July Film Festival

The second half of July was the Wellington International Film Festival. This has become a pretty big event, especially since New Zealand has been developing its own film industry. However, being NZ, it is not a glitterati event. It was the main thing that occupied our time after Yearly Meeting. We saw eleven movies over twelve days in the festival and one other movie that month. So the rest of this blog will be short descriptions of the movies. Some are pretty obscure and some probably have already been released in the USA. The pictures are film related, although not necessarily about films we saw at the film festival.

The first movie we saw was not part of the festival but was shown at the National Film Archives, another great resource here in Wellington: "The Rainbow Warrior Conspiracy". While this not a particularly well made film, the real life story is terrific, and one of the turning points in modern NZ history. Apparently there is a much better film called "The Rainbow Warrior" with Sam Neill and Jon Voigt.

We went to the opening night showing at the film festival of "Bright Star", directed by Jane Campion, who also introduced the film. It is a beautifully made story of the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Braun, and also the friendship and working relationship between Keats and another, much lesser poet, Charles Brown. As Fanny tries to educate herself to understand Keats poetry, the audience is also drawn into its beauty and rhythm. Of course, the movie ends sadly with Keats' early death from TB. Instead of music during the credits, the Keats character recites "Ode To A Nightingale", which certainly kept me in my seat.

The next movie was also very well made. Called "Firaaq", it examines the after effects of the communal violence in Gujarat in 2002. Hundreds of Muslims were killed in rioting in retaliation for a presumed Muslim attack on a Hindu train. The film follows a number of different people of varying backgrounds along intersecting story lines, trying to put their lives back together, living in fear, seeking revenge, justifying violence, hoping for peace, racked with guilt. It is disturbing, and not very optimistic about breaking the cycle of violence.

"Our Beloved Month of August" was a very quirky film from Portugal. We went because it was supposed to have lots of music. Indeed, the story follows a family of musicians traveling among various small town festivals in the mountains of Portugal, singing pop/traditional love songs. I felt like I could feel the heat and smell the dust and pine trees. It reminded me of summer fairs in Oregon and Ontario. But it is also about the making of the movie. Every once in a while there is a break, and the producer comes in to complain that the director is not following the plot, or he hasn’t cast some of the characters, or some such thing. Then lo and behold, some folks show up to audition, and then they appear in the story, which now continues along its plot line. Over the ending credits there is a very funny argument between the director and the sound engineer about sounds that have magically appeared on the tape.

On my own, I went to "Birdwatchers", an Italian/Brazilian film about the Guarani Indians of the Amazon. Aroused by a rising tide of suicides among their young people, one tribal leader takes a group to try and reclaim some of their land outside the reservation, even though the forest has been cut down and the land plowed into farms. More and more people join him. The other plot line follows one young man who is learning to be a shaman. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end any better than most stories about the fight for indigenous rights; although the credits do tell us the fight is still on going.

Ron went to see The "Baader Meinhof Complex", which he said did a good job of showing the conditions that led them to form a terrorist organization. It also showed the downward spiral that resulted from using such violent tactics.

Again on my own, I went to see a collection of short NZ movies. They were ok. The funniest/scariest was "Careful With That Power Tool" about a kid who finds a nail gun while exploring his dad’s workplace. No one was harmed in the making of the movie, but I had to close my eyes at some spots.

The most disappointing of the big budget movies we saw was "In The Loop". It is a fictionalized version of concocting the evidence in Great Britain to justify the invasion of an unnamed country by the US. Perhaps our problem was that we really needed subtitles to understand all the various British accents. Although since every other word was f**k, maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. Much of the satire about politics was spot on.

"Unmistaken Child" is a really interesting documentary about trying to find the reincarnation of a deceased Tibetan lama. The person charged with searching is his young disciple, who clearly misses his master very much. He is also quite uncertain of his own ability to discern his reincarnation, although he seems quite satisfied in the end. Indeed, the transfer of his affect to this new child is quite sweet.

"Theater of War" is a great documentary about the staging of "Mother Courage and Her Children" in NYC in 2006, with commentary from Meryl Streep and Tony Kushner, among others. The most interesting footage, however, was from the original production in Berlin after WW2. I learned a lot about Bertolt Brecht and the play.

