So, we’ve just started to host on airbnb, it’s a lovely little place we began to build in 2019. It’s 28squares with a loft bed chamber, a skylight (currently awaiting new flashings because the lovely dudes who built our home didn’t quite get it right) - it’s ok guys, I’m not looking to blame but it would be lovely if you’d just say, ‘yeah, we’re sorry, we totally fucked it.’ ‘You did’, I would say, ‘let’s hug it out’ and I’d make you a cuppa coffee (Flat white, tiny bit a’sugar) and together we’d fix it.
Anyway, it’s a pretty cool spot we’ve got here and we were just saying that I can see lots of other lovely places in and around my hood when I look for people doing what we’re doing and how I’d like to connect. I believe we could bond together and tracter-beam people here with our love. Love for this beautiful place we live that isn’t at war. Love for the abundant nature surrounding us. Love for the history of this place.
History, for a nation born from colonialism (are there any that aren’t?), but within the last just-a-bit-less than 200 years, for a nation such as ours, it is difficult to talk about our history. It is one where white people from the northern hemisphere came and took the land and the assets, the culture and the belief systems that were the way of being in this world of the brown and black people in the south (oh, and the north too, hemispheres are just about the only things white people don’t discriminate against). We took them. I am guilty. Forgive me. I evolve. That’s all I have and it may never be enough.
Anyway, so we were talking about the history of this amazing place and it’s fucking awesome! Out in our sparsely populated area, not far from the centre of New Zealand’s biggest city, we sit at the gateway to the Waitakere Ranges. We are atop volcanic rock formed 12-15 million years ago. Cool, eh. (Or 22-15 mill, it’s too many and I can’t understand that amount of time anyway. Just like I can’t understand millions of dollars, let alone billions.) It’s covered in a rain forest. There’s really awesome birds, harbour beaches and Tasman Sea beaches that are to die for. Quite literally sometimes, the sea is treacherously exciting on the west coast. There’s heaps of tracks in the bush, up streams, down waterfalls and all and one is named after one of our ‘most famous sons’, (though the Empire claimed his victory over ‘the bastard’ Mt Everest for itself) Sir Edmund Hilary. Cool eh! Amazing feat but somehow sadly displaying our unhealthy relationship with nature, with which it seems we have waged a forever war, knocking bastards off an’ all.
And then we laughed about how one of those harbour beaches about 5 mins away from us, was going to be the centre of Auckland and the Manukau harbour be our main trading route. This was before they noticed the Manukau bar, a notoriously dangerous area of shifting sands at the mouth of the harbour. The Manukau gap sits there like an oscillating vagina, endlessly timelessly reverently opening and closing, filling and emptying with the tides, frothing with both life and death. It is the scene of what is still our worst maritime disaster. In 1863 the HMS Orpheus went down into the sandbar, guided by an out of date map of the sands. I mean, they shifted, that was ALL they did, those grains of sand, so why bother capturing it in a moment of time?Nope, the only way to navigate those sands is to put them under constant surveillance. That’s ironic. 189 souls perished and it would have been many more had not the local Maōri people risked their lives to save some white men sent here to kill them. For the ship held a batallion of soldiers sent to quell the mighty Waikato Maōri iwi in the Waikato land wars and, well I KNOW I have read that somewhere but when I just tried to recap on the web of everything, I couldn’t find it anywhere. It was part of the terrible, shameful pandemic of taking by force the lands of indigenous people around the globe. It continues still.
Anyhoo, somehow this area became part of an easy scam. Land at the local beach known as Cornwallis was ‘sold’ to people in the UK, who then came over on record breakingly long sea passages expecting to see the town they were going to be founding members of. They arrived to find they had been lied to and sold a dream - for a hundred squid. Nothing had been done, the land was wildly impenetrable with steep canyons. The guy who sold it didn’t even own it, though he thought he did, he had been hoodwinked too. It would have been unbelievably challenging to arrive in those circumstances. We imagined it. For fuck’s sake, THAT was living your life. Imagine you dealing with that right now. Those people struggled to live and some didn’t make it for very long. Their graves as well as their efforts have long been reclaimed by the bush. Today, refugees - caused by land grabs masquerading as righteous wars - could perhaps relate to those settlers. Only difference is, no dignity, no adventure, no power. The rest of us would all perish upon stepping foot on the land, if we had made it through the sandbar.
And that is what we’re missing these days isn’t it? Good old-fashioned reality. We are now wrapped in lightyears of extraneous information, a kaleidoscope of thoughts lighting up our overloaded brains and completely and utterly useless at survival. I’m talking about The Mob who are disappearing into their devices, melting into flaccid uncoordinated bodies and allowing their brains to atrophy. The Mob that, as long as it is sucking down it’s coca cola and meaninglessness, is happy. Imagine arriving to that - and surviving. Water to drink? Go find it. Food to eat? You eat what you kill. Basic, eh?
My youngest (twins) turn 18 TODAY! My husband is taking them and their older brother for a cold plunge in one of our favourite waterholes. It’s Spring Equinox here and it’s been a WET, cold year. It’ll be bracing and wild (it’s stormy today) and abso-fucking-lutely fantastic for them all. Q is going to tell them that he wants them to bring their children into nature on their 18th birthdays and that’s how we can pass it on. Keep it real.
So come and visit: Hire our little pad, we’re on airbnb - ‘Rustic Cabin Getaway near Titirangi, Auckland.’ Nobody’s heard of Parau.
Chur x
https://airbnb.com/h/rusticcabingetawaywaitakererangesauckland
Where I live here in Westport, MA, the town is trying to outlaw Air B and B's. People come and cause a disturbance, a mess, then leave the neighborhood upset. Hopefully, your clients are caring, nice, considerate folks.