Some time ago I found an old wiro notebook in a drawer. A scruffy wiro bound notebook with a photo of 2 men in a kayak with a bear on the front cover. In that notebook I found terrible sketches drawn in pencil made while travelling in 1991. One sketch leapt out at me. It was a rough pencil sketch of Mt Ararat from a backpacking trip to eastern Turkey. The sketch really surprised me – it was a very basic pencil sketch, drawn using a .5mm technical pencil on a cheap notepad. The sketch is just black and white… To my surprise the sounds and smells of the day came flooding back. Meeting some Kurdish goat herders and their flock near the base of Mt Ararat, about 10km from the Iranian border on a bright sunny but cool, alpine day. Along with memories of driving across the mountain steppe in an old Renault 19 and the smells of chai and coffee in a Doğubayazıt pasta solunu. It all came back come flooding back! Why did it evoke such vivid memories? I’m not really sure to be honest. Maybe t...
I’ve lived in this city a while and I thought I knew everything about the Auckland Domain; the museum, the Wintergarden, the annual ANZAC Day commemorations, the duck ponds and cricket matches. Then occasionally you scratch the surface a bit deeper.
Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, the first Māori king, lived in a cottage on a hill in the Domain. I was a bit skeptical because Pōtatau was a Tainui (Waikato) leader. We’re talking mid 1840’s before he was coronated and things had ‘gone south’ quite literally with the Crown heading south to claim as much Tainui land as they could.
There are no signs of the cottage today but if it were still there it would have a clear view of the museum, the hospital and the Sky Tower.
In it’s place grows this tōtara tree planted by his great granddaughter Princess Te Puea Herangi in 1940 on the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
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