On a long haul flight you have plenty of time for reflection. I’m staring at my callused hands and I keep thinking about the life changing experiences I’ve just had in New Zealand.
I had been reading about organic farming and permaculture and it’s not like I wanted to become a farmer or save the planet but I felt I needed a break from academia and wanted somehow to connect with the land, with people living on the land “in sustainable, harmonious relationship with soil, plants and animals”, as it said in the brochures. I wanted to come down out of my ‘ivory tower’ in the Linguistics Department of my university in Munich so I came to New Zealand as a WWOOFer, a willing worker on organic farms. I wanted to learn more about organic farming and get my hands dirty. I wanted to experience the country by working my way around WWOOF hosts in different places and experience Kiwi culture.
Hanna, my girlfriend/fiancée, was not able to come with me, or perhaps didn’t really want to come. She was busy completing her PhD in modern European languages and would then take up a fellowship with the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität . She had no time for travelling, not at this time anyway. To be honest, I think I also needed a break from Hanna, as things had not been going so well with us.
I had made contact in New Zealand with a woman called Lisa, who had an organic farm in the far north of the country, in the Hokianga. Lisa was a Māori woman, maybe in her forties, hard to tell, and fairly tall for a woman, about the same height as me, but lighter. She was not thin, or slim, as they would say in a fashion magazine. You would call a man wiry. Can you say that about a woman? I felt pale and podgy by comparison. She was very capable but couldn’t do everything on her own. Her partner had walked out on her, had shot through, she said. I thought at first she meant a business partner, but it was a de facto husband. I discovered there were many partner couples in the Hokianga and not so many married couples. I said I was sorry to hear her partner had left and she said not to be too sorry because it saved her the trouble of kicking the useless bugger out. I had never really thought about it but I had imagined permaculture people to be different, more settled, more permanent, I suppose.
Lisa lived with her 12-year-old daughter, Kiriwai, in the Wekaweka Valley in an old wooden house which had been her family home. Kiriwai was a pretty child and somewhat precocious, both mentally and physically. The school bus picked her up at the roadside, along with about twenty other children along the road, ranging in age from five to sixteen. Kiriwai’s chief recreation outside of school time, when she was not helping with chores, was riding and caring for her horse, Lucky. She also joined her friends at the swimming hole in the river, where the older and more daring kids would leap off the high bank at the roadside. I was watching her grooming her horse and commented that this was a nice environment for a child to grow up in. Lisa agreed and said that Kiriwai was changing, seemed no longer a child and some of the local men were noticing how she was growing and she could see how they were looking at her differently, which really pissed her off, she said. I wondered if there might be a warning in that for me and averted my gaze from her.
Lisa’s father and a sister and brother were living in Auckland and she had a brother in Australia, exactly where she didn’t know. The brother in Auckland was in Mount Eden, not in the leafy inner city suburb, but in Mt. Eden prison. I had seen this prison very briefly from the window of a bus on the Auckland Motorway and thought it looked like a dark medieval castle. I didn’t ask why her brother was in prison. Her mother had died a few years ago of lung cancer.
Lisa’s siblings were not interested in taking over what remained of the family farm and Lisa had started work on converting it into a permaculture farm with orchards. She was extending an existing small orchard of stone fruit with some subtropical fruit trees and macadamias. She had tried growing avocados but they had not thrived because of the high rainfall. I planted a lot of trees, which involved a lot of digging in rocky soil. I also helped with propagating seedlings and grafting saplings in the glass house, where there were also many tobacco leaves hanging like rags to dry. It was interesting work. One of my regular, less interesting chores was cutting and stacking firewood. Lisa had planted a stand of black wattles and Tasmanian blackwoods that could be coppiced as a sustainable firewood crop. I cut the wood with a chainsaw and split it with an axe.
