New Zealand Now
New Zealand is a beautiful place, where nature takes few
breathers. You want to take see biomes
and micro-climates in close proximity or take nature photographs that never quit? The South and North Islands are one big yawning monster
of fjords, mountains, glaciers and glacial lakes and rivers, waterfalls, seashore
and ocean, beaches, caves, vineyards, sheep ranches, rain forests and small
roads, all crammed together within short distances.
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| Cathedral Cove - North Island NZ |
But that is not exactly
what I want to talk about, not yet. The
indigenous people of New
Zealand, which is an island colonized by the
English, are the Maori, a Polynesian people.
New Zealand can be
considered part of Polynesia to my mind. They make up 15% of the population. There is a Maori language TV station. Maori greetings are even given out by white
people at gatherings. Tattoos are
big. Every single museum has a Maori
section. It is treated as a second
language in many government projects.
Maori’s fought at the
battle of Gallipoli and were heavily bloodied, and also in WW II in the
southern theaters, though Maori radicals led by a female, Te Puea, organized
resistance to conscription in WW I. This
is a story omitted from the current Gallipoli exhibit in Wellington’s
Te Papa museum, as was the fact that Gallipoli was a monumental Churchill /
British failure that acted as a prod to New Zealand’s own independence. On the surface at least, the identity
politics side, Maori’s are treated with dignity… certainly more than indigenous
people in the U.S. Only perhaps in Hawaii
do indigenous people have a real presence in the U.S.
However, as with all
questions like this, there is the real side.
Poverty among Maoris is high.
Bouncers and panhandlers seem to be mostly Maori. Maori’s live in remote rural areas, some that
are neglected by the government. Lower
life expectancy, graduation rates, higher unemployment, crime and health issues
are the familiar flip side to political correctness. Land is a particular sore point, having been
taken from Maoris consistently since the beginning. In fact it is almost as if ‘respect’ replaces
actual social progress as the goal of the white ‘liberal’ New Zealand
power structure. This is a familiar
pattern under the neo-liberalism of the market economy, there as it is here.
New Zealand was the first country in the world to guarantee
the vote to women, which measures its progressiveness. Maori men were allowed to vote in 1867 for
four designated seats, which was probably also a first. But it also had its broken 1840 “Treaty of
Waitangi’ which the guerilla leader Te Wherowhero refused to sign. Guerilla war
followed, led by Te Wherowhero and Maori radicals on the North
Island in the 1860s, fighting from ‘pa’ headland fortresses and rain
forest and mountain redoubts. Land issues
continue to this day, but were especially sharp in the 1930s.
Maoris recently sent a
message of support to Standing Rock, as indigenous people world-wide are watching
that development in the U.S. They, like their brothers and sisters in the U.S., are a real line of defense against the
degradation of the imposing environment in New Zealand that I first mentioned. But they alone ultimately can’t prevail.
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| Maori Carving - Te Papa Museum, Wellington |
As my traveling companion put it, New Zealand is
a bit ‘too’ British still. The minute
the English arrived on the islands, they started clearing the hilly land to
graze sheep and cattle, trying to make New
Zealand into a replica of old England
or Scotland. This clear-cutting was for meat, wool and
later milk and cheese production, which they still brag about. This in spite of its ecological footprint, as
grazing land takes up much more room than merely growing vegetables, wheat or
fruit. In the process they destroyed the
native old-growth Kaui trees in the millions, deforested large swaths of rain
forest (called ‘bush’ in NZ), denuded hillsides, eliminated bird habitats,
imported the possum which ate birds eggs by the millions. At present, chunks of New Zealand forest are monocultures of Douglas
firs or balsams or other trees, planted for loggers after clear-cutting the
hillsides for wood exports to China
and suchlike. Each tree identical,
spaced, the same height, the same variety.
Basically turning some NZ hillsides into tree farms.
This the Maori cannot
stop, much as they might wish too. Nor
do the people running New
Zealand want that.
New
Zealand is
influenced by their ‘big brother’ across the Tasman Sea, Australia, and political developments in England and the U.S. – all of which have had
conservative governments recently, slaves to the market system. Their conservative prime minister just
surprised the whole country by resigning on December 5th, so people are
wondering what hidden issue or scandal prompted this. The Labour Party in NZ is as hobbled as the social-democrats
and Labor Parties across the globe by their own accommodations with capitalism,
but they still remain the largest opposition.
New
Zealand is also home
to “Sir” Peter Jackson and the crew at Weta Studies in Wellywood, on the Miramar peninsula west of Wellington. He is the director of “Lord of
the Rings” and “The Hobbit.” The former is possibly the premier formative myth
of the 20th Century for English-speaking people. Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell’s focus on
Greek, Roman or Biblical myth can’t compare, just as academics want
to ignore more modern myths being created by recent books or film. James Cameron has also moved to Wellington to work on
'Avatar' 2-5. (!) 'Avatar' itself was a film about the destruction of nature by capitalist mining. New Zealand
is littered with sites from the ‘Hobbit’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ films, close
to Wellington and north to Hobbiton, and south
to the South Island and Milford Sound. The place really is middle earth, with a
little CGI, spliced images and miniatures, yet still based on shooting the film
in actual regional parks using actual steel pikes and silicon masks.
In “Lord of the Rings” the
tree Ents rage against Saruman’s minions for destroying the forests to wage war. The Ents might have to break out of fiction
to deal with the deforestation that has taken place and is still taking place
right in the middle of the real ‘middle-earth’ if the humans cannot do it themselves.
Red Frog
December 28, 2016
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