Looking for Isilei Latu

I'm grateful to New Zealand Kaniva Pacific for this review of my tohi fo'ou The Stolen Island. Kaniva Pacific's reviewer focuses on the mystery of Isilei Latu. 

We know about Isilei Latu thanks to Frederick Goedicke, a wealthy German businessman who divided his time between Tonga and Nu'u Sila. In a letter written in 1945, near the end of his life, Geodicke remembered attending some horse races* held on a beach near Auckland on Christmas day in 1894, and meeting a man who introduced himself as Isilei Latu.** 

The man told Goedicke that he had been stolen in the 1863 slave raid on 'Ata island, and then put to work as a slave in South America. A Catholic priest had helped him escape on a ship that went to Auckland, and he had married a local Maori woman and started a family. Latu said he was very happy in Auckland, and was content to remain there.

Kaniva Pacific also notes that descendants of a Tongan who escaped slavery may inhabit Rapa Iti, a very isolated island in the extreme south of French Polynesia. There's strong but circumstantial evidence that a Niuafo'ouan was dumped on the island by a ship returning from South America, and that this man settled and had a family in his new home. An expedition to Rapa Iti is needed to confirm the island's Tongan connection.

Is Frederick Goedicke's letter accurate, given that it was written fifty-one years after the event it describes? Are there New Zealanders with 'Atan blood flowing through their veins who are unaware of their ancestors' remarkable and tragic history? Can we identify Isilei Latu's descendants today? Do some of the people of Rapa Iti have Tongan ancestors? I hope all these questions eventually will be answered.

*Christine Liava'a and I have been trying to factcheck Goedicke's letter, and we think he attended one of the racing meets held every Christmas for years on the beach at Orakei by local Maori. See the advert at the top of this post. 

**Frederick Theodore Goedicke was an interesting chap in his own right. He was a friend of both Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tonga's Tupou II, and he is one of the very few recipients of the little-known Order of the Crown of Tonga. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

'Ata on Radio New Zealand

This morning I discussed the Pacific slave trade, the fateful raid by slavers on 'Ata, and my book The Stolen Island with Radio New Zealand's Wallace Chapman. I'm grateful to Wallace for his enthusiasm, and for the half hour he gave me. You can listen to our talanoa here.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Launching The Stolen Island

Much 'ofa to everyone who came to the launch of The Stolen Island on Thursday night. Kenneth Tuai, a direct descendant of Paula Vehi, the last Tupouata, or leader, of the island, took these fine photographs. The fifth image includes a photograph of 'Ata's traditional reservoir that Alavaro Cerezo took in 2015. The penultimate images show Visesio Siasau talking about the visit he made to 'Ata with the Tongan navy in the early '90s, and Sione Tu'imani speaking on behalf of his cousin and fellow 'Atan descendant Masalu Halahala.

I'll be talking about 'Ata and the Pacific slave trade tomorrow morning on Radio New Zealand, starting just after eleven.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Stepping ashore

It is quite possible that, over the last fifty years, more human beings have flown in space than have stepped onto the island of 'Ata. 

Since Tasmanian and New Zealand slavers stole its people in 1863, 'Ata has had no permanent inhabitants. A few sailors have been wrecked on 'Ata, and and the occasional archaeologist or ornithologist has come to examine its ancient ruins or count its storm petrels, but the island's wild surf and high, almost impassable cliffs have made their visits dangerous.

Visesio Siasau is not only one of Tonga's most famous artists but one of the small club of people to have landed on 'Ata. 

In the 1990s, before he began his career as a sculptor and painter, Sio was a member of the Tongan navy, and during one patrol of the southern borders of his country he was ordered to leave the safety of his gunboat and land a small craft on 'Ata's tiny, boulder-strewn beach. 

Sio recently returned to Nu'u Sila from a six month residency in New York, and I'm honoured that he will be sharing a few memories of his a'ahi to 'Ata tonight at the launch of my book The Stolen Island. 

