Kiwiland Far Away

AUCKLAND. This city of 800,000 (a third of the country's population, the total of which I keep reminding myself is less than Philly's metro area) is an astonishing joy. There's water everywhere: 60,000 locals are "yachties"--pinched as it is between the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

I'll start with the zoo, which I stumbled upon going to the Sculpture Symposium at an open-air sculpture park in Western Springs, a half hour bus ride from downtown Auck. A flotilla of black swans (with sexy red beaks) terminally distracted me from the symposium, a lark in which two dozen local chippies were given a chunk of hinuero stone each (which formed a million years ago from lava flows--it's creamy to orange and a lovely building material.)

The zoo at a price $7 is worth every penny of it: Red--or lesser--pandas, Asian otters playing Kiwi grab ass to the hysterical delight of moppets, and cats like you've never seen in your house--the African serval leaps three meters into the air to nail its prey. A baby serval mesmerized cat lovers of all ages. And wombats, kangaroos of every ilk, and kiwis, the flightless birds with the long beaks (to extract grubs with).

The first day, I fell by Chin Chin's, a neo deco bar, to taste my first green-lipped mussels, humongous beasts that make ours look like rejects. The next week, the refurbed 1910 Ferry Building will informally open its boutiques, with Kiwi Republic an especially interesting spinoff on our own Banana Republic.

Auckland's Harbor Board Building won the NZ architects' top prize last year. No wonder. It's the nerve center and control tower for the computer-run port servicing all of NZ's North Island. I haven't been so moved by a building since Corbu's Ronchamp. I was kindly allowed to crawl all through the security-conscious building (one wharf over from where the despicable French sunk the Rainbow Warrior).

The glitter canopy is open to the wind to help cool the service core stashed on top. Inside, it's a chrestomathy of Kiwi art--stained glass, sand-blasted glass, wool hangings, exquisite Douglas fir-laminated beams.

I teased my guide, Theresa, about the Latin motto of the city, "terra marique floremus," but the joke was on me--she had taken five years of Latin and read it right off--"On land and sea we flourish." I believe it.

The Auckland City Art Gallery is revving up for a major Edvard Munch retro (which I caught in Dunedin in the South Island, along with half of Peter Watkins' contentious film bio of the troubled Norsker--172 somewhat repetitive minutes!). I opted for two galleries of local art. Oh what lovely locals, like Rita Angus, a Charles Sheeler of the Wellington area. Or make that a Hopper. Or a Burchfield. Oh, hell, she's Angus, an original of great power.

The Listener (NZ Broadcasting weekly mag, a tasty melange of original poetry, short fiction, political commentary, as well as radio and TV listings) raised a stink over an exhibit when a free-lance critic alleged that the regnant critic's wife managed seven of the 11 in the gallery. The old man punched the young man in the noggin last week in a night club. Honor, man!

The Kiwis are a remarkably open bunch, easy to talk to on the street, where the longest traffic lights in the world encourage casual conversations--at least in me. I started chatting up a Hamburg woman sitting on the wharf who turned out to be the agent for Champion Jack Dupre, a 79-year-old barrel-house piano player who has been an ex-pat from New Orleans since 1950.

He's a gas, half Cherokee and half Belgian. He never saw his parents, who were incinerated by the KKK. He fought light-heavy for ten years in his 20s. He eschews gin and whiskey, drinks only cognac and beer, and is as quirky an original as I've interviewed in ten years.

His entourage swept me up to a tea-dance where the band was the Sydney club band, Mr. Crow, on their way to the Victoria Jazz Festival and other North American venues. I pressed the 39-year-old mother of the college student working the lighting to trip the light fantastic. I hadn't forgotten, kicking her shins only once or twice.

There are three dailies: the New Zealand Herald, (the country's New York Times), The Sun (a color-filled tab), and its parent, the Evening Star. Two channels of TV are international re-runs, except for news, which is damn good. Public radio is superb. An A-plus.

Not the least of Auckland's assets is that I found someone to put the "n" back on my Olympia typewriter five minutes after arriving here. Can-do Kiwis!

Rotorua is a smallish village four bus hours southeast of Auckland. But it is the heart of Maori culture, with a splendid Maori Institute of Art and Culture on the outskirts of town. It's the least Disney-like theme park I've ever been in. The Maoris must have gone ga-ga over the thermal springs and geysers that dominate the region, animists that they were. It's spooky.

In 1886, the still active volcano really blew its led, killing 138 people and rearranging the contours of the locality. There's a splendid display documenting this key event in the Rotorua Art Gallery and Museum, as savory a bit of Tudor fake half-timbering as ever I've seen.

Gingerbread colonial is all over NZ, a tasty garnish to the surprisingly tropical flora. I stayed at the youth hostel in Rotorua for $12 instead of at the Hyatt Kingsgate for $200 (gulp!) a night. There was the usual mix of UN students hosteling their way across the world, including a "very left wing" (his characterization) Israeli demobbed soldier who engaged me in hot debate for an hour, before I withdrew, exhausted, to my cheap flop.

(The next day in Auckland at the Globe Trotter hostel a right-wing Israeli--just short of Rabbi Kahane, he positioned himself--ran me backward through the same gamut of arguments I had just heard from the opposite end of the political spectrum.)

I lucked out on the bus back to Auckland, sitting down next to a 50ish Maori nurse (with her nose deep in a textbook of Maori lineage). There is disconcerting heat lightning here over black power. Good Friday, a gang of six toughs, threatened to trash the Cook Strait ferry if they didn't open the buffet. Astonishingly, they did open it.

Simultaneously, the Wellington police seemed to me to overreact to a loud party in a "black" neighborhood (they're not black, but they pick up the rhetoric from U.S. blacks), triggering a burned-out police van and a spatter of Molotov cocktails. I quizzed a Wharf Police-constable about this seeming inconsistency, and he granted they weren't sure yet how to react, black militancy being only five to ten years old.

My nurse is full of contempt for these layabouts. She got herself a professional credential the old fashioned way--by working hard--and scorns the whiners who don't try but flaunt the "pure" Maori blood.

She contends there isn't any such, so friendly have the sexual relations been in the century and a half that Europeans have been here. In fact, if you have 1/64th Maori blood you're entitled to indigenous perks, an anomaly that causes many to complain that non-Maoris are taking these perks even though their blood is all European.

100,000 (mainly Maori) youth are chasing 18,000 jobs at the moment--or not chasing them, and the employment minister's plan to cut youth off the dole has caused a big flap in the local papers. Maori culture is great, but you can't buy groceries with it. Pakehas (white faces) are generally respectful of Maori art but not of black-power antics. The political sky won't clear soon here either.

Off to New Caledonia this evening to see why those natives are restless!

(Editor's Note: The above was sent to us inscribed helically on a pair of kiwi eggs, and it is quite possible that we have crossed spirals in a few places. The following paragraph was excised as being meaningless within context--possibly ill-hatched--but worth including on its own as a remarkable example of a Hazard to the written language.)

Across the Edenic looking bowling greens in the new District Council HQ, a splendid building by the Christ Church architect Miles Mahoney. (He did the NZ embassy in D.C.). It pays respect to Colonial gingerbread, the Prince's Gate Hotel, so called because the future Edward VII popped in there in 1880 to take the thermal baths; but the hotel itself didn't appear until 1886 where it was carted lock, stock and delectable High Vic stained glass from an abandoned gold mining town of Wahia, 100 kilometers to the north, where a dearth of the shiny stuff and a blue law forbidding drinking killed the hotel business.

From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, May 4, 1988