Who am I?

Today I learned that I was adopted. I’m 79, so this came as something of a surprise. How did it come about that at this advanced stage of my life, I learned something about myself that at least some others knew, but which had been hidden from me for nearly 8 decades?

It started out with a recent DNA analysis, in which it was revealed that 23% of mine was Polynesian.  This was a surprise, as nothing in my known family history hinted at this, since my father was born in Sydney of English descent, and my mother was born in England, also of English descent. So, I contacted a cousin in New Zealand, where I was born, and asked her if she had any leads which might reveal where the Polynesian part of me came from. (As my son also had had his DNA analysed by a separate organisation, which produced a 10% ‘Oceanic’ component, there clearly was something Polynesian somewhere.)  Without really believing it possible, I suggested that maybe there was an adoption, possibly my own.

Today I received a letter and some documentation from my cousin. It arrived just as I was preparing lunch, and my wife opened the package, so while I was in the middle of cooking beef stroganoff, I heard my wife say “You’re adopted”.

This information raises as many questions as it answers.  Unfortunately, the generation which might have some answers are all dead, and few of my cousins will have any knowledge of my adoptive status, nor probably any interest. Quite simply, I imagine that in the past this was something that wasn’t discussed, and that after a while, people — including even my parent — forgot that I was adopted. Now, it’s only because oner or two cousins have been exploring family history that this has come up, and more significantly, only because of the questions raised by my DNA analysis, and subsequent contacting my cousin, that it has come to light.

Now I’m wondering whether I’ll go through a sort of revere equivalent of the five stages of  grief and loss : 1. Denial and isolation; 2. Anger; 3. Bargaining; 4. Depression; 5. Acceptance. At the moment, my feeling is one of regret — of not having known when my parents were alive. But thoughts on that, and a request for my pre-adoption birth certificate form the New Zealand Dept of Internal Affairs are matters for another day. Meanwhile, I end 2017 knowing a lot more about who I am but with a great deal more remaining to be discovered in 2018. 

PART SEVEN: REFLECTIONS

 This visit ‘home’ had been undertaken almost spontaneously, and had been intended to be both a trip down memory lane as well as an opportunity to see some parts of my native country which I had never visited – thus the time spent in Marlborough.  It was also to be a voyage of discovery and rediscovery which might reveal things about NZ and about myself.  The visit to Te Papa introduced a significant theme: identity.  What I was exploring and discovering was, in part, New Zealand’s contemporary identity, and what, as an expatriate kiwi, is my own.  How has one contributed to the other?

I think the first thing that struck me was less the lansdcape, significant though that is, than the built environment because, of course, there are buildings everywhere, some dating back to the Victorian and Edwardian eras,  many from the interwar years, and some from recent times. Some have been cherished and preserved, others have been repurposed, some abandoned, some gussied up in a style which would have puzzled the original builders, others wrecked by natural forces like the Christchurch earthquake.   The built environment is layered, with a rich patina, and I came to realize that it provided a kind of visual metaphor for the country and the changes which have occurred over half a century, while the reflections of some provided a counterpart to the distortions and misunderstandings of my own view of my birthplace.  The buildings that I recognized from childhood provided an anchor, taking me back to a period when I simply took such structures for granted.  Some, which I had been unaware of, a lifetime later take on a new significance. Art deco has acquired meaning in adulthood, and it is part of a small area of knowledge and experience acquired since leaving NZ.  

Other parts of the built environment also took on new significance.  The settlement and history of NZ can't be separated from the construction of roads, railways and bridges, harbours and wharves, the country’s infrastructure.  My railway journeys took me through landscape which offered a huge challenge to the railway and civil engineers.  With imagination, grit and a hard working labour force, they pushed the railways through and helped to knit together parts of the young nation.  Today, those railways are not so much a means of transport as a vehicle for leisure, representing yet another change since my departure. 

Finally, there’s the landscape itself.  In its pristine state, as when Abel Tasman navigated its coast in the C17th, the landscape of NZ must have been quite spectacular, though alien, being largely covered in dense forest.  There was an exotic bird life.  There were no vermin or snakes.   Although Maori had made some impact on the landscape and its fauna – they had driven the huge moa to extinction, for instance – when the first European settlers arrived, vast areas of the country were more or less as nature had made them.  Within a couple of generations of European settlement, huge tracts of forest had been cleared and replaced by pasture, and with this clearance came a decline in the native bird population.   Today, much of the landscape, as in Canberbury and the Manwatu,  is completely man made, and even in such isolated places as the Marlborough Sounds, there are huge areas in which the native forest and its bird life have been obliterated to be replaced by pasture or pine forests.

Now NZ has woken up to the environmental effects of these man-made changes, and what was formerly a resource to be plundered is now a damaged landscape to be restored or unspoiled forest to be carefully maintained in its pristine state.   Restoration trumps exploitation. For instance, Kapiti Island, which gives its name to the Kapiti Coast, is a strictly managed wild life reserve, and there are other islands which are being used as refuges to encourage the breeding of indigenous bird life. 

Restoration has also been applied to the land and resources of the Maori.  The most conspicuous form of restoration applies to the language. Fifty years ago, the Maori language (Te Reo) was not widely spoken and was little known.  My school, FAHS, sported a Maori motto, "Kia Toa Kia Ngakaunui” ("Have Courage, Desire Greatly"), a local substitute for the usual Latin moto.  There was also a constant reminder of the language in the countless Maori place names. However, their pronunciation was heavily anglicized and little of the music of  Te Reo survived its encounter with the pakeha tongue.  A truly massive change has taken place.  Te Reo is now widely taught in schools, many more people speak it, it has a highly visible place in public life and literature – my NZ passport is in two languages, English and Maori – and there are two Maori TV channels.  Most significantly,  great care is now taken in pronouncing Maori accurately and authentically, so the TV weather forecast presenters for instance, who necessarily have a whole range of Maori place names to articulate, do so as to the manner born.

The changing status of the Maori language has for some time been accompanied by a growing Maori assertiveness and what some would consider to be the overdue restoration of long denied rights and benefits deriving from the misappropriation of Maori land. Since the 1990s, governments have worked at restoration of use and ownership rights, though the so-called Waitangi process (after the treaty of 1840) has not been without controversy, particularly among  some of the pakeha population.   Likewise, the acquisition of significant sums by tribes and tribal groups hasn't always led to intra or even intertribal harmony. Even so, the so-called Waitangi process has attended to long-standing Maori grievances and attempted to put right injustices.   This represents a truly huge and desirable change since the 1960s.

So, Maori are secure in their own homeland and can look forward to a prosperous future. Or can they?  Some things don't change, and the socio-economic status of Maori hasn't changed so drastically as to move the majority into the property owning,  fully employed middle class.  I heard a radio interview with an MP regarding a controversial development in his constituency, North Auckland, which could bring employment to a region much in need of it. He pointed out that there was very high unemployment among Maori youth, a situation repeated on the East Coast where there is also a high Maori population.  Both areas are predominantly rural, with limited economic opportunities other than farming. So, despite their higher status and their significant contribution to NZ identity, the plight of Maori still remains problematic.  Like some of those old buildings, this unfortunate aspect of  NZ life lingers on.

There is likely to be another issue which will arise, as far as Maori are concerned, deriving from the considerable increase in immigration, especially from Asia.  It is projected that 250,000 Asian immigrants will arrive between 2006 and 2026, while even today, 23% of  New Zealanders were born overseas. (Cf 13% in the UK where immigration has become a significant political issue, at its worst verging on xenophobia).) Evidently most of New Zealand's  23% live in the Auckland region.  Although Maori are by a large margin a minority in their own country, the arrival of new immigrants further dilutes their proportion of the population,  so it is not difficult to see that migration could be a source of contention not only among the majority pakeha population, but also among indigenous Maori.  

Such immigration can and will have an effect on NZ identity, but in ways that it is difficult to predict.  I've already commented on the orientation of NZ towards the Pacific and Asia apparent in the displays at Te Papa.  How meaningful and acceptable this orientation will be to newcomers from beyond Asia, such as the Turkish waiter in the Devonport restaurant, is open to conjecture.   What contributions to the cultural mix will such newcomers make?  How accepting will they be of the specifically Maori seats in parliament? And how in turn will immigrants’ aspirations, attitudes and values affect NZ identity?