Another lovely period costume drama was "Cheri", starring Michelle Pfeifer. It is based on two novels by Collette about a Belle Epoch courtesan. Ready to retire, she takes up with the 19 year old son of a colleague. They are both so used to a world where love is for sale that they don’t recognize the depth of their own affections for each other until after they have irrevocably split up. There is a very annoying and intrusive narrator in order to drive the cynicism home.

The top New Zealand film that we saw was "The Strength Of Water", which had an introduction by the director and the screen writer and a panel discussion afterwards. It is a leisurely story about ten year old twins. The sister dies in an accident, but the brother continues to see and interact with her until they are both ready to let go. It is a lovely film.

That was the last film we saw together. Ron also went to see "Balibo" about five Aussie/kiwi TV journalists who were murdered in East Timor while covering the Indonesian invasion in 1975. No one has ever been prosecuted for their deaths.

Rarotonga

On Saturday August 1 we got up about 5 am to get on a plane to Auckland to then get on a plane to Rarotonga for a mid-winter break. The second plane flight was about 3 and a half-hours long and got us there mid afternoon on Friday July 31! Crossing the International Date Line is such fun. We were greeted by a shuttle to our hotel and given leis, which was a nice touch. We stayed at the Palm Grove Hotel on the south side of the island. We had a nice A frame bungalow with its own kitchen. There is a small swimming pool and a nice beach across the street facing onto a wide lagoon. We arrived just in time for their Friday night happy hour with live music – a lady singer and a male guitarist/singer and electronic drums/background music. Most of the songs were rock/pop/country classics. Some people loosened up to sing along to the chorus.

The next day being Saturday all over again, we got to go to the Saturday market in Avarua, the capital of the Cook Islands. Besides the many stalls with pareus (sarongs) and other clothing, and produce, there was also a dance and drumming troupe performance. They do a nice style of fast hula in the Cooks, especially for the men, and sometimes the women also do a slower one. We also just wandered around the town getting oriented, and did some supermarket shopping, so that we ate most of our lunches as picnics and dinners in our bungalow.

The weather was not as hot as we expected, mostly I would guess around 70 F, but with a steady wind that made it seem cooler. It was also cloudy the first two days and rained occasionally, but I am not complaining. Anyway, it made us not want to swim, and I was glad I had packed some long pants and tops. However, the weather cleared up for the last two days.

Rarotonga is a volcanic island about 31 kilometers in circumference. The mountains are quite steep, and are obviously collapsed calderas. It is very green, and does not seem to have a dry side like some of the Hawaiian Islands do. There are a number of hikes up to various mountaintops or across the island, but as they all involved scrambling, muddy & slippery trails, and sometimes ropes, we decided not to try them. We did walk to a small waterfall at the beginning of the cross-island walk. In fact, we walked a lot everyday, mostly on the beach, but sometimes on the inland road. I was impressed by the small and tidy market gardens of the interior. In fact, most of the produce in the stores seemed local. One day we managed to walk 10 kilometers going east. The lagoon widens out there and includes some small islands and people wind surf and wind board. I don’t know if that is the proper word, but the person is on something like a snowboard and is being pulled by a large kite. Going west, we walked probably 5-6 kilometers, so you can see that there is a lot of beach. Luckily, they have a good bus system, so we could go as far as we wanted and hop on a bus to return. They come every half-hour, one going clockwise, the other counterclockwise.

We went back to the main town on Monday – the rainiest day we were there. It has two museums, for some reason, although they seemed somewhat redundant. They were interesting, but only about as sophisticated as you would expect for an island of a little over 20,000 people. The museums help to point out what a huge effect the coming of the missionaries had on the island culture. We went out that evening to a resort that was having an “Island Night,” with singing and drumming. Ironically, it turned out to be the same troupe we had seen for free at the Saturday Market, but it was still fun.

So Rarotonga seemed, from our brief experience, to be a very pleasant and sane tropical island. None of the resorts we saw were extravagantly plush, nor did we see any obvious poverty. Most of the islanders seemed to speak Maori among themselves, which was nice to hear. We had a very nice vacation. Plus, now that we are back, the worst of the cold, wet weather seems to be past, and it is feeling almost Spring-like!

