the 1830s. 
In one way, though, Te Puoho was an innovator. During the halcyon days of the Musket Wars Hongi Hika had never attempted to hold onto the lands he attacked. Hongi and his warriors would float over the horizon on their waka, storm, loot, and burn a pa, and leave with prisoners, most of whom were considered floating kai rather than slave labourers. 
By contrast, Te Puoho wanted to conquer and administer the whole of Te Wai Pounamu. He would put Kai Tahu to work, grow food to barter or sell to Pakeha, and become rich. 
Although Te Puoho failed, his plan for Te Wai Pounamu was to some extent realised in the distant Chatham Islands, whose indigenous people lacked not only guns and any sort of military tradition. Some of Te Puoho's relatives joined with their fellow North Taranaki iwi Ngati Mutunga and invaded the Chathams in 1835. They killed hundreds of Moriori, and made the rest work as slaves on farms that supplied Pakeha towns like Port Nicholson, Sydney and even San Francisco with potatoes. 
The society that Ngati Tama and Ngati Mutunga established on the islands they called Wharekauri was unprecedented in New Zealand history. With its mixture of slavery and cash cropping, it resembled, on a small scale, Confederate America or Europe's slave colonies in the Caribbean. 
Only the confluence of a number of factors - the isolation and pacifism of the Moriori, the demand for food from Pakeha towns, the use of guns, which made large-scale coercion possible in a way that the traditional armoury of Maori war didn't - made Wharekauri possible. (Unfortunately, and for obvious reasons, conservative Pakeha have in recent decades tried to make Wharekauri into a symbol of pre-Treaty Maori society in general.)
Because the British Crown did not consider the Treaty a charter to interfere in Maori affairs, and had no interest in bringing British law to Maori society, the slave colony on the Chathams persisted into the 1860s. 
The story of Te Puoho shows why the Musket Wars were petering out in the 1830s, before the treaty of Waitangi was signed. And the story of the society Te Puoho's relatives established on the Chathams suggests that, even after the signing of the Treaty, Britain had no desire to impose its legal code on Maori chiefs, as long as those chiefs did not interfere with Pakeha colonists and British businesses. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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The rise of the Minimalist Party

December 8, 2014, 2:35 pm
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We all know about minimalist art and minimalist music, but in the Kingdom of Tonga a minimalist style of politics seems to be thriving. 

The seven independent MPs voted into parliament in Tonga's recent general election have no common philosophy, no common policies, no manifesto, and no common name: that hasn't stopped them, though, from turning themselves into a de facto political party and conducting negotiations first with the Democratic Party of 'Akilisi Pohiva and then with the nobles who are allotted nine crucial seats in parliament by Tonga's revised constitution. 

Sadly, the post that I wrote in 2010 about Tonga's previous general election and its aftermath seems to describe many of the events of the last week. For the second election running, the Democratic Party has won a clear majority of the seats in Tonga's parliament elected by universal suffrage; once again, though, Pohiva and co look like being denied the right to form a government.

Last June, when a festival of political discussion was held in Nuku'alofa, I argued that Tongan democracy should interest us all. I wish it interested the kingdom's nobles and independent MPs. 

For updates and waspish commentary on the negotiations in Nuku'alofa, follow 'Atalanga-based scholar Teena Pulu Brown's twitter feed.  [Posted by Scott Hamilton]
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Deep diving

December 9, 2014, 1:44 pm
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Three shots from the same war

December 11, 2014, 4:35 pm
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Beneath the smooth lamplit tar of Highway One: the gravel voice of an old Waikato road, the bones of ambushed coaches

Beside Onehunga's main street the pressganged soldiers of the Orpheus await resurrection, remembering the rotten teeth of Plymouth pier, and skiff-sized breakers on the Manukau bar

At Rangiriri cemetery, wild imperial soldiers are parted from their booze and loot, and made to stand at last in silent respectful rows. Death is a drill sergeant.