As my visit and the many changes in population and material culture demonstrated, for all its isolation in the South Pacific, NZ is fully integrated into the globalization which links the rest of the world through flows of goods, information, ideas and people. The original European settlement of the country represents an earlier phase of globalization,  when colonialism by such powers as GB brought a form of globalization in which the flow of power and ideas was distinctly asymmetrical, and remained so for many generations. With the expansion of settlement and livestock farming, NZ became a pioneer in the shipping of chilled and frozen meat and dairy products to the Mother Country and thousands of young NZ men heeded the call for troops to defend its interests, beginning with the Boer War in 1900.  This truly significant involvement in global conflict is commemorated in the ubiquitous war memorials, such as those found in Feilding, Palmerston and Auckland, and, in an invisible form in the demographic impact brought about by the deaths and disablement of a significant percentage of the most economically active male age cohort during the 20^th century.

Attitudes to the Home Country (aka UK), though largely favourable and carefully maintained by regular royal visits, inevitably began to change in the latter part of the C20th. Especially significant in this change was the entry of Britain into the EU because, while NZ could still continue to export to what had been its prime market, new markets for its products would have to be found to compensate for the reduction in exports to the UK.  Happily for NZ, a vast and rising market was available in a region of the world which till then had provided a relatively limited outlet for NZ produce: Asia and the Middle East.  Where trade goes, people and ideas also go, and with the striking economic development of such countries as China, Malaysia, Singapore and India (not to forget the leader, Japan), NZ’s focus has been literally reoriented. 

The integration of NZ into the globalized world has also been strengthened by the Kiwi diaspora.  Nearly half a million NZ born people live abroad, of whom around 360,000 live in Australia, including children of my two cousins and my hosts in Paramata.  Such a diaspora involves travel and the flow of people and ideas across the globe.  This is augmented by the flow of British and American TV and films onto Kiwi screens, including, with the cinema career of Peter Jackson, an important burgeoning of production skills and a wave of tourism in and to NZ – or Middle Earth. 

His films are a global phenomenon, but represent a European, even English Home Counties fantasy world.  The real world of NZ seemed to me to be somewhat unrepresented on NZ TV, in which all channels are commercial, and in which so many programmes were imports.  For once I could begin to understand the French obsession with protecting their cinema industry. Even more striking was the fact that Sky TV as seen in NZ is actually based in Australia, so the majority of the news items appeared to be Australian, and the space devoted to actual NZ news seemed to be comparable to the ten minutes allocated to ‘the news where you are’ on the BBC news in the UK.  In the UK, however,  ‘where we are’ is just a county, so this portioning out of space on the national news is understandable. But NZ is a whole country!  I suppose with such a small population, Aotearoa simply doesn't generate enough news for Aussie Sky. 

Alone among the unrepresentative sample of TV programmes that I saw, only two were made in NZ. The first was a crime series set in Auckland, with New Zealander Sam Neale playing the role of a police inspector trying to protect his team from the dysfunctional ambitions of his superior,  who was more concerned with getting ‘headlines in tomorrow’s Herald’ than with the just resolution of a current case, which appeared to involve a Polynesian family and the building of trust between the police team and the family in an attempt to achieve a satisfactory outcome rather than headline news. 

The other programme was one which presented a really important part of NZ society and culture to the Kiwi audience: the ANZ Young Farmer of the Year Grand Final.  Even here, globalization wasn’t far from the scene as one of the finalists had worked for a time under Gordon Ramsey, so that in addition to his many skills as a livestock farmer, he was able to rustle up a gourmet dinner.   This bit of reality TV, while drawing on a format developed elsewhere, presented an authentic slice of NZ to the nation’s viewers, reinforcing a central part of the national identity, that of the down-to-earth, multi-skilled give-anything-a-go laconic male Kiwi (there not being, evidently, any female young farmer finalists this year).  The finalists also served to challenge the stereotype of the Kiwi farmer immortalized in Fred Dagg from Taihape (New Zealand’s self-styled Gumboot Capital), a comedy character created by satirist John Clarke in the mid 1970s.

