Auckland

The Auckland Quaker Centre is a larger, roomier, and sunnier building than the one here. On the other hand, guests stay right in the same house with the Resident Friends in Auckland, whereas here we have more privacy, with the guest rooms separate and having their own entrance. There were lots of activities during our week. Besides Sunday Meeting for Worship, we participated in two different discussion groups, one Thursday evening and one before the Wednesday noon Meeting for Worship. There was a Tuesday morning walking group, which included many of the same people as the Thursday evening discussion group, all of whom we knew from Yearly Meeting or visits to Wellington. There was also a Saturday evening shared meal and activity, which for October was decorating Christmas fruitcakes. This was a real cross-cultural experience, because we have nothing like it that I know of in the States. First, we don’t decorate fruit cake; second, I don’t think you could get similar icing. To decorate, first you roll out an almond paste icing from a can until it is big enough to drape over the cake, which is about 8 inches square, encasing and preserving it so you can store it in a cupboard until Christmas. Then you roll out sugar icing from a can until you can drape it over the almond icing. Then you take sugar icing that you have mixed with various food colors, and cut out or form shapes to stick on top. People made Santa Clauses, angels, trees, holly leaves, stars and animals. It was fun to watch.

One of the things that surprised us about Auckland is that I think of it as flat and Wellington as hilly. However, walking around Auckland, we went up and down hills much more frequently than we do walking around Wellington, so I felt we got in good shape there. Walking downtown is at least a kilometer down hill; often we took the bus or train back, but sometimes we walked. As I said before, our first day there we mostly rested up, so Friday when we were on our own, we walked downtown and went first to the Auckland Art Gallery. They had a special show of the paintings of Rita Angus, a 20th century NZ artist. I was very impressed. In some ways she reminded me of Frida Kahlo in her use of color and a somewhat flat and stylized design. There were landscapes, portraits and still lifes.
http://images.google.co.nz/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=rita+angus+paintings&cr=countryNZ&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=sfMNS46_CpHSsQPO_sDHDA&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBIQsAQwAA

Next we walked down to the harbor and took the short ferry ride to Devonport. We walked up to the top of the hill there and had a great view of the outer bay with all its islands. The closest is the newest volcano in the Auckland region, Rangitoto, which erupted out of the sea about 600 years ago – within Maori times. Apparently each period of volcanic activity is centered around a new vent, so none of the volcanoes get very tall, but that is why there are some 40 volcanic hills within Auckland. Wellington only has an earthquake threat! After lunch, we continued walking around the town, which has many examples of 19th century NZ houses.

We went to the Auckland Museum in the Domain, a big park, twice. We enjoyed their Maori and Pacific Island wings. They also had one of the better displays on natural history and NZ evolution that I have seen. It was easy to follow and not too overwhelming. Did you know that the kiwi, about the size of a chicken, lays an egg about the same size as an ostrich’s? I also really enjoyed their exhibit on volcanoes. In one area, you are sitting in a living room with a lovely view of the harbor and Devonport while the TV is telling you about the warning signs that a volcanic eruption is imminent, so Auckland is being evacuated. Then the building shakes, the electricity goes off, the sea in front of you starts to boil, a volcano starts to appear, and then a pyroclastic wave sweeps through and we all die. Very realistic. I should think most people would move somewhere else. Of course, no one thinks it will happen in their life time. At least you do get warnings about volcanic activity. Earthquakes usually strike without warning. The Domain also has a lovely pair of conservatories, called the Winter Gardens, with orchids and other tropical plants. For some reason there is a tall plinth in the outside garden with a statue of a cat on it, which looks like it is batting at a butterfly.

