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“I’m taking your brother and going to the South Pacific!” my dad would occasionally threaten when frustrated by raising two temperamental daughters.  During the Depression, young, and without clear direction, he had done a stint with the Army in Panama. Then, he enlisted in the Navy. When War II began, he found himself on a destroyer, the USS Nashville (CL-43), headed for the Solomon Islands. On their way down the ship stopped at an unknown (to him) island to let the sailors have a little R&R before heading into battle.  My father was raised in a tiny hamlet in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. This mysterious exotic island was the most beautiful place he had ever seen. When James Michener and Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote of the South Pacific, they touched on the experience of many GIs. But, during the war, the southern oceans might be paradise one day and hell the next.  In midst of his ship’s hell a forward gun turret exploded. No one ever discovered why. His best buddy fell on top of him and my father was the only one in the turret who survived. He was packed into a sleeping bag-type device and cabled high over the battle to a hospital ship that brought him to Wellington, New Zealand. He recuperated there until he could be transported to the Naval hospital in San Diego.  Dad never told me about his stay in New Zealand until fifty-three years later in 1996 when I told my parents about our plans to move here.  When I tell New Zealanders this story, they understand the connection I feel. They understand the connection between the United States and the freedom this land experiences today. If it weren’t for the care my father received in Wellington, I would not be here to tell the story. And New Zealand is now home for my children and my children’s children.

Countryside on the South Island of New Zealand

Some solutions include cities with good access to facilities, social networks and family for the coming “age quake,” the government urging those finishing high school to consider trades rather than a university degree as there is a chronic skills shortage. And, then, there is the ongoing quest for solutions to living peacefully in this bi-cultural nation established at the ends of the earth, at the end of the colonial era.
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Celebrations for Waitangi Day

Every year, early last month, on February 6, Waitangi Day was celebrated. It is a national holiday. Most people, it appears, think of it as a day off from work or to go shopping for sale items. And there are some good bargains on Waitangi Day! But, it’s really the holiday most akin to the 4th of July in the United States. Perhaps, it is the American at work in me, but it seems Waitangi Day should be a day of proper celebration if the country could just figure out how or why.  The headlines in the newspapers told us the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, was jostled as she entered the marae (or meeting place) at Waitangi in the North Island. The Opposition Party leader, Don Brash, who recently made a speech advocating disregard for the Treaty saying it leads to inequity, was pelted with mud when he tried to enter. Police, lined up to protect visitors and keep peace, were heckled by those who felt their marae was being invaded. Ngapuhi, the tribe whose marae is at Waitangi, has promised “Things will be different next year.” Is there trouble in paradise? The answer is that living in paradise has always been about getting in and out of trouble. On February 6, 1840, representatives of the United Tribes of New Zealand and the Crown of England, Queen Victoria, signed a Treaty at Waitangi in the North Island. This Treaty basically called for an end to warring between the Crown and Maori, the establishment of Civil Government, the granting of all the right and privileges of British Subjects to Natives of New Zealand, AND -- this is where it gets tricky today—their Land, Estates, Forest, Fisheries and other properties possessed collectively or individually. That is the English version. The problem is in the translation, of course! To the Crown these words meant one thing, to the Maori another. The Maori word possession is taonga and means everything that is held precious. Today what are being fought over are the foreshores and seabeds.  Maori hold these precious. When we first came to New Zealand, we heard something vaguely like “all the beaches belong to the people of New Zealand. No one can buy or build on them. Everyone has the right to walk along any beach in the country.” It sounded wonderfully foresighted and was because of something called “The Queen’s Chain.” http://www.publicaccessnewzealand.org/files/monograph_4.html

