A trip to Marumaru South, aka Baring Head

I can see Baring Head from my deck (I could see it from my desk right now if another house didn't intercede) but the view is particularly good when I'm walking home from the bus stop on a summer evening. Over the course of several such evenings two years ago I decided my fictional town of Marumaru South, located somewhere between Timaru and Oamaru, would actually look a lot like Baring Head, but with houses and streets.

Despite it seeming so close from the top of Mt Albert, Baring Head is actually an hour's drive from my house, followed by an hour's walk to reach the lighthouse and the views back across the harbour. And despite working on a novel set in Marumaru South for the last year, I had never actually been to Baring Head until today.

Before starting the walk to the lighthouse, M. and I drove to the coast, near the mouth of the Wainuiomata River. From the beach you can actually see the lighthouse and the hills you have to climb over to look back at Wellington.

After traipsing through sheep paddocks following the occasional orange triangle that marked the path, we made it up the hill and I was able to take the reverse of the photo above:

Baring Head is the windiest place in New Zealand, and it didn't disappoint today. Luckily the sun was out so it wasn't too cold. The sun, the wind, the pulsing grass in seed, the rocks and white-capped sea - it was all quite dramatic. Oh, and the sheep!

I'm not into lighthouses like some people (*cough* Marcus Lush *cough*), but there's a lighthouse in my fictional town and I was interested to see what Baring Head's lighthouse looked like up close.

Aside: I know I risk sounding a lot like the novelist in this article from the Onion:

According to Milligan, he spent seven months conducting in-depth historical research in order to conjure, as if out of thin air, the fictional and entirely bullshit universe of Connor's Cove, Massachusetts, including its utterly uninspired lighthouse...

I guess this is as close to operating on a knife-edge as we historical novelists get, eh?

Anyway, the Baring Head lighthouse (built 1935, so too recent to be much use to me) is a concrete design similar to the one at Cape Reinga, which I saw last month in almost zero visibility; you couldn't see the sea at all). Sadly there's a few temporary NIWA buildings behind the Baring Head lighthouse which ruin any lighthouse + sea photos.

Baring Head lightouse + sky - sea - NIWA weather station

Back from the lighthouse there are three boarded up cottages and another few small sheds/outhouses. The lawns had all been freshly mown giving the place a recent viral epidemic vibe.

Continuing on the loop walk yielded some great views of Wellington Harbour. Thanks to my zoom lens and some more digital zooming at home I've been able to identify my flat in some photos, but you'll just have to trust me.

Looking toward Wellington from Baring Head

So, how did my trip to Baring Head affect my thinking about Marumaru South? Well, I think there'll be more wind when I go through and do the second draft.

I'm holding off on any other changes as I'm going down to South Canterbury and North Otago in a fortnight for a four day research trip. It'll inform both my Marumaru scenes and the later 'flight to the hills'.

But for now, my trip to the real Marumaru has given my motivation to work on THE NOVEL a nice fillip. And who knows, maybe the exercise and new environment stimulated a bit of neurogenesis...

Away From The Desk (and I feel fine)

Soundtrack: Springtime in Vienna Wellington

I'm struggling with THE NOVEL at the moment. More to the point, I'm struggling with my attention span. To counter this I've been trying to get out of the house more so it doesn't feel like I'm permanently in front of a screen (over winter, I pretty much was).

Last Friday I went with my brother to the Karori Sanctuary to bush walk and take photos of birds.

Photographic Evidence:

Kaka eating some kind of nut

Hihi (stitchbird) - male

Korimako (bellbird)

Last weekend M. and I went for a walk with friends from the Brooklyn Windmill to Red Rocks. It took four and half hours or so and was pretty awesome.

The South Coast from the Radome Track

Makara Wind Farm, Cook Strait and the South Island

Our lunch spot

View of the South Coast from above Red Rocks

In terms of wildlife, we saw goats, seals and ostrich (though these weren't exactly wild...

Ostrich doing the Boredom Dance

Last night my mum was down from Palmy so we went out for dinner and checked out the RWC2011 Fan Zone on the waterfront (Aussie was playing USA in the Caketin at the time). It was also the first night, I think, of the festival of lights. Different designs were projected on buildings like the boat shed, St Johns and the Stock Exchange Building.

Jazzy St Johns

Burlesque Stock Exchange

Stained Glass Stock Exchange

Ivy League Stock Exchange

I've also been to the Otari-Wilton's Bush twice in two weeks. The first time was an unplanned stop and I didn't have my camera, so of course I saw two karearea (NZ falcon) which I've yet to photograph, and a keruru (I didn't spot any of them in the Karori sanctuary on my recent visit, though I've seen plenty before).