Saturday, October 24, was a World Climate Day of Action, sponsored by 350.org. 350 is the level of carbon in the atmosphere we should try and stay under, except that I think we have already exceeded it. A number of people from the Meeting joined a couple of hundred people on the top of Mt. Eden where there was a large 350 sign on the hillside. We could see at least one other group on another nearby hill. We sang and made noise for about an hour, and then trooped down the hill to a small festival in the park. It was fun, but I didn’t see anything in the newspaper the next day. We had also seen an interesting school kid demonstration downtown the previous day. The kids were at an intersection where the “walk” signal is for all four directions. They would wait at all four corners and when the walk signal went green, they would all cross, making noise and shouting 350. In between, on the corners, they were singing “We are the Children.” Although there seems to be a lot of grassroots concern about climate change in NZ, the recent election voted in a more conservative government, which does not want to make farmers or business pay to reduce carbon emissions.


Among other places we saw was the new Anglican Cathedral, which has the largest expanse of stained glass in the Southern Hemisphere. On the same property is an old wooden church, which is even bigger than the wooden one here in Wellington. We thought one window there depicted St. Eustatius, since it had a deer in it, but it turned out to be the Welsh St. Aidan.






The walking group went to One Tree Hill, which is a large park with many interesting trees, some old buildings, and another hill top view of Auckland. We also went to an historic home, Highwic, built by a well-to-do landowner in the 19th century.






And we saw the Rainbow Warrior memorial at the waterfront where it was bombed.







One day we took a ferry ride to one of the bigger, further out islands, Waiheke, where there is a Quaker House. It is used for retreats by individuals or small groups and has a Meeting for Worship twice a month. Monday October 26 was NZ’s Labor Day long weekend, so they were having a work weekend, and we went out to help. Ron got to cut down brush and I weeded a gravel path. We also got to walk on the beach, of course.




We returned to Wellington on the Overlander Train. Our seats were right in the back just in front of the observation seating area, so we had good views. The half way point and mid-day break was at the National Park in the center of the North Island. We had good views of two of the volcanic peaks there, but the biggest, Ruapehu, was still obscured by clouds. We caught a little snow just after we left the park.

November has been a quiet month back here in Wellington, centered around a German Film Festival in the second week, in honor of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. I won’t bother describing most of the films, because there is little chance you would see any of them. The festival’s guest of honor, Andreas Dresen, directed four of the films presented. After each film he had a question and answer session, which usually only had 25-30 people. We all started to recognize each other after a while! This kind of opportunity to interact with important people in their fields is very New Zealand, since it is such a comparatively small country where it seems like there is only one or two degrees of separation between everyone.

Today is Thanksgiving, although we are of course 16 hours in advance of the East Coast. We are going out to an evening of astronomy talks. It is a group we have not gone to before. One advantage that we do see to Thanksgiving is that at least it holds off the worst of the Christmas rush. There has been Christmas hype here since Labor Day at the end of October. It still feels strange to see the decorations and parades and such as we approach summer. Still, we are looking forward to Christmas at the beach with Cici.

Rotorua and Coromandel

For the second half of October, we arranged with Howard and Rosalind Zuses to switch Resident Friend positions, so we went to Auckland for a week while they came down here to Wellington. We took an extra four days to get there.

We took a bus to Rotorua on October 17, which was a quite comfortable way to travel and pleasant to be able to see the sights from high up and nap whenever we wanted. It was a cloudy and sometimes rainy day, so we did not get a clear view of the tall mountains, but we did have a good view driving around Lake Taupo, which I also remember from our visit 20 years ago. We had a studio room with kitchenette in Rotorua. The motel had five thermal pools, so we soaked in the spa pool with the water jets, a mineral pool, and the outdoor swimming pool. We then took a walk down to the lake, which has a large population of black swans. We walked over to the Maori Anglican Church on the lakeside, which is a very pretty wooden building. It is most notable for an etched side chapel window of Jesus. Since you are looking out over the lake, it looks like Jesus is walking on the water. It was also the warmest church we’ve been in, since hot water is piped under the floors. After dark, we walked around the grounds of the Museum and Spa. Sunday morning, we walked through the town park, which has many steam vents and hot water and mud pools, as well as rhododendrons. In fact, there are steam vents even in people’s back yards. I liked the little church so much that I went back for the Sunday service, which was quite well attended and is conducted half in Maori and half in English. Ron walked around the Museum grounds to take pictures. We will have to go back to Rotorua, because there is a lot more to see and do.