Yearly Meeting

New Zealand Yearly Meeting Annual Gathering was held here in Wellington from Thursday July 9 through Sunday July 12. It is the centennial of the first Annual Gathering of New Zealand Quakers, also in Wellington. Of course, at that time NZ was a Meeting under the care of London Yearly Meeting; it became independent in 1964. The first Meeting for Worship was in Auckland in 1885. Because the Gathering is held in the winter, it is mostly business; there is a summer gathering with workshops and family activities. Wellington Meeting has been working on this conference for about two years. They are very glad that it is now successfully concluded!

Ron and I went mostly to help and to meet people; we figured that most of the business did not need our input. Ron helped particularly at registration the first day, and we went to lunch Thursday, Friday and Saturday. We enjoyed meeting people from Auckland, Christchurch, and all over NZ. About 110 people attended. I worked mostly on Saturday, helping in the book store. I found that as soon as business meeting started, I could close up and join it. The sessions I heard were the tail end of a report on their Quaker Ethical Investment Trust, a report from Young Adult Friends, and one from the Treaty Relations (Indigenous Rights) Committee. None of the reports seemed to lead to any decision making, which perhaps goes with an observation that about half of each monthly business meeting is taken up with work for the yearly meeting. Many decisions seem to come through this process, but I also haven’t observed enough to be sure.

The Young Adult Friends seem to be approaching getting the status of their own monthly meeting. They get together physically once a year at Easter for a long weekend, and have Skype conferences monthly. A couple of them traveled to the Triennial of the Asian section of FWCC in Bhopal, and found that very interesting and different. There was a Young Adult weekend after the main conference, where they met many more young Indian Friends, most of whom are on the more biblical, conservative end of the Quaker spectrum.

The Treaty group deals with Maori relations and issues, and is working on a position paper to give to the government about some of the issues currently at the forefront. In their report to the Meeting, they emphasized the constitutional issues for New Zealanders. The problem may be that, as with Great Britain, there is no Constitution. There is a Bill of Rights, and the Treaty of Waitangi sets out Maori rights, but it is relatively easy to override them. The High Court can only interpret legislation, it cannot not overrule it as unconstitutional. The committee’s opinion was that this means that minority rights have fewer protections, and that it might be a good idea for NZ to look at this issue. New Zealand, along with Australia, Canada and the USA, has not yet ratified the UN Treaty on Indigenous Rights; although all 4 countries seem to be moving towards signing that treaty under their new governments.

Thursday night there was a public lecture in the Town Hall auditorium, which might become the first of an annual Quaker lecture series wherever the Yearly Meeting session is held. This lecture was about the Chinese immigrant experience in New Zealand, and was given by Bill Willmott of Christchurch. At first that seemed to us a strange topic for a Quaker lecture, but in fact it made sense, since he was quite frank about issues of discrimination and assimilation. I believe that Christchurch, which came up with the idea for this lecture, and hopes for an annual lecture series, sees it as an opportunity to present issues of interest to the wider community.
Howard and Rosalind Zuses arrived on Saturday with their daughter Elizabeth and her friend Bill. Rosalind came for Yearly Meeting, but Ron was able to act as tour guide for Howard, Elizabeth and Bill. It was very nice to visit with them. They are also really enjoying their NZ experience as Resident Friends in Auckland.

After a celebratory dinner on Saturday at Yearly Meeting, there was a slide show and talk about the Quaker School in Wanganui, which operated from 1921 to 1969. Then there was a film about the civil rights movement in Kentucky, made by a former resident friend, Betsy Brinson. It is always fascinating to be reminded of those times and the courage of the people fighting for their rights.

Sunday morning everyone was bussed over here for Meeting for Worship, so we had approximately 120 people in the main room and out in the corridor and library. Afterwards, we had our flat and the guest quarters open for people to be able to see all the renovations that have occurred over the last year or two. Yearly Meeting business officially ended Sunday evening. The Zuses left by ferry early Monday morning to tour around the South Island. Many people came and left their bags at the Quaker Centre during the day, so they could tour Wellington until needing to go to the airport, so we continued to be quite occupied all day.

I confess that I have now attended more of NZ Yearly Meeting than I have of Baltimore Yearly Meeting, so I am not able to compare the two. However, I did enjoy meeting this wider fellowship of Quakers and found many are thinking and working on a broad range of topics that need addressing.