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Teena Pulu Brown rattles Tonga's cage

December 14, 2014, 2:13 pm
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[Vuna Road is only a dozen kilometres long, but it encompasses all of the contradictions of the Kingdom of Tonga. Vuna runs along the waterfront of Nuku'alofa, Tonga's capital and only city, from the suburb of Sopu, where palangi diplomats and local businessmen have built large homes and walled compounds, past bars, restaurants, and a series of wharves and berms that double as marketplaces, to Patangata, a shantytown built on a sandspit by economic refugees from Tonga's outer islands. 
Commerce brings the different populations of the waterfront into contact. At improvised stalls set up on the sides of Vuna Road, fishermen and carpenters from Patangata sell fresh octopi and carved ika to Australasian diplomats and elderly Americans disgorged from cruise ships. On weekends, middle class Nuku'alofans park their SUVs and buy kava from relatives who have driven dented utes in from the countryside.

Recently, though, Tonga's government announced plans to regulate and segregate the entrepeneurs of Vuna Road. It told stallholders to stop trading from the grassy edges of the road, and instead conduct business from a new 'marketplace' that consists of a few hundred square metres of of crushed coral rock surrounded by wire fences. This hot and treeless space has been named 'the cage' by Nuku'alofans.  
In a paper that she gave at last week's Human Rights in the Pacific conference at Albany Massey University, Teena Pulu Brown, who is a senior lecturer in Maori and Indigenous Development at AUT University, made the 'cage' on Nuku'alofa's waterfront into a metaphor for Tongan society in the second decade of the twenty-first century. 

Brown delivered her paper with journalist Richard Papamatautau, who accompanied her on a recent visit to Tonga to observe the country's general elections. After putting Tonga into its regional context, Brown's paper describes the action, and sometimes the lack of action, during an electoral contest whose outcome remains uncertain. After I apologised to her for missing the conference, Brown was kind enough to send me a text of 'Who's who in the zoo?', and to let me publish it here. ]

