He Waiata Wai

"Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink"*

Depending on our state of health (and where we live), we're about 60 to 70 per cent water.

Dihydrogen monoxide enables us live – along with every other known lifeform on our planet.

Without water – even if it is steam or at boiling point – nothing will live here.

It is the essential matter.

Okay, so I love coffee and coffee is essential to me: best is mothermade and brought to me in bed (this doesn't happen every morning but is always an especial treat.) I drink two large mugfuls – and that's coffee, for the day. Unless I'm travelling, and then it can be a doubleshot espresso and a large flat white before my brain can engage again with the world.

And I love vegetable juices. And smoothies. Wine (especially the sauvs and pinots, blanc, cab and gris) – the bubblies! O yes! A warm evening and a cold Lindauer ... am I a chauvinist apropos my wines?

Yes, mainly.

And, uisquebeatha, another water-of-life?

O, sing to me, my single malts – Lagavulin, Laphroaig, and a hundred other blissful notes!

All these drink-joys are but scum and sundry flavinoids without the main constituent: te wai.

I live in a rain-rich, water-rich area of these islands: often, there is way too much aqua around for my life to be wholly comfortable.

Rain on the roof o rain on the roof / such a soothing sound and my soul is/waterproof –

You quickly get used to floods and downpours, the slips and the leaks and the washouts.

I was partly brought up (as in, this where I learned a lot including life – lessons during holidays, as well as grew up in the usual important ways) at Moeraki. Moeraki doesn't have a natural source of potable water: we were taught from infancy how to use fresh water abstemiously, to cherish it, never to waste it. There were only the tanks after all, and while Uncle Bill had ensured there were a few of them, we were not a small whānau ... to this day, I can't let tapwater run while I brush my teeth.

The sea – o the abundant life-enhancing wrathful and gentle and delightful and frightening and destructive everlasting sea! – was, and is, another matter altogether.

We are seaborn (land and species), and we were sea-bourne. We came to this wonderful archipelago using maps of memory, long garnered knowledge of sea and island life, enhanced by shell and coconutfibre instruments: we came to this wonderful archipelago using stories and maps of ink and instruments of brass and glass. We are seapeople.

In winter, my family – most of us I think – relish the winter veges: yams, kūmara, brussel sprouts; pumpkin, garlic, and harvested herbs (whether summer fennel seed or kareko or whatever you really like. I stock up on dried mushrooms myself.)

And there is winter blue cod, and oysters and ... tītī are missing this year.

A lot of chicks died in the burrows, and a lot of adults left early. Same thing happened in

Tasmania.

I asked my mate there, "So, what went wrong your side?"

"No small feed."

"Anchovies, silveries, sardines, that stuff?"

"Nah, worse I think. Plankton gone down."

You know the axiomatic "a cold shudder went down my spine"?

E hoa mā, a cold shudder went through my gut too.

Ever since I can remember, mutton birds are winter: the delicious smell, the life-enhancing fat, the meaty goodness of those birds! They were one of the things my granddad, Tame Rakakino Mira (Thomas G. R. Miller), truly savoured.

And the love of eating them has passed on to most of his descendants.

Because of the way things have worked out, historically, none of Tame's descendants (my mother Mary Miller's children, grandchildren, greatgrandchildren basically) have ever birded Kāi Mohu. I've flown over it; I've written about it – hey, I've written hymns to tītī! – but – we weren't brought up knowing how to bird, and nor was anyone else in the immediate family.

I know about ahi kā for this kind of thing BUT

There is a new generation of fit and savvy younger people growing up. They learn Māori: they are environmentally aware. They have access to the old ways and memories. But if the practical matters aren't passed on to them, in this fraught time, an ancient Kāi Tahu lifeway will eventually die.

You see, I think, the more people who know how to do things, the better?

And the more people who become aware that our waters – inland, underground, reserved (e.g. snow, ice) and sea- are under severe threat and duress, the better. The dire lack of tītī this year is not the only indicator.

How do I love water?

Let me count the ways: when our Kāi Tahu ancestors arrived here, they already had many classifications of water: water that was dead (or baneful); water that healed (physically or mentally or spiritually); water that had *memory* (it's one of the meanings of waitai); water that sanctified; water that cleansed, water that celebrated life, and water that sheltered the dead.

We learned the ways of a tumultuous western ocean here – west waves are different from eastern waves) and we learned that water could be cold beyond our belief.

We adjusted some of our beliefs. We gained new knowledge. We built new watercraft (there is good evidence that southerners made doublehulled craft with different sails). We kept our love of fishing, promulgating shellfish, and making seagardens: and of course- swimming (and surfing, and rafting!).

We're going to need all our ancestral skills, and every new one we can access.

Our waters are in trouble, and we are up to our necks –

*The Rhyme Of The Ancient Mariner,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He Kōrerorero
nā Keri Hulme

He Waiata Wai
Waihau.
Waimate.
Waiora.
Waitapu.
Waitai.

Writer Keri Hulme is southern Kāi Tahu but lives in "Big O" — Okarito. Among her passions are whitebait and family history. In 1985 Keri's novel The Bone People won the Booker Prize.

Inside Issue 43

Wind of your Homeland

Cyber Connections

Reo Revolution

Keeping Watch Over Mātaitai

Bi-Lingual Tamariki

Chopper Ready

Appetite for Living

Organic Gardening

 

Issue #43 Published July 2009
© Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu