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—for Tez— IN THE BEGINNING, there was Te Kore, the Nothing. From Te Kore came Great Woman the Night. The fantails laughed, the Great Woman awoke and death came into the world. The last habitable corner of that world to be settled by humans was the land of the long white cloud. But even before there was language to name things there was Aotearoa. Out of the void comes a young Maori male dressed in black jeans and a purple tie-dyed T-shirt. He is sloping along the road next to the golf course — Racecourse Road, incongruously enough — past vivid, roller-manicured lawns; like carpets laid out in the sunshine. “White men’s lawns, eh. Cut grass is life an fuckin death to the Pakeha.” Smoke billows from the Glenbrook steel mill to form a long white cloud across the sky’s Cinemascope screen before him. Who is this misfit? What aspect of him lingers with me? I first felt his presence. Later came his voice: a phantom looming from that same darkness. He took on a life of his own, this wanderer: Te Kaihau, the loafer. His radio-Walkman is tuned to bfm. “Louder Than A Bomb” goes their slogan and they play the Mutton Birds and Supergroove and The Headless Chickens. His people have been here for a long time. They came in canoes; with their own music and a dream quite different from their destiny. He remembers Pukekohe, the town in which he had been born — ‘Pookie’ for short — as one might remember the pattern of the wallpaper in a childhood bedroom. A town with all the charm of a small Midwestern trading-post; a brightly-coloured blot on a landscape characterised by utility vehicles, verandas, primeval bird calls, alien grasshoppers, cold beer, positive thinking, foreign thieves and staunch cannibals. With a language of its own: utes, decks, tui, weta, Stein Lager, not a problem, Pakeha and Maori. In my Inside-Head, I practise saying the misfit’s name; try pronouncing it the way he would: Tah´neh. His name is Tane because — although in quite different circumstances — like the son of Rangi, the Sky Father, he created the world in which he lives by pushing apart his parents. Tah´neh. The reedy timbre of his voice is like music to me. *
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