New Plymouth

On July 2 we had a few days free without any guests, so we took a car ride over to New Plymouth on the west coast. Its particular scenic attraction is Mount Taranaki. As with many place names, general usage has shifted back to the Maori name from the British Mt. Egmont. Taranaki is a nearly perfect volcanic cone mountain rising to 8200 feet. It was a stand-in for Mt. Fuji in the movie “The Last Samurai”. The area is also one of the prime farming areas of the North Island, and had some of the bloodiest history from the Maori land wars in the nineteenth century. The weather was very mixed over the three days, so we never got a really clear view of the mountain, but we have lots of photos anyway.

On the drive the first day, we made one stop on the coast at the town of Patea to see the beach at the river’s mouth: black sand, fishermen, dunes and cliff, and a faint view of the South Island. Then we went up the east side of Mt. Taranaki through the towns of Stratford and Inglewood, but it was already starting to get dark, so we did not try any of the mountain visitor centers or ski fields on that side.

Much of Friday it felt like we were chasing the sun, or at least breaks in the cloud cover. So we headed up the coast first thing, but that turned out not to be terribly interesting, so we headed back to the mountain, where the view was clearing up some. We went through some nice forest to the North Egmont Visitors’ Center where we got some views. Then we headed back to town and a picnic lunch in Brooklands Park. They have a 2000 year old Puriri tree which is mostly impressive for all the hollows in the trunk and lots of epiphytes in the branches. There was also a nice small zoo with a walk through aviary and a troop of capuchin monkeys, among other things. We visited the old stone church of St. Mary and walked along the coast walkway. That part of New Plymouth, anyway, did not seem to have any beach. The town was the home of Len Lye, a famous NZ “kinetic” sculptor. That is, his sculptures move; I don’t know how hyper he may have been personally. So there is this really tall pole with an orange ball on the top on the water front. It actually looks like it would sway a lot, but its movement was pretty subtle even though there was a decent wind. It was fun to have a back drop of the waxing moon. We spent most of the afternoon in the Puke Arike Museum, which had good natural history and settler and Maori history. (You pronounce Puke with two syllables.) Dinner in a pleasant and reasonably fancy Indian restaurant was mostly notable because it was set up with two long tables against one wall. As we sat nearby, groups of 2 to 4 attractive young women kept arriving, until both tables were full to about 40. It kind of reminded us of sitting on the porch at Range Lights at sunset, watching an endless stream of seagulls flying past; you wonder where they all come from and if it will ever end. We did eventually ask the girls: they were having a farewell party for a French exchange student to their school.

The next day we headed home again, this time driving along the coast road, called the Surf Highway, on the west side of the mountain, which again was mostly hidden by clouds. We drove up and over a shoulder of the mountain to be back in the forest, and then back to the coast. We took a side road to the Cape Egmont lighthouse. (Actually, there were two a couple of miles apart.) We stopped in the pleasant little town of Hawera for lunch, and walked around the small city of Wanganui later in the afternoon. There is a Quaker settlement there, on the site of a defunct Quaker school, which we expect we will visit later. They do seminars about once a month, sort of the NZ version of Pendle Hill.
Although the weather was kind of typical maritime winter weather, we enjoyed the break and the chance to drive around a different part of the country.

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.

May - The Inside Story

As I said in the last blog, the weather is getting colder. We had a couple of weeks with gale force winds that closed the airport and ferries, and it feels warm if the temperature gets into the 50s. Still, in terms of cloud and rain, the weather changes every half hour, so it is never uninterrupted gloom. Therefore, we have done lots of inside things this month: music, theater, movies, and lectures. Unfortunately, these don’t offer so many opportunities for photos, so I am putting in pictures of the Museum, Parliament, and various statues around town.

This has been Music Month in Wellington, so Te Papa Museum has been offering lunch hour music events. We saw a Maori group called Big Belly Woman. They started with a couple of songs with Maori chants, but most of their work was jazzier. They did have an interesting instrument – basically a disk spun on 2 strings to make a humming noise – I don’t know its Maori name. Another program featured a pair of young Pakeha women singer/songwriters called Harriet and the Matches. (Pakeha is a commonly used, non-derogatory term here for non-Maoris.) Finally there was a program of nineteenth century French songs in honor of the Monet exhibit and performed by students from the New Zealand School of Music.