Lisa had a flock of black sheep and supplied a niche market with black and brown fleece. She also had a small flock of Saanan goats and supplied fresh goats’ milk for the local market. I learned to milk goats by hand but it was usually Lisa who did the milking. I helped out with trimming their hooves and treating cases of foot rot. I grew quite fond of the goats and knew them all by name. I liked the way their natural expression was a slight smile, like dolphins, who always appeared to be smiling. The goats jumped up onto the milking stand eagerly for the bowl of mash in the head stall and looked around hopefully for more while they were still being milked, smiling politely all the while. The goats were gradually clearing the blackberry and gorse that were encroaching into the back paddocks and I marvelled at how they could eat the thorny canes and tough spiky leaves. You need good fences to contain goats and I did a lot of work, upgrading the old broken down fences, working with a post rammer and wire strainers and nailing battens.
I usually worked for about six hours, had a swim in the river and relaxed in the house. I enjoyed conversing with Lisa in the evenings on subjects in which she was interested and knowledgeable: permaculture, biodynamics, New Zealand history. She spoke sadly of the Land Wars of the 1860s and the loss of Māori land to the Pākehā, “so much of our land here in Tai Tokerau is gone from us.”
“Still, that’s all in the past,” I said. That was I phrase I often used when conversations turned to the subject of war. I would say, “It’s all in the past” to try to distance myself and my country from the Second World War. Kiwis still think of the War when they meet me because I am German.
“Yes it’s true. I did think that,” Lisa admitted. “And it’s true it’s all in the past and we have to move on but the loss of our land still hurts us,” she said. “It hurts us economically, culturally and spiritually. We lost our connection to the land. You know the Māori word for land is whenua, and whenua is also the word for placenta.”
What have we lost? I wondered. Our innocence? Our self-respect? Do we Germans still bear the guilt? Do the British still bear the guilt for their treachery in colonial New Zealand?
I also learned from Lisa that Māori had no written language until the nineteenth century with the arrival of English missionaries who learnt the language and taught it in written form. However, Māori had an oral history that went back over a thousand years to the arrival of Kupe, the legendary Polynesian navigator and explorer, who arrived in an uninhabited Aoteaoroa at a harbour he called Te Puna o Te Ao Marama, The Spring of the World of Light, a place that became known as Te Hokianga-nui-a-Kupe, the place of Kupe’s great return. Kupe returned to his homeland of Hawaiki and there followed the great Polynesian migration to Aotearoa. “This is where our ancestors first arrived,” Lisa said. “This is where it all started.”
I was surprised to find that Lisa spoke very little Māori but I was beginning to understand how colonisation had repressed the indigenous language of New Zealand in the early twentieth century. I explained that organic farming was just a personal interest and I had an academic interest in language, that I was taking a break from studying English and Linguistics. I said also that I was enjoying the opportunity to improve my English, but she remarked that my English was better than that of many people around here; just a bit unnaturally formal. I would pick up more informal language, she said, just by living here for a while and mixing with people. By “people around here” she meant “the drop outs and drop kicks” of the lower Wekaweka. I had already learnt from her some colloquialisms like dole bludger, piss head and dope head and some of the many alternative names for marijuana.
The Wekaweka Road branched off State Highway 12 just before it ascended into the Waipoua Forest with its famously massive kauri trees. The Wekaweka was like the Lost Valley of the Dinosaurs. Hidden away along the fifteen kilometres or so of winding gravel road that followed the Waimamaku River into the hills, there were hippies or ‘alternative lifestylers’, homesteaders, crafts people, communes and a few longstanding traditional farms. And there were similar habitats around the same South Hokianga area, like the Waiotemarama Gorge Road and Pine Hill Road. They were mostly young people, of my generation I mean, but some older, and whole families living in remote locations, some without road access or electricity. The upper Wekaweka, I discovered had a slightly different culture: more educated people with university degrees, some of whom were drop outs of a sort on communal farms and crafts people, but also a few teachers, an artist and a writer.
