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Photograph of a woman in magnificent creepy bird costume, staring straight to camera.
Whiti Hereaka as Kurangaituku (Photo: Tabitha Arthur; Design: Tina Tiller)

BooksJanuary 25, 2022

Transformation: a takatāpui response to Whiti Hereaka’s novel Kurangaituku

Photograph of a woman in magnificent creepy bird costume, staring straight to camera.
Whiti Hereaka as Kurangaituku (Photo: Tabitha Arthur; Design: Tina Tiller)

In this singular new book, essa may ranapiri discovers a sense of space and peace – and some properly hot gay sex, for once. 

Kurangaituku stands upright surveying the area, her clawed feet scraping the rocks that push their heads out of boiling water and mud. She stands there, her body moving between manu and tangata in a sort of flux. She thinks about the world that has moulded her, thinks about the ways in which she changes with each utterance of her name. Kurangaituku. And she’s a bird again, flying through volcanic material. Kurangaituku. A woman making love to another woman both holding their breaths so as not to let out their shared trauma. Kurangaituku. A woman betrayed by a man who doesn’t know where the clitoris is. Kurangaituku. A vengeful power that rips open her enemies while drums thrash, and electric guitars dirge. Kurangaituku. A victim to the boiling mud. Kurangaituku. Or a trickster outsmarting the Te Arawa boy and removing his voice.

I have heard many versions of this story, of Kurangaituku and Hatupatu, or as it’s probably more well known, Hatupatu and the Bird-Woman. The first time I heard it, it was the story of a wicked Bird-Woman trying to kill the boy Hatupatu. The Bird-Woman was terrifying and ugly; a threat who must be put down like an untamed dog let loose in the streets. The next version I read, many years later, was by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku. This is the one that focuses on Kurangaituku’s experiences, brings us into her world, describes the wrong that is done to her. Hatupatu is an arrogant and destructive person who kills her manu. Kills the creatures that she is kaitiaki of after she lets him into her world. In this version of the story Kurangaituku is not tricked to her death but uses the steam from the boiling mud as a cover. She is of course aware of the land she lives in, some boy couldn’t outsmart her in that way. She comes back and surprises Hatupatu and enacts utu, creates a balance, a song for a song and pulls out his tongue. A human voice taken for his crimes.

The next time I come across Kurangaituku is in the journal Landfall. In a poem by Stacey Teague that depicts a school performance where the bird-woman meets her end on the “lacquered brown floors of a school hall”. This poem feels like mourning, feels like a response to the ways in which we are taught that resistance will be met with violence. The first time I read it, I cried and it was a deep cry, not just for Kura but for everything that has happened since 1769. It was this poem that prompted me to pick up my metaphorical pen (take out my typewriter) and write my own work about the bird-woman. In my poem she has avoided death (as in Te Awekotuku’s work) and made it to the Mediterranean where she is teaching the sirens of the Odyssey how to lure men to their deaths with song. What a tale of revenge, what would Kurangaituku be better at than bringing down the patriarchy?

I am no stranger to Kurangaituku, and I feel like a lot of you reading this aren’t strangers either. In a way all of us queer wāhine, wāhine takatāpui, have felt some form of shelter under the feathered arms of this bird-woman, who is ready to kill for us if need be. I say this because reading Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka, especially through a lens of my experience as a transgender wahine, felt like coming home. 

Two book covers, similar aesthetic but one white on black, the other black on white, featuring a woman's face and a bird.
The two faces of Kurangaituku (Images: Supplied)

The book, told from Kura’s perspective in the first person, is split into three parts. To reflect the perspective of the main character it is not structured in a linear fashion. On one side working towards the centre is Ruru which follows Kurangaituku’s adventures in Rarohenga, and on the other side is Miromiro which describes her origins and relationship with Hatupatu. The third part and the centre of the book is Hatupatu and the Bird-woman, which is a retelling of the traditional story. Regardless of how you read it, you always end up at that retelling, that point that changed her life forever. And both sides that you can start with always begin in Te Kore, the space of potential. For Ruru this space is just post-death, and for Miromiro this space is pre-birth. But the narrator, Kurangaituku herself, is always aware of the whole stretch of time that spirals out to be her life. There is a sense that she is always looking back to these events even if they haven’t happened yet. 

Kurangaituku allowed me to see myself within te ao Māori in a way I hadn’t before. Kurangaituku is unambiguously queer and perhaps ambiguously a woman and definitely a story-teller. There are so many scenes across this book that set a fire in me. The first being that of the eruption of Taupō, “An eruption so tremendous it colours the sky on the other side of the planet, and rips apart the centre of this island … The crater that is left is the shape of a human heart, and will eventually fill with water …”

This scene is explicitly manipulated and slowed down and this moment is stretched out in some of the most electric prose I’ve ever read. “The column is made of ash, pumice and lava. It is bigger than any of the buildings that you have engineered, or will engineer. It glows from the heat of the earth and expands with the gases that are created by the heat.”

