To the Moon, In Seven Easy Steps by Scott Hamilton

Author:Scott Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, New Zealand
Publisher: Titus Books
Published: 2020-06-15T02:08:17+00:00

My Experiences in the Maori Wars

Homage to the Head of Captain Thomas Lloyd

Like most boys of my generation, I was an ardent militarist. A steady diet of Battle Picture Weekly comics and Saturday afternoon repeats of World War Two black and whites fed my obsession, and birthdays brought new additions to my arsenal of plastic rifles, bows and arrows, boomerangs, and jungle knives. It’s no surprise, then, that on visits to the Auckland Museum I gravitated towards the third floor, where the World Wars were commemorated in a series of huge rooms full of sacred objects: dented German helmets, rusty rifles, a jerry-built wireless with a wax operator, and a spitfire kept like a caged bird behind steel railings. The rooms were connected by a Hall of Remembrance, where flags of long-extinct nations hung listlessly from marble walls covered in the names of dead soldiers. At the end of the hall, in what might have been a converted storeroom, a number of less sacred relics – a weatherbeaten chest, a musket with a strange bird carved on its shoulder, a Maori Bible– sat in glass cabinets too big for them. The room was lit as dimly as a cave, so that I had to squint to read the captions under the artifacts, the maps and pictures on the wall, and even the sign beside the door that said NEW ZEALAND WARS.

The wars commemorated by this room made no sense to me: here the Maori soldiers who had turned up occasionally in Battle Picture Weekly, doing war dances in the desert beside the wreckage of Rommel’s tanks, were fighting against the side carrying the Union Jack. Worse, the twosides were fighting in ridiculous places, places like Rangiriri, the gas-station on highway one where we’d stop for pies on the way to Rotorua, and Russell, a beach where I’d gone snorkeling while my brother lay in a nearby motel with mumps. There were no smoking Panzers or shell holes in Rangiriri or Russell.

There was one exhibit in the converted storeroom that did interest me. Placed between Te Kooti’s chest and somebody else’s Bible, it was a black and white drawing no larger than a postcard. A black pillar adorned with an upturned crescent moon and two pyramids rose out of a river; beside them, a large round sun had sprouted a human hand. The hand was waving – to say hello, or to warn the viewer away? Another hand could be seen below the sun, part of a forest of images that the drawing’s small size made difficult to see in the dim light (looking at the drawing now, in clear light and with a head full of interpretative frameworks, I don’t see the same images). I kneeled and squinted and read the caption at the bottom of the glass cabinet:

Reproduction of a drawing by Aporo, a Hauhau mystic, showing fantastic machinery and supernatural beings. As time went on Maori looked to supernatural forces to deliver them from the nightmare that the wars had created.

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