Auckland

Aotearoa Land of the long white cloud

Maureen at the Museum carved meeting house

Arriving yesterday, a couple of hours late but feeling good, I picked up a hire car and found myself battling right across Auckland at rush hour to stay with artist Maureen Lander at Devonport. Some of you will remember Maureen from her visit to PVAF ( Perthshire Visual Arts Forum) in 2007. Until her retirement last year she taught Maori material culture at Auckland University so she was the perfect guide to take me to the Maori displays at Auckland Museum today (Thursday 5^th) Connie recorded her visit to the Museum in 1897 , probably in the old building , recalling the magnificent 80ft carved wooden canoe capable of holding a thousand rowers and all carved from a single tree, and the splendid Maori house carved all over, which both looked just as fantastic to me today – and Connie remarked then ’ how differently one looks at these things when one has really made the acquaintance with the people who made them’. Maureen’s Maori perspective and knowledge certainly drew my eye to many things I would otherwise have missed.

When they were in New Zealand Connie and Margaret made a collection of ‘Kits’ a specific style of Maori basket made with New Zealand flax, and co-incidentally – and I am not short of those – Maureen has a collection and has made kits as an artform using all manner of contemporary fibres and materials. She co-wrote a book about Kits and I was able to purchase a copy from the Museum Bookshop this afternoon. Crossing the harbour by ferry today I really wished I had at least a week here as there are so many places to visit and explore, and all this blue sky and sunshine takes time to adapt to.

Flight Path

Leaving Glasgow airport

Sunrise over Australia

Well here I am in my little airborne bubble like a battery hen being fed and watered at regular intervals, with the lights turned off and on in ways designed to fool the body clock into submission. From leaving Glasgow airport in heavy snow to arriving in Auckland, hopefully in sunshine, is a journey time of about 30 hours. When Connie travelled in 1897 she came by steam ship and regretted the speed at which she covered the distance saying that she felt the earth was forever dwarfed and the ocean a mere pond – but then she was an inveterate sailor.

In 1961 my first journey to NZ on the Dutch ship ‘Oranje’ took about 6 weeks. Flying was very uncommon then and sea trips usually took between 5 and 7 weeks depending on the route and number of ports visited. On that occasion we went through the Suez canal, well I actually got off at one end and made a hair-raising bus trip down to Cairo, rejoining the boat at the other end of the canal. I do recall being abruptly woken up in the middle of the night and deep in the desert, by armed soldiers boading the bus and prodding us all awake with rifles and demanding aggressively to see our passports. Even the driver had no idea what was happening. All became clear when we reached Cairo and realised that President Nasser was making a street parade and hundreds of thousands of people were descending on the city. Infact, to get to our hotel, the driver had to crawl the bus through the narrow lanes of the ‘ city of the dead’ because it was the only place without any ‘living’ souls.

The man sitting next to me here on this Emirate flight lives in Kirkaldy but works in northern Australia and makes this trip every month. Some work commute. Changed times .

In the notes I wrote on that sea journey I noted my lack of ‘awe’ after seeing dolphins running in the bow wave of the ship. I was excited and fascinated but noted that because I had seen it on TV several times I couldn’t have the level of awe that earlier travellers would have experienced. This is interesting because I had first seen TV only 9 years earlier when an uncle had hired one for the Queen’s Coronation and it was several years after that before we had one at home. So even that small exposure had totally changed the nature of travel for me.

Right now there are atolls below in the Indian Ocean with storm clouds ahead and I have my laptop balanced on my knee!