I'll be complementing Sio's talanoa by showing a set of photographs that the Spanish adventurer Alvaro Cerezo sent me after his nearly disastrous visit to 'Ata last year.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Masalu's coming south

I am very grateful to Craig Small, the director of the Tongan division of New Zealand Immigration, for speeding up the visa application of Masalu Halahala, so that Masalu can fly south to Nu'u Sila and attend the launch on Thursday night of my book The Stolen Island: searching for 'Ata.

Masalu's ancestors thrived as farmers and traders for hundreds of years on the tiny and rugged island of 'Ata, at the southern edge of Tonga. In 1863, though, a ship crewed by New Zealand and Tasmanian slavers raided 'Ata, and took half of the island's people away. The king of Tonga moved the survivors of the slave raid to the larger island of 'Eua, where they founded a community they called Kolomaile, after the village they had left behind on 'Ata. Masalu Halahala is a leader of Kolomaile village and a guardian of many stories and traditions of his 'Atan ancestors. 

When I travelled to 'Eua in 2015 Masalu and his wife Pisaina made me and my family welcome in Kolomaile, feeding us puaka and kava and sharing tales. Now I am delighted to be able to make Masalu welcome in Auckland. He will be the guest of honour on Thursday night at Auckland public library. The librarians will be making a podcast to commemorate the launch of The Stolen Island, and they are looking forward to recording a few words from Masalu. I am sure many other Aucklanders are looking forward to some talanoa with the elder of Kolomaile. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Trump's Tongan nemesis speaks tomorrow in Auckland

Last April I had a very long conversation in very pleasant surroundings about the unpleasant subject of Donald Trump and America's white nationalist movement. I was sitting under a moonlit mango tree in Nuku'alofa, the capital and only city of the Kingdom of Tonga, and my interlocutor was Dr Maikolo Horowitz, an American-born sociologist who has spent most of the last twenty years researching and teaching in the kingdom.

Horowitz has been politically active since the 1960s, when he worked with Herbert Marcuse and Abbie Hoffman in the American New Left, and he was a vociferous supporter of Bernie Sanders' campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Last April Horowitz told me about his research into the movement gathering around Donald Trump, and warned of the danger of a Trump presidency.

Tens of thousands of Tongans live in America, many without legal status. The kingdom is one of the frontlines in the economic and diplomatic confrontation between China and the States.

Understandably, many Tongans followed the recent presidential election closely. Horowitz has been sharing his research into Trump and American politics in formal and informal seminars at Nuku'alofa's 'Atenisi Institute, and tomorrow (Tuesday) he'll mark the beginning of his summer residency at Auckland's AUT campus by giving a talk called 'Has Democracy Been Trumped in America?' in room WG 608 of the Sir Paul Reeves Building, on Mayoral Drive, at noon. You can find the venue with the help of the maps on this page.

You can get some background on Horowitz's geopolitical thinking from the interview that I did with him in 2013, shortly after he had visited Fiji and New Caledonia and interviewed some of the important political players in both societies.

When he's not worrying about American politics Horowitz spends his time researching the history of the Pacific's fragmented Jewish communities. You can see some of his findings here.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

In remote waters

Malo aupito to Auckland libraries for advertising the upcoming launch of my book about 'Ata Island with this fine poster. The map on the poster shows a fragment of the world's largest ocean, including 'Ata and two-thirds of the much larger Samoan island of Sava'i.

'Ata cover less than one and a half square kilometres, sits at the southern edge of the Kingdom of Tonga, and hasn't been permanently inhabited for one hundred and fifty three years. When I was researching the island, though, I met many people who were obsessed with its landscape, its coast, its fauna, and its history. Some of these obsessives were bound to 'Ata by blood and family stories; others had discovered the island on the internet, or in old books. Most had never so much as seen the place, but a few had visited it, at great cost and inconvenience.

One of the chapters in my book introduces Alvaro Cerezo, an adventurer who spent a week and a half on 'Ata last year, and returned with a healthy appetite. 'Ata was not the first deserted island that Cerezo had made his temporary home. Since he was nineteen, the Spaniard has deliberately wrecked himself on uninhabited islands across the tropics, and survived on what he has found there. He now makes money by abandoning wealthy Westerners on tiny pieces of land in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Jen Murphy recently interviewed Cerezo about this curious exercise in entrepreneurship.

