Stokes Point Revisited

Auckland Harbour Bridge
[photograph: Bronwyn Lloyd]

A couple of years ago I posted a photo-essay about Stokes Point in Northcote, scene of some proposed literary inscriptions celebrating certain late great North Shore writers ... I was therefore quite intrigued, on picking up the NZ Herald the other day, to discover that the project had indeed gone ahead:

The Stokes Point Pillars
[photograph: Stephen McNicholl (NZ Herald (26/7/12)]

Poetry and musings under the bridge downtown
[text: Matthew Dearnaley (NZ Herald]

Steve Mutton
[NZ Herald]

One reason it interested me is because I was one of the "literary experts" who advised on the choice of texts and authors for this "Trestle Leg Series," as it's now been called by artist Catherine Griffiths and landscape architect Cathy Challinor, who headed the project.

In fact, seven of the eight authors now up on those pillars were suggested by me, as well as five of the texts. The Transport Agency manager substituted his own choice of Smithyman poems, and so (I see from a recent blogpost) did the Janet Frame estate. Apart from the quote from Te Waatarauihi, the rest are more or less as they appear in the anthology Golden Weather: North Shore Writers Past and Present, co-edited by Graeme Lay and myself.

Golden Weather (2004)

But really, who's counting? I had plenty of fun with the project - first shaping the choice of texts, then giving what I thought was quite an amusing account of the process of selection in an essay for yet another anthology: 11 Views of Auckland, co-edited (this time) by Grant Duncan and myself.

11 Views of Auckland (2010)

Having now paid a follow-up visit to Stokes Point, though, and despite Scott Hamilton's laudatory review of the whole project, I do have to say that I have my doubts. The graffiti has already started to appear (though I sincerely hope that the word "white", written under Robin Hyde's poem, was not meant as a comment on the whole tenor of the series ...)

first graffito of spring

Of course the plan was always to regenerate the whole park, and this avenue of "literary pillars" was never meant as much more than an invitation to sample the rest of the beauties of the reserve ... It's therefore only appropriate to reserve judgement until the whole thing's completed.

I am a little dubious about how well those texts are going to last, though. It's great to have some celebration of literary figures in Auckland to march the writers' walks in other cities (Wellington's waterfront, Dunedin's Octagon), but those texts have - for the most part - been cast in bronze. I realise that carving them onto the pillars would have been prohibitively expensive, but will this work as well?

In any case, I thought it was important to get a good look at them while they're fresh and new, just in case anything does happen to them along the way. There seem to be some people actually living in their vehicles under the bridge supports at present. How do they feel about this new tourist attraction?

the residents

One thing's for certain. I wouldn't have missed this Stokes Point project for the world. It's been so entertaining from start to finish that it richly makes up for all the hours I've spent on it, first to last. Judge for yourself:

Vistas:

the approaches
[all photographs: Bronwyn Lloyd]

a home away from home

gentrification

You are being watched ...

the series starts small

... & ends big

Texts:

1 - A. R. D. Fairburn, "The Cave"

Fairburn (a)

Fairburn (b)

Fairburn (c)

Extracts from A. R. D. Fairburn's poem, "The Cave." The letters in red are supposed to add up to some kind of continuing text, or at least that was the original idea. In this case it reads:

"the sea hoards its bones"

2 - Robin Hyde, "At Castor Bay"

Hyde (a)

Hyde (b)

It was quite difficult to find anything appropriate to quote from Robin Hyde. I know she only spent a short time on the Shore, but her stay in that bach in Castor Bay is also the subject of a memorable piece of prose, "A Night of Hell." The text chosen to be put in red here appears to be:

"autumn's pining"

3 - Janet Frame, "The Road to Takapuna"

Frame (a)

Frame (b)

My plan was to include something from Janet Frame's account of her stay with Frank Sargeson in the famous army hut at the back of his bach on Esmonde Road, but instead - in consultation with the Frame estate - they've put in an interesting, hitherto uncollected poem (at any rate I can't find it in either of her published volumes of poetry), "The Road to Takapuna." The text in red here is:

"we drain our thoughts into the sea"

4 - Kendrick Smithyman, "Building Programme"

Smithyman (a)

Smithyman (b)

Smithyman (c)

Smithyman (d)

Kendrick Smithyman was a great cat lover, so it seemed only appropriate that this very friendly moggie should come up to make our acquaintance as we photographed his poem. The text in red here is:

"the skyline is not what it was, nor are we"

5 - Te Waatarauihi (1860)

Te Waatarauihi (a)

Te Waatarauihi (b)

This korero by Te Waatarauihi, chief of Te Kawerau in 1860, is "addressed by the inclusion of speech punctuation," according to artist Catherine Griffiths. The text in red here is, accordingly:

""

6 - Frank Sargeson, "A Great Day"

Sargeson (a)

Sargeson (b)

Sargeson (c)

I did wonder if the project designers would have been quite so keen on this extract if they'd known that this particular Frank Sargeson short story ends with one man trying to drown another man on a reef out in the Rangitoto channel. It's a fine piece of writing, in any case. The text in red here reads:

"was another world"

7 - Maurice Duggan, "A Small Story"

Duggan (a)

Duggan (b)

I really love Maurice Duggan's work, and it was a great satisfaction to include him in this series. The text in red here reads:

"each day had its own rules"

8 - Bruce Mason, "The End of the Golden Weather"

Mason (1)

Mason (2)

Mason (3)

I don't feel any compunction about including this piece from Bruce Mason's immortal one-man play, but I am rather sorry that we couldn't find room for his equally great namesake R. A. K. Mason. The text in red here reads:

"they threw them all together in a heap and stepped ashore"

So there you are. Was it all worth it? Only time will tell. For the moment, though, I do urge you to drive over and check it out if you live anywhere near here. There can be few such projects to be seen anywhere, I'd have thought.

Fifty Years of Randle McMurphy

[Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962)]

The publicity gurus at Massey have this thing where they try and get us to take over a high school for the day, with appropriate members of staff teaching all of the normal classes in some kind of special souped-up "university" way. As you'll gather from my tone, I have certain reservations about this idea. Are we really that much cooler and more interesting than their usual teachers? It seems unlikely.

Anyway, the latest target is Mahurangi College. We're going to occupy it next Monday, 27th August, and I (for my sins) have to teach one of the year 13 English classes - what I'm afraid I still think of as "seventh form." I'm quite terrified. I had to go to a High School to present prizes a few years ago, and the moment I arrived the fear came back - I felt at any moment I was going to be hauled off for disciplining by one of those eagle-eyed Heads and Deputy Heads keeping an alert eye out for trouble ...

The thing that does interest me about this event, though, is the subject of the lesson: Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I first read the book myself when I was in the sixth form at Rangitoto College, in - it must have been - 1978 (I remember one of the older, staider teachers fulminating on about all the hippie nonsense they were getting kids to read these days - instead of sticking to good ol' Dickens and Thomas Hardy). That was more than thirty years ago.

But there it still is, in the curriculum, Chief Broom, Randle McMurphy, the Combine and all ... When you think that the book was already a bit of a period piece then, at the end of the seventies, what does it sound like now, to these teenagers they're getting to read it? I was born in 1962, the year of the book's publication. Not only were these kids not born or thought of then, but their parents probably weren't either - it actually comes from their grandparents' generation.

[Milos Forman, dir.: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)]

Anyway, it didn't seem safe to rely on those thirty-year-old memories - nor my recollections of the (then current) Jack Nicholson film, which was screened for us in the school video room, and which I suppose I must have watched on video at least once since. So I have been rereading the book. Not only that, I've also been rereading Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), an account of Kesey's subsequent adventures with LSD, the magic bus, and his group of Merry Pranksters.

[The Merry Pranksters]

What strikes me most about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is just how good it is. Kesey definitely had a lot of talent, and his narrative barrels on like an express train. Nor do the themes of the book (presumably set in 1960, as reference is made to "voting for Eisenhower" as an especially loony thing to do, in the early pages of the book - crazy because it was his vice-president, Richard Nixon, who was actually running for president that year?) seem particularly dated. The idea of the "Combine", the machine that runs the whole country, keeping everyone in line, is still right on the button.

There's a certain inescapable romanticism about the whole thing, of course: the Chief's escape at the end, bearing McMurphy's soul with him, is a bit too good to be true. But then, it was never supposed to be a realist text, an expose of the mental health system (though there are elements of that within it). It's more of a blueprint for the real-life adventures and escapades that Kesey would himself enact a few years later.

And, as such, it's quite prophetic. Just like McMurphy, Kesey was eventually busted and flung into jail, and after his release, things were never quite the same. Where he and his pranksters had pioneered the Hessean Journey to the East, and were, at the time of their dissolution, trying to find a way to go "beyond acid," it was the bland suits of the music industry who reaped the cash rewards. Where he and his pals dreamed of a great spiritual awakening, the reality came down mostly to a string of squalid communes springing up on waste ground all over the world.

It might have been better, in some ways, if Kesey had achieved the martyrdom of his fictional hero instead of turning into a reclusive old has-been on a farm in the back of beyond. He did go on to publish a couple more books, but none of them had the power and influence of his first two - Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) still resolutely refuses to go away or go out of print, just like its predecessor.

Jack Kerouac grew old and sad, too - drinking himself to death in a scungy old cellar. But there the analogy ends. Kesey was always more focussed and productive than Kerouac: his pranks worked, his prose made better sense. He died in 2001, but it's hard to see his story as over yet. His books keep on selling, keep on being read, because he genuinely had something to say: the fact that he lapsed into being a mere man of letters gives you some clue of just how high the expectations for him had become.

If he was a John the Baptist rather than a Messiah, preaching the coming of something bigger than himself, then that can hardly be seen as a reproach. He may have got some of the details spectacularly wrong (in particular the timetable), but it's unfair to type him as a lost leader, a failed hope. Nobody since has succeeded in picking up that baton, but I guess we're all still waiting for someone to try.