I had the use of the farm motorbike, which was not strictly road legal, and I rode up and down the road occasionally to the general store at Waimamaku or on some other errand and sometimes just for sightseeing. I always had to watch out for wandering stock on the road and for feral goats. One day I saw a dog mauling a goat on the road while a man stood by just watching the spectacle. I stopped and he tilted his head slightly and raised his eyebrows, which was a pretty standard Hokianga greeting. He was holding a rifle so I said, “Shoot it. Put it out of its misery.” He continued watching the dog tearing at the goat a bit longer, then put the rifle to his shoulder and fired it when he had a shot clear of his dog. He looked back to me with the same gesture but without the eyebrow lift and just a twitch of a sneer. He still said nothing. I returned the gesture and continued on my way. I would also walk around outside some nights in the dark. I had never seen such total darkness. Can we say we see darkness? I gazed at stars in the night sky and glow worms in the darkness in the bank at the side of the road. The gravel under my feet told me I was still on the road as I walked.
*
I went with Lisa and Kiriwai to Waimamaku beach for a bit of fishing and as we walked along the beach Lisa said “We’ll catch fish today. The kahawai are running.” I asked her how she could tell and she said, “Just look into the waves.” Which I did and yes I could actually see the fish surfing in on the waves. With our surfcasters we pulled in kahawai as fast as we could rebait the hook and soon had enough for the smoker and some to give away. The fish put up a fight and were exciting to catch. Kahawai means strong in the water, Lisa informed me. Kiriwai took a dip in the estuary. The surf was too dangerous to swim in. There had been drownings. On the way back Lisa asked me if I’d seen the big fat guy with the little fat kid walking along the beach. “That’s our prime minister”, she said. “He’s got a holiday home up this way.”
Lisa had a new man in her life, who visited while I was there; one of the few married men in the area, so they were being secretive and cagey about it. He parked his car discreetly behind the house. Another night the ex partner turned up and I think he was a little drunk. I stayed in my room and listened to them arguing. He was very rude. He said, “I hear you’ve got a new toy boy, a young kraut.”
“I presume you mean my woofer,” said Lisa calmly. “Well, I suppose that’s the sort of assumption a paedophile would make.”
“Paedophile! What the hell are you talking about? I never touched Kiriwai.”
“I’m talking about the young Brazilian woofer we had. You couldn’t keep your hands off her.”
“She wasn’t a child. She was 18”, he said, “and you’re full of shit.”
Lisa told him I was a good worker and he should mind his own business and get out and if he didn’t leave she would get a trespass order against him. I was afraid I would have to intervene if he became violent but he eventually left. That night I heard some demonic snarling, coughing and hissing noises. Lisa gave me a big torch, not a fire on a stick, but what Americans call a flashlight, and I shone the torch on a possum in a peach tree while Lisa shot it with a .22 rifle. There was another possum the next night and then I did the shooting.
*
I told Lisa I thought I should go see a doctor and maybe get some antibiotics because I had a cut on my foot that had got infected.
“How’d you cut your foot?”
“It was when I was walking barefoot on the rocks at the beach.”
“Show.” She inspected my foot and said, “No need for a doctor. We can fix that here.” She made a poultice of some leaves she called kopakopa, which I recognised as the common weed, Wegerich, or plantain in English. Within a few days the poultices had drawn out the poison and the wound healed cleanly.
Lisa told me that I would be sure to enjoy the dance at the Waimamaku Hall. She would not be going herself. She was going to Auckland to visit her father, who was in hospital being treated for diabetes complications, including the amputation of both his legs. It would be a chance for Kiriwai to see her Koro, not that Lisa would allow to her to go to the dance anyway. I would look after things on the farm and I went to the dance on my own, on the motorbike. On the way I picked up a guy standing next to his broken down car. He was also going to Waimamaku. Everyone was, he said. I parked the bike at the front of the hall and Hemi, my pillion passenger, introduced me to two guys leaning against a car, sharing a big fat cigar of a joint.
“Hey guys, meet my mate here,” said Hemi. “Uh, what was your name again?”
“Henrik.”
“Yeah, meet Henry. He gave me a ride here.”
