Te Kereme:Southern stories find a voice at heritage village
Out of a wasteland site in Ferrymead, a remarkable transformation has taken place - the construction of a tourist attraction that is unlike anything else in the world. Four-and-a-half years “in the talking”, construction at the Tamaki Heritage Village has been under way since December last year, with shows running since May.
Awatea Edwin, artists and cultural director at the village, says bringing more people and more overnight stays for the city is one of the main goals of the Tamaki village, and that the attraction is unique. “It’s different from anywhere in the world at the moment. I don’t know if people actually realise what they’ve got.”
Bringing business to the city is also an important motivator. “If we get (the tourists) overnight it’s another bed night for a hotel… 148,000 people a year we bring in up north, if we can even approximate that down here it’d be a huge win for Christchurch,” he says. “Honestly in a year or so’s time when we’re bedded in as a destination I think we can out-do that number.”
We started our tour of the site just before a bridge. It’s a visitor experience that blends modern technology and heritage to involve the audience like never before. It is a striking construction, which Awatea says was the subject of much discussion and visioning, and working closely with builders to turn empty wasteland into world-class tourist attraction. “A lot of the builders we used were guys that had small companies doing labouring, a lot of those guys were completely perplexed at the start, completely in awe of it.”
“They’ve become so in love with the place that they quite often come down here just to sit and see what it is they’ve created.”
We look across a lagoon to an island with a number of small constructions on it.
“This is the uru-pa, the burial ground. We try to keep everything really authentic.
“The bridge itself the carvings all talk to you as you go past - they chant. You come through the bush, through the Pathway of Prophets, and this is the Pathway of the Ancestors, into the House of Raroheka, which is the underworld, where the spirits go to drop all their human baggage. We go through there, through the spirit world, to 1818, when we arrive in Matuku Moana, the village.”
The project was “four-and-a-half, five years in the talking” and building has been ongoing since December. “We spent most of the second half of last year (2006) revamping the old cooperage buildings and making the restaurants at Ferrymead (Heritage Park).”
Inside the village
Standing in the village, surrounded by a manuka fence, visitors see storehouses and whare that house carvers, weavers, fishers and tohunga.
“Each of these houses represents a different aspect of our culture.
“We tried to get as complete a picture of the culture as we could without having to build 700 houses.”
“We picked the ones that really stood out and that we could really become interactive with. We do the weaving - we actually have real weavers working during the shows, and they are able to talk about the whole art, but they’re in character, they’re not just on show like in a museum. They’re living in 1818. You ask them a question they’ll answer it from an 1818 stand point.”
“We have a fisherman’s hut, so he’s building all sorts of wares. Eventually we’ll have mokihi boats here as well for going on the lagoon in the summer months.
“Over here we have the whare kauta, which is the house where food is prepared - there’s all the different types of foods and implements they would use to tend to the garden.”
The garden in the village is a tohuka mara, or an experimental garden, where new crops would be tested. Various platforms are used for storage, whata (flat, raised platforms), pataka (raised house-style constructions to protect supplies from rats and climbing creatures) and rua - ground storage for potatoes - which were kept close to the earth so they would remain fresh.
The carver’s house wouldn’t normally be in the village but was necessary to capture the importance of carving the traditional Māori society. A huge sequoia log has been stood in the ground of the village ready for carving.
“It’s a project we want to spread out over 18 months. Maybe two years so it becomes an ongoing part of the show.”
The healing house, which has all the plant medicines, touch therapies as well as energy healing, is twinned with the warrior house.
“It’s important that audiences realise that the warrior and the healing houses go together”, Awatea says.”
“People think about a warrior culture and they think all we’re about is war. They forget that there are seven trails of a warrior, and the first two principal trails are healing and fighting. They’re twins, they’re back to back; the shadow of the light if you like.”
“You think about that further and it’s the ability provide - food gathering is a trail of its own, and there are various other trails, like the artistic trail of oratory. The greatest gift of all is the gift to be able to communicate. Then there’s the carving arts, and weaving arts and other artistic or esoteric pursuits. We talk about these two (the warrior house and the healing house) and they lead us further into the idea that a warrior culture is a lot more than just scrapping and fighting.”