After he had returned from 'Ata, I asked Cerezo whether he'd consider asking the Tongan government for permission to bring his business to that island. 'Never' he told me. 'The island is far too tough.' It had taken him two days just to get up the cliffs from 'Ata's tiny and stony beach to the plateau that dominates its interior.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

'Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake'

Earthquakes have always been metaphors for human crises and catastrophes. Donald Trump's win in last week's American election was likened to a quake, and the protest marches and riots it prompted in a dozen cities were characterised as aftershocks. Brexit was an earlier quake. 

This morning a real earthquake rolled through New Zealand, splitting newly cemented foundations in the long-suffering city of Christchurch, blocking roads and collapsing homes in the coastal town of Kaikoura, and closing Wellington's business and political districts as efficiently as any terrorist attack. 

It is hard not to think about today's earthquake as a sort of corollary of recent political upheavals. In his great poem 'Barbarossa', Hubert Witheford tied the earthquake that destroyed Napier in 1931 to the chaos and conflicts of the Great Depression. In a poem called 'Aubade' written a couple of years later, William Empson described being woken by an earthquake in Japan, and then linked the disaster to the 'pains' of his native Europe, where fascism was spreading and armies were training for a new world war. 

In a marvellous blog post from 2011, John Mark Greville visits the Chinese town where Empson defied the Japanese invaders by teaching English literature at the end of the 1930s, and then explicates Empson's poem about the earthquake he suffered in Japan years earlier:

Empson and his Japanese lover are woken by an earthquake, and she says she must go back to the house where she is employed as a nanny, as the child might also have been woken up. This raises for Empson the issue as to whether or not his relationship can survive: the earthquake becomes a symbol of the coming war between Britain and Japan, a war that would make his marriage to a Japanese citizen difficult or even dangerous...

Here's Empson's poem. 

Aubade 

Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake.
My house was on a cliff. The thing could take
Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row.
Then the long pause and then the bigger shake.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go. 

And far too large for my feet to step by.
I hoped that various buildings were brought low.
The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed.
The guarded tourist makes the guide the test.
Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No.
Taxi for her and for me healthy rest.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

The language problem but you have to try.
Some solid ground for lying could she show?
The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

None of these deaths were her point at all.
The thing was that being woken he would bawl
And finding her not in earshot he would know.
I tried saying Half an Hour to pay this call.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

I slept, and blank as that I would yet lie.
Till you have seen what a threat holds below,
The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

Tell me again about Europe and her pains,
Who’s tortured by the drought, who by the rains.
Glut me with floods where only the swine can row
Who cuts his throat and let him count his gains.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

A bedshift flight to a Far Eastern sky.
Only the same war on a stronger toe.
The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

Tell me more quickly what I lost by this,
Or tell me with less drama what they miss
Who call no die for a god for a throw,
Who says after two aliens had one kiss
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

But as to risings, I can tell you why.
It is on contradiction that they grow.
It seemed the best thing to be up and go.

Up was the heartening and the strong reply.
The heart of standing is we cannot fly.

Explaining everything

I'll be speaking - briefly, let me add - at the launch of Richard von Sturmer's autobiography, This Explains Everything, next Wednesday.

Von Sturmer is one of New Zealand's most versatile intellectuals. He has written hit pop songs, acted in a famous feature film, made his own movies, published acclaimed books of poetry and prose, and lectured and written about Zen Buddhism. 

In This Explains Everything von Sturmer reveals some of the origins of his creativity and restlessness by telling the stories of two members of his family. He describes his grandfather's adventures in Australia's Western Desert, where he tried to get rich during the Great Depression by prospecting for minerals. Ernest von Sturmer's near-suicidal journeys gave him a reputation: an Outback policeman once refused to shake the explorer's hand, for fear that he might be a ghost. 