“Henry, meet Tane and Chook.”
“Where’s your car, bro?” Chook asked Hemi.
“Aw, my car done a shit. I left it at the side of the road.”
“Good on ya Henry,” said Tane. “Here, have a toke.”
The smoke had the sweet, mellow taste of cured marijuana heads and had a ferocious bite. I held it in for a moment and coughed it out. “Wow,” I said, “where does that come from?”
“It comes out of this little tin in my pocket, mate,” Chook said, seriously.
Which I took to mean: it’s locally grown and don’t ask any more questions about it. We passed that joint around the four of us, or five or six, as at least one other person took a toke in passing. The band was starting up so we all ambled on inside. It wasn’t really the traditional country folk sort of dance I was expecting. There was a strange assortment of people of all ages, but mostly young adults who looked pretty rough and wild, many with long hair, some with no hair, some bushy beards. The music was a barrage of loud manic guitar with the usual back up of a four piece group. All local guys, Hemi told me, and young Rick on guitar was pretty good, I agreed.
“Too bad he always gets so smashed when he plays. Starts off sweet but he gets too out of it and his playing turns to shit.” And sure enough he kept taking slugs from a bottle of what looked like whisky and the guitar gradually started sounding muddy and slurred. Meanwhile the bass player was getting more and more agitated, aggressive and finally violent. He left the stage shouting and pushing and shoving when the band finished their gig. Hemi told me later Kenny, the guy on bass, was on some weird LSD trip and the other guys actually tied him up to keep him under control.
I noticed quite a few people going outside, including Hemi, so I followed to see what was happening. It was a fight that was drawing a crowd. Two teenage boys, a Māori and Pākehā, were throwing punches wildly, not many connecting, lurching and grappling. They looked strangely like they were dancing. Some of the crowd were egging them on but then a man and a woman in uniform came and pulled them apart. I thought at first, police officers, but they were Māori wardens. They managed to calm the boys down and even got them to shake hands. The crowd drifted back inside.
The local band was a curtain raiser to the main act, which was a well known Auckland band and while they were setting up a young man took the stage and recited an epic poem of impressive fluency and obscenity. The poet was apparently the son of a very prominent New Zealander, who may have been a household name in New Zealand but I had never heard of him and so don’t remember his name.
The visiting band was very professional: a tight six piece outfit, including some brass, and a singer who also performed fire breathing feats, much to the delight of the crowd. Overhead, a curious possum sauntered across a roof truss. The nocturnal devourer of fruit and forests was getting a different sort of night life. The hall was packed with cheering, drinking, smoking revellers dancing with great abandon. The music, the crowd, the buzz of the marijuana all combined into an exhilarating concert/party energy that swept me up and I was dancing and leaping about with the best of them. I wondered why such a band came all the way to this little backwater to perform. When I learned more about this remote community I found there were a lot of personal connections with Auckland and some of a commercial nature. Marijuana seemed to be such a mainstay of the local economy and I imagined the band getting paid with a big sack of ‘the musicians’ drug.’
One Hokianga grower attracted some attention by buying a new car, a Trans Am, with a bag full of cash. His plot got busted and helicopters came swooping, snooping and searching. It’s hard to hide commercial outdoor cannabis crops and some were discovered and ripped up. Huge bundles of mature marijuana were flown away suspended under police helicopters, with their rotor blades whipping out the seeds and dispersing them over large areas of bush and farmland.
There were a lot of people at the dance who were very inebriated one way or another and some behaving strangely but not causing any bother. There was one guy walking around stark naked but nobody took much notice, except that one girl walked away crying. Maybe she was related to him and shamed or maybe he was her date or maybe just a random guy and she had hoped to see her first naked man under more romantic circumstances. Normally I just observed other people. Now I found myself observing myself imagining scenarios around other people.