[Ken Kesey (1935-2001)
Statue in Eugene, Oregon

NZ's Best: Matt Harris & Miriam Smith

How Far is Heaven (2012)

43,000 Feet (2011)

I'm afraid I've only made it to two film festival films so far this year. They've both been extremely interesting, though: last Saturday (21/7) I went to the world premiere of Chris Pryor and Miriam Smith's documentary How Far is Heaven, and this Saturday (28/7) I went to the New Zealand's Best programme of six local short films, selected by veteran Kiwi film-maker Roger Donaldson.

There were, admittedly, some ulterior motives in these two choices. I've known Miriam Smith for a number of years, and have watched with admiration the sheer enthusiasm and determination she's brought to her quest to break into the film industry. It's wonderful to see her name on a feature film at last, and especially one as innovative and thought-provoking as this documentary about the small Māori / Pākehā community at Jerusalem / Hiruharama on the Whanganui River.

Miriam Smith & Chris Pryor

Matt Harris, who wrote the screenplay for the short film 43,000 feet is also an old friend and colleague. We work together, teaching creative writing at Massey's Albany campus, and I was in fact the co-supervisor of his recently completed Doctoral thesis on New Zealand metafiction. Getting the opportunity, at last, to see the short film we've heard so much about, was therefore quite a thrill.

What shall I say about the films? The idea for the NZ's Best short films screening was to get the audience to rank in order the ones they preferred, with a substantial cash prize awaiting the victor. I may be prejudiced, but I do feel that Matt's film, expertly filmed and interpreted by director Campbell Hooper, cinematographer Andrew Stroud, and producers Heather Lee and Amber Easby - not to mention actor Dylan Pharazyn - was by far the best. Or the most to my taste, at any rate.

That's not to say that there was anything wrong with the other films: I was particularly struck by Michelle Saville's Wellington hipster comedy Ellen is Leaving, but Sam Kelly's Lambs was also extremely powerful and well-made.

What all the other films had in common, though, was a strong local flavour: almost an insistence on the value of portrayals of the Kiwi quotidian. Matt's stood out simply because of its "rootless cosmopolitanism" - as with the metafictions he's been studying so assiduously over the past few years, Matt's film seemed the only one that was interested in laying out new directions for our storytelling.

One might argue - Matt, in fact, has - that this tendency has already been successfully established in New Zealand fiction (with Janet Frame the first great breaker of the mold), but our film-making still seems dominated by the great New Zealand realist tradition.

It was not the ideology of the thing that made Matt and Campbell's film so entertaining to watch, though: it was the Taika Waititi-ish playfulness of the story, combined with the magical intensity of the imagery.

Was it necessary to give the lead character an American accent, and imply a North American setting for the story? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I'm sure a lot of thought went into the choice. The fact that the film has already screened at so many international film festivals (including the Tribeca Festival in New York) would seem to vindicate their decision, though.

13-year-old Chevy & 94-year-old Sister Anna Maria

You could hardly imagine a greater contrast with Chris and Miriam's film about the interactions between the nuns of Mother Mary Aubert's order of the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion, and the children of the local community.

This was fly-on-the-wall film-making with a vengeance. Interview after interview had been carefully spliced together into a somewhat meandering chronicle of life in this small outpost on the Whanganui River. At times one felt the lack of a larger context to the story that was gradually unfolding - some account of James K. Baxter's involvement with the place, for instance; not to mention Mother Mary Aubert's own experiences there.

By the end of the film, I felt more as if I had myself spent a year living in Jerusalem than that I'd seen an analysis of the complex interactions going on there now, more than 120 years since Mary Aubert first established her mission so far up the river.

Thinking it over since, though, I've come to realise how necessary this approach was to such sensitive material: so many off-the-cuff comments and revelations offered to Chris and Miriam in trust. Of course, though, their film has turned out to be an account of the sheer difficulty of helping people, however good your intentions. With so few locals attending their services or requesting their aid, the nuns have been forced to reconsider their role in the town. As one of the sisters puts it herself: "“At a major level they do not need us.”

Should they stay or should they go? No heavy-handed solutions are suggested by the film, but the sheer scope of the problem is outlined with subtlety and tact. The more I thought about it, the more I understood why the sole reference to James K. Baxter, whose grave still looks down on the little town from a bluff above the river, was a side-view of a picture of him inside the church. There's an absorbing, fascinating history to Māori-Pākehā relations at Jerusalem, but the subject of this film is how it feels to live there right now.

It may be less immediately beguiling than Matt and Campbell's film, but Chris and Miriam's definitely stays with you, grows in the mind. It's a film to ponder, to watch more than once. These film-makers may have fallen in love with their subjects, but the way they've cut their eventual documentary offers a wry commentary on a lot of aspects of life in this country that it seems very timely to hear about right now.

As the young girl Chevy explains, talking about the taniwha that lives under the concrete bridge leading into the town: "Rivers are important to Māori. It's because we don't have anything else."

43,000 Feet