Guest Editorial: A Time to Pause

TIM HIGHAM

Tim Higham has owned a property near Kaitoke for 20 years. His love of wild places and writing has taken him to our southernmost nature reserves and Antarctica, and through Asia and the Pacific with the United Nations Environment Programme. More recently he’s championed the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park and Predator Free 2050 Limited. Tim’s new book Island Notes: Finding my Place on Aotea Great Barrier Island(1) is a meditation on what the island may teach us.

Before I start each day, I sit for an hour.

Some days are still, and a slight breeze might cross my cheeks from an open window in the garden shed that has become my meditation studio.

On others, wind may thrash around its concrete walls, branches of spruce and eucalypts knocking on the iron roof.

Through October and much of November it seemed rain drummed incessantly above me.

At least the water table will be rising and the creek won’t dry up like last summer …

Return to the breath and body, let thoughts pass … There are days when kākā and tūī are raucous; others when the kek-kek-kek calls of kōtare intrude; or I hear pipiwharauroa, the shining cuckoo.

… sounds, thoughts, arising, passing away.

It’s difficult not to engage with the usual rush of ideas and irritants, those habits of mind …

But I’ve been putting in the practice, sitting silently on 10-day Vipassana retreats in a small valley near the Kaipara harbour each winter for the past three years.

After an hour of sitting, I might do some writing, some work on the computer, a few of the long list of jobs around my place.

Julie Anne and I bought our property off Kaitoke Lane nearly 20 years ago.

I’ve snorkelled and fished since I was a boy, but snorkelling has become free-diving and specialist shops have sprung up to service it. A few years ago, I enrolled on a course in town with a group of young men busting for weekend action.

Our first instruction was to swim a length of the pool underwater. We all plunged in and reached the other end blowing hard. We were told to repeat the exercise but sit on the bottom and wait thirty seconds before setting off. We came up with less explosion.

These days I am usually choosing not to pull the trigger of my speargun and rarely take a crayfish from the reef.

Over the last two years, I’ve watched the shallow kelp-covered reefs inside Tryphena harbour collapse. Places I know intimately - hidden crayfish lairs, channels where butterfish drift above the weed, sun speckled depths where a squadron of kingfish might suddenly appear - turned to ruin, kelp stipes laid waste by a march of kina.

Their prognosis is not good. It took decades for kelp forests to return to the reefs within the marine reserve at Leigh, only after big snapper and crayfish capable of breaking kina shells became residents again.

Is the way of the world finally catching up with us here, the last mad rush and grasping for what remains of wild nature?

It is the result of nearly 20 years advocacy by the Aotea Great Barrier Environmental Trust: important work documenting the loss and vulnerability of the island’s fauna and promoting a rat and feral cat free future.

I want to dive in and get started, with plans and calls to action, now the trust has secured funding through the Jobs for Nature programme.

But something keeps niggling me.

How am I implicated in the problem we’re trying to address?

John Andrews in No Other Home Than This(2) unpacks what European New Zealanders brought with them to this country: Christianity, Roman law, democracy and freedom, hyper-rationality, faith in markets, fascination with maps and measurement, preferred tastes in literature and art, a diet that favoured a few staple crops, and axes, saws, ploughs, oxen, horses …

Geoff Park, author of Ngā Uruora(3), was troubled by our ‘particular settler history’, by the theodolite – ‘the three-headed monster’ - which consigned, grid-by-grid, the forests of the plains to destruction, and by our attachments to progress and improvement.

How this played out here in Aotea can be found in the Office of Treaty Settlement’s summary report of the Deed of Settlement between the Crown and Ngāti Rehua Ngātiwai ki Aotea(4). It includes a Crown apology for historical actions or omissions that caused prejudice, in breach of the Treaty of Waitangi, which resulted in the hapū being left ‘virtually landless’ within 50 years.

What accompanies this process? Rachel Buchanan in Ko Taranaki Te Maunga(5) writes:

Here, some of us have listened to the korero of Rodney Ngawaka, of the pou that mark the spiritual and metaphysical world of Ngāti Rehua Ngātiwai ki Aotea. When I listen, I glimpse - through a glass, darkly – alternative ways of explaining and organising things. Ways of seeing the world that are less black and white, where opposites might co-exist, where the collective trumps individual expression and past and the future are interwoven.

The Aotea Great Barrier Environmental Trust can take great credit for championing the ‘Tū Mai Taonga project’, from its beginnings with the Aotea Conservation Park Advisory Committee, then garnering support from Auckland Council, the Department of Conservation and Predator Free 2050 Limited, and exciting the community about its potential. Now as the environmental trust hands the mana of leadership over to the Ngāti Rehua Ngātiwai ki Aotea Trust it feels like a time to pause, to take a breath, to let thoughts pass, to hold off pulling the trigger, and to listen for new voices that will inform and guide it.

References:

1. Tim Higham (2021). Island Notes, Finding my Place on Aotea Great Barrier Island.

2. John Andrews (2009). No Other Home Than This: A History of European New Zealanders.

3. Geoff Park (1995). Ngā Uruora: The groves of life – ecology & history in a New Zealand landscape.

4. Ngāti Rehua Ngātiwai ki Aotea Deed of Settlement summary: tinyurl.com/3kfx6pft

5. Rachel Buchanan (2018). Ko Taranaki Te Maunga.