Who’s who in the zoo? Tonga election 2014
Movember was a hairy month.  It made “the poor state of men’s health due to lack of awareness” go from bad to worse (Movember New Zealand, 2014).  There was Tony Abott’s koala summit (Lavelle, 2014).  What was that all about?  The G20 countries acting for “two-thirds of the world’s population, 85 per cent of global gross domestic product and 75 per cent of global trade” landed in Brisbane to talk shop (G20 Australia, 2014a).  Pacific Island states stood for the one-third that didn’t get a look in, which was customary.  The Trans Pacific Partnership evaded the regional radar of Pacific Island governments.  No political head uttered it was about “investor rights not free trade,” of which they didn’t have any (Lennard, 2014).  But when Australia’s Prime Minister erased climate change from the G20 talk-fest because it stymied economic growth, and Pacific Island leaders said niente, nichts, nada, nichego to the European Union bankrolling climate funds, something, somewhere, was disconnected.
A few days after global trade stormed the global South, Will Ilolahia of Auckland got on Radio Australia.  The tide turned to Pacific Island politics.  A week off from 50,405 Tongan voters electing seventeen people’s representatives to parliament was an opportune time to wave a red flag at the Tongan state, Will thought (Matangi Tonga, 2014).  He was right and wrong, which was typical.  Will had gotten his protestor skills as a young Polynesian Panther of 1970s inner-city Auckland.  This was his urban Polynesia edge.  Different to community leaders his age, migrants who spoke English with a Dongan accent and socialised in Tonga not to rumble with authority, Will got in the state’s face. 
“Those of us who actually hold Tongan passports we’ve been quite concerned, and we raised it with some of the members, why can’t we be like other democracies [and] be able to vote because after all, a lot of us overseas Tongans provide Tonga with a significant amount of income in regard to remittances and other important things that we do for the Kingdom.  Areas of expertise by overseas Tongans should be taken into account but the hierarchy and administration is always done by the locals who, to be straight up, I don’t think they see past the island itself when we are becoming a global force.  Millions of dollars is remitted back to Tonga, more than what they earn in their exports” (Hill, 2014a).
‘Aminiasi Kefu, Tonga’s attorney general quashed any whiff of an overseas uprising.  “[We] just simply can’t afford to set-up voting from outside because it would have to cover Australia, Japan, France, the UK, the US, and the Tongans [are] basically everywhere.  That would just be a logistical nightmare and also, we need a lot of resources.” (Pulu, 2014).
Meanwhile in New Zealand, the colonial propaganda wars had resumed.  Whether 1840 Maori chiefs ceded sovereignty by signing a Treaty with the Queen of England was disputed.  John Key had an opinion.  New Zealand’s Prime Minister thought the colony was settled peacefully.  He was mistaken and shameless, which was characteristic.
“In my view New Zealand was one of the very few countries in the world that were settled peacefully.  Maori probably acknowledge that settlers brought with them a lot of skills and a lot of capital” (Stuff NZ, 2014; Waatea News, 2014).  He should have put it in context: Maori acknowledge settlers brought skills and capital they used against them.
In Nadi, Fiji, Pacific Island heads of government gathered to pivot and prostrate to China.  President Xi Jinping performed a declaration: “We feel a natural kinship with each other.”  “The vast Pacific Ocean links China, Fiji and other island countries and, indeed, our hearts close together” (Fox, 2014; China Embassy, 2014; Jinping, 2014).  Three days prior, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi repeated the rhetoric in Suva: “This is a region that is important to us.  There is a lot we can do for these nations” (Modi, 2014).
The world’s largest ocean was vital to Chinese, Indian, and Russian navies upgrading their Pacific fleets and dependent on open lines of communication and ports of access for deep penetration in the remote South, which was proving to be no longer a Western sphere of influence.  With “our hearts close together” in “a region that is important to us,” China, India, and Russia spun polished stories to get inside sea borders of South Pacific security (Jinping, 2014; Modi, 2014).
The Pacific Islands’ region had joined hands in an ancient circle dance.  They had returned home to the Austronesian family of languages of South East Asia, Madagascar, and Oceania, and were singing for Live Aid as the world’s 21st century dependent relatives. 
On November 27th 2014 the Tonga election intensified the country’s bipolar condition.  People were attached to, and cut off from, the region’s global-scape.  Many assumed “politics [was] not a priority for youth” (Tonga Daily News, 2014a).  High school youth had their faces blacked out in media as lean, mean, bare foot brawlers outrunning flabby cops who looked like contenders for a United Nations non-communicable disease list, not that there was a national register, but not that the Tongan state wouldn’t formulate a fat people’s file for funding.
