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Thom Conroy

• Publisher: Massey University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780994140753
• eBook ISBN: 9780994140760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie

A compendium of non-fiction pieces held together by the theme of 'home' and commissioned from twenty-two of New Zealand's best writers. Strong, relevant, topical and pertinent, these essays are also compelling, provocative and affecting.

What is home when it's a doorway on a city street because you are homeless? What is home for urban Maori returning to their tribal lands? How do refugees make new homes while coping with the fact that their old homes are in ruins? 

In this marvellous collection, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Laurence Fearnley, Elizabeth Knox, Ian Wedde, Tina Makereti, Sarah Jane Barnett, Sue Wootton, Ingrid Horrocks, Brian Turner, Helen Lehndorf, Paula Morris, Anna Gailani, Nick Allen, Diane Comer, Gina Cole, Ashleigh Young, Lloyd Jones, Thom Conroy, Jillian Sullivan, Bonnie Etherington, James George and Martin Edmond show that the art of the essay is far from dead.

sue wootton

homing

Home is an internal rhyme,
syllable of instinct, known call—faint bell
of faith that beats within a roaming apse of bone.

— Sue Wootton, ‘Albatross Bells’

It was spring in the south of the south. All morning, downpours rattled the plastic corrugated roof of the crib in which we were staying. After each flurry the rain passed over and out to sea, leaving the wind to harry the house. A new set of rain clouds would detach from the wall of ink in the west and chug towards Riverton, becoming fatter and blacker as they approached, bearing down and taking aim. Between squalls, the sun shone. It was pleasant under the plastic roof. We worked in silence, side by side, aware of but uninvolved in the storm.

About two, in the midst of a particularly fierce downpour, we stood and stretched. Rain hammered the roof and sluiced past the windows. We drove, windscreen wipers on high, to the main street for a late lunch: Caesar salad and seafood chowder. A young German woman bearing a cycle helmet came drenched out of the storm. ‘Kitchen’s shut!’ yelled the cafe owner in her strong Southland accent. The German girl fended this and various other shouted comments bravely, but looked so forlorn at the counter that I regretted having eaten all my chowder. I would gladly have shared it. I remembered cycling Ireland’s Ring of Kerry: an overnight storm at Dingle, a tent that leaked and a sloping field to pitch it on. How chilled I was, how unhappy. I’d been a similar age to this girl, who surely was no older than my own daughter. I felt the oddness of time, and of my tiny place in it and on the globe.

My parents arrived in New Zealand by ship in 1961, steaming into Auckland harbour and transferring to the overnight train to Wellington. My mother, pregnant with me, remembers the train coming to a halt after hours of travelling. She raised the window blind, and then wondered if she had raised it at all. The pane was lashed with rain, but beyond it there seemed only a wall. Peering through the gloom, she saw that the wall was a steep cliff, to which a few stunted trees were attached, their roots half exposed, their brutalised branches whipped by a ferocious wind.

Later she would learn the name for this place: Paekākāriki, ‘perch of the green parrot’. She wouldn’t have believed it that day. Nothing could perch in those conditions. But she didn’t know Paekākāriki then, not the way she would come to know it. There would come a time when she would hear people say Pie Cock, and know exactly the place. There would come a time when the sight of this very same cliff would signal she was almost home.

How does that happen, the making of a home, the feeling of ‘at home’? At what point does the migrant stop perching and begin to identify as one who belongs in this place? As a child, I did not feel completely at home in the country of my birth. I didn’t always ‘get’ what my classmates were saying, despite the fact we were all speaking English. I felt as if my small family had been beamed down on the wrong planet by accident. Though which planet had we come from? Planet Africa, and before that Planet Yorkshire. Both were grey-lit, old-fashioned worlds, at least according to the family photo album. I leafed through it and stared at unfamiliar faces. It was a mystery all right. ‘Related’: right there one of the words I couldn’t really see. For my classmates, by contrast, it conjured cousins, aunties, uncles and grandparents. Ah, but I did have a grandmother. She was dark blue left-leaning handwriting on a flimsy pale-blue aerogramme. In my memory she is closely associated with the milk crate that it was my job to put out at the gate, next to the letterbox.

The cafe owner continued to shout at the German girl, and it was possible now to discern under her powerful accent a genuine kindness of tone. The girl sensed it too, and pointed at the muffins. She was served coffee. ‘It’s great coffee!’ shouted the cafe owner, but once again in the local accent which I was sure was hitting the German girl’s ears as an unknown dialect.