What I have come to realize, reflecting on this visit, is that identity, whether national or individual, is a continual process, a work in progress,  and not a fixed product (politicians obsessed with nationality quizzes please note).  Like the country itself, identity is continually constructed and bits of the old are left behind or are repurposed, while the new is introduced and maybe with some discomfort or irritation and adaptation is integrated, and an altered configuration/identity emerges. As NZ has evolved as a country and as a nation, its identity has been influenced and subtly altered with each generation and each wave of immigration. Fortunately, some of the old attitudes and behaviours have, like many of the old buildings, been retained in up to date guise, and some less desirable ones become largely extinct, if not entirely, as the anti-Semitic comment of the Christchurch taxi driver revealed.   Even so, Kiwis remain open, friendly, helpful , hospitable, unpretentious,  and critical of anyone who pulls rank or uses their position to gain advantage – as the unwise Mr Gilmore discovered.  Aotearoa is still a homely, comfortable place, despite the overlay of globalized sophistication.

When I left NZ in 1963, quite obviously I didn't leave my NZ identity behind like a discarded garment.  I took it with me, and since then, as with the country I had left, that identity has been a work in progress, subject to many influences and incorporating quite a few changes. What this visit made me appreciate is the basis of that identity: like the Marlborough sauvignon blanc, made and bottled in New Zealand/Aotearoa, but matured elsewhere.

On my last evening in Wellington, I arrived back at the Paramata railway station and started heading towards the 200 steps up to Derek and Rosemary’s house overlooking an inlet. As I looked out over the familiar Porirua Harbour towards the Ngatitoa Domain, which during the day provides a pleasant though unremarkable vista, I realized that in the fading light the scene had taken on an unfamiliar,  almost magical quality.  I whipped out my mobile and snapped the clouds, the evening sunlight, the reflections and the water,  capturing images that mirror the impact and memories of my visit --  some vivid, some permanent, some distorted, some as fleeting as the quietly magical scene before me.

Haere ra Aotearoa!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/75004468@N08/sets/

PART ONE: CHRISTCHURCH & GREYMOUTH

For the past fifty years I’ve lived an expatriate life, having left New Zealand in 1963, a year marked by a much more momentous event -- Kennedy’s assassination. This lengthy  absence has been punctuated by occasional visits, the last about ten years ago.   On the current occasion, encouraged by Nora, I was to make a visit ‘while you can still enjoy it’, since long haul travel and advancing years don't always make a good match.

When, after a long journey via Melbourne, I finally arrived in Christchurch, it was to be the start of three weeks visiting a combination of the unfamiliar, such as the Marlborough area of the South Island, and of the relatively familiar, such as Wellington, my native city, and Auckland, where I went to university.    In the process, I would meet some cousins – one of whom I hadn’t met for sixty years --  and old friends, as well as have an opportunity to reflect on the changes which had taken place in my native country and myself over those fifty years.

Christchurch was in some ways an odd place to begin, since it had been badly wrecked by serious earthquakes in 2010 and 2012. At first, the arriving visitor is not aware of this, since the new airport is very smart, traffic is flowing and there are no obvious signs of damage, until on skirting the CBD, the route passes abandoned and damaged commercial buildings and eventually, the dramatic wreck of what was the truly ‘iconic’ Anglican cathedral.  In fact, although I didn't visit the CBD, being driven around the perimeter at night revealed a lifeless cordoned off area, truly a ghost of its former self, while empty sites scattered at intervals elsewhere showed that the quakes had a widespread and serious impact.

According to my cousin Lorraine, this impact is still being felt, while in the local press I read reports on the plight of people still living in temporary accommodation, unable to return to their wrecked properties.  Likewise, the commercial and tourist life of the city has been affected to the extent that the daily train service from Christchurch to Picton is now suspended during the winter months for lack of demand.    Elsewhere I learned of the ‘Christchurch effect’ on the economy and on decisions which, while motivated by sympathy for the city, may be disadvantageous for other parts of the island. A frequently cited example is the long mooted proposal to replace Picton as the main interisland ferry port with a newly built one nearer to Christchurch. Needless to say, the people of Picton, and latterly of Nelson, are not very happy with this plan.

