Redefining ‘Bucket List’
One word that really annoys me is ‘bucket list’, as if the world is a commodity for our personal gratification, experiences we are entitled to before we die. It suggests we can travel the world contributing to pollution without contributing to better relationships and we can look at this place, Hauraki, as a pretty backdrop for our lives, without facing what is happening to its life.
A sense of place is vital to most human communities but in Aotearoa it has tricky connotations. Our colonial project has not only damaged the indigenous people but other indigenous life forms, and our economic systems grind on extracting from the earth. As Hauraki, the people, work to rebuild their home, the least the rest of us can do is recognise their effort and support regeneration.
We live in a remarkable place (as are all places) with a backbone of mountains and forest, cursed with an underground web of precious metals which belong in place, not in banks. We live on a sensitive, rugged surface surrounded by Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, that great ocean, and Tīkapa Moana, that inland sparkling sea. Beneath the sea surface, the pollution from pine forestry sediment and the remnants of old gold mining waste, as well as the run-off from a huge city and from intensive dairying, all settle into Tīkapa. And then there’s commercial fishing, its damage goes on and on.
Those of us who moved here in the 1970s later fell in love with the land, its particular form of wildness, despite the relentless subdivision of the coast. If we look deeper, we see inequality and the housing crisis in the empty mansions and middle class ‘baches’ waiting for a summer we expect to deliver. Meanwhile Te Whāriki o Manawāhine o Hauraki tell me women and children are stuck in the Refuge safe houses because there is literally no housing for them to move to. We see unique places struggle from the onslaught of climate chaos and we demand a quick fix so we can keep tourism afloat, but a sense of place is deeper than we know.
The kuaka (godwits) have a sense of place. For them, it’s an annual pilgrimage crossing the world to Alaska and returning to the sandy shallow waters at Pūkorokoro. The day after the election I sat there with Keith Woodley from the Bird Centre and we talked about the rewards of living in that place of wonder, including the light. The people, be they Ngāti Paoa, tangata whenua kaitiaki, or the Pākehā volunteers, work for tiny feathered creatures with an extraordinary seasonal sense of place. This is how it used to be for the people of the land, seasonal relationships with land and sea.
As well as the kuaka, I am inspired by the maunga; from Te Aroha to Te Moehau they frame our lives. Sometimes they hide under mist or peer through rain clouds, but always they stand to remind us that we are lucky to be within Hauraki waka and we can learn what that means by listening, to the mountains and to the first people of these lands.
Wainuiototo, blessed and cursed for being in The Lonely Planet top beach list, a place of silence and surf that touches us. People do not realise that the fight against the development of the land beside that shining coast continues. It must continue. Wharekirauponga, home of the ancient tiny taonga, a 200-million-year-old species the size of my fingernail. I may never walk on those paths in the high forest behind Whangamatā, but we will resist gold mining blasting beneath those tiny bodies who have no ears but feel through skin vibration. Their sense of home is within one or two metres.
That’s part of my list, my sense of place which is only some 50 years old. We all have our own senses fed by this place, but the question is how to live within it – not on top of it, without care?
We can follow Hauraki in the long-term regeneration, not to create a tourist museum, but to find a common sense together, to respect this place in all senses.
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