We picked up a rental car in the late morning and drove north to the Firth of Thames and the little town of Miranda, which has the largest hot mineral water pool in the Sothern Hemisphere! There were lots of families there, picnicking and having a day’s outing. Besides the large pool, there is a smaller, though still good size, hotter soaking pool. We were very content. The other thing Miranda is known for is their shorebird bird sanctuary, so in the morning we drove out there and walked around. Unfortunately, without binoculars, it was hard to know what we were seeing. Next, we headed around the bay to the Coromandel Peninsula, site of gold mining and logging in the nineteenth century. The town of Thames had many picturesque old buildings and the drive further up the coast to the town of Coromandel was very scenic. After lunch we went to Driving Creek Pottery, the studio for one of NZ’s most well known potters, Barry Brickell, which is actually best known for its 3K narrow gauge railway, which the potter also built. Ostensibly it was built to various spots where he digs out his own clay, but mostly he just likes trains. It ends at a 2 story tower high on the hill. They are also doing extensive kauri tree planting. The Coromandel was covered with these massive trees until the settlers cut almost all of them down. They can reach many hundreds of years old with 15 foot diameters. All the current logging is done on pine plantations, because of course, no one wants to wait that long to be able to harvest timber.


We then drove over the hills to the East coast to the town of Hahei and our cabin near the beach. The camp ground and the beach cove reminded us of our favorite spot in Australia, Emerald Beach, except that the temperature was 10 degrees centigrade cooler.

The next morning, we hiked up the beach and the headlands to Cathedral Cove, which has a striking tunnel under a headland and numerous small steep islands in the coves and bays, reminiscent of Cannon Beach, Oregon. The cove was used as a set at the beginning of the Prince Caspian Narnia movie.
Stopping for refreshment at a café in town, we met up with the local parrot named Piaf. We thought it belonged to the other patron whose shoulder it was sitting on, but when he left, it came over to visit with us. It stayed with us on the whole walk back to our cabin until we went by a house where someone was sitting on the porch when it finally decided to fly off. After lunch, we had time to walk to the headland at the other end of the beach, wait out a rain storm in a little cave overhang, and still drive out to Hot Water Beach at low tide. You are supposed to dig a pool in the sand which then fills with hot water. Unfortunately, it is impossible to dig a deep hole in water-filled sand, but there were a lot of people trying. We decided that it was not worth getting all sandy just to sit in four inches of hot water. We stood in various pools instead. It was interesting because one part might be very hot, and just a foot or so over it would be cool. You can also squirm your feet deeper into the sand to get hotter.

We had to leave very early the next morning to return our rental car to Rotorua and pick up a bus to Auckland, arriving about 5 pm. Howard kindly met us at the bus station, and Rosalind had a nice meal, homemade bread, and cookies ready for us at the Quaker Centre. They had a Premises Committee meeting after dinner, so we took a walk up to the top of Mount Eden. The next day we mostly rested, except that Howard took us for a walk around the neighborhood to show us where the grocery store was and such like things. They headed off around 5 pm for a flight to Wellington. I think I will write about our week in Auckland in the next entry, as this one seems about the right length.

September

Although Spring officially started September 1, the weather has still been mostly cool, windy and rainy, with some very pleasant days interspersed. As you can see, we are encouraged to use wind energy around the house. I have planted some peas and we had another nice hike up to the Botanical Gardens to look at the tulips – no photos however, as we forgot the camera that day. It has, however, been another month with lots of learning.