“What are solutions for problems [like] committing suicide?”  Questions were put to parliamentary candidates at a youth event bankrolled by the United Nations Democracy Fund that attracted few young people.  The response was holey with an e implying worn and leaky, not the holy with a y suggesting divine and flawless.  “Youths nowadays should try to accept God, fully repent from sin and everything will be clearer.” (Tonga Daily News, 2014a).
How will Tonga solve youth unemployment?  “Youths are lazy because of their attitude.”  “Weaving mats and display it in stores will help to push youths [to] see that [it is] important.” (Tonga Daily News, 2014a).
With 8,175 new voters aged 21 to 35, the mentality that “youths are lazy” and need to “accept God [and] repent from sin” did zilch to elevate this voting bloc’s value by saying young people have rights to inclusion (Tonga Daily News, 2014a, 2014b).  Young people’s voice and visibility didn’t matter, and they showed it by not giving a rat’s ass. 
“Are you half caste?”  “My grandfather was European.  But I’m Tongan like you.”  “I can see you Palangi.  Are you half Tonga?  Are you sure?” inquired the cleaner with bucket and mop in hand.  She gazed at the exotic hybrid exiting my hotel room with money in pocket for overpriced coffee at a town café.  In town, I was fenced by one block of cafés and bars for foreigners who paid cash or credit for food and alcohol, but spared no coins on poor beggars pestering them for change.  In town, I didn’t have to play the hotel half cast watching Tongan women clean, cook, and serve white tourists in strained English, clumsy manners, and frayed uniforms stitched up with black cotton.  In town, I could pretend the cage wasn’t fragile. 
I asked my colleague Richard to do fieldwork for a co-authored article.  A journalism academic, he had been Radio New Zealand’s Pacific correspondent covering the 2010 vote, and state funerals of father and son monarchs, Tupou the fourth and George Tupou the fifth.  Richard knew how Tonga rolled out election pageantry brimming with brass parades and car-cades that could not conceal families with children manning road side stalls for twelve hour shifts.  He understood I was tied to political actors, drenched in the politicking, gagging to get breathing distance from the field.
While Richard was doing fieldwork, my job as an anthropologist, I thought I’d be a Facebook journalist back at the hotel.  I posted photographs with news captions.  “The Cage.  The outgoing Tu’ivakano government wants to capture street vendors selling vegetables, firewood, and seafood on Vuna Road in this cage and charge them a fee to sit in the hot sun, uncovered, without shelter or access to running water and an ablution block peddling their poor people’s goods.”
No one liked my investigative reporting.  I tried live commentary from the field.  “Top end of Vuna Road by the Palace was cordoned off last night when I was driving back from town and it’s still blocked this morning.  I was going to drive through the cones.  King Tupou the sixth is here at the Palace, which is why this part of the road was closed to the public.  Why?  Do the common people have ebola?” (Brown Pulu, 2014a). 
My Tongan Facebook friends with European ancestry liked the angle so I played it loud like a broken ukulele.  “Watched a rusted old truck from the Sopu end of Vuna Road drive around the barrier and straight through to town.  Go the commoners!  Half cast has more appeal.  I have an escape route out of Tongan commoner jail by motioning that the other half points to European ancestry.  Be jealous of me too!  I ain’t royal and I ain’t no goddam commoner with ebola.  I am mean.  I am speaking from my British and Dutch side.  Blame that part of my mixed-up racial, ethnic, and cultural background.” (Brown Pulu, 2014a).
I was uncoordinated piecing it together. Journalists Pesi Fonua and Kalafi Moala told New Zealand media the election was peaceful.  It wasn’t.  It was pensive.  Young people brooded that job chances were grim.  Families fretted that scrapping together an evening meal could worsen.  Many didn’t vote because it made no difference to them who was in government.
Back in New Zealand after election week, Ma’afu texted me.  Outgoing Minister for Lands and a high-ranking noble re-elected to parliament, I picked a fight with him in Tonga and came off second best.  His message beckoned me to bury the bush knife and relate.
“If the Nobles support Vaea, [I] am crossing the floor” (Ma’afu, 2014).  I nearly died.  Read the one-liner dazed: Ma’afu was “crossing the floor?”  Is he drunk?  I grappled to take in that this noble might actually cross the parliamentary floor to support the nomination from the people’s representatives for Tonga’s Prime Minister.  The noble Ma’afu was doing democracy.  Why was it hard for me to accept that?  What double standards I had.