Finding a southern voice for Māori
We discuss Matariki, and Awatea, originally from Temuka, mentions that there was discussion about hosting Matariki events at the village - but he stresses that it is more of a North Island celebration.
“I’m a southerner myself. It’s interesting that we actually celebrate New Year, which belongs to the northern hemisphere, here, and now we’re celebrating Matariki in the South Island, which belongs to the North Island - it’s not our new year at all.”
“The whole Pleiades thing is a northern thing. The southernmost area where it’s really significant is up north. Down here you get a glimpse of Pleiades, but what we follow is Rigel, which we call Puaka, and I think this year Puaka stands at it’s highest about the 29th.”
So next year we’ll follow that up properly and we’ll develop a show that will run over that period of Puaka instead of worrying about Matariki. We’ll create a new paradigm shift again. We’re not into chasing everyone else’s rainbows, we’ll create the rainbow.”
“We’re fighting the idea of re-colonising over what’s been colonised, which is what’s happening with things like Matariki and North Island language and culture and traditions being layered on top of what we do here.”
Telling South Island stories is an inherent part of the project.
“That’s the major reason Mike’s (Tamaki) brought me on board - to try to find authentic southern expressions of culture and put them in here.” Awatea puts hand on heart to show the passion he says is being put into the project to incorporate the southern Māori experience.
“There’s myself and a few others, kaumatua like Riki Pitama who are trying really hard to bring back some of the stuff that’s been submerged under the layers of the homogenised Māori world view, and bring about this true southern Māori world view”.
The southern voice has been a long time coming, Awatea says.
“As we say in the story, we’ve been waiting more than 150 years to tell our story. We don’t just mean that as Māori, but we mean that really specifically as people in the south. To tell our story of the things we went through … we were not only submerged in the European cultures that came over the top of us, but then when it became trendy to be Māori again, it was the northern culture that came over.”
“Schools teach this homogenised version of our culture and not traditional stuff. We’re quite keen to celebrate the fact that Māori are out there and doing that, but in that landscape I guess it’s time to bring something more - more depth and a bit more reality and closeness to the true ways of what happened.”
“Now that we have a platform of basic understanding of what being Māori’s about again in New Zealand to the way we’re thinking it’s time to nurture that growth now and understand that each flower grows differently. What’s the old Zen saying? Some grow long, some grow short, but all the flowers of spring exemplify the beauty of the garden. That’s what we’re trying to say.”
“We’ll tell stories that will echo this environment, but will resonate throughout the whole country because they are not different around the country in terms of the basic story, but the nuances and the particulars make them unique to the place you’re in.”
Delving into history, and onto the pa
Anyone discovering the stories of early New Zealand and Ngai Tahu would experience the onion effect, Awatea says. “Most of the stories that you see in literature are Ngai Tahu versions, which is great - but peel that over and you’ve got the Mamoe; peel that again and you’ve got Waitaha; peel again you’ve got Rapuai and Hawea. And then you peel it again and we’ve got these stories and we’re not too sure exactly who they belong to, but they were very ancient. We talk about what we now refer to as the mythical peoples of Kahui-tipua and Maeroero and all those sorts of things.”
We’re up at the pa site, the fall back position when the main village was threatened or no longer safe. “The village is the kaik, where you lived in day to day life, but when you’re invaded, or when times got threatening you’d evacuate there. It had slightly smaller houses and things but it was a place that was more able to be defended. This landscape presented us with a hill it was a good place. You can have a tower to look out from, you can have smaller houses and the double palisade to protect you. Ideally we’d like to have had ramparts built as well, and trenches, but there are restrictions on what we could do.”
The site is built on an old dump, so major earthworks were out of the question.
Outside the pa is a shantytown, complete with authentic European washing on the line.
“We try to get down into detail on some things. We’re six weeks in the running at this stage, so as we develop and we spend more time in the business here, everything will become more and more detailed.”
Involving the visitor in the performance
It’s a different kind of visitor experience - not a museum, but one where the audience are part of the performance.
