North & South May 2022

Kia ora koutou, The feature stories we offer this month may strike you as a little divergent from your usual edition of North & South, as we have two first-person narratives. But I hope you agree that these are both compelling reads, as is Tobias Buck’s excellent reporting (which begins on page 36) into what exactly a Wellbeing Budget is and how ours stacks up against similar iterations around the world. Our first-person essays could not be more different. In ‘The Forever Files’ (page 26), Nicola Saker writes of what she discovered when she requested her late father’s security files. It turned out that Wellington GP Dorian Saker had been spied on much of his adult life, as had his close circle of friends. Nicola told me she was variously amused, astonished…

Reflection on the Protests As the police were finally breaking up the 23-day ‘occupation’ in the grounds of Parliament and surrounding areas on 3 March, a TV1 news clip showed one of the protestors complaining that, in the course of the eviction, “war crimes” had been committed against them. Coincidentally, the other main news story of that evening also featured war crimes, a term that covers genocide, torture, hostage-taking and the extensive destruction of property. This second item, though, referred to the crimes committed by Russian armed forces against Ukrainian civilians, crimes which are continuing and include bombing a nuclear power plant, kindergartens and schools, robbery and the deaths of children. The International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague is investigating these war crimes. The protestor’s complaint was just another example of the…

Lizzie Marvelly In late January, writer-singer-activist Lizzie Marvelly (Ngāti Whakaue) gave birth to her first child, daughter Ellis Atiraira, at Rotorua Hospital. Recounting the traumatic experience which culminated in an emergency c-section, she says, was both “harrowing and healing to write”. Marvelly’s social media posts about Ellis’s birth saw many other women share stories in response. Some of these have been included in her piece. “It’s been an honour to hold the stories of these other women in my hands,” she says. “I cried when I read each of their tales.” Nicola Saker Nicola Saker is a Wellington writer and journalist with a particular interest in food, food history and Katherine Mansfield — her books include The Katherine Mansfield Cookbook and Woman in Love: Katherine Mansfield’s Love Letters. But it was her interest…

In Four Corners this month we alight on a piece of the Pink and White Terraces, consider the start of our realpolitik relationship with China (page 20); and discuss the brandishing of the deeply symbolic Te Kara o Te Whakaminenga and tino rangatiratanga flags in the chaos of the anti-mandate protests at parliament (page 17). Thames School of Mines and Mineralogical Museum Just two blocks from Thames’ Queen Street stands a trim building of butter-yellow weatherboards and plum corrugated iron. Built in 1886, it housed a mining school. Here, classrooms, laboratories, furnaces and a smelting house are almost exactly as they were more than 100 years ago. In one classroom, wooden pews behind slanted desks face a blackboard to the left, while on the right, a wooden laboratory bench holds iron tripod…

When black smoke rose from Parliament lawns on 2 March, two flags usually reserved for Māori sovereignty movements flew from tall white poles. On the ground, police had donned riot gear, protestors threw bricks, and the area was strewn with remnants of three weeks of occupation — some of which was now ablaze. Wellington’s wind lifted Te Kara o te Whakaminenga o Ngā Hapū o Nu Tireni — the flag of the United Tribes — and the tino rangatiratanga flag in scenes of chaos broadcast here and across the globe. Both flags are powerful symbols defined by historic circumstances — which in this context seemed completely absent. In fact, flag historian Dr Malcolm Mulholland (Ngāti Kahungunu) believes their use showed an historic amnesia: “To align that protest with the struggles of…

Few news events warrant being turned into an opera. The epoch-making trip to what we then called Peking by US President Richard Nixon 50 years ago became an opera, an artistic signal of how important it was and how it shaped our world — including New Zealand. Nixon in China, by John Adams, premiered in 1987, 15 years after Nixon took arguably the greatest risk of any president since George Washington, flying to China to meet Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. It opened diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. That led to the creation of the superpower that we know, fear, and rely upon today. “News has a kind of mystery,” the Nixon character sings in the opera. “When I shook hands with Zhou Enlai on this bare field…