There was a day I stood in a crowded bread store in Munich and finally made it to the front of the queue, pointing at the loaf of my choice. The shopkeeper was a woman shaped like a block in an apron. She glared at me. ‘Mitnoosin!’ she shouted. I stared back, bewildered. ‘Mitnoosin odour nickmitnoosin!’ she yelled, and kept on yelling. I felt the crowd of Germans behind me jostling and pressing. Finally I said, ‘Mitnoosin,’ and the room breathed out; the shopkeeper smiled roundly and packed my loaf into brown paper. I bore it outside like a bomb, and inspected it without at first touching it. ‘Nuts!’ I said. And happily, because I would have chosen the bread with nuts if I had had the choice.

I watched the German cyclist wrap her hands around her coffee cup. I thought of Pie Cock. I remembered that in my childhood school playground Kiwi kids wore singlets but aliens wore vests. I recalled working as a physiotherapist in London and telling the consultant that our patient was better; his expression of intense concern — ‘But why is she bitter?’

Home: it’s where you lay your head. It’s the first and final poem, and every poem between, stitched together with a mum home seam. It’s the hunter, home from the hill, and the sailor home from the sea. It’s the bird on the wing flying free, hearing the song of home endlessly. It’s where the red morocco shoes lost their way in the larkspurs’ dazzle of blues.

Then again, it’s what may yet be seen in Johnsonville and Geraldine, behind the door we walk through to hang up our clothes and surnames, without thought.

But how?

When I did my OE, I hauled my backpack through several continents and laid my head on uncountable pillows, all the while carrying two passports in the money belt I seldom removed. My New Zealand passport had rounded corners and a soft-shell cover. I hardly knew I was wearing it. My British passport was a rigid rectangle. Its edges dug into the skin of my belly and up under my ribs. Its outline was hard to camouflage, blatantly mocking the rationale for wearing a hidden money belt.

Some of us have to travel a long distance before we realise we’re lugging unnecessary burdens.

The Riverton rain, which throughout our lunch had been driving along the street horizontally, like silvery vehicles racing through town from end to end, now ceased. We left the cafe. The sky was a bruise in the west, but over the town itself high white clouds were scudding. Everything was being pushed out to sea: the clouds, the rain, the Jacobs River estuary emptying its swollen self through the bridge-spanned gullet. Out in the bay, the sea was attempting to regroup in an orderly fashion as rows of waves, but these the wind kept sweeping back, ripping spray from their tops in plumes. The waves collapsed, defeated. I saw no birds. It was as if they dared not fly on such a wind.

We drove on, across the cattle stop and into the reserve at the far end of the bay. Heavily pregnant sheep stood firm on the grass, pictures of woolly fortitude. Bob Dylan sang ‘Beyond the Horizon’, but the horizon was very close, though completely curtain-clad, and there was no way of telling what was beyond. The sea boiled over, chaotic, its tides and currents wrecked, everything roiling. A carpet of kelp held pliant to the pitching surface. We pulled over at the end of the road and got out, heaving the doors open against an almost solid resisting force. We could hear the pebbles clattering as the beach churned. We followed the track to the saddle on the ridge between bays. The hillside flax was flattened. The sole cabbage tree was threshing in its hobbles. At the saddle itself my lungs felt suctioned. The wind snatched my words as they reached my mouth, and hurled them out to sea.

The first time I said ‘Grandma’ aloud, and meant it, the word was as difficult in my mouth as if I were trying to speak Russian. I had to repeat it three times, and each time it sounded worse, a wrong note, a bad translation. My accent, fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• preface: the art of the essay
• introduction: opening doors with our feet
• to tatau or not to tatau? that is the ‘afakasi diasporic question: selina tusitala marsh
• sniffing out the neighbourhood: a scent map of home: laurence fearnley
• home without now and then: elizabeth knox
• how not to be at home: ian wedde
• on all our different islands: tina makereti
• suffering is optional: sarah jane barnett
• homing: sue wootton
• oscillations: ingrid horrocks
• southwards to the always talking sea: brian turner
• the sensory seeker: helen lehndorf
• greys avenue: paula morris
• a token of patience: anna gailani
• home in alien spaces: nick allen
• under clearer, brighter stars: diane comer
• na noqu bubu: gina cole
• matrices: ashleigh young
• proximity: lloyd jones
• m a-2: thom conroy
• a roof over our heads: jillian sullivan
• never coming home: bonnie etherington
• returning places: james george
• the red in my mind: martin edmond
• about the contributors
• acknowledgements
• Copyright