Today I had my camera, so of course all I saw were tui and grey warblers (too quick to photograph) and robins (too dark to photograph). Thems the breaks.

Tui at Otari-Wilton's Bush

See You Zeg / Covers Playlist / Koru Milo / NZ Post Book Awards

Georgia on my mind

The other day I received an email from a friend currently teaching English in Georgia (the country in Eurasia rather than the US State) trying to introduce a Georgian word into English usage, at least amongst his circle of friends back here.

• zeg = (n) day after tomorrow, in two days time.

Its brevity appeals. I also rather like the sound of it. ‘See you zeg.’ Sounds kinda hepcat, kinda Brave New World.

In my brave new world of working Monday-Tuesday and writing full-time Wednesday-Sunday, I’m often losing track of which day of the week it is. So promising to check the oil and water zeg means I can gloss over the fact I can’t remember if it’s Thursday or Friday.


Bi-fold playlist for a week in which you doubt your own originality


Side A: Originals Whose Fame Has Been Surpassed By Covers
Torn – Ednaswap
Nothing Compares 2 U – The Family
Tainted Love – Gloria Jones
Mad World – Tears for Fears

Side B: Covers That Make Being Not Entirely Original Seem Cool
You’ll Never Walk Alone – Gerry And The Pacemakers 
It Ain’t Me Babe - Jan and Dean 
Throw Your Arms Around Me – Neil Finn 
The Letter – Joe Cocker

Side C: Spotlight on Manfred Mann (& Manfred Mann’s Earth Band)
Do Wah Diddy 
Quinn The Eskimo 
Blinded By The Light
For You

Side D: Hey Joe. Hey Joe? Hey Joe! Hey, Joe? Hey! Joe!
Hey Joe - The Byrds 
Hey Joe - Patty Smith
Hey Joe - Brant Bjork
Hey Joe - Tim O’Brien


Kiwi As

What's more New Zealand than a koru pattern in a mug of Milo?
(And yes, my desk is normally this messy)

2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards

Tonight the winners of the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Awards were announced. Thanks to the live tweeter from the NZ Book Council (@nzbookcouncil) I can tell you that winners in the four categories were:

*  General non-fiction: Chris Bourke - Blue Smoke: The Lost Dawn of NZ Popular Music 1918-1964

*  Illustrated non-fiction: Damian Skinner - The Passing World: The Passage of Life: John Hovell and the Art of Kowhaiwhai (also winner of most coloned title)

*  Poetry: Kate Camp - The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls

*  Fiction: Laurence Fearnley - The Hut Builder

Chris Bourke's Blue Smoke also won the people's choice award... and the Book of the Year (so he cleaned up, basically). Congrats to Chris!

The short-lists for each category can be found here.

As I post this, there haven't been any press releases on the winners (embargoed until 10pm I think), so I'm like, totally breaking news here for you non-Twitters.  (The first book award winners were announced ages ago; press release here).

And now for the comment portion of this mini-post: Meh. It's late, I'm going to bed (before I say anything that I might regret; if not tomorrow, maybe zeg, or the day after zeg).

On leaky buildings

On Friday the newspapers were reporting the estimated $150 billion repair bill for leaky school buildings (see here and here). I am an employee of the Ministry of Education, but only tangentially involved with any of the leaky building stuff, and don’t want to talk about schools specifically. What surprises me is how accepting everyone is about the whole situation. Perhaps ‘resigned’ is a better word for it.

First it was leaky homes, then leaky apartments, and now everything in New Zealand constructed between 1994 and 2004 is high risk for ‘weather-tightness defects’. In hindsight it’s easy to say the deregulation of the building industry was a boo-boo (“look at Canada!” etc), that of course if you permit the use of untanalised timber you’re gonna encounter problems — but what about the human factor? For every leaky building, state- or privately-funded, someone had design it, someone had to sign-off on the designs and materials used and someone had to build it. The design flaws such as roofs with stuff-all gradient, parapets to trap the water in, and insufficient flashing are both the fault of designers and their clients who let themselves be duped by the fashions of the day (it is quite easy to recognise a leaky building by sight: like this one) and who were happy to pay bottom dollar. But I struggle to understand how the builders could have done such a bad job for such a long time. Even today, with Building Act changes and leaky home tribunals, I get the sense the building profession is a long way from being a ‘profession’. Where’s the duty of care, the pride in one’s work, the common sense?

