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Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

BooksMarch 31, 2022

Moana Jackson: The art of having faith in ourselves

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

Moana Jackson, the esteemed Māori lawyer and teacher, has died. The following is an excerpt from one of his last pieces of writing, the foreword to new book Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art.

Art is the telling of stories. In some cultures, storytellers begin by saying, “In the days before we remember”, or, “In the days of the ancestors”, while in others they trust in somebody or something else, and say, “In the beginning was the word and the word was God.”

Whichever words are used, the idea of “once upon a time” is a chosen glimpse into facts or fantasy. It can be the simple beginning of a narrative or represent the particular ideas and memories that a people have placed at the heart of their collective sense of being. It is a portal from creation to what Patricia Grace has called the “now-time”.

Māori art has a particular “once upon a time” that captures its own chosen glimpse into what might be called a sense of imagined possibility. Whether it is a poem, a song or an image, it can draw on the mystery of creativity, which Rangi Chadwick once called “the quiet space where anything seems possible”. Like the whatihua, the active cosmos that curves into the sky between the dreams of the seen and the unseen, it can be boundless in its vision and inspiring in its reach.

The art in Toi Tū Toi Ora captures a vision that emerged from the creative potential held within the void of Te Kore, before emerging into the world of light, Te Ao Mārama. The vision was then nurtured over centuries in the intellectual and cultural histories of iwi and hapū.

Each history is as distinctive yet as subtle as the differences in iwi dialect; they have shared enough common insights and values to constitute a unique Māori intellectual tradition. It was within that tradition that this ‘quiet space’ was found for art to flourish.

It was a tradition bound by the promise of “i ngā rā o mua” – the past time that stretches into a future as limitless as the whatihua. If the works in the collection have been open to other sources and influences, it is because the tradition from which each has sprung was also immeasurable and was never closed to a wondering of what might be.

In many ways, the Māori intellectual tradition is a navigational one, forged in journeys across the Pacific that looked back to Rangiātea, while longing to know what lay beyond that distant point where the earth met the sky. It has always been a daring, as well as imaginative, tradition propelled by both a longing to explore and the confidence that has come from the stories told in this land.

From the moment the first waka arrived on these shores, the stories and traditions adapted and grew to suit this land. For our people found and told new stories about the importance of place and the relationships they might have with the land and the universe, as well as with each other.

Moana Jackson receiving his honorary doctorate from Victoria University. (Photo: Leonie Pihama)

In the beginning stories, some of the land seemed so vast the people called it Aotearoa – land of the long white cloud. Yet it was never so large or forbidding that they couldn’t see its beauty in small things or notice if the earth rose up and shrugged her shoulders. And so the land became Papatūānuku, the mother who shaped relationships and held the people close as they figured out what she might have to say.

The sea swirled along longer coastlines than time had made known to them before, and it could seem more angry and sharp-tongued, too. Yet they knew its dangers as well as its calm and they soon learned its currents and its bounty. And so the sea became one with the land, joining time and place and life and eternity as the dead leapt over its depths to return to Hawaiki.

The rivers at first seemed to stretch further and rushed away more violently than any of the people had known on their other earlier islands. Yet they were still not as long as the far blue paths that brought the people here and their course could always be traced across the land. And so the rivers became the lifeblood of Papatūānuku and the tīpuna of the people who in each iwi would learn, in their own way, that they were the river and the river was them.

The mountains seemed to pierce the sky and break away from plains and forests that could lurk darker and more chilling than those that once looked down on tropical seas. Yet they were always somehow close and never far from sight. The mountains became monuments to iwi and hapū identity, markers of their relationships with the land that would forever call the people home.

The land nourished the people, even when there were moments of conflict and stress. Such times were the freighted costs of human fallibility but they also led to an awareness, as they do in all cultures, that people cannot exist in a power vacuum or maintain good relationships in a lawless state. And so the intellectual tradition gave rise to political and legal thought, and the iwi and hapū became polities, independent yet interdependent, because that is what living with the land and each other required.

The people thought their lives into being; the intellectual tradition eventually became what Te Rarawa Kohere has described as a “tūrangawaewae of thought”. Wherever iwi and hapū chose to make a place they could call home, history and the soft hands of the land always provided comfort because nothing was ever too far away and separation was only as relative as the pause between sleeping and waking.

Even though finding a place to stand in this new land was a daunting adventure, it was also a claim to the familiar, as these islands were still islands in the Pacific. They necessarily encouraged a way of seeing the world that included the imagined possibilities of looking beyond the horizon.

The stories our people told helped shape and were in turn shaped by the “tūrangawaewae of thought”. They gave expression to its emphasis on relationships and found meaning in its sense of intimacy and distance. Most of all, perhaps, they drew together the whakapapa of knowledge and the knowledge of whakapapa. They therefore ensured that just as whakapapa itself is a series of never-ending beginnings, in which new life always eases the sorrow of death, so the possibilities of the imagination could also be infinite.

Thus, when Tāwhaki brought the baskets of knowledge from the heavens, he unleashed the potential for creativity that was always latent in Te Kore. The enlightenment of Te Ao Mārama then followed in the realisation that there was no end to what might be known, because the baskets were infinite in size, too. Indeed, knowledge and imagining were only limited by the willingness to traverse the mind-fields of observation and assumption, philosophy and science, experience and experimentation, reason and hope.

The mind-fields were constantly tested and expanded as new questions were asked or new discoveries were made. If the answer to a question was sometimes just another question, it simply meant that there was more to know before enlightenment was possible. A sense of place and even of intimate distance always engendered new hope, as it did on those first long and lonely waka voyages.

Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art (Penguin, $65) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington

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Noelle-M-photo-essay (1)

BooksMarch 29, 2022

‘Take another one’: Noelle McCarthy on the photos behind her new memoir, Grand

Noelle-M-photo-essay (1)

Long lost family photographs unearthed while writing her first book made Noelle McCarthy realise the past isn’t always as black and white as we remember it.

The last time I saw my mother, I sat alongside her on a narrow hospital cot, stretched my arm out and took several photos. Timestamped a few weeks before Covid locked the world down, they show us with our heads close together, filling the frame, hers tiny, mine bigger. Death has already started to creep into her face, but there she is – alert, narrow-eyed, game still, even with the sunken cheeks and balding temples. I look like a grieving bullfrog, eyes red and bulgy.

I don’t know why I took them, the weight of the moment barely covered by a selfie. Or rather, of course I do – photos were our thing, hers more than mine. In good health, she was a demon for them, taking any excuse for a self-directed shoot: a mad hat, a vintage car, the pumpkin suit she bought in a job lot of dress-ups for 10 euros (the convict costume came with a free ball and chain). She was a ruthless editor, instantly dismissing badly composed shots, ones that didn’t capture the spirit of the thing.  “Take another one, a good one now,” she’d say. “Do it again, come on Noelle, do it properly, stop making a fool of me.” 

Photo: Noelle McCarthy

My mother Caroline, with her dahlia in the kitchen at home in Cork, August 2020. It was a spur of the moment thing, I noticed the flower matched her hair. She was game enough to pose, even though she thought she looked terrible. She had lung cancer, she was starting to feel sick by then.

I wrote Grand at a desk lined with photos of my mother: as a young girl on holiday in Kerry, in a pub lounge in Cork sometime in the 80s with rouged cheeks and her best friend next to her, as a grandmother with a giant pink dahlia, me getting married and her standing next to me. Those photos froze her in single moments, trapped under glass like a butterfly. They kept me honest, or as close to honest as I could get, a reminder that she was always more than what I saw of her. More than just my mother; a young woman in a bar with frosted lipstick and every anticipation of a good night in front of her, a teenager with long hair and long legs and an arm full of irises posing self-consciously. A complicated woman, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a personality of some force and depth and mystery. I looked at the photos and tried to get as much of her as I could into our story.