One of the most interesting outcomes of the destruction has been the effect on church life, because not only was the cathedral destroyed, but many other places of worship were damaged irreparably.  It seems that various denominations have been forced to share premises and are now realizing that maybe rebuilding their old places of worship isn't  such a good idea, so why not continue sharing?   This seemed to me to be an excellent example of ecumenical spirit combined with Kiwi practicality which might be usefully adopted more widely among people of all faiths.

The brevity of my stay in Christchurch meant it was more efficient to make use of taxis rather than buses to get around, and this introduced me to that part of the service sector which universally provides a first step on the economic ladder for immigrants.  In fact, I had already been introduced to the immigrant presence at my motel, whose manager/owner is Korean.  His daughter is studying medicine at Otago, making the second generation transition into the professions.   I wasn't able to establish whether this kind of trajectory was typical of the families of the immigrant taxi drivers I met in Christchurch and elsewhere, but what I did find was considerable diversity in their places of origin, from China to Ethiopia and many Asian countries in between.  Quite unexpectedly,  I also encountered a disturbing instance of racism on the part of a middle aged native Kiwi taxi driver, who in the course of our chat while en route to the railway station referred to the Prime Minister as a ‘bloody Jew’. 

On this occasion, I was going to catch an early departing TransAlpine train for the first of three train journeys I was to take, having decided that train travel would be a better way to see the sights than by driving a hire car, which has been my way of getting around on previous visits.  It turned out that the railway system reflects many of the changes which have taken place in New Zealand during the past fifty years.  When I left NZ, jet travel was in its infancy, and flying, either domestically or internationally, was a luxury.  Travel between main cities, such as Wellington and Auckland, was mostly by train, despite the length of the journey and the discomfort.

Today mass use of the railways seems to be confined to the urban networks, and the inter-city system appears to be pretty much in terminal decline, except for tourism, as air travel has replaced rail. Visitors like me are encouraged to buy rail and bus travel passes which provide combinations of travel and a fixed number of rail or bus days.  I had elected to buy a rail pass which gave me 3 ‘rail days’ over two weeks, starting with the return east-west TransAlpine journey from Christchurch to Greymouth.  The utilitarian rolling stock of 50 years ago has been replaced by smart, comfortable – even luxurious – carriages made in Dunedin, and the rear carriage of the train is a open sided observation car so that travellers can enjoy to the full the sights and smells of the passing landscape , while capturing the scenery on their cameras and mobile phones.

The first part of the journey, lasting about an hour, goes across the Canterbury Plains, a vast area of flat land devoted for generations to the raising and fattening of sheep.   Huge hedges provide shelter, and the impression is that of moving between vast outdoor rooms.  In fact, as we moved across the landscape, I realized that we were passing through a huge agricultural factory devoted to the efficient production of first class protein, much of which is exported, mostly to markets in the Middle East and Asia which were unheard of fifty years ago, when the UK was the main market for chilled and frozen lamb and mutton.  Now slaughtering is carried out according to Muslim rites and consumers in Iran and the Gulf states eat Canterbury lamb for dinner.

 Once the train leaves the plains, the route meanders through increasingly hilly, even mountainous, terrain which, as elsewhere in New Zealand would have been a challenge to the railway engineers constructing the lines and building the bridges and viaducts.  As the route travels further west and higher and higher, the hills become more spectacular and the dry landscape of the eastern side of the island gives way to the wet and forested western side because both islands of New Zealand have distinctly different  east-west coast climates. 

The interior of the South Island is sparsely populated. Farmsteads are isolated and few and far between.  The two townships at which the train stops – Arthur’s Pass and Otira – have never been large, and Otira in particular gives the impression to the railway traveller of being very down at heel, although apparently it is popular with those pursuing an alternative life style. Overshadowed by mist and bush covered hills, the colourfully painted cottages, probably relics of the days when the railway was a significant part of the Otira economy, are now part of the life style choice. 

The journey continued through misty valleys, where power lines disappeared into the misty distance. Maintaining the infrastructure in such an environment must be a constant struggle and will call for the rugged tramping (i.e., hiking) skills which are an important part of the recreational attractions of this region of New Zealand.

