June

Winter officially started in New Zealand on June 1. I have always thought that such a system matched the weather better than starting the seasons with the solstices/equinoxes. We are settling into a routine, but it still surprises me how much we find to do.
The photos are mostly of tapa (masi) cloth from Fiji. This first one is of a fern globe suspended over the civic square in Wellington.

I would say that the theme for this month has been economics, of all things. There is a Quaker settlement about 200 K from here in the town of Wanganui; they do a workshop about once a month. There was one in May about the book Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy. We didn’t go, but a group of five from here did go and reported back on a Sunday evening, and I read the book. The book is about the need to bring the world economy into balance with world ecology. In particular, it looks at world institutions that currently stand in the way of such balance, and new ones that might need to be set up to bring us into alignment. The task sounds quite daunting, and I am skeptical about trying to manage world systems; it doesn’t seem as if we know enough to do it well. On the other hand the current system seems to be leading towards disaster! I was frustrated however, by the lack of ideas of how to proceed locally and personally. I did discover a useful website called www.myfootprint.org that tells you how much of the planet you are using up.

I then had a great opportunity to go to a workshop on local alternative economies in a nearby town. It presented 3 different systems. The first was time banking, where people in the community exchange time dollars representing hours of work. This gives credit for a lot of service exchanges and is particularly useful where people are time rich and cash poor. Often the motivation is more to increase interactions in the community than to bypass the money economy. The second system was more oriented to paying for goods with a non bank credit system. Some towns have actually set up an alternative currency, but these days one can use a virtual credit system. This kind of system was used during the Great Depression in towns like Yellow Springs, Ohio because bank credit was not available, but people still had produce and goods to trade. It is harder to set up because more trust is involved to believe that other people will accept the alternative currency. The third way talked about was a kind of savings and loan club for people who do not have access to bank credit for home building or repairs. The group discussed consisted of about ten Maori families on tribal land. Everyone starts off by saving, and then when some capital has accumulated, a family gets to start borrowing and building. If everyone can help with the building, there is that much more savings. Then as they repay their loan, and everyone is continuing to save, another family can start building. Eventually, everyone gets to build, and when the loans are paid off, they have their savings and never wasted half their money on interest. Apparently there is a large bank in Sweden – JAK Bank - based on this interest free lending and savings. Since the workshop, I have gotten notice of a meeting in Wellington to set up a local exchange, probably a time bank, but possibly also an alternative currency scheme.

Our predecessors as Resident Friends had started a tradition of evening supper and conversation for the Meeting members to meet some of the interesting guests that come thru the Quaker Centre. So we hosted such an evening in June with Esther Cowley-Malcolm from Auckland. She has been involved with a longitudinal study of Pacific Island families with babies born in 2000. There has only been one other longitudinal study in NZ, about 30 years ago in Dunedin, so the population was almost entirely Pakeha (British ancestry). She is now helping to set up a new study that will look at a population that includes Pakeha, Maori, Pacific, and Asian children. Anyway, I find these long term studies very interesting, so I enjoyed the evening, and I think it was a success.

We went to the Pataka Museum in the nearby town of Porirua which had an exhibit of masa (or tapa) cloth from Fiji. My mother had purchased a big piece in Tahiti years ago, which is up at her cabin in Canada. I enjoyed learning how the cloth is made by beating the inner bark of the mulberry tree. The designs are stenciled on, rather than painted. In the old days, they cut the stencil from banana leaves, but now they use plastic. I actually went back to the museum with a friend from Meeting, and we also saw an exhibit about nearby Mana Island, which used to have a Maori settlement, then was a sheep station, and is now being restored as a pest free refuge for native species.

Ron and I also went back to the Aratoi Museum in Masterton. We took a very pleasant train ride, which let us avoid the rather scary hairpin curves of the roadway. We met a friend from Meeting there who then chauffeured us around. They had an exhibit of art from the Seventies in Papua New Guinea. After independence, the country started an arts printing program at the technical college. So these works were an interesting blend of traditional designs within a western medium. It was also obvious that these people were thinking of themselves as artists, and not traditional craftsmen, and playing with the new images and technology. Sadly, after this first artistic flowering, funding dried up and the artistic movement mostly fizzled out.
Our theater experience for the month was going to see “A Polynesian Othello” with friends. The theater troupe is made up of Pacific Islanders. The play was billed as reverse castings, but in fact, it was hard for me, at least, to see any ethnic difference between Othello and the rest of the cast. That actually made it more focused on the domestic drama and Iago’s machinations. I always feel very sorry for Desdemona, who really has no way out of her fate, even though she tries.

We also went to two classical music productions. The first, Midwinter Mozart, was a simplified version of The Magic Flute, done by students. The songs were still quite captivating, and the singing quite acceptable. This was followed by another Mozart singspiel called Bastien and Bastienne, written when Mozart was all of twelve years old. The three singers were older and more professional. It was a cute story of two young lovers who quarrel and are reconciled by a sort of magician/huckster. The second music performance was by the Wellington Chamber Orchestra. They did two pieces by NZ composers John Psathas and Douglas Lilburn, Ralph Vaughn Williams’ London Symphony, and a brilliant Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #4. Having recently seen the movie “In Search of Beethoven”, I appreciated the piece even more.

We continue to go to the movies. We saw a NZ documentary called “Trouble is my Business” about a high school assistant principal. It was an interesting look at a South Auckland high school, although not very deep. The principal clearly cared for his students, and was making a big effort to reduce truancy, but he never seemed to try to delve into why the kids were skipping school. He would just track them down and haul them back. Another NZ based film which may get shown in the US is called “Bride Flight”. It was co-produced in Holland and is often in Dutch with subtitles. It is about 3 young women who come to NZ from Holland to join their husbands. Not all their lives proceed as planned, and in fact, the plot turns out quite differently than I expected. We also saw “Easy Virtue” and “Good”, both of which I can recommend, but since they are probably available in the States, I won’t bother to describe them.

We continue to take hikes on the beaches when the weather allows. Some friends from Meeting took us out to a very remote beach on the West coast called Makara, which is apparently quite popular in the summer because it is warm and sheltered. We also hiked out to a place called Red Rocks on the South Coast. I doubt that it is ever warm and sheltered, but it is dramatic and easy to reach from the city. Of course, we keep forgetting to take a camera with us!

Hopefully I will write soon about July. Wellington is hosting the centennial Yearly Meeting, and we also got away for a short trip to New Plymouth and Mount Taranaki.