References
Brown Pulu, T. (2014a). Facebook Post, Nuku’alofa, Tonga, November 29.
Brown Pulu, T. (2014b). Facebook Post, Auckland, New Zealand, December 1.
Callick, R. (2014). Fijian stopover as Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping charm Pacific. The              Australian, Melbourne, Australia, November 21.
China Embassy. (2014). Foreign Minister Wang Yi Talks about President Xi Jinping’s Attendance at the G20 Summit and Visits to Three Countries Including Australia.  Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Republic of South Africa, Pretoria,     South Africa, November 25.
Fox, L. (2014). Chinese president Xi Jinping signs five agreements with Fiji as part of China’s            Pacific engagement strategy. Australian Broadcasting Corporation: News, Melbourne, Australia, November 22.
Gulati, M. (2014). Modi in Fiji: An Agenda Beyond the Diaspora – Analysis. Eurasia Review:   News and Analysis, Madrid, Spain, November 20.
G20 Australia. (2014a). G20 Members. G20 Australia 2014, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, Australia.
G20 Australia. (2014b). G20 Leaders’ Communique, Brisbane Summit, 15-26 November         2014. G20 Australia 2014, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra,        Australia, Pp. 1-5.
Hamid, M. (2014). Mohsin Hamid: why migration is a fundamental human right. The Guardian, London, United Kingdom, November 21.
Hill, B. (2014a). NZ Tongans want vote without flight home. Radio Australia: Pacific Beat,       Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Melbourne, Australia, November 20.
Hill, B. (2014b). NZ Tongans wield political influence behind the scenes. Radio Australia:        Pacific Beat, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Melbourne, Australia, November          21.
Jinping, X. (2014). Bright future for friendly cooperation with Pacific Islands, says H.E. Xi     Jinping. Matangi Tonga Online, Nuku’alofa, Tonga, November 20.
Kaniva Pacific. (2014). 9 Nobles vs 9 Democrats: 8 Independents decide which party to        form government. New Zealand Kaniva Pacific, Auckland, New Zealand, November  29.
Latu, K. (2014). Democratic Party promises shake-up of Ministries to promote growth and            development in the Kingdom. New Zealand Kaniva Pacific, Auckland, New Zealand,   November 24.
Lavelle, N. (2014). Cross Talk with Michael Hudson, John Weeks, and Colin Bradford: Koala Summit. Russia Today, Moscow, Russian Federation, September 19.
Lennard, N. (2014). Noam Chomsky: Trans-Pacific Partnership is a “neoliberal assault.”        Salon, San Francisco, United States, January 14.
Ma’afu. (2014). Text Conversation from Lord Ma’afu to Teena Brown Pulu, Ma’ufanga,        Tonga, December 2.
Matangi Tonga. (2014). Tongatapu holds highest number of new voters. Matangi Tonga        Online, Nuku’alofa, Tonga, September 29.
Modi, N. (2014). PM Blogs on his visit to Myanmar, Australia and Fiji. Narendra Modi, New  Delhi, India, November 21.
Mohan, C. R. (2014). Chinese Takeaway: Modi’s Indo-Pacific. The Indian Express: Opinion,        New Delhi, India, November 21.
Movember New Zealand. (2014). Men’s Health: The State of Men’s Health in New Zealand.  Movember New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand.
Peterson, S. Et. Al. (2014). Low health-related quality of life in school-aged children in          Tonga, a lower-middle income country in the South Pacific. Global Health Action, 7:       1-10.
Pulu, J. (2014). NZ Tongans want to vote in the upcoming 2014 elections but can’t. Tagata  Pasifika, Television NZ, Auckland, New Zealand, November 21.
Raines, S. (2014a). Tonga’s ailing economy the key election battleground. Radio Australia:   Pacific Beat, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Melbourne, Australia, November          21.
Raines, S. (2014b). Youth vote and policy detail lacking from Tongan vote. Radio Australia:  Pacific Beat, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Melbourne, Australia, November          27.
Stuff NZ. (2014). NZ ‘settled peacefully’ – PM. Stuff NZ: Politics, Auckland, New Zealand,        November 20.
Su, R. (2014). John Key Says Britain Settled New Zealand ‘Peacefully’ Despite Tribunal          Report Findings. International Business Times: Australia, New York, United States,       November 21.
Tonga Daily News. (2014a). Politics Not a Priority for Youths. Tonga Daily News, Nuku’alofa, Tonga, November 19.
Tonga Daily News. (2014b). More Young People Register to Vote. Tonga Daily News, Nuku’alofa, Tonga, September 30.
Urban Island Review. (2014). Out From the Lion’s Den – Mr Clive Edwards. The What It Do:   Urban Island Review, Los Angeles, California, United States, November 20.
Waatea News. (2014). NZ settlement peaceful says John Key. Waatea News, Mangere,         Auckland, New Zealand, November 19.

Xinhua. (2014). Xi visits Fiji for closer ties with Pacific island countries. Global Times, Xinhua, Beijing, China, November 21.
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