This month we also went to the first of the two operas we have bought tickets for: The Italian Girl in Algiers by Rossini. It was performed in a marvelous huge Baroque style Opera House. We were towards the back of the top tier, which would have been ok, except that our view of the English subtitles was partially blocked. We did manage to move down a little bit after the intermission. The Italian Girl is opera buffo, so the plot is quite silly, but Rossini’s music is very lyrical. I think to help the plot seem funnier, it was staged as a TV soap opera, but on the whole I found that to be more confusing and distracting, rather than helpful. The University has been offering some opera classes, so I took one about this opera, which definitely helped, and now I am taking a couple on Shakespeare as adapted to opera, which is very interesting.

We saw the play, Blood Wedding, by Garcia Lorca, ironically on Mother’s Day. The play is about a girl who runs off with a former lover on her wedding day. Although the groom’s mother did not particularly approve of the marriage, she does approve of her son pursuing the couple for revenge and honor. It was well done.

In honor of their Monet exhibit, Te Papa also showed some French documentaries (without subtitles) about Monet, Degas, and Debussy, which I think I actually understood about half of. I learned a lot, particularly about Debussy and Degas. They also showed a film about the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, which was really interesting. There were lots of film footage and stills from the 30s on. It was made on the occasion of a reunion in 2000 of surviving members. Many were still remarkably active and interesting for being in their eighties and nineties. Both programs piqued our interest for ballet, so we have bought tickets for a ballet in July.

We also went to two programs about writers. One was a reading, discussion and book signing with Ann Thwaite about a new book Passages she has written about her New Zealand pioneer great grandparents. She talked about some of the differences between writing family history and biography. She has written biographies of AA Milne and Frances Hodgson Burnett, among others. We also went to a panel of regional winners of the Commonwealth Prize for Literature, where each person read some of his or her book and answered questions.

I went with a friend from Meeting to see a film at the National Film Archives about Maori weaving. I found it most interesting about teaching and cultural transmission. In traditional societies, the children mostly learn without being taught. They are around adults all day, and attempt to do the things the adults are doing. The adults may help them learn, but that is secondary to doing what they do. When you have a society like the Maori, where some of that cultural transmission got interrupted, you have to more deliberately learn some of the crafts as an adult, so the people in the movie were really analyzing this process and trying to figure out how to continue to pass on their skills. They were also thinking about the role of artistic innovation in traditional crafts. The woman who was the main artist decided that what mattered was who you were making the piece for. If it was for the tribe, she made it traditionally. If it was for herself or for sale, she could innovate.

I also went to see the new Star Trek movie, which I enjoyed very much. And Ron and I went to see Rocky Horror Picture Show. At last I have seen it in a theater where the audience knew how to participate in the film. So there were lots of kids in costume, dancing and throwing rice and all the rest of the stuff. It was a lot of fun.

Finally, we have gotten involved with some political activism here. We were invited by a friend to go to a meeting about a raid that happened in 2007 on some Maori activists. Like many countries, New Zealand beefed up its security after 9/11. Having actually also zero danger from outside terrorists, it justifies its security budget by going after domestic targets. A Green party Member of Parliament talked about what he has discovered about his surveillance, and even that of his mother, a Communist back in the fifties and sixties. I also went to a rally for Aung San Suu Kyi a week ago, for all the good it might have done. It was a small group of people, but we were addressed by Members of Parliament from all three parties.

Then last Sunday and Monday we attended a conference on Nuclear Disarmament. The opening keynote speech was by Malcolm Fraser, a former (and rather conservative) Prime Minister in Australia, giving an excellent speech on why we need to move towards abolition of nuclear weapons now. New Zealand also has a Minister for Disarmament who spoke. With Obama’s recent speech in favor of eliminating nuclear weapons, now is hopefully the time to move forward on this front.

Two weeks in May - the wild life

Well, it is definitely becoming Autumn here. After a lovely April, the weather is much cooler now, and occasionally VERY WINDY. We feel lucky if the high gets to 15C (app. 60F), and we’ve had winds reaching 50 mph. A piece of glass got blown out of the overhang above the door to the Quaker Centre. We’ve had quite a bit of rain, but usually it comes in gusts and showers and then the rest of the day will be ok.

