1/7 The great writer JG Ballard said that he believed in the power of imagination to change reality. Looking at images of Kanton Island, I wonder whether the place somehow escaped from Ballard's mind.
2/7 As a kid Ballard watched the Japanese capture Shanghai's International Zone & destroy the Western society that had prospered there. His books are filled with images of ruined modernity: weedy swimming pools, crashed airplanes, gutted hotels.
3/7 Kanton was uninhabited until the US & UK covered it in a runway, hangars, barracks, & hotels in the middle of the 20th C. Pan Am airways used the island as a stopover on trans-Pacific flights. Vice-president Nixon visited in '53, on his way to NZ.
4/7 But as airplanes grew more powerful Canton was no longer needed. The planes & their glamorous travellers flew over the island. The hangars & hotels rusted & rotted.
5/7 Kiribati became independent in 1979, & took Kanton from the US & UK. A few score settlers from the new state's overcrowded atolls arrived. Like characters in a Ballard story, they hunted & fished & cooked over open fires amidst the ruins.
6/7 In 2010 a yacht stopped at the island, & found its inhabitants hungry. The Kiribati ship that supplied them with coconuts & flour had not called for months. The US Coast Guard made an emergency visit to Kanton.
7/7 Today we watch TV shows & films about the end of the world, & hear dire predictions from climate scientists. As JG Ballard knew, tho, the world has ended many times. Like the young Ballard's Shanghai, Kanton is a post-apocalyptic zone.
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1/11 When I saw a photo of Farage posing with Union Jacks I thought about an interview James Belich gave about a decade ago. Belich observed that Britishness was one of the most effective ideas in history, but that it was withering in the 21st C. Farage symbolises that decline.
2/11 Britishness is a modern idea. Linda Colley has traced its emergence to the early 19thC Napoleonic Wars, when Britain faced off against a revolutionary France. British identity spread through the world during that century. It was capacious.
3/11 Like many Scots & Welsh before them, most Pakeha in NZ identified as British. As Belich shows in his book Replenishing the Earth, the colonial project was in part an effort to spread & share Britishness. The identity had room for non-white peoples.
1/4 Altho the problem seems to have gotten worse lately, the misuse of Nazi history by politicians & media began even before the end of WW2. Winston Peters was named after the man who fought the UK's '45 election by comparing Labour's proposed welfare state to Nazism.
2/4 Nor is the problem confined to the right, as this appalling cartoon from the Key era shows. The tragedy is that NZ appeased & collaborated with Nazi Germany & fascist Italy in the '30s, & that we may be on the way to making a similar mistake today.
3/4 The topic deserves a book, & I was only able to scratch the surface, but I detailed some of the collaboration, by both the NZ state & many non-governmental organisations, in this article: We put a trade deal with the Nazis ahead of helping Jews.thespinoff.co.nz/society/27-01-…
1/5 I find the eliminationist rhetoric that's entering NZ politics from Trumpian America disturbing. We're hearing the rhetoric from the right at the moment, but I've also heard it from the odd person on the left in the past. I've got a graphic to show to NZ's eliminationists.
2/5 This is a graphic of NZ's 1902 election, when Seddon's Liberals triumphed over Massey's Conservatives. In the 122 years since, NZ has been divided into left & right blocs. They aren't going away, because they're rooted in sociology & history.
3/7 Eliminationists see people on the other side of the political divide as either evil or deranged. They see the ideas of the other side as irrational, & consequently have the illusion they can be eradicated. I've been disappointed to see some on the left adopt eliminationism.
1/7 Imagine that settler govts had not denied Maori the vote, that there had been no wars & confiscations, that Maori & Pakeha had come together in a hybrid culture. This might sound like a plot for an alt history novel, but in a remote part of NZ it was reality.
2/7 These precise & exquisite maps are part of Kaye Dragicevich's book about the gumlands of early 20thC Northland, which I acquired yesterday. Amidst the swamps & hut villages on these maps a new, Slavic Polynesian people was born.
3/7 Tarara is the Maori name for a person of Croatian & Maori ancestry. Croats fled repressive Habsburg rule to dig for kauri gum in Northland. There they met another oppressed people. This photo remembers the first Croat-Maori marriage, in 1892.
1/7 The debate about the meaning of the Treaty shouldn't be settled by partisan politics or polls. It should be settled by historical evidence. Here are 5 reasons why I believe David Seymour's wrong when he claims the Maori who signed the Treaty 1840 gave away all sovereignty.
2/7 The reason is the speeches the chiefs made at Waitangi. If they wanted Britain to take away their authority, why did not one of them say that? The chiefs talked obsessively about the negative impact of British settlers in the north, & the need to control those settlers.
3/7 The 2nd reason is the way Britain colonised. In place after place, from Africa to India, the Brits liked to exercise 'indirect rule', by cutting deals with local leaders that left those leaders with some sovereignty but Britain with overall control. Why would NZ be different?
1/10 A number of people who don't read poetry have pronounced Tusiata Avia a bad poet. How can we judge for ourselves? Back in the days when I used to edit literary publications, & often had loads of poems to accept or reject, I had two tests. I think Avia passes both.
2/10 The first test involves imagery; the second involves sound. One of the jobs of the poet is to renew the worn out, cliched imagery that we tend to use in everyday life. Bad poets will use cliches. Their seas will sigh or shine; their mountains will be mighty.
3/10 A poet's imagery should be original, but also needs to be meaningful. Silly novelty is no good, as my youthful poems show. I find vivid & meaningful images in many of the poems in Avia's 2016 book Spirit House/Fale Aitu. Here's one of my favourites.