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Driving through Patea on the twelfth day of Christmas.  The children are still in school—it is calf day at Waverley—but you know it’s Christmas because of the decorations. See, look at that guy: buzzing back from the dairy on his mobility scooter: huge New Zealand flag behind him, full mast and flying. You know it’s Patea because just there are the Patea Maori Club rooms. Over there is the concrete waka where Joe Moana breakdanced in the Poi E video. You may hardly ever pass this way, but you know it well. Directly ahead, down the main street, you can see Mt Taranaki, sporting a quiff of cloud for which Cory Jane could have modeled. Or one of the other Santas. Strictly speaking, the decorations should come down on the twelfth day of Christmas, but no one seems ready for that.  Every second car still has a Silver Fern streaming in its slipstream, hanging on for the ride. A little frayed at the edges by all the drama, perhaps, but aren’t we all. Wherever you look—on farms and wharenui, fences and factories—someone’s hung an All Black flag. Dalvanius Prime said he wrote Poi E to connect people with their culture, [...] Read More »

  At Te Papa there is a multi media exhibit about New Zealand in the 1980s. Beginning with Muldoon’s announcement of a wage and price freeze, it telescopes a  period of massive political and economic change—a transition from the past to the present—into just three minutes: Labour winning the 1984 election and floating the currency, Rogernomics, state asset sales, Bastion Point, the sharemarket crash. “Excuse me. We’re conducting a survey about the exhibits here at Te Papa. Would you mind answering a few questions?”  Question Two.  ”How does this exhibit make you feel?”   Well now, there’s a question. When Vincent Van Gogh was in the south of France—the period at the end of his life when he painted his best known works—he wrote in a letter to his brother that he wasn’t trying to paint what sunflowers look like, but rather how sunflowers made him feel.  ”Expressionists,” explains Simon Schama, ’sought to express emotional experience rather than physical reality.” Physical reality comes easily enough to most of us. Approached by a museum researcher we could talk at great length on our memories of the 1980s or how successfully we think Te Papa has captured that era in its exhibit.  But what if they don’t ask those questions? What if they ask how we feel? Ask what is our emotional experience of a sunflower? Of something in their museum? [...] Read More »