The slowing-down of the story becomes its own dramatic turn. “It is a trick of our imaginations – that because we’ve slowed down time, we’ve allowed some life to escape. We have written in a space between the shock wave and the fire cloud that really didn’t exist. If their bodies had survived the boom, if their organs had not been liquified, if their lungs survived to take their next breath, it would have been one of fire and poisonous gas … It is impossible not to admire a force such as that.” Our stories that try to save, can only observe, can only record, can only invent another path but not enact it.

Before this moment in the text, Kurangaituku has been a bird, living amongst other birds. It is here, with the traumatic explosion of Taupō, that this changes. She begins a transition in the depths of Papatūānuku. Kurangaituku is encased in earth, where she struggles like a bird in an egg. Here she describes the muffled prayer of the baby bird before it hatches. “ … this place is too small for me. Body folded, wet with albumen, yolk sack absorbed. Egg tooth pierces the air cell / and I breathe for the first time – hā.” This reminds me of the internet slang that compares a trans person who isn’t yet aware they’re trans to an egg. What egg tooth broke me out of that stage of my life? What egg tooth gave me freedom? I think honestly, the word takatāpui was my egg tooth. Having a space in te ao Māori has allowed me to be honest and open about who I am. 

Throughout the book, Kurangaituku is further shaped by the perceptions and stories of the Song Makers (people), and within relationships is defined even further by what the other person sees. This is so often the case for trans people, having to perform and shift to fit the perception of their partner or their family who have calcified a version of who they are that can be extremely hard to break from, like the crust of earth that Kura must break through. This shaping by others can be incredibly traumatic. Like the experience of Kura with Hatupatu, who sees her as monster and sex object at once, which really is some of the most relatable shit for trans folk. 

There is another part of the book I want to speak to that breathed life into me; another place where Kurangaituku is shaped by another. This is in her relationship with Hine-nui-te-pō. Also I just want to say this book has some of the hottest gay sex I’ve ever read, turns out when shit isn’t written by straight men, lesbian love can flourish. 

This exchange, full of humour and lust as Kura comes to terms with who Hine-nui-te-pō is: “She ran her tongue along my clavicle and bit my neck. Is this how you greet them, your children? Hine laughed. ‘I greet my children with love, love a mother has for their child. But I am still a woman and you, Kura, are not my child.’’’ Their relationship is tender and beautiful and she shapes Kura in her own image, Kura becoming likened to atua. The ultimate mana wāhine power couple. What I want to say about this is how important it is that we are seen and realised by those that love us, and through that perception grow. Kura and Hine’s relationship is a lot more fraught than the parts I’m focusing on, and it does end up succumbing to the trauma both wāhine have been through. But the glowing moments of that relationship brought me so much peace. The atuatanga of takatāpui, of that egg tooth breaking through into the world of the light, is everything to me in this pukapuka and I am so thankful to Whiti and Kurangaituku for realising this. 

Kurangaituku stands in front of the mirror and for once likes what she sees, her body shifting before her eyes. She is an ocean of love and life and a lake the shape of a heart after it has exploded. 

Kurangaituku, by Whiti Hereaka (Huia Publishers, $35) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington

Keep going!
Collage of cut-out illustrations showing children's book characters wearing Red Bands. Also an image of a little girl wearing her dad's huge old gummies.
Red Bands, Red Bands everywhere – the little chook in her dad’s gummies is author / illustrator Kat Quin (Design: Archi Banal)

BooksJanuary 23, 2022

The Great Kiwi Gumboot Mystery

Collage of cut-out illustrations showing children's book characters wearing Red Bands. Also an image of a little girl wearing her dad's huge old gummies.
Red Bands, Red Bands everywhere – the little chook in her dad’s gummies is author / illustrator Kat Quin (Design: Archi Banal)

Are Red Bands sneakily advertising to children? Books editor Catherine Woulfe with this special report. 

Red Bands, Red Bands everywhere. On our suburban doorstep right now we have three pairs of the best gumboots in the country and this is completely normal and fine. 

We also have at least 10 New Zealand picture books explicitly featuring Red Bands, most of them published in the last year or so. And that’s … weird. 

The thing is, children’s books have long been a blessedly ad-free zone. There’s almost no branding in them, no product placement, aside from the screamingly overt (I’m talking about those ubiquitous ripped-from-TV books about Lego and Beyblades and My Little Ponies). 

“I’ll always approach drawing recognisable brands or products pretty carefully, for legal reasons but also it’s just a bit weird if your book starts feeling like an ad,” says Toby Morris, kids’ book illustrator and Spinoff creative director. “There’s usually ways to suggest it rather than show it outright. If I’m drawing a character in sneakers I wouldn’t put Nike ticks or Adidas stripes on the sides for example, you just have some kind of squiggles or pattern there so that it feels like sneakers.”