In another section of This Explains Everything von Sturmer recalls an alternately idyllic and eerie childhood on Auckland's North Shore, on a strip of half-rural land between the volcanic waters of Lake Pupuke and the Waitemata harbour. Von Sturmer's celebrates his father, a man who struggled with guilt and depression, yet also loved to play surreal games and hatch complicated jokes. This Explains Everything ends with a series of poems and song lyrics that bring together many parts of the von Sturmer family story. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Firing uselessly

Tens of millions of people are currently roaming the internet, searching for the vaguest premonition of the outcome of America's presidential election. If any of them stumble through the door of this blog they'll disappointed. My coverage of the election campaign has been sporadic and erratic.  

Back in January I blogged about the grotesque but compelling pieces of performance art that Trump was staging across America, and suggested that, like Oswald Mosley, his appeal was as aesthetic as it was ideological. I argued that, like Mosley, Trump was a response to an imperial power's long-term and irreversible decline. 

In July, after Trump had taken the Republican nomination and begun his erratic campaign against Hillary Clinton, I used an unpublished Kendrick Smithyman poem and the lapidarian research of Alastair Bonnett to query the notion of the United States as a traditionally white nation. I argued that the rise of white nationalism in America was a sign of that nation's decline as a world power. 

In August I speculated about the foreign policy Trump might pursue as president, and about the unintended consequences that policy might have in the Pacific. I suggested that Trump might accelerate, rather than reverse, America's abandonment of parts of the Pacific to China. 

It seems that last post was in vain, because Trump faces a narrow and precipitous path to victory today. 

Despite his deficit in the polls and the demographics he has managed to mobilise against him, Trump has announced that he's bringing a massive arsenal of fireworks for his post-election party. Trump is of course a uniquely hubristic individual, but the high-pitched triumphalism of his campaign has had its counterpart in Hillary Clinton's frequently repeated and impossible promises to revive American manufacturing and restore the country to its old eminence in global affairs. 

I'm reminded of a poem that John Ashbery wrote in 1976, while watching a beleagured America attempt to celebrate its two hundredth birthday:

OUT OVER THE BAY THE RATTLE OF FIRECRACKERS

And, in the adjacent waters, calm. 

Ashbery is known for writing long and cryptic poems, but he had begun to experiment with haiku-like fragments after encountered an anthology of Japanese verse in the mid-'70s. In 1976, as in 2016, the United States was contending with the aftermath of a disastrous war and an economic crisis. By contrasting the bright but brief fireworks of a Fourth of July celebration with the vast indifference of the sea, Ashbert reminded his readers that the American empire, like every empire, is a mortal, even fragile thing. His vision of fireworks rising noisily before falling pathetically into dark water might be considered a peculiarly American version of Joseph Conrad's famous image of the hubris of European empires:

There was no settlement visible, but the ship was firing its guns into the forest. Apparently the French were fighting some war near there. The boat’s flag hung limp like a rag while the hull, with guns sticking out over it, rose gently and fell on the greasy, slimy waves. The ship was a tiny speck firing away into a continent. It was pointless and impossible to understand. The guns would pop, a small flame would appear from their barrels, a little white smoke would puff out, and nothing would happen. Nothing could happen. It was insane, and it only seemed more insane when someone swore to me that there was a camp of natives (or ‘enemies,’ as he called them) hidden in the jungle.

America's politicians will keep firing uselessly.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Homage to Tongan poets

Here's a poem I have in the forthcoming issue of Landfall, New Zealand's remarkably long-lived literary journal. I wrote the poem in Tonga last April, after a very sad encounter with Siua Ongosia, aka Swingman, the talented and funny rapper-poet. Back in 2013 I had spent some time with Siua, and had watched while Paul Janman and two 'Atenisi students filmed him talking reciting excerpts from an epic poem he had composed about the Amazon. When I tried to get a look at the manuscript of this poem in April Siua explained that he had lost it. He also seemed to have lost many of his memories.

I suppose I didn't stop to wonder about the propriety of writing about Siua because the man is a public figure in Tonga and in the Tongan diaspora. Everyone knows his story; most people know his music.

But some of Siua's friends in the Seleka Club, the bastion of Nuku'alofa's nonconformists and creatives, recently gave me the wonderful news that the rapper had given up drugs, reignited his marriage, and begun to make music again. This sort of extraordinary transformations is not uncommon in Tonga, where notions of self are less cumbersome than in the West, and personae can be worn and cast off easily. Womanisers and boozers can become, overnight, puritanical men of God; implacable critics of the monarchy and the state church can suddenly kneel before the king and at the altar.