“We make (the audience) part of the show. When they come through the bush they are slowly inducted into the feel of it. We try to touch them on three basic levels - we tell them that we are going to take you in to see what we’ve seen, to hear what we’ve heard, but more importantly to feel what we’ve felt.
“If we can get them to that level it takes them into being where we’ve been - tasting the sense of reality that we tasted and experiencing the journey that our people took. By the time they come into the village they should feel that they are coming into their village. We spend just enough time for them become part of that village before it gets invaded.”
The audience meet a dictator character who confronts them with his invading warriors. Actors rise out of the audience to meet the challenge.
“When it gets invaded our actors are dotted around amongst them, not in front of them, not behind them. So they haka from within the audience, against the invaders who are doing their haka in front of them, and they feel very connected (to the action).”
The villagers then watch as their own people are massacred and their chief is killed.
Later in the show the dictator character returns, as an older man, who with the wisdom of time and loss, recants. “He realises that he was contributing to the decline of his own ways, his own world. He’s dying of the diseases that have come in, and they (the audience) become empathetic towards him.”
“It takes them through a range of emotions and they can’t understand why they are now in touch with this guy and it’s a fantastic experience. Instead of just sitting back and having a visual experience and going ‘ooh, this is great fun’, with a song and dance, we’re actually touching them on (different) levels.”
Reminders of New Zealand history
“We talk about the New Zealand Wars, and we’re really keen to remind people that they were New Zealand’s civil wars. That we actually had 30 years of full on civil war in this country. As James Belich rightly said, the New Zealand Wars didn’t end here until 1916, there were still little bits and pieces going on while New Zealand was over in Europe supporting the Allies in World War 1.”
“What we do is we take you back to 1818, when the technology of the gun and the cannon and first came amongst us and what happens to a people when certain members of that people become empowered with a new warring technology and no-one else has it.”
It’s that period of time where our people learned the arts of fighting, they changed their old warrior knowledge to adapt to the musket. They invented saps and trenches which even the Europeans weren’t using - they stood in front of each other and shot each other.”
“We dug holes in the ground and sapped towards their enemies. Kaiapoi was a classic example where they sapped towards their enemies and built up a brush base and set fire to it…”
“That knowledge was transplanted to the north, into the wars in Taranaki and the Waikato and around the North Island. I don’t think we would have been nearly as successful (in the New Zealand Wars) as an indigenous people against those British troops had we not had the musket wars beforehand.”
“The paradox of that is that in the musket wars we annihilated so many of our own people that when the New Zealand Wars began, a chunk of those people became allied to the Europeans because that was how they could get their revenge on those that had inflicted violence on them two decades before.”
People from surrounding suburbs who have seen the show are enthusiastic about it, Awatea says, and the company have worked hard to involve their neighbours, Ferrymead Heritage Park.
“We’ve contracted in the tram people, and we rent the main street of Ferrymead in the evenings. The trams are our time machine - we stop and look at the shanties, and people come out and get on the trams with us and then we go into the town and we look at the latter part of the post Treaty times, religion coming in, the Land Court stuff, so the story spans the early to late mid 1800s.”
“Then we leapfrog into the 21st century and take them to dinner in our dining hall over there for a hangi meal. We simply spend time with them and answer a lot of the questions. Most tourist products you come away and you have no questions, you just have a sense of ‘oh that was cool’. What we want to do is leave them asking questions. We can give them some sense of direction on an answer.”
“Aside from all of the theatre and all of the atmospheric stuff, we actually want to make sure that we pour onto them our culture and the way that we do things. For us it’s really important in our culture that when they come for dinner they don’t just come for a plate of food and a quick dessert. It’s a buffet - so they can eat as much as they like - and we provide more food than they need, but we also provide them with the food of … what we say in our language is ‘Ko te kai o te rakatira - he korero’ - the food of the chief is words.”
“The whole show is about giving people the chance to be part of us - and it’s so important - even most New Zealanders have not experienced a lot of intimate time with Māori in our own comfort zone and environment. It’s a really big part of who we are and what we are doing.”
The Tamaki Heritage Village can be found online.