When our landlords recently paid for double glazing to be installed in our flat (they plan to move here in a year or two when they retire, so it was not a selfless act), the workmen had to cut a larger hole in the bathroom to fit the new window. This meant our toilet roll holder had to be removed from the wall and repositioned once the new frame was in place. The problem was that it was screwed into the wall at least an arm’s length from the toilet. It seems like the sort of prank they’d play on candid camera, or something a handyman neighbour would do when a feud escalates to humorous home invasion territory. But seriously, what were they thinking? I suspect they were not thinking at all. Same as when they took gouges out of the walls in two bedrooms and the living room. I’m not so fussed about the walls (it ain’t my place after all), and these window men may not work on new builds, but it does seem symptomatic of the industry they are very much a part of.

I suspect part of it stretches way back before the changes to the Building Act in the 1990s. Anyone who has hosted exchange students or visitors from overseas will have heard how cold and draughty our homes are. It seems our climate is just mild enough not to warrant central heating (and until recently: decent insulation). But foreign visitors also remark on New Zealanders’ (and Australians’, to be fair) relationship with their homes. Whereas in most places in Europe, houses or even apartments, are thought of as multi-generational investments, here in New Zealand it is not uncommon for us to buy and sell a new house every decade, many times opting to build new only to need something bigger, smaller, grander or lower maintenance in a few years. In contrast, when we visited M’s family in Italy, the house was four hundred years old and inhabited by a mother, father and two children, a grandfather and his sister. It was still thought of as the grandfather’s house, though it was slowly becoming more and more the daughter’s. As the needs of the occupants changed, the internal layout of the house had changed, and will continue to change, but its firm foundation and cool-in-summer, warm-in-winter make-up will endure.

New Zealand is very much the land of disposable buildings. In accounting terms we talk of building lives in the range of forty years, rather than four hundred. We are a nation of property investors: our go-to move is to buy an old house on a large section, knock it down and subdivide. What do we build on these picnic-blanket sized sections? Townhouses. How much do we spend on them? As little as possible in order to sell them and make our return as large and a fast as possible. Why do we buy these shoddy townhouses with no section? Because there’s a decent rental market for something with fresh paint and no lawns. Why do we live in such cynical, soul-destroying abodes? Because it’s only for a year or two, until or needs change.

This is all to say that we asked for leaky buildings and we got them, and we will continue to get them (in different forms: subsiding buildings, toxic paint buildings, sticky door-jamb buildings) until we stop viewing property as a disposable commodity and think about it in multi-generational terms from the moment the designer puts mouse-point to CAD plan.

It makes sense to think about how much a building will cost to maintain over its life (be that 40 years or 400), rather than just the up-front costs of construction. Buyers of property should these days be waking up to the costliness of poor design and materials and factor this into their offering price. Something solid and well constructed with a nice sloping roof of whatever material experts agree will last for donkeys years should fetch you a premium on the resale market. But then, why would you ever want to sell your warm, dry home with enough space and a flexible layout to cater for the changing needs of your family? Oh, you’ve been transferred to Auckland. Fine.

And one wrinkle on a personal level: how’s a mid-level public servant supposed to afford a mortgage for a sustainable, multi-generational home? With M and my salaries combined, we’re mired in the market for a crappy three bedroom house that needs: a new kitchen, new bathroom, new hot water cylinder, insulation, window frames replaced and some bushwhacking to get any semblance of a garden. And if I were to revert to writing full time? It’s difficult to see us ever getting a foot on the property ladder.

So for now it seems I’ll write my grumpy, finger-pointing blog posts from the comfort of my double-glazed rental accommodations with great views and a well appointed, modern kitchen.

Road Trip: Cape Palliser

On Saturday, M. and I crossed the Rimutakas and headed south... as far south as you can go in the North Island in fact.  Twas a great day.  Here's some pics:

Palliser Bay and the Orongorongos

Putangirua Pinnacles

Boats and dozers at Ngawi

Fur seals (kekeno) at the North Island's largest seal colony

A bird (grey warbler? a stray brown creeper? the suspense is killing me) at the North Island's largest seal colony

The lighthouse at Cape Palliser

Sunrise this morning (to show the other side of the Orongorongos...)

Seeing the sights... anew

It’s no secret I’m on a mission to learn more about this fair country, the one I chose to return to. In January I documented my first forays into a deeper knowledge of New Zealand’s native flora and fauna. But I’m also interested in the history of this place.

The two are interlinked.

After I ventured into the bush on Tinakori Hill in search of pohutukawa and rata, I also looked up the history of the hill.

When walking around Island Bay, I noticed the spelling of Houghton Bay (“Haughton Bay”) on the band rotunda and did some digging to find out if this was a typo or the spelling has changed over time (this).

But some weeks I can walk around blissfully unaware of the questions I should be asking about this place I’m in.