I apologise to Siua if this poem perpetuates an outdated image. I hope to meet him again soon in Nuku'alofa, and write about his renewed musical career.

The second part of the poem in Landfall reflects my divided feelings about ancient Tonga. I am fascinated by the beautiful artefacts of the Tongan empire - the layers of cut stone that decorate the graves of kings and their court poets, the sacred birds and knife-like moons incised on deadly and elegant war clubs - but repulsed by the class divisions of that society, and the way thousands of commoners dug gardens and dragged stones for the benefit of a few royals and chiefs. I feel the same way about the glorious but barbaric empires of ancient Egypt and Rome.

Homage to Tongan Poets

1.

On this sunny morning

rain falls in Malamahu maketi:

last week's storm is still a pool on the roof,

draining through the rusted iron

a few drops at a time. 

I step past the earliest hawkers,

past their undersized avocadoes and bootleg DVDs,

and see a bleb of dirty water break

on the forehead of Siua Ongosia,

punake, lover of Carroll and Lear,

first Tongan to rap in glottal stops,

star on youtube and at the Billfish bar,

and now the first beggar to arrive at Malamahu

every morning, to mount the bench that is his last stage.

Yesterday Siua told me about Tennyson 

and the Amazon; today he greets me like any other stranger,

asking for taha, 'ua pa'anga, for a smoke, for a light.

His hands are scarred and dented, like the tin

the avocado farmer uses to catch last week's storm.

It is taha noa, and Siua 

watches the utes arrive from Kala'au and Te'ekiu,

as young men in torn tupenu unload their fathers' harvests,

offering 'inasi to tourists

and the Nuku'alofan bourgeoisie.

Their yams look like missiles; their dirty talo are landmines

harvested from the ancient battlefields of Hihifo. 

The farmers' boys do not talk with Siua, though they've all watched him

on youtube, seen him swinging from a mango tree while rhyming

uaea with tractor, heard the love poem he wrote for his wife

after she left their home, dragging their only suitcase 

around pools of kava and beer. 

2.

Twenty maile away, at Lapaha, the punake and their kings are silent.

With toki made of stone, the tu'a cut stone

from the beaches of Fafa and Pangaimotu, Niutoua

and 'Uvea. They shook coconut heads from the heavens, 

split and sipped from them, lashed coconut hair

round the stones, dragged the stones to Lapaha,

laid one stone on top of another. 

Today tour buses stop at the royal tombs. 

Do not talk about reverence, about fatonia.

The tu'a were not offering tribute.

They raised stones to keep the dead

from rising, to keep the 'eiki and their whips

in Pulotu, to keep the mouths of the royal poets

stuffed with earth.

Intellectuals, fools, and hubris: Gordon McLauchlan responds to Roger Horrocks

When I reviewed Roger Horrocks' book Re-inventing New Zealand for Landfall recently, I gave the thumbs up to most of the text, but took issue with an essay called 'A Short History of the 'New Zealand Intellectual'.

I disagreed with Horrocks' claim that New Zealand was an intellectual wasteland for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and worried that his discussion of our intellectual history gave too little attention to the thousands of Kiwis who learned about and exchanged ideas outside the walls of universities. The working class autodidacts who studied socialist classics and Shakespeare at evening classes and summer camps, the Christian scholars who mastered Greek and argued about the nooks and crannies of their sacred texts, the tohunga who carried and extended Maori knowledge - all of these types seemed absent from Horrocks' narrative.

One of the targets of Roger Horrocks' essay is the veteran journalist and author Gordon McLauchlan. Horrocks offered an opinion piece called 'We Don't Need Formally Educated Fools' that McLauchlan wrote for the New Zealand Herald in 2003 as an example of the anti-intellectual attitude that he thinks infects much of Kiwi society.