*
On the farm there were some beehives in the orchard, not Lisa’s hives but some that belonged to an apiarist called Doug. I met Doug when he drove up in his ute one day to harvest honey. He and Lisa had a serious conversation and he asked me if I would be interested in working for him for a while. He was having a very busy season and expanding his business. It was expected that woofers would move from place to place anyway and I think Lisa was feeling uncomfortable about her visitors: the unwelcome ex and the clandestine lover.
My ear was getting accustomed to the kiwi accent with its back shifted flat vowels; some of the same vowels that were front shifted in Australia. Amongst all the graffiti I had seen in Auckland was a message in black spray paint: Australia sux. Under that, someone, presumably an Aussie, had painted in red: NZ Nil. Something to do with sports rivalry, I suppose. I had a little difficulty understanding Doug at first as he had some speech impediments: a slight stammer and difficulty enunciating th. When he explained the honey is extracted with a centrifuge, he retracked on the with and it came out as “extracted woof woof…”, giving the odd impression of a dog barking. Some of the locals referred to him as Dedoug, which I thought was a little unkind.
Doug had been a beekeeper for some years, collecting mixed bush honey, but mainly manuka honey, as manuka grew so prolifically in the Hokianga. It had recently been discovered that some manuka honey contains naturally antiseptic, antibiotic properties and it was much in demand as a natural remedy. The honey was laboratory tested to determine its UMF content and good UMF honey was fetching huge prices. Doug found that he was sitting on a veritable goldmine. He was placing more hives in more areas and investing in more equipment, including a flash new Toyota ute, a conspicuous contrast to the dilapidated old Holdens commonly seen on the local roads. I thought this would make him quite an eligible bachelor in the community but I discovered later that he had a boyfriend. I was very interested to find out more about this miraculous honey and a little disappointed to find that UMF stands for Unique Manuka Factor. I thought it would be something more scientific. Anyway, UMF or not, manuka honey will always be, for me, the deliciously rich, dark taste of the New Zealand bush.
I went to work with Doug at the honey house down the road at Waiotemarama and in the field, harvesting honey. One day when we went to one of his more remote locations we found the 24 hives he had placed there had disappeared. Bee rustling was becoming a problem since the manuka honey boom. “F-fieving bastards!” said Doug. “I don’t go onto their maraes and take stuff.” I asked him how he knew the thieves were Māori and he muttered something. I think he said, “Who else would it be?” I didn’t stay long with Doug. I went back to help support Lisa when her father died.
Lisa’s sister, Florence, phoned her from Auckland with the news of their father’s death. His body was returned to their family marae on Waimamaku Beach Road, where he would lie in state for the tangi. He had been a kaumatua and a man of great mana in the Hokianga, and hundreds of people were expected for the funeral. The death notice was in the form of a whakatauki, a traditional proverb, that said a mighty totara had fallen. I couldn’t help thinking that the mighty totara had been chopped down.
Lisa and Kiriwai went to the marae and stayed for the three days of the tangi. The tangata whenua, all who called the Waimamaku Marae their home, made preparations for hosting the many visitors, the manuhiri. Masses of food arrived: the produce of farms and gardens, of hunting, fishing and gathering other kai moana.
Florence arrived from Auckland with her daughter, Aroha, and they stayed with Lisa on the marae for the first day. There were some who said they should have remained on the marae the whole time. They turned up at the farm the next day and I helped them harvest fruit and vegetables and slaughter a sheep. I put a bullet in its head and strung it up in a tree over an offal pit. Florence did most of the skinning and gutting. I found it quite unpleasant work but that is the visceral reality of eating meat. We dropped off the carcass at the marae and I helped with digging the hangi pit. Then we returned to the farm to cut up a trailer load of wood for the hangi fire.
The hangi food was prepared by many hands, while I tended the fire, alongside another couple of guys, to heat the hangi stones, which were then pushed into the pit that became the earth oven. The food was cooked in wire baskets stacked on top of the hot stones, covered with wet sacks, then all covered and sealed with soil. First the meat: wild pork, mutton and chicken, then the vegetables: potatoes, kumara, pumpkin, cabbage. It all tasted richly of the earth in which it steamed and cooked for three hours. A very efficient way of catering for a large gathering of people.