I’ve discovered a tonic for such complacency: spending time at the Mt Victoria lookout.

On Saturday M. and I walked from Mt Albert (as in Queen Victoria’s hubby) along the Southern Walkway to Mt Vic (and back – oh yeah!). There was a lot of interesting stuff along the way like the back of the zoo ( we saw baboon, African hunting dogs and giraffe), Truby King Park (an interesting history in itself), and the mountain biking nationals on the slopes of Mt Vic. But in 10 minutes at the summit, I compiled a list of things I needed to learn more about, all by eavesdropping on other people’s conversations.

Some were clearly locals (or British subjects who now call Wellington home) who were showing visitors to our fair city the sights. They’d point to the Basin and say, ‘That’s where they play test cricket,’ then go into a long story about how the founding fathers (his term) of the city planned to carve a canal from the waterfront to the Basin (an actual sinkhole back in the day) along where Kent and Cambridge Terraces are now. I remember reading this somewhere, but seeing it from Mt Vic made it sink in for good.

There was also a real kiwi bloke who was, I suspect, running a mini-van tour. I listened to him explain how Miramar was an island, and up until 1855, it was only a sandbar that ran from it to the mainland. That what is now Kilbirnie, Rongotai, Evans and Lyall Bays has all been reclaimed in the last 150 years. I’m quoting this guide now, and haven’t looked into how correct his dates are. That’s on my to do list.

Aside: The other day I was listening to the radio on the way on from work and the two DJs had the most inane conversation about what the Japanese word Tsunami translates to in English, and whether there was a difference between a tsunami and a tidal wave. It would only have taken them 10 seconds to find on the internet, but they managed to generate a couple of minutes of “content” from their ignorance before I changed the station in frustration. I know that I risk doing the very thing that turned me off by talking about my own ignorance, but let me plead my case. The purpose of this blog post is not to generate content with the least amount of effort (a la the ignorant DJs) but to A) alert readers to ways in which they might awaken, reawaken, or heighten their interest in their own surroundings and B) track my own response to being back in New Zealand after five years (of and on) away.

Ahem.

There were also clusters of tourists without local friends or tour guides up the top of Mt Vic, and their conversations were often as compelling. They’d point at buildings or streets or islands in the harbour and lunge for a name, perhaps in the hope of triangulating their position. Most of the time I knew the names of the landmarks they discussed, but not always. What’s the name of that observatory up passed Brooklyn? Is it an observatory or a spybase? Wait, don’t tell me, I’d like to find out myself…

Ah, I mean the radar transmission station on Hawkin’s Hill. Sounds like I’ve got my weekend walk sorted.

Do we read enough Kiwi-made?

The Sunday Star Times recently did a piece for NZ Book Month called Why Don't We Read Kiwi-Made?  

The piece begins by saying "...only 5% of the fiction we choose to buy is published in New Zealand," which seems to contradict the assertion we don't read Kiwi-made.

5% isn't nothing.  It could be a lot more.  But then the percentage of NZ books borrowed from libraries could be higher.  Maybe that's why Brian Edwards was so pissed off a few weeks ago.

[Aside: Took me a while to find the link to Brian's brain explosion as he later removed all traces of it from his website (and conspiracy theories abound about the affair's disappearance from wikipedia).  More info on the saga here.  Got to love a) Google's caching abilities and b) a classic case of blogger's remorse].

Who cares about the percentage, anyway.  The real question we should be asking, once we've decided what a Kiwi-made book is (NZ author? published in NZ? printed in NZ? about NZ? some combination of these?), is: What do NZ books do that books from elsewhere don't?

There's that whole 'Telling Our Story' boilerplate which underpins so much of our arts funding, but I think there's something less tangible that comes with reading work by local writers.

After graduating from university with (amongst other things) a BA in English Lit, I could still probably count on my fingers the books I had read by New Zealand authors.  I purposely avoided the NZ lit paper without ever thinking through my prejudice.  Shame on me.  As a late-teens, early-twenties male I felt NZ literature was staid and unexciting.  I know now I hadn't read widely enough.


Then I moved to Australia and I could walk around as if NZ books didn't exist.  My time in Australia was punctuated by a nine month stint back in Wellington where I got a taste of the local writing scene and discovered a few more local writers, but the desire to read NZ authors only really struck me while living in the UK. Blogging about writing and books and reading other NZ lit-bloggers had something to do with it. Getting published in NZ literary journals and websites had something to do with it. The Scottish Poetry Library's great collection of NZ poetry had something to do with it.

These all seem like entirely personal reasons, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

All I can say is: why not make 5% of your books this year Kiwi-made, and if you like it, go from there. I'm ready and willing with some recommendations.