Honouring the Obelisk

Paul Janman and I spent today floating down that river known as the Great South Road, turning occasionally up certain tributaries and beaching ourselves often on traffic islands and litter-strewn reserves, as we inspected, and - where necessary - replenished the geocaches we have hidden between central Auckland and the old border settlement of Te Paina/Port Russell/Mercer. The Great South Road Geocache Experiment is our contribution to A Sense of Place, an exhibition being held in Papakura Art Gallery until June the 10th.

Near the end of the day Paul and I made a visit to the so-called Bombay Obelisk, a handful of sad-looking volcanic rocks that were pushed out of the route of the southern motorway in the 1990s and now stand on a bank overlooking indifferent traffic. For the neo-Nazis, conspiracy theorists, Maori-bashers, and anti-semites who promote the notion that New Zealand was settled thousands of years ago by an advanced white civilisation, the Obelisk is the remains of an observatory erected by ancient Aryan scientists. In the website we've set up for our geocaching experiment we've described the Obelisk as Stonehenge for Racists.

During a section of Native Affairs' recent expose of the believers in an ancient white civilisation, Martin Doutre, the Holocaust Denier, 9/11 Truther and author of that classic of pseudo-history, Ancient Celtic New Zealand, showed off the Obelisk to reporter Iulia Leilua. As Leilua nodded with an understandable lack of enthusiasm, Doutre denounced the 'apartheid' system that Maori have supposedly imposed on the indigenous white people of New Zealand, and explained that the marks bulldozers had apparently left on the side of one of the obelisk's rocks were actually made thousands of years ago by Celts.

Doutre and his fellow pseudo-historians accuse a vast and intricate conspiracy of troublemaking Maori, politically correct academics, cowed National Party politicians, and United Nations bureaucrats of systematically obscuring this country's glorious white history. Doutre has even spoken to teams of demolitions experts wandering the hinterland of Te Ika a Maui, searching for ancient stone structures to disintegrate.

I would never stoop to such measures, despite my unsympathetic discussion of the pseudo-historians on Native Affairs last week. I did, however, feel the need to leave a small and temporary mark on the Bombay Obelisk today. Paul decided that I was paying tribute to The Who's greatest album, which includes that epic, synth-assisted denunciation of uncritical thinking, 'Won't Get Fooled Again'...