While we worked together I talked with Aroha quite a lot about Māori culture and about language, as I discovered she had been doing a degree in Māori Studies at the University of Auckland. Apart from her grandfather, she was the only fluent speaker of Te Reo Māori in the family. I was interested to find out about the Kohanga Reo movement I had read about, which was well regarded as a successful model for reviving an indigenous language. I knew that it started with preschool children; now I knew that Kohanga Reo means language nest. I asked her about how the Māori language evolved since European contact to accommodate new concepts and technologies and was interested to discover that many English words have simply been transliterated into Māori. Introduced animals for instance: cows, sheep, horses are kau, hipi, hoiho. Māori has fewer consonants than English and no S sounds, no sibilants or fricatives or L sounds. Transliterations not only from English but some also from French, the other would-be colonisers. The Māori word for honey is miere, from the French miele, and the French themselves are wiwi, from the early days of first contact when they were often heard to say oui oui.
Aroha was very knowledgeable and she seemed to appreciate that we had a common interest in language, but you can’t learn Māori language, she said, without Māori culture, tikanga Māori. The language is the manawa, the heart of the culture. And if you do learn Te Reo Māori, it will change your way of thinking. Your world view will become more Te Ao Māori, the world of Māori. Well, I was already beginning to experience tikanga Māori first hand on the marae. There is much of the essence of Te Ao Māori in tangihanga.
Another group of visitors arrived from Whangarei and gathered at the entrance of the marae. They could not simply walk onto the marae without a powhiri, a ceremonial welcome, to remove the tapu that is carried by outsiders. I should go and join them, Aroha said, as a visitor and a foreigner I should really have done this from the start. I waited at the gate with the others for the karanga, to be called onto the marae by one of the kuia. We walked solemnly onto the marae and an elder from the manuhiri, responded with a speech. At the conclusion of these formalities we removed our shoes at the entrance to the wharenui and filed inside. At the far end of the wharenui was an open casket with the grieving family gathered round it.
When we were all seated, a kaumatua of the marae rose and gave an impassioned speech with animated gestures and flourishing of an ornately carved walking stick. A few more speeches followed, alternating between tangata whenua and manuhiri and each speech was followed by a waiata, a song, from each group in support of their speaker. It was all in Māori, of course, and though I could not understand it I was impressed with the oratory and singing. At the end of these proceedings, the kaumatua for the manuhiri placed a koha on the floor, a gift, an envelope of money, which was picked up by the tangata whenua.
Individual greetings followed. We moved along lines of the tangata whenua, men greeting each other with a hongi, nose to nose, forehead to forehead and a sharing of breath. Women were greeted with a kiss on the cheek. I had never pressed noses with a man before but I repeated this gesture many times that day and kissed a lot of cheeks, including Lisa’s, Kiriwai’s, Florence’s and Aroha’s. The kaumatua, the first speaker, greeted me warmly as though he knew me. “Tena koe Henrik,” he said. “Thank you for your help.” I began to feel less like an outsider. There were other Europeans there, including some Māori-Pākehā couples but I think I was the only European European.
I stayed on for the meal which was prepared for the manuhiri and sat at a long table in the wharekai with Florence and Aroha. “You may as well stay the night,” they said. “There’s a bed for you in the wharemoe.” I also mixed with the Whangarei visitors and joined them in helping with washing up after the meal. I found a place in the wharemoe, which was the wharenui with its floor covered with mattresses. I had noticed when I first entered the wharenui for the powhiri that the walls were panelled with carvings of human figures and now I was able to look more closely at them and run my hands over the sinuous curves of the carved wood. “Each of these carvings is one of our ancestors,” said Aroha. All that evening in the wharemoe, where the family maintained their constant vigil around the coffin, there was much singing with guitar playing, storytelling and laughter, stories told in Māori and in English, while the ancestors gazed on with their paua shell eyes from the carvings round the walls. The living and the dead. The atmosphere was strangely at once both eerie and convivial.