So, on Waitangi Day I decided to visit the Cathedral in the Square in Christchurch. I knew they were having a Waitangi Day service. I got there just as the Salvation Army Band (they are always surprisingly great) had finished and a man from the Ngai Tahu tribe, the indigenous tribe of Christchurch, welcomed us. His greeting tried to shed some light and perspective on the current events. He was descended, he said, from an ex-whaler and a Maori maiden. These are the cultural roots of the native New Zealander, he said, typified by this couple, his ancestors, as they worked together to build a family and a nation. He acknowledged that this vision is still happening as more and more people come from other lands to do the same. Then we heard messages in song and speech with the same theme:  Sing two races’ different stories,  sing their hopes and sing their needs.  Let the Treaty write our story, Frame our vows and shape our deeds. I was left with the impression that I am a part of a young and vibrant country, still with a vision and still willing to struggle to overcome. I can’t help but compare this new awareness to my wee grandson, a happy little chappy, and just eight months old on Waitangi Day! He started to crawl that week. What that means is bumps and bruises; learning he can’t bite his mum without getting rebuked or pull on the cat’s whiskers without getting scratched. It means he has tough days when all those things happen and a tooth is coming in besides. But, he is young and alive and growing, just like New Zealand where he was born, the child of an American Jew and Gentile and a Scottish and English Kiwi.

Cathedral at dawn in Christchurch

Rail station in Dunedin

This is not really off the subject, but my husband, Tom, was a musician. Although we sang together and made nine albums (this was before CDs), I am not really a musician—in fact, my idea of having an audience is to make the people go in another room, close the door and get busy doing things while the sound of my playing drifts their way! Every so often, my audience can look up and say “Hmmm…she might have gotten that chord right.”  Anyway, one of the songs I sing besides “If I Were a Carpenter” which my husband sang to me when we were falling in love is “Blowing in the Wind.”  This something bigger IS blowing in the wind. This blowing in the wind, for me, often brings gracious and encouraging serendipitous events. They are often focussed on the tension between our human desire for a paradise and confrontation with the hellishness of reality. Here is an example. In 2001, the last time my mother-in-law came to New Zealand before Tom died, she wanted to take us on a trip somewhere. Anywhere in the country, she said. She would take whoever wanted to come, a wonderful and generous offer: she knew that we had been working hard to become settled here and that most everyone who came to visit had been more places than we had! We decided to go south, about 4 hours, to Dunedin (www.cityofdunedin.co.nz). Everyone we met from Dunedin, including graduates of Otago University, loved the city. The unanimous advice was, “Go when the students are there; that makes all the difference.” But that wasn’t possible, so we enjoyed a quieter, more subdued Dunedin.

Albatross come to nest every year on the peninsula. Albatross have fascinated me ever since I first read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” many, many moons ago.  Though generally not insistent upon having my own way, I let it be known I REALLY wanted to see the albatross. For one thing, I had learned, they mate for life. This touched me deeply as my husband’s degenerating health made us very aware that while we had pledged ourselves to one another for richer or poorer, in sickness and health, death might well be getting ready to part us. When we got out onto the peninsula where the albatross nest (quite a fascinating and Riviera-like drive in itself), our group of five (Tom, his mom, me, our daughter and her friend) had to make a choice: were we going to pay $100NZ for all of us to take a hike to a little hidden place where we could view through binoculars the albatross nesting OR would we pay $100NZ to go on a boat ride along the coast, view the sea life, and maybe see an albatross? My mother-in-law (who was paying, of course) said, Let’s do the boat ride and even if we don’t see any albatross, we will have had a boat ride and some fresh air. Good idea, Mum. The delightful cruise along the coast showed off steep, rocky cliffs full of flying, squawking smaller-than-the-albatross bird life: cormorants, shags, yellow-eyed penguins. The rocks in the sea were covered with fur seals.  But where were the albatross?

Albatross

He was facing the inside of the boat, relaxed, with his arms outstretched along the rail, his face lifted to the sky. In spite of his tremendous health issues, Tom always carried himself well; someone who didn’t know his medical history would not have known the hell he was enduring. It seemed like it had been one thing after another: first tachycardia, then an aortic valve replacement, followed by high blood pressure, mild congestive heart failure, high cholesterol, thyroid disease. Now,Type 2 diabetes was looming. A few years before, he had lost the sight in his left eye when scar tissue developed following a detached retina; in his right eye, a cataract was ripening that made vision at night like being in a snowstorm. In his mid-fifties, he had to consider giving up driving and seriously wondered if he was past his “Use By” date. 