Oh, you’ll see the odd jar of something that looks like Marmite, especially from kiwiana-inclined illustrators like Kat Quin or Donovan Bixley. Sometimes a bag of sugar with Chelsea-pink squiggles. Very occasionally, a plane with a smudgy blue-and-green tail will zoom across a page – it could be a koru? If you squint? But airlines are generally not happy about their logos being used by illustrators. Too much opportunity for crashing and burning, I suppose. 

But Red Bands are a different story. Red Bands are everywhere. In fact, the preponderance of Red Bands in picture books has been increasing over time and for the last few months it’s been galumphing to a crescendo. What is going on?

Chuck your gummies on and come see. 

Illustration of a farmhouse at night – inside a cat licks her paw beside a fire, outside a line-up of Red Bands on the deck.
The great Donovan Bixley, in The Great Kiwi Bedtime Book (Image: Supplied)

We begin with books that feature Red Bands once and incidentally. First up: the aforementioned Donovan Bixley, wonderful writer/illustrator, in The Great Kiwi Bedtime Book and The Great Kiwi ABC. The gummies here are just part of the scenery – lined up on a deck, as you do. Likewise, a couple of years back Giselle Clarkson (get her to Te Papa) dropped a pair of Red Bands into the superb children’s cookbook Egg & Spoon. A single pair. Just kicked off under a table. NDB. 

An illustration of a table set with an amazing cake, a jar of jaffas and a crown. Underneath a pair of kicked-off Red Bands. A peacock's strolling past, the walls and floor are bright pink.
An opening image in superlative children’s cookbook Egg & Spoon, illustrated by Giselle Clarkson (Image: Supplied)

On we stomp, to Kat Quin’s Kuwi and Friends Māori Picture Dictionary, a huge beautiful hardback that came out two years ago and remains a stalwart of the Unity children’s top 10s. Red Bands pop up thrice. Twice with a cute-as kiwi chick in them. Again, in isolation I’d think nothing of it. 

That same year, Craig Phillips stuck a pair of Red Bands onto a character in Let It Go: Emotions are energy in motion.

If this is where it stopped I’d never have got all suspicious. 

Four illustrations from children's books: two are cute drawings with a little kiwi nestled in the top, the other two are a sad-looking boy wearing Red Bands.
Cutie-pie Red Bands via Kat Quin; down in the dumps version from Craig Phillips (Images: Supplied)

But now we enter squelchier terrain. In September, publishers Little Love released Kiwis and Koalas, a hardback written by Sarah Milne, with illustrations by Laura Bernard. In this book the Red Bands are given words, precious words, the one thing you can’t afford to splash around when you’re putting together a picture book. 

“Lily pulled on her gumboots. Her most favourite gumboots! They were red and black, big and heavy – just perfect for stomping through muddy puddles in wintertime and striding past spiky ferns in spring.” 

Four photos of illustrations showing a little blonde girl in a yellow dress and Red Band gummies. A dog features in lots of them. Much skipping and frolicking.
Lily and her most favourite gumboots, from Kiwis and Koalas (Photos: Catherine Woulfe)

Kiwis and Koalas also gives the gumboots oodles of pictures: 12 of them, sprinkled throughout the book, plus an extra pair for the cover. The red and black practically jumps off the page. By the time I put that book down I was pretty sure product placement had finally come for picture books. 

I resolved to look into the matter, and then didn’t. But a couple of months later another Red Bands-orama landed on my doorstep. 

Glenn Jones is an artist who sells kiwiana tea towels and keep cups and fridge magnets and native bird kites. Did he also sell out to Red Bands? I kinda thought so. His very good debut book The Rhyming Pirate stars a pirate who conspicuously wears a single Red Band on his non-peg leg. Again the boot all but kicks you in the face; again it’s on spread after spread, including the cover. 

Three illustrations, all bold and bright, featuring a pirate and his gumboot, and a parrot.
Glenn Jones also makes prints and tea towels featuring high-heeled Red Bands (Photos: Catherine Woulfe)

It was lockdown; I was bored; I dug through the books in the garage and came up with Samantha Laugesen’s Stuck in Poo, What to Do? which was illustrated by Kat Quin (then Merewether) and came out in 2014. My son had loved it. It was entirely focused on Red Bands. It stars a pūkeko posing like an influencer trying to influence small consumers to buy Red Bands. I went to Laugesen’s website and found she was selling the book – and selling actual Red Bands. I finally stomped into action.

Photo of a picture book flanked by a plush toy pūkeko wearing Red Bands, and a pair of kids' Red Bands.
The ‘stuck in poo package’ on offer at lukethepook.co.nz (Photo: Supplied)

I bounced the whole thing off a children’s bookseller, who agreed it smelled like capitalists coming for our children. I DM’d Giselle Clarkson and we laughed about illustrators being in the pocket of Big Gumboot (her line) and how actually it would be quite nice for illustrators to get a bit of extra cash, somehow. 