 Having passed along the shore of Lake Brunner, the train eventually arrived in Greymouth, the end of the line, where quite a few of the international tourists – Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Germans among them -- joined waiting coaches destined for Nelson or Queenstown.  Those of us returning to Christchurch had about an hour to explore this small town, which had evolved as a port for the coal from the mines which formerly provided the basis for the local economy.  Consisting of two parallel streets running along the banks of the river towards the port, Greymouth is named after a 19^th Century colonial servant, whose presence is also commemorated in the eponymous Greytown in South Africa, and in the river and town in New Zealand, where he eventually became Prime Minister.   

It was Saturday, so most of the shops were closed, and the town was largely deserted. As I wandered down the main street, I passed the town library where, much to my surprise, I found a plaque commemorating a local son, Bill Pearson, who over 50 years ago had been one of my English lecturers at the University of Auckland.  Bill was also a member of the archaeological group to which, as a student of anthropology, I also belonged, and my recollection of him is in that context rather than the lecture hall, where he was a less than charismatic performer, although he was a kind and helpful tutor.   The plaque very properly celebrates his other virtues, while also demonstrating how much New Zealand has changed in half a century, since his sexual orientation, then suppressed, would now be openly acknowledged.

 Greymouth, like many parts of the South Island, is attempting to reinvent itself. There are souvenir shops and even the odd gallery, the former Bank of New Zealand building having been artfully repurposed – and renamed. Here as elsewhere tourism is replacing extractive industry. 

This kind of repurposing was, in fact, to become one of the themes of my tour. As the economic and social fabric of the country has changed, so too has the function of many buildings, and the 'New Land' gallery in Greymouth provides an unexpected example of this change of use and decoration.  Greymouth also provided an unexpected example of another contemporary development: the impact of the corporate franchise on the local high street.  In Greymouth, Robert Harris, a very good national chain of coffee shops appears, in the manner of Starbucks in other countries, to have put a small local chain out of business, the Smelting House café having brewed its last cup of coffee, reflecting an identical development in far away Henley-on-Thames where a comparable local chain has put up the shutters.  So, although New Zealand is a Starbucks free zone, national corporate power has exactly the same Starbucks effect on small local businesses. Different hemispheres, same outcomes.

There was one novelty, for which the Greymouth Evening Star deserves credit.  The walls of their car park are covered in murals depicting the history of the region from its earliest days of settlement.  Here was an acknowledgement -- indeed, a celebration --  of the hard slog -- and not a few tragedies, such as mine explosions -- that had gone into the development of the area.  A trio of Japanese tourists from the TransAlpine found this an irresistible photo opportunity.  The adjacent premises of the Evening Star continued the originality of the murals.  The street sides of the building were completely glazed so that the passer-by could see into the print floor where the presses are located, making it possible to see the day's paper actually in production.  This is a bit of newspaper theatre which is normally out of sight, yet here in sleepy Greymouth, the local paper has made a feature of it.  As Bill Pearson's roman a clef (at least as far as people in Greymouth were concerned), Coal Flat, had revealed, there is more to Greymouth than are hinted at by its prosaic town centre and the riverside warning of sewer outfall.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/75004468@N08/sets/ 

THE KIWI BLOG: REVISITING AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND

In May, I did a three week trip to my homeland, Aotearoa, and while I had intended to run a blog while on the trip, for various reasons, I didn't get round to it. Recently, I completed an account of the trip, and I'm now going to post it as a series of episodes.  There are also photographs which are an integral part of the story, and these are posted on flickr with the title of the relevant blog.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/75004468@N08/sets/

Altogether there are seven parts to the story and seven sets of photographs:

PART 1 : CANTERBURY & GREYMOUTH  

 PART TWO: PICTON, NELSON & THE WAIRAU VALLEY

PART 3 : WELLINGTON  

PART FOUR: ‘PALMY’ & FEILDING

PART FIVE: AUCKLAND  

PART SIX: WAIHEKE ISLAND  

PART SEVEN: REFLECTIONS 

I may also get round to reporting on accommodation and dining in case anyone wants information on this aspect of the tour.