Ko Rimutaka te maunga
Ko Ruamahanga te awa
Ko Høvding te waka
Nō te Oreore ahau
Ko Holloway tōku whanau
Ko Bevan tōku ingoa.
In the book Small is Beautiful, Schumacher says
“A highly developed transport and communications system has one immensley poweful effect: it makes people footloose.”
And by that he means, it becomes easy for people to flit and take flight, to lose their steady anchor.
To that I would add the speed factor. Things can be moved on from quickly. Increasingly so.
That’s one of the major threads of the colonial narrative, right? People escaping: persecution | poverty | authority | class | tyranny | . . .
It’s a thread that has emphasised individuality. I am me. You are you. I stand, whether or not you stand. Meritocracy rules.
It doesn’t matter where I am. If I’m good enough, and strong enough, I can achieve whatever I want wherever I want. My past is irrelevant, if I want it to be.
It’s a thread that’s baked into the DNA of our education systems.
And, while there are positive aspects of this thread and the moral and ethical imperatives it brings with it, we cannot forget that there are things it leaves behind and neglects. It comes with a cost.
House and Land Wasn't this the site, asked the historian, Of the original homestead? Couldn't tell you, said the cowman; I just live here, he said, Working for old Miss Wilson Since the old man's been dead. Moping under the bluegums The dog trailed his chain From the privy as far as the fowlhouse And back to the privy again, Feeling the stagnant afternoon Quicken with the smell of rain. There sat old Miss Wilson, With her pictures on the wall, The baronet uncle, mother's side, And one she called The Hall; Taking tea from a silver pot For fear the house might fall. People in the colonies, she said, Can't quite understand . . . Why, from Waiau to the mountains It was all father's land. She's all of eighty said the cowman, Down at the milking-shed. I'm leaving here next winter. Too bloody quiet, he said. The spirit of exile, wrote the historian, Is strong in the people still. He reminds me rather, said Miss Wilson, Of Harriet's youngest, Will. The cowman, home from the shed, went drinking With the rabbiter home from the hill. The sensitive nor'west afternoon Collapsed, and the rain came; The dog crept into his barrel Looking lost and lame. But you can't attribute to either Awareness of what great gloom Stands in a land of settlers With never a soul at home. Allen Curnow, 1941
Don’t those last four lines just punch you in the gut?
I love this poem. I think it captures the essential issue people like me - descendants of settlers - face: the lack of an anchor to a place.
Just think of the title - House and Land. House, not Home. We all know what the difference is. And it’s separate from the land, too.
Old Miss Wilson sits in her house relating to the land through the prism of ownership and prestige. The cowman traipses across the land in pursuit of novelty and employment. Both are unsettled settlers. They live on not in a place.
They are footloose.
Where is their soul? Where do they feel a sense of settling in?
This is something that Pepeha deliberately surfaces.
I think this need to consider relationality - to place, to ancestors - is a core component of the development of self-awareness.
For, when I say, Ko Rimutaka te maunga, am I not also anchoring an aspect of my identity in a specific place? Does this not beg the question why? What is the story behind that anchor?1
Surely, being able to tell that story is an act of self awareness?
Operating under the assumption that what counts is what someone can do and achieve, and the faster the better, means that we lose the ability to develop this crucial aspect of what makes us human. We emphasise footlooseness and sacrifice anchoredness.
So, if we thought of schools as places where kids can grow a sense of anchoredness, then we must also actively provide contexts where the relationship they have with the land is deepened.
What things can we do that realise that? What needs to be dropped? Does play help?
I would tell you of the many journeys we had as a family over Rimutaka to visit family in Wellington. I would tell you of how my Mum used to make that same trip as a child and how they always had to stop at the summit to let the car cool down. I would tell you of my Dad who moved the other way as a child, shifting from Upper Hutt to a farm in Martinborough. I would tell you it’s a much safer road now that it’s been straightened in a few places, but that the cuts into the maunga look like lacerations and if I think long and hard enough I wonder how it felt as the machines cut and drilled and scraped.