The expedition indoors

Although the report Paul Janman recently sent south from Urupukapuka Island was full of interesting details and provocative speculations, I couldn't read it without feeling a little pained. I feel similarly uncomfortable when I read about older New Zealand adventurers, like William Colenso, the botanist and missionary whose jaunts around Te Ika a Maui are reenacted in new books by Peter Wells and my old friend the late Leicester Kyle. The likes of Colenso and Janman have been making me jealous. Skyler and I moved in the middle of this year to a suburb in the deep west of Auckland, and in recent weeks we - I use the word 'we' very loosely - have begun some renovations here, stripping layers off bedroom walls with an archaeological curiosity, and tearing up leagues of an ancient, peat-coloured carpet in the hope that there will be something solid underneath.

But the Waitakere Ranges rise on one side of our house, and whenever I think about the feats of travellers like Janman and Colenso I want to throw down my hammer or scraper and head for Waiatarua, or Ruaotuwhenua, or one of the other hills where antennae and bush grow.

As the likes of Jack Diamond and Lisa Truttman have reminded us, the Waitakeres have long been a place of refuge and adventure for Aucklanders tempted or forced to abandon city life. Bandits, deserters from imperialist war, and escaped prisoners have all made their ways to the ranges, along with visionary artists like Colin McCahon and Allen Curnow. There are a few research trails I'd like to follow through those hills.

I got a similar desire for flight back in the eighties at Drury Primary School whenever a teacher used to bang on about our area's association with Edmund Hillary. Looking through the Standard Three window past the last subdivisions of Auckland at the the dark blue Drury Hills, and hearing stories of our Ed's alpine daring, I was barely able to control the urge to rush out the classroom door and make for the south.

Skyler argues that living near the edge of the city can give us a certain mental balance, but I wonder whether it actually creates a peculiar sort of melancholy, by continually reminding us of the alternative to our quotidian suburban existences. Because I've been spending more time in hardware and furniture stores than in the countryside lately, I'm unable to respond in kind to Paul Janman's reports from pa sites and historic ruins and picturesquely isolated jetties. Instead, I thought I'd invoke the credo of Alf, and of anti-travel writing, by making the best of a bad situation, and glorifying the outwardly unedifying. In this poem, which I tried and failed to send to Paul yesterday (I suspect that he's once again drifted out of internet range, into one of Northland's serpentine harbours or estuaries), I deport William Colenso to twenty-first century suburbia.

In Defence of William Colenso's Botanical Expedition to a West Auckland branch of Target Furniture

Did you imagine him on a ridge-top,
chatting with cabbage trees,
or chin-deep in some bog
where kahikatea strain the sunlight?

Have you forgotten the forests
in this city?

Have you forgotten the rooms
full of rimu tables,
the oak cabinets varnished
with kauri gum?
Don't you remember
those spiders and dragonflies writhing
in blebs of gold?

Have you forgotten the library
archives, their piles of paper rising
like puriri trunks?

The deepest woods
the best specimens
are always indoors!

To reach the specimens
in the storeroom of this shop
Colenso climbs the staircase
like a tree.

[Posted by Maps/Scott]