1/11 Since the revitalisation of feminism by the #MeToo movement, many female artists who were neglected by publishers & curators are getting attention they deserve. Miranda Art Gallery & Atuanui Press has published a book of Diana Halstead's drawings. I wrote the introduction.
2/11 Halstead's father was a minister in Sid Holland's union-busting government. Her whole life can be seen as a quiet rebellion against her background & upbringing. Disillusioned with life in Auckland's upper class, she spent much of her time with animals & in the natural world.
3/11 Halstead studied at Elam in the early '60s, but what affected her most were the journeys she took to Auckland museum's galleries. She saw the Nukuoro goddess Gawe (also known as Kave), which had only recently been liberated from the closet where she had spent decades.
4/11 Colonial curators considered Gawe a 'primitive' work of art, but she fascinated the likes of Picasso, Henry Moore, & Giacometti. Halstead studied the shamanic religions of the Pacific & North America, where humans fused with animals during sacred trances.
5/11 Halstead married one of NZ's best-known artists. But like so many NZ artists & mothers - Jacqueline Sturm, Anne McCahon - she had to play second fiddle in the r'ship. In the early '90s her marriage collapsed, & she produced the visionary images in Archetypes.
6/11 'They were an escape and a therapy' she recalls. 'I made them very fast. I did one every day. They seemed to already exist somewhere; it was as if I were summoning them. And the figures, the figures I drew, they seemed to be communicating, to be talking with me.'
7/11 There are hybrid creatures, cat-women, dog-men. There are fragments of bodies, organs & limbs & eyes, that might belong to humans or animals. Whales fill vaginas. Gawe's blank but strangely passionate face appears. Distinctions between the human and the non-human dissolve
8/13 In the 21st C scientists have become shamans. As they analyse DNA and pick apart the human body, geneticists and anatomists bend boundaries between human and animal, past and present, & remind us of the provisional nature of humanity.
9/13 DNA analysis has revealed that hundreds hundreds of our genes are inherited from other hominids, & also from bacteria. The strong, instinctive grip that newborn babies have is a vestige of the hold monkeys and lemurs took on the branches of Paleocene trees.
10/12 For two decades now Halstead has lived in a forest above the west coast of the Coromandel peninsula. She and her husband run a sanctuary for wild pigs menaced by hunters; sometimes they give refuge to pigs rescued from cruel farmers.
11/12 Pigs sometimes enter the house & lap water from plates on the kitchen floor. In her life, as well as her art, Halstead is testing the boundaries between the human and natural worlds. The drawings in Halstead's book can be see as a manifesto for a different way of life.
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.