I lay back and gazed at the vaulted ceiling of the wharemoe, intrigued and almost mesmerised, following the swirling, interlocking patterns along the ornately painted ridge pole and rafters; tribal patterns that I had also seen in the tattoos adorning the bodies of the Ngapuhi men and women. Aroha said that what I was looking at in the roof was the backbone and ribs of the whare tipuna and the barge boards at the front of the roof are its outstretched arms. The structure of the building is the human body, the body of the ancestor of their iwi. There in the wharemoe we all slept peacefully in the bosom of the ancestor.
More visitors continued to arrive on the third and final day of the tangi, to attend the burial at the urupa, the cemetery, which was back near the main road. It was quite an emotionally intense ceremony with a lot of crying and wailing, tears and mucus flowing. After the interment I hurried back to the marae to help with the hangi for the hakari, the final feast. There were now a great many people and the long trestle tables were heavily laden with food. Lisa was happily socialising with friends and family among the lively crowd. Her weeping during the three days and her harrowing crying this day seemed to have purged her of the emotion of her grief. That evening the floor of the wharemoe was covered with mattresses for the manuhiri and it was overflowing with the influx of visitors. Some of the visitors stayed with local families and Florence and Aroha came back with me to stay at the farm house.
I was coming to the end of my time in New Zealand and I was lying awake thinking about my return to Germany. I hadn’t travelled around the country much, as I’d planned, but I had no regrets about that. I quietly slipped out the back door of the farm house, with my blanket wrapped around me against the cool night air, to gaze for one last time into the magnificent New Zealand night sky. When I was about to go back inside Aroha came out the door. She lit a cigarette and in the flare of the match I could see the brown sheen of her face and neck and her flimsy white pyjama jacket. Her face had the same broad shape and smooth features as Lisa’s, though younger and her hair was longer. They are an attractive people, the Māori.
“Is that you, Henrik?” she said.”What are you doing out here? “
“Just star gazing. I couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither, so I came out for a smoke. Lisa’s home grown tobacco.”
“I can see the Southern Cross,” I said.
She said I could see Matariki too and showed me where to look. “You might know it as the Pleiades,“ she said. “You know, we Māori knew hundreds of stars by name before Europeans came here.”
“I’ve never seen such darkness,” I said, “or such a clear night sky.”
“You can’t see darkness,” she said. “You can only see light.”
“Sure you can,” I said. “Look at that darkness and listen to that silence.”
She laughed and I was pleased with this light-hearted banter. It wasn’t actually completely silent. The morepork was calling, as it did every night and I could hear the shrill whistle of a kiwi from the bush.
I said, “Are you cold? Here, share my blanket,” and draped one side around her. I would not normally have done such a thing spontaneously. I would have considered the risk of offence, or rejection, and maybe not done it at all. She threw her cigarette down and snuggled against me under the blanket.
“I hear you’re leaving us tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes, I have my return ticket and I have to leave.”
“You must be looking forward to going home.”
“Not so much as I thought I would and I’m rethinking what I’ll do back home.”
“Lisa will miss you. She says you’ve been a good worker and good company. I’m going to stay on after you go. She’ll need someone to help out.”
“I’ll miss her too. I’ll miss this place. I love it here.”
I had my arm around her, holding the blanket, and I drew her to me and kissed her, a little tentatively. ” Is that okay?” I said.
“Yes, that’s fine,” she said.
So I kissed her again, a more passionate and lingering kiss.
“Okay, that’s enough for now,” she chuckled softly.
*
In my time in the Hokianga I managed to learn some Māori language and discovered that the Māori place names I had become familiar with all had meanings or stories behind them. Waimamaku is pretty straightforward. Wai is water and occurs in many names. Mamaku is the black tree fern. The weka is a native bird. Waiotemarama translates wonderfully exotically to Waters of the Moon. And Hokianga; how aptly, how perfectly named: The Returning.