We have been to two wildlife refuges this month, which is where most of the pictures were taken. But first I have to introduce a new member of our entourage. My grand-nephew, AJ Mullen, in second grade in Canby Oregon, is doing a letter writing project with his class, so he mailed us a friend of his named Flat Stanley, from a book of the same name. We have been showing Stanley around Wellington and sending postcards and emails back to AJ. So, Stanley shows up in some of these pictures

New Zealand split off from Australia about 65 million years ago, so it has a very unique set of flora and fauna which evolved here without any mammals at all, and very few predators. Therefore, there are lots of flightless birds, and reproductive rates are slow. Many of the trees grew very, very big. When the Maoris came about 800 years ago, they started the first wave of extinctions, partly thru over hunting and partly by introducing the rat and the dog. For instance, there used to be the moa, a giant bird like the ostrich. Of course, when the Europeans arrived, the changes accelerated The North Island was probably 80% forest, and although the settlers certainly harvested some wood, they were so anxious to clear the land for farm and pasture, that they just burned a lot of it. Now New Zealand is slowly trying to restore habitat and stop extinctions. Many animals are only surviving on small islands which have either never had invasive species, or where it has been relatively easy to remove them.

One of these islands is Matiu/Somes Island in the middle of Wellington Harbour. Because of its location, it was used as a quarantine stop for both animals and humans until about 1920. During both WW1 and WW2, it was used as an internment camp for enemy aliens, including Italian residents of NZ. In the 1980s, rats were eliminated and native species of plants and then animals were re-introduced. So, on one of the warm, calm days that still happen, we took a ferry out to the island for a picnic and walk. We are not good at spotting birds and lizards, etc, but we did see red-crowned parakeets, fantails, and native robins. It only takes an hour to walk around, so you can tell it is a small island. The ferry ride back took us to almost all points of the harbor, north, east and south, so it was a lovely cruise.

Then a few days ago, we took the bus to Karori Sanctuary. Wellington was planned out with green belts around it, and this area had also been part of the water reservoir system, so it probably started out fairly green. Then in the 90s, they decided to turn it into an urban wild life sanctuary. Its approximately one square mile area is surrounded by a pest proof fence, the first of its kind, although it has now been duplicated elsewhere in NZ. They have eliminated invasive mammals, and reintroduced native trees and wildlife. One of the most invasive species that they are trying to eliminate all over NZ is an Australian tree possum. It eats leaves, flowers, fruits, eggs, baby birds, etc. and reproduces very successfully. Don’t know who had the clever idea to bring it over from Australia where it is a protected species. So we had a nice picnic and hike through part of the Sanctuary. We got very good at identifying the tui, a bird with a repertoire that would shame a mocking bird. We saw a tuatara, a small green lizard native only to NZ. There was a sign board in their protected area telling us where to look. Since I have never seen one of these animals actually move, once you know where one is, it is fairly easy to find. The park also puts out logs with dens for a native insect called a weta (pronounced with a short e), which looks sort of like a 2-3 inch long cricket. The park also includes an old gold mine. (New Zealand had its own gold rush in the 1860s.) The mine is supposed to have glow worms and cave wetas, but we didn’t see any.

We continue to hike up to the Botanical Gardens fairly often. We’ve been up 3-4 times and still only walked about half of it. The Botanical Gardens are about the opposite of the wildlife sanctuaries, because they were designed for testing out exotic plants to see what would grow well in New Zealand. Apparently there are more Monterey cypress in NZ than in California because they grow so well here. None the less, we have enjoyed the Rose Garden and the Begonia House and Tropical Hot House.

We also took a drive all around the Wellington peninsula. I think I described the harbor once as like an upside down J. The peninsula is more like an H, with Wellington actually on the outside of the left line. The horizontal line is where the airport is, and that land only rose up above sea level in a large earthquake about a hundred years ago. So we drove clockwise all around with the water to our left. You go through populated areas and then wild areas. Eventually, we got views of the South Island again. After maybe two hours of driving (slow and winding and many stops), when we reached the end of the road, we were able to turn back, drive straight north up the left of the H, and get home in about 15 minutes.

In the next post, I will write about all the intellectual and cultural activities of the last month.