Photo: Noelle McCarthy

My mother found this photo out of the blue one year. She’s in Kerry here, in a village called Glenbeigh, in 1970 so she was 16. She had two copies made and sent them to me and my sister Sarah. My copy arrived a few weeks after I had my daughter Eve.

As I was finishing the manuscript, my sister was sorting through our mother’s things at home in Ireland. She found a couple of strips of passport photos – one in black and white, one in colour. It’s very early in the morning in New Zealand when she sends them through to me. I’m a teenager in the colour strip, with long dark curly hair like my mother. Hers is a perm from the place at the bottom of Shandon Street, where you could smoke while the hairdresser did you. At first I can’t place it, and then I remember. A white booth, in the corner, next to a Coke machine, beside the platform where the train leaves for Cork. Pigeons roosting in the open air above it. A grey curtain with neat knife-pleats hanging chest-high across the opening. A grey plastic stool in front of the camera. “Come on, for the laugh,” one of us would have said.

We were up for a public speaking competition. I’d have been feeling indulgent towards her, for behaving herself all day, drinking the too-strong tea and eating sandwiches like the other parents, not trying to slip away to some place along the Quays for two pints of Carling before the train. “Come on!” And we’d have found the surprisingly large number of pound coins required. Inside, two of us on the tiny stool, me braced against the cold white wall, avoiding her bony elbows. The familiar smell of her: cigarettes, Silvermints, and Estee Lauder White Linen, or Alliage. “Come on Noelle, stop messing!” Her mouth’s in a humorous twist in the first photo, not smiling yet, but not far off. By the second shot, I’m pulling her head down, onto my lap. I thought that it was my hand on the side of her head, when my sister sent the photos. But it’s her hands, her ring, our hands have always been identical. She’s laughing, hand on her head, being as silly as I am. 

Photo: Noelle McCarthy

My mother and me, in a Dublin train station in 1994. The scarf is from my school uniform, I’d been at a public speaking competition. I’m about 14 years old here. 

Back in New Zealand, in the early morning, I am confused when I see these photos. I do not remember us being happy during this year of my life. I remember fighting, and screaming, notes left on congealing dinners outside my bedroom door. I do not remember talking to her much at all. But here it is written down in my swirly teenage writing on the back of the photo: in March 1993 we were together in a train station in Dublin, happy, laughing, clowning around. Am I wrong about everything, I wonder, when I see this photograph? What does it say about my unreliability as a narrator that I have no memory of bits like this, bits that were fun? The photos are evidence that things aren’t always as I remember. I tell my sister, “It’s lucky you sent this.”

The other strip is black and white. It’s been about 30 years since I last saw it. I’m a baby – somewhere between six months and a year old – with a cap of dark hair, and big dark eyes. My mother’s eyes are hazel, but in the black and white photos they look as dark as mine. She’s holding me up and out towards the camera. In the second shot, the flash must have gone off, I’m starting to smile. She’s young – 24 when I was born, but she looks even younger. Her hair’s in a funny style, parted in the middle, caught up at the temples on each side. It makes her look innocent and slightly frumpy – a young mother and housewife at the end of the 1970s. She’d given up nursing by then, and was adjusting to her new role in life.

Photo: Noelle McCarthy

These were taken probably some time in the middle of 1979. They came in the same package as the train station one. “They were folded up in a little tin in your old bedroom” my sister wrote.

Under the duvet on a New Zealand morning, I stare back into time, tears mixing with the sleep in my eyes. After months spent thinking about how much my mother lost, it’s a bittersweet feeling, seeing her so young and so happy, here in her 70s version of a selfie, holding the first baby she could keep up to the light.

This photo was a total surprise to me. It’s an outtake from a magazine shoot I did with Stephen Langdon in Auckland sometime in 2005.  My sister found in a pile of my mother’s stuff after she died… I must have sent it to her. I used to send her things, cards, silly presents, photographs and stuff. Lots of people have said “is that your mum” on the cover? Sometimes I say yes. 

Grand: Becoming My Mother’s Daughter (Penguin, $35) is is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington

Read more: Crash and glitter: A review of Noelle McCarthy’s new memoir

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