An outsider in New Zealand’s South Island

 

‘Listen, girl – listen. The stars are whispering.’

An old Māori kaumātua whispered that to me himself, both of us tiny and silent underneath the spinning iridescence of the southern sky. I was in a quiet corner of New Zealand’s South Island, far removed from the hectic confusion of central London, hypnotised by the soft wisdom of the kaumātua’s words as he spoke of the Māori people’s connection to the land, the sea, and the sky. ‘The stars are born in Aotearoa,’ he said, ‘they have witnessed everything.’

I considered this in the darkness. Frost was beginning to sting my exposed flesh. The songs of nocturnal birds were filling up the space between the matted earth and the starry dynamo above. I felt like an intruder. The central South Island has a humbling way of reminding you of the magnitude of the universe, and your utter insignificance in it. This is an elementary land, where immense beauty and breathtaking tragedy exist side by side. Life is in constant flux, an unpredictable danger embodied in an adolescent land still forming, unsure of what it will become. In New Zealand, nature still holds a greater power over life than what any human being could render.

Christchurch and the rugged peaks of the Canterbury Plains is the site of more than eleven thousand earthquakes since 2010. Deep, telling scars run through the fertile earth, the flesh of the land ripped open by tectonic force and the rumbling of nature. Mounds of soil are arbitrarily jolted upwards and deposited, almost comically, on plots that have escaped the fury of shifting plates underneath the country. The Southern Alps, towering over the Plains in dramatic and snow-capped glory, are a grandiose example of hidden friction underneath the land. The first settlers of New Zealand struggled over these mountains from the West Coast when they arrived here in the early nineteenth century. I imagine the women, clad in pathetic Victorian sandals and layers of concrete undercarriage, struggling against the untamed thicket of wilderness. Through sheer determination, they made the grueling hike from coast to coast, and settled in Christchurch. Their suffering is endearing; pain is a secret letter that seems to underscore history, soldering together the bonds of life.

Today, Christchurch is an awkward splattering of half-up, half-down buildings. Relics of Victorian architecture moulder starkly beside postmodern design; a hubris of artistic pride competing for naming rights over the new city. Regardless of age, the lives of all buildings are marked in some way by the earthquakes. There is great controversy over how much history the city should retain; the cathedral, once a celebrated landmark, sits as a sad abandoned shell behind reels of red tape. Christchurch is a city full of promise and ambition; while there are no skyscrapers, grotesque steel machines reach up into the sky, crafting the commerce of tomorrow. The streets teem with engineers, tradesmen, and labourers. There is a constant hum of sophisticated machinery. Everything rattles and the ground shakes.

If you sit, very quietly and very still, underneath the southern stars at night you can hear the pages of history turning over in the cosmos. It is the sound of humility, solitude, and infinite wisdom. The stars sit over the land as it morphs and changes shape, just like the face of a clock watching its hands, time observing time. And there you are, an outsider, caught somewhere in between.

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