McLauchlan's article discussed a conference he had attended in the United States where the question of the social role of intellectuals was raised. After a Latin American attendee had asked why American intellectuals were not doing more to oppose George Bush and his invasion of Iraq, McLauchlan had explained that, in New Zealand and other Anglo-Saxon countries, the word 'intellectual' was treated with some suspicion. In his article for the Herald Mclauchlan argued this suspicion was warranted, and that the judgments of 'clear-thinking everyday people' should be preferred to the 'vanity' of formally educated politicians and bureaucrats. 

Back in June, when Horrocks was launching Re-inventing New Zealand, The Spinoff published his criticisms of McLauchlan under a jejune headline.  

When I read Horrocks' arguments against McLauchlan I wondered whether he had properly appreciated some of the context in which the journalist had written his 2003 article. McLauchlan has been a stern critic of the neo-liberal 'reforms' that privatised and globalised the New Zealand economy in the late 1980s and '90s. He wrote a whole book, which he called The Big Con, to document the way that a small number of politicians and public servants seized upon the exotic and simplistic doctrines of neo-liberalism, and then inflicted these ideas on their country. 

Like Bruce Jesson, whose books Fragments of Labour and Only Their Purpose is Mad cover some of the same territory as The Big Con, McLauchlan saw the conquest of New Zealand by neo-liberalism as a lesson in the damage that intelligent and powerful people can do when they lose contact with reality and escape the control of democracy. In Fragments of Labour Jesson shows how a circle of influential Labour Party politicians began to study neo-liberalism at the beginning of the 1980s, how they were converted to the notion that the smooth operation of the 'free' market offers the solution to society's ills, and how they turned that notion into the guiding principle of the Labour government elected in 1984. 

I think that, when Gordon McLauchlan warned about the dangers of 'formally educated fools', he was remembering the disasters that Labour's neo-liberal clique wrought in the 1980s. 

McLauchlan used part of his 2003 article to attack Helen Clark, who was then the head of the fifth Labour government. Clark was an intellectual, and McLauchlan worried that she was beginning to show some of the 'hubris' that had been such a characteristic of 1980s Labour. 

Clark had won her government a second term in office in 2002, but by 2003 she was arguing with some of her Maori MPs about iwi claims to sovereignty over some of New Zealand's coastline. By 2004 Clark would be effectively expelling her most senior Maori MP, pushing the inflammatory Seabed and Foreshore Act through parliament, and hiding inside the Beehive while thirty thousand protesters descended on Wellington. Labour's loss of Maori support had a lot to do with its defeat by National at the 2008 general election. 

I don't know whether Gordon McLauchlan was thinking about the foreshore and seabed shambles when he wrote his 2003 article, but I certainly think he was correct in warning Helen Clark about the dangers of hubris. 

Last week I asked Gordon McLauchlan about Roger Horrocks' essay, and about that article from 2003. Here are some excerpts from the reply McLauchlan sent me, reproduced with his permission:

At [the conference in] Iowa [there were] twenty or so different people at the discussion...The Englishman (Ed Carey), the American and me...were ambivalent about what constituted an ‘intellectual’...

I have made the point that of all the Prime Ministers in New Zealand history between Balance and Jack Marshall, many of whom were daring legislative trailblazers, only one went to university (and was Prime Minister for a few weeks) and very few even went to secondary school. They were all self-educated and, therefore, even someone with as sophisticated a mind as Peter Fraser (left school at eleven) would not fit into Roger’s identity of the ‘intellectual’.

I know what he means about the anti-intellectual redneck reactions of people being destructive as, of course, they are; but identifying what constitutes an 'intellectual’ is the tricky bit. I remember a BBC interview many years ago with a Kenyan called Tom Mboya, a brilliant Oxford educated man. The interviewer rather patronisingly said how remarkable it was that he had achieved a First at Oxford and yet his father had been illiterate. Mboya said that his father may have been illiterate but had as subtle, incisive and acute a mind as anyone he had met at Oxford. Would Roger consider the father an ‘intellectual’? It’s all so interesting and certainly worth arguing about.

I think it's worth arguing about, too. 

Footnote: the image at the top of this post was published in The Listener in 2012, alongside an entertaining interview with Gordon McLauchlan. 

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]