You may remember that in June I wrote about going to an alternative currency workshop in the nearby town of Carterton. Since then I have gone to a couple of meetings in Wellington trying to revitalize their local trading network, but it hasn’t gotten very far yet. So Living Economies sponsored a similar workshop in Wellington at the end of August, and it looks like we might finally have a consistent working group here for what is now called Wellington Independent Trading System (WITS). We are still dealing with some of the basics, like a philosophy statement, but one of the new people has offered to be a membership coordinator, because there is still a group of traders left over from the previous incarnation of the group. I am really interested in seeing this take form and begin to work, because I think people working together outside the regular money system is really necessary, but I am actually not particularly interested in getting involved with trading myself. Partly, I am leaving soon, and partly I don’t really have anything I want to sell or buy.

I have been educating myself more about money by reading various books. The funniest one, if you like the author, is Making Money, by Terry Pratchett, whose stories are based in a fantasy world. But it is a good exposition about paper money versus a gold standard. We visited the Reserve Bank Museum in Wellington, which had an example of a really interesting machine called a MONIAC, invented by a NZ economist working at the London School of Economics in 1946. The MOnetary National Income Analogue Computer is a visual demonstration of the way money flows through the economy by using water flowing through clear pipes in and out of various tanks representing households, business, government, etc. You can change the flow by raising taxes or increasing savings or whatever and observe the effects on the system. It seems to me to be a concept which is ripe to be converted into a computer model, but as far as I can tell, no one has done so yet. A similar machine is featured in Terry Pratchett’s book. The Museum also has a replica of a giant moa. If they hadn’t already been hunted to extinction by the Maori, it would certainly make camping in NZ a different experience!

Another area for activism I rediscovered is vegetarianism. I went to a lecture about diet and climate change which rekindled my enthusiasm. Certainly the ecological effects of meat eating on water, land use and poverty were some of the reasons why I stopped eating meat forty years ago, but this lecture also linked it to carbon emissions. One of the quickest ways to reduce your carbon footprint is to eat less meat and dairy. Meat eating uses about twice the carbon as a vegetarian diet, but being vegan cuts your use to about a quarter of that of vegetarians. So I am trying to reduce the amount of milk, cheese and butter I use. It is hard, so I sympathize with meat eaters who are cutting back. There has been a lot of debate in NZ about their carbon goals to take to the Copenhagen conference in December. Part of their problem is that a lot of their emissions come from their dairy and meat cattle, and no one knows how to reduce that yet. Agriculture is also one of the key constituencies of the new government.

Peace activities have also suddenly started happening this week; maybe it is because it is Spring. This week I went to a lecture about the Genuine Progress Index by Canadian Ron Coleman. The GPI is an alternative to the Gross National Product, whose inventor even said it (GNP) should not be used to measure the health of economies because it makes no distinction between positive and negative economic activity. The GPI also looks at net income, so it is not necessarily a good thing if farming income is increasing, if farming expenses are increasing faster. The GPI also takes into account the value of natural resources, so if you are depleting your fishery stock, that is a negative. If you are building your forest reserves, that is a positive. I feel that this is peace related because anything that helps you improve the human condition will promote peace.

Next, we went to a lecture about the Global Peace Index by Kevin Clements, Director of the newly formed National Peace and Conflict Studies Centre and a Quaker. Recently developed in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unit, it has been ranking 141 states on levels of internal and external peacefulness for the last 3 years. This year New Zealand ended up number one. Somewhat to my surprise, the USA is actually in the middle. He also pointed out that none of the 5 permanent members of the Security Council are in the top fifth, and Russia ranks quite low.

Today there is a forum on nuclear disarmament and tomorrow there is a peace march in honor of Ghandi’s birthday. It is one of the beginning steps for a World March For Peace And Nonviolence which will travel around the world over the next ninety days, ending in South America. We will be helping carry some Quaker banners. One of them looks like an antique from the days of demonstrating for a nuclear free NZ.