I emailed Skellerup, asking what the deal was – were there any commercial entanglements, was any money changing hands? Absolutely not, they said. All they do is rubber-stamp publishers’ requests to depict the gummies.

But Big Gumboot was not to be trusted. So then I emailed a bunch of illustrators, feeling like an absolute git, asking if they were taking dirty sneaky advertising money. Absolutely not, they said. One said it in all caps, which I deserved.

Donovan Bixley was very cheerful about the whole mucky business: “I can say unequivocally that I have not been bought off by, or am in the pocket, trouser leg, or boot heel of ‘Big Gumboot’ …  although I wouldn’t be adverse to slipping a Red Band into the background … if say … the arrrhhh–hmm … boot was the right fit.

“Maybe Red Bands are happy for the exposure in Kiwi kid’s books,” he added. “I mean, the worst light an illustrator can show gumboots in is covered in muck or standing in a cowpat, and that’s exactly what they’re made for.”

Samantha Laugesen: “I am not in the pocket of Skellerup (wouldn’t that be nice!) but yes, a few years back they bought some books off me to sell in their tent at the field days, I’m pretty sure they sold out which was awesome!”

So why are they all drawing Red Bands?

Well, says Bixley, “They’re just more fun to draw. Most of the time in my books, a gumboot is just a background thing, but … if I want to draw attention to a gumboot in one of my illustrations, weellll …  Red Bands are it. They’ve got that striking red and black design element that makes them appeal to illustrators.”

Sarah Milne, who wrote Kiwis and Koalas, specifically requested the illustrator draw Red Bands. “Pretty simple really,” she told me. “My daughter has always had a pair, as have my nephews. In short, kiwiana + kids = Red Bands.”

Black and white photo of eight pairs of Red Bands lined up against a wall. Above each pair, you can see a child sitting, legs dangling.
The children of Sarah Milne’s extended family, and their Red Bands (Photo: Supplied)

Laugesen: “Quite simply, for us farmers, Red Bands symbolise #farmlife. We wear them, our mothers wear them, our fathers wear them, our grandparents wore them, and with the release of junior Red Bands now our kids wear them! Red Bands rock!

“Red Bands were the inspiration for both my Luke the Pook books (over 37,000 copies sold, yippee.) When junior Red Bands were first released back in 2012/13 I remember going to the local country preschool and seeing the lineup of teeny tiny red bands at the door. I thought, how cool, maybe I could write a story about Red Bands for kids. And so Luke the Pook, the Red Band-wearing pūkeko was born.

“I found Skellerup very approachable, I had already been in contact with them for permission to use an image of Red Bands on a fabric design so I contacted their marketing manager for permission to use Red Bands in my books. I got a big thumbs up. I was lucky too, I was provided with contacts in the big farming supply stores RD1 and Farmlands to get my books on their shelves.”

Glenn Jones: “I think I just consider it as symbol of New Zealand. I remember my dad had a pair when I was little and I’ve just always thought of the red/black colour combo on a boot being a uniquely NZ thing. When I was trying to add a bit of kiwiness to my pirate character in the book but still keep him piratey the boot felt like a nice fit (pun intended).”

Kat Quin: “I felt the Red Band look is instantly recognisable, and I like that it is a longstanding gumboot brand, founded in Aotearoa. Plus, the black and red are great for aesthetics!

“Red Bands also bring back nostalgia for me personally, as I grew up on a Waikato dairy farm, so they are boots that remind me of my dad.”

Small girl in a pair of giant gummies.
Kat Quin at 4 – these are either faded Red Bands or a rare pair of off-brand boots from her dad’s collection (Photo: Supplied)

A final point from Bixley:

“The bigger issue we should really be addressing is, why are so many children’s book illustrators limiting themselves to Red Band gumboots? As creatives it’s our duty to open up children’s minds to all of life’s possibilities – may I suggest they check out the classic white freezing works gummies I illustrated for Marc Ellis’s Good Fullas, or the many colourful kids’ gumboots decorated with flowers and dinosaurs throughout my books. Come on New Zealand – our kids deserve better #gumbootdiversity.”

Investigation closed, and here is what I’ve discovered: Sometimes the world is not wholly terrible. Sometimes what looks like the worst kind of advertising turns out to be simple symbiosis, a circle of life, an organic and mutually beneficial partnership. Red Bands make for better picture books. Picture books sell a truckload of Red Bands. On and on the wheel will turn, perpetually in rubbery motion, a marketer’s dream. And I will continue to read to my kids – and wear my decades-old Red Bands – with nary a twinge, relieved to be proven a cynical old boot.