SEE MATURE FLÂNEUR DOWN UNDER
Upside Down in Auckland
Arrival in New Zealand
New Zealand has been on Teresa’s and my bucket list for decades. At last, here we are, on the bottom of the world. It’s mid-June and chilly, because it’s mid-winter. It gets dark at 6 p.m, because this is the season with the shortest daylight. And yet, everything seems so bizarrely…normal.
“Auckland looks like a better version of Portland,” said my beloved, eloquently damning with faint praise.
We are staying near the recently refurbished downtown marina, an area of chi-chi restaurants, gleaming office towers and condos. The boats at dock are big and extravagant — including a NZ American Cup racing yacht. Walking around the city, everything appears disorientingly familiar, right down to the brand-name stores: H&M, Northface, HSBC, Citibank. There’s a Starbucks across the street from us and a MacDonald’s down the block. The iconic Sky Tower looks a lot like the Seattle Space Needle, or Toronto’s CN Tower. It doesn’t even feel British (apart from driving on the wrong side of the road). Everything’s too new; it’s not run down enough to be the UK. Did we just travel halfway around the world to visit a place just like home?
Only when we took the elevator up to the top of the Sky Tower did I begin to get an inkling of the ways in which this upside-down land is not like home. From the 60th floor of the tower, one gets a panoramic view of the city, the port, and the surrounding islands. What is most immediately noticeable are the funny cone-shaped hills of green that pop up here and there.
These hills are in fact extinct volcanos. Geologically, this area is known as the “Auckland Volcano Field,” a region of intense volcanic activity in ages past, some 50 cones in all. From the Auckland Museum, I learned that much of New Zealand is in fact new-from-the-sea land. 23 million years ago this land mass was mostly (perhaps entirely) underwater. Tectonic plates colliding in the Tasman Sea pushed mountains upward on the South Isles and rent the Earth’s mantle further north, so that great gobs of subterranean magma spit through to the surface, creating volcanos. The most recent eruption near Auckland happened a scant 600 years ago, forming the new island of Rangitoto, just off the coast of the city. It rises just beyond Auckland harbor, grey and sullen, like a mini-Mordor, a reminder of this land’s unsettled recent past. The Māori name, Rangitoto, means “Red Sky.”
New Zealand’s recent birth from the sea, isolated from other lands, put it on a unique evolutionary track. Plant seeds arrived only by sea or by air to settle the newly emerged land. And, while insects and birds could migrate here by air, there were no mammals — not even from Australia. No kangaroos, no koalas, nor dingos. Kiwis and other flightless New Zealand birds evolved in a land free from predators. That is, until humans arrived and brought their companion animals with them— both domesticated and pests — such as dogs, cats and rats. These have ravaged native bird life.
New Zealand is also relatively new to people. In fact, it was the last significant land mass on the planet to be populated by humans (not counting Antarctica). The ancestors of the Māori arrived by sea canoe from East Polynesia scarcely 800 years ago. Their relative isolation in this faraway land let to rapid evolution of distinctive Māori cultures.
The Auckland Museum features exquisite examples of Māori art and craftsmanship — longboats, weapons, communal halls. These are carved mostly of wood and whalebone. The Māori had no metallurgy: no bronze age, no iron, no steel. Not until the arrival of the British, who sold them muskets for inter-tribal warfare.
This brings me to one other way I discovered New Zealand is not like other places. Today, the Māori make up 17% of New Zealand’s population, well above the indigenous populations of the US (2%), Canada (5%) and Australia (3%). Unlike these other Anglo-dominant nations, in New Zealand, there’s a vision here of a land shared by two peoples.
This is more than simple reparations for past injusticies and theft of land (although that is a big part of it). The Auckland Museum tells the story of The signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 between Māori chiefs and the British Crown. This document serves as the legal foundation for this shared nation. The museum also grimly describes the many violations of the treaty committed by British New Zealanders — including full-scale wars — and the long journey towards justice begun in the past fifty years.
Yes, there’s a long way to go. In 1860, the Māori owned 80% of the land; today they hold 6%. But, there’s a principle at work that is truly profound: where the treaty has been violated, there’s a legal and moral obligation for the dominant culture to address it. At first brush, this seems fundamentally different from what I know of other colonizer-nations, like my own (Canada, and my adopted country, the USA). More to come on that when we visit Waitangi, where the treaty was signed.
Next week we set out to explore the entire country, from top to bottom for a total of 90 days (the maximum tourist visa allowed). We have rented a Polestar 2 Electric Vehicle for the trip, so we can travel with a reduced carbon footprint. Readers who have been reading Mature Flâneur since last summer will remember we traveled up and down Norway in a Polestar 2, and loved it (despite grappling with a whole new technology)! As we head towards the South Pole, under southern stars, the Polestar 2 seemed a fitting choice.
So, please join us on this new adventure down under, as we flâneur through New Zealand from the subtropical tip of the North Island to the chilly bottom of the South Island. Our only plan is to see as much of the country as we can, just following our noses and taking our time. (Next up: Climbing Rangitoto Volcano).
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My new book, Mature Flâneur, is now available for preorder in print or ebook format! Enjoy!