But, this day, because he knew he would not be able to see the wild life, he sat enjoying the fresh air and the sunshine. This particular day, he looked unusually content and at peace. I was drawn to a spot on the railing near a woman who seemed to be about my age. Perhaps we would strike up a conversation should there be an opportunity. Soon there was.

The pilot of the boat suddenly let the engine die, got on the speaker, and told us that if we looked to the right we would see an albatross floating on the surface of the water. And there it was. A real, live albatross! Magnificent in its strangeness, glorious in its hugeness, and our terrible realization that it actually was…a bird! Of course we couldn’t tell if it was male or female, but the pilot explained that each parent takes a turn sitting on the nest while the other goes out to sea to feed for a week or more. 

Because of its tremendous wing-span, the albatross needs a strong air current and a good run to take off and remain aloft. This is why, in less technological times, the albatross was so dear to sailors: they could use the albatross to tell which way the wind was blowing. This was the reason an albatross was hung about the neck of its killer in the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

But, there was no wind that day. The albatross couldn’t get back to its mate and their nest without it. But, the albatross simply continued floating, seemingly at peace and in unity with the rise and fall of the sea’s surface. Just like Tom today, I thought.  Both seemed to be content with what they were, in their situations, patient to wait until the conditions were right to lift them up above their present circumstances. 

An almost holy hush had fallen over all of us on the boat. After some minutes of staring, I turned to the woman next to me and quietly, but excitedly, began to tell her about my husband and what I was experiencing. “He has been so unhappy,” I finished, “My husband is a man who has lots of talent and has always worked hard, had energy and vision. He uses his eyes for his work. He can’t do anything but wait for a wind to lift him up. But today he seems like that albatross, at peace with waiting.” I was thinking of John Milton’s poem, On His Blindness:

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide:
'Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?'
I fondly ask: but Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, 'God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best: his state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.'

Then the woman began to tell me her story.

“How do you think I feel?” she said. “I am a judge from Jerusalem. I have just retired so that I can begin to paint and write before it is too late. I want to live the rest of my life in peace, but we have nothing but war, fighting and unrest.”

Her family had come from France to Israel after the Holocaust. One of her best friends was the Ambassador from Israel to New Zealand. She had been reading New Zealand history about the wars between the two cultures—Maori and the Crown of England. She had read about the Treaty of Waitangi and the continually renewed efforts to live in peace and work toward solutions. She knew that the national anthem of New Zealand appeals to the God of Nations:

God of nations, 
At thy feet, 
In the bonds of love we meet, 
Hear our voices we entreat: 
God defend our free land. 
Guard Pacific's triple star, 
From the shafts of strife and war, 
Make her praises heard afar, 
God defend New Zealand.

“I was talking to my husband in Jerusalem last night,” she went on, “I said to him, “What have we been doing in Israel for the last 50 years? Why aren’t we, the Israelis and the Palestinians, able to do what they are doing here in New Zealand?””

Then she turned to me and said, “Like that albatross, all we can do is wait… wait for….” She stopped--she couldn’t go on--gave a little shrug, and then lifted her hands into the air.

Could this little spot of earth, I have wondered since, this small nation, out in the middle of the South Pacific serve as a place of light to the world?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Note: Candy is now making plans to take her Easter school holidays on Norfolk Island where they celebrate the American Thanksgiving!

To contact Candy Click Here

The following are the two previous articles that Candy has written about New Zealand for the magazine:

Living In New Zealand ~ Answers & Anecdotes Part 1
Life, Liberty, The Pursuit Of Happiness And Dying - Reflections On Immigration To New Zealand
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