THE CENTRE OF NEW ZEALAND

Note: This being the approximate halfway point of our time in New Zealand, Alex’ sidekick and unofficial photographer decided to take a little walkabout (as they say on the West Island) and visit Nelson, the earliest colonial settlement on the South Island. He humbly offers the following guest posting.

p.s.: In Mozilla and some other browsers, to see a larger version of a photo, double click on it.

Nelson is full of history. Tasman, D’Urville, and Cook sailed the nearby waters. The city was founded in 1841 by Arthur Wakefield, the most respected member of the tarnished Wakefield family, and was home to the first Anglican bishop and the first Quaker Meeting House.


Above all, Nelson is the Centre of New Zealand, and the Centre is accessible by means of a short hike. The hike begins at the footbridge over the Maitai River at the end of Hardy Street, and the sign points to a playing ground in front of a large hill.


At the start of the “zigzag” up the hill, however, we learn that the centre is not really the actual centre, so the hike becomes instead a search for the psychic centre of the country. And the preliminary clue to this centre is right there on the same sign, pointing out that the first Rugby game in New Zealand was played on that very field. (see texts in footnotes below)

As we continue upward on the path, there is another clue, in the form of what appears to be a large wooden phallus. Why there is such emphasis on sports and masculinity in this society I wouldn’t venture to say.

It may have something to do with memories of the Empire, and Gallipoli, and ANZAC Day. These memories are revered by almost everyone.











After a further fifteen minute hike I reached the top, where there are survey markers and a sculpture. In the distance are more signs of New Zealand. The Cathedral, which was meant to have a peaked roof but for some reason has a flat one. The hilltop site of a former fortified Maori Pa, which did the inhabitants little good when Maori from the North Island, after obtaining muskets from the early European whalers and missionaries, came south and dispersed them.


Below the former Pa is the modernist and ugly Town Hall, with its clock tower. And in a different direction, sheep and logs.


In the distance is Abel Tasman National Park, the sort of place the foreign tourist associates with the true New Zealand. The day before, it was too rainy to hike, so I had taken a boat trip up the coast. One island, Adele, has by continued trapping and poison been made predator-free and has become a haven for birds. (The predators were all introduced pests, not native.) The boat turned off its engines for several minutes so we could listen to the birdsong.








Turning my attention back to the sculpture at the Centre of New Zealand, I notice that the heavenward-pointing lance has a bumper sticker on it. Is it true? Especially in secular New Zealand? As the Tui Beer commercials always say, “yeah… (snicker snicker), right!”






Like Split Apple Rock at Abel Tasman Park, New Zealand and most other countries are divided, formed from land stolen often more than once.





When you get deep enough into it you see the contradictions and the dark side.
In 1843, Arthur Wakefield and several others, including a Quaker surveyor, were killed by Maori in the Wairau District in a still-controversial land dispute. The outsider hesitates to make any judgments, since on the surface this is a successfully bicultural country, but old wounds, misunderstandings, bigotry and political correctness still seem to hover over most attempts at Maori/Pakeha resolution. While waiting for some future secular National Epiphany to occur on that hill at the sort-of-Centre of New Zealand, I will continue to work on my Kiwiana collection.















































(Text of Marker -- "The top of Botanical Hill is reached by a moderately easy track, commonly referred to as the 'Zigzag', winding up the southwest face. The monument at the top designates the geographical centre of New Zealand. It is suggested that the actual Geocentre is in the Spooner Range, about 55 kilometres southwest of here. Botanical Hill's claim probably arose from the fact that the trig station on the hill was the first survey point allotted in the South Island and the first surveys radiated out from this point. The plain table at the summit illustrates this point.")


(Re: First Game of Rugby: "Charles Monro was born at Waimea West on the 5th of April 1851 and entered Nelson College in 1861 where he remained until 1865. In 1867 he set out for England with the intention of entering the Army. In preparation for this he attended Christ's College in London where he learnt the game of rugby. Returning to New Zealand, he brought the game with him and is considered the founder of rugby in New Zealand.")