NZ-Aotearoa

‘How did I get here, exactly? I rang my father from the red phone box on the footpath outside my grandmother’s, praying that she wouldn’t spring me inside my emergency-coloured beacon. She doesn’t, because down inside the house below street level Grandmother Margaret is also ringing my father, but from the landline.

‘Three days later my father arrives to ferry me back to live in Canvastown, Marlborough. I know I am about to fall off the grid. The grid, as I know it, comprises a circle of girlfriends from relatively stable middle-class homes, my A-student niche, my weekend prowls, life as my grandmother’s last daughter. Despite my scarlet phone call, I feel I have no real say in the abrupt termination of these things.’

Colin McCahon ceased painting in 1982. He locked his studio door and, as became apparent after his death in 1987, left his final painting, perhaps unfinished, face down on the floor. Its text, from Ecclesiastes, begins: I considered all the acts of oppression/under the sun; and ends: Here again I saw emptiness under/the Sun without son or brother/toiling endless yet never. It is unsigned and above those last words is a roughly oblong area of deep dark black.

With that a brilliant career as an artist of unstinting generosity, fierce commitment and unparalleled skill, concluded.

By juxtaposing the accounts of settlers – who believed that the appropriation, and later purchase, of land was legitimate – with the effects of their occupation on Māori, Hawken highlights the greater struggles of Māori within the European narrative of settlement.

Climate change, migration, activism, terrorism: for people living in a small country at the bottom of the world, what does hope for the future look like in the teeth of that gale?

‘Non-driving, my passenger assures me, is a far higher calling than being in the driver’s seat.’

It is like an inverted and far more complicated version of Sedgwick’s erotic triangle (in which two men bond over their rivalry for a female’s affection). What I keep seeing is variations on this: two young women, both of them queer or queer-adjacent, intensely connected and wavering between the platonic and the erotic; and then the added complication of an older straight man, with whom one of the women sleeps.

‘I hope I’ve answered to that young boy that I once was. I hope he is happy that I was able to make something of his childhood vow to put his culture before his country.’

What amazed me was not just that Beck had written back to me. It was that he had written the words ‘New Zealand’. He’d said the secret code word that granted us access to the rest of the world. And he was interested to know what it was like here. It didn’t seem an idle interest, but a genuine one. He was so interested that he’d said ‘Wow’.

‘It was the day that Seamus Heaney died: August 30, 2013. I hadn’t seen John Clarke since the late 1970s.’

Personally I can’t imagine anyone writing about New Zealand literature without mentioning that New Zealand is defined by its biculturalism.