Allan Ramsay looks back on his 31 years away from Aotearoa, finally finding it was the sounds, flowing koru and aroha of te ao Māori that called the loudest across the hemispheres to bring him home
Thirty-one years and two days. All of them, both the years and days, away from home. It sounds a long, long time. It is a long, long time.
And what really gives the measure of time such length and impact is adding the words to the numbers – away from home. That’s what we’re really interested in.
Home. Such a deceptively small and simple four-letter word but so heavy with centuries, millennia even, of love and yearning and pain and just sheer need. Wars have been fought over it. Actually, wars are almost always fought over it, so effective is the call to “defend the homeland” against any sort of threat, real or imagined.
I left home, Aotearoa New Zealand, on Waitangi Day 1989. I was away for those 31 years and two days and I don’t even have the excuse of a war to explain it. I was away from home because I wanted to be closer to it.
I wanted to stand somewhere else far away and look back at home. I wanted to hold it up and peer under it, behind it and see it as a whole, separate thing. I wanted to make sense of it and I couldn’t do that while living in the middle of it.
And standing far, far away, I sometimes felt like the Apollo 17 astronaut who, in 1972 took that famous photo of Earth floating like a blue marble in the blackness of space. From the other side of the planet and the teeming northern hemisphere, Aoteoaroa New Zealand, a precariously undernourished, underpopulated skitter of shaky brown dirt, green bush and white mountains floated all alone in the deep blue of the Pacific.
I wanted to understand that place. That’s the strange thing about home. It births you, holds you, grows you up, parents you, teaches you everything you know up until a particular point. Until, suddenly, it doesn’t do any of those things anymore. And what it has become to you is not enough. It’s time to leave home behind.
Real parents are parents forever but home, that other carer and shaper of us in all sorts of other different ways, suddenly stops teaching. And to understand her (surely, home has to be female), we need to go away, shed all her lessons... and then learn them all over again with new wisdom.
We’re born with this sequence in our DNA. I read somewhere that human babies are the only mammal young that keep trying to crawl away from their mothers, their food source and safety. As soon as they are able, they want to find out what’s in the next room, over the edge of the deck and out in the backyard. They want to go away. They want to be somewhere else.
This urge to move, to travel, to go elsewhere - just for a look, a recce, a once over to check it out – just because we can and so we can compare it to home seems particularly strong for island dwellers.
Living on this long, thin streak of soil marooned at the bottom of the planet, with the relentless bombardment of the long swells of the Pacific Ocean, the Southern Ocean and the Tasman Sea on our shores, there is no escape from the call of the horizon.
For some, caught in their particular time and particular place, home can be almost anything, anywhere. I was always amazed at the affection and loyalty people could fight about and hold for some of the most spectacularly dirty, overcrowded, decaying corners of London, the world city where I spent my years away.
Teenagers could and would stab other youths who had trespassed on to their “enz”, their postcode or their estate. It was their home, no matter how bad it looked to others. Their turangawaewae was, I guess, how they saw it.
The stabbing wasn’t really personal, it was making the point that this was not a place for just anyone to pass through. A casual beating and a knife in the buttocks installed respect for that notion of home in all those involved - those doing the wounding, the bleeding victim and anyone else who cared to know. The stabbing was a recognition tax.
London, that monstrous and shining, hustling city bursting with possibilities could and would eventually become some sort of home to me too. Much as I resisted it, I came, at times, to love it almost as much, but not quite, as my rose-tinted and golden memories of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Dawn on a Fiordland river can be heaven on earth but then again, watching the first streaks of sun light up the silent, stoic Thames while listening to one of earth’s major commercial engines start up another brutal, money-making day brings its own brand of awe too.
Somehow, the British have ensured that the atmosphere of a proper London boozer in the depths of winter can never be copied anywhere else in the world no matter how many times “ye” and “olde” are shoved into a name above a bar.
And the aggressive, rapid fire, poetic slang of Jamaican British patois rolling around the upper deck of a No 36 bus rocking through the streets of south London is a precious insight into the real 21st century Britain..
It’s a pre-internet social media that, in its wit, speed and frightening puncturing of pretension, will give you both great wisdoms and great stupidity simply unavailable anywhere else. And it’s a long, long way from the confected, nostalgia-drenched TV costume drama UK that much of Pākehā NZ is so in love with.
These are some of the things I miss. By the time I left those loud and crowded streets, those things made me feel all at home and not at all at home, both at the same time. But in the beginning, it was a torturous process to realise that the concept of one single home which I had clung to so desperately, was not set in stone. It could and in fact, needed to, change
British acquaintances were often incredulous that a Kiwi would choose to swap on a long-term basis, the apparently clean, green, wide open, virgin space of what they saw as a south Pacific paradise for the aggressive, dirty corners of their crowded London. The lie of the “100% pure NZ” tourism campaign continues to do its job well.
But don’t you miss it, they would often ask. Only every fucking day, I would always reply and that was absolutely true. Every day - for 31 years and two days - I could never forget where I came from. I always made time somewhere in the day to dig up a quick flash of memory of a mountain, a river, a patch of bush, a coastline, of somewhere, of anywhere in this stunningly beautiful land.
And my insistence on including profanity in my answer always surprised me a little. I realise now that I was angry. Ashamed to not be at “home” home i.e Aotearoa New Zealand and angry also that I was allowing London with all her insidious little ways, to ensnare me and make herself my home, too.
I resented that and I resented being forced to build a whole new place to try and recreate that same sense of belonging I’d always taken for granted. I also felt unfaithful to that thin, green skitter in the far away Pacific which until then I thought would always be my one and only.
I am a tail ender of the boomer generation. We grew up being taught quite clearly that it was Britain, the creator of the empire of which we were once a part, that was our true and proper home. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, that’s the term many Pākehā used when they travelled overseas and it was constantly reinforced in all sorts of subtle ways.
And, of course, not so subtle ways too. In my lifetime, Māori had been beaten for speaking their own language in their own land.
Outwardly we laughed at the notion of “Mother England” but I found it planted deeper in my subconscious than I thought. Growing up in Southland can do that to a mind. Full of false colonial nostalgia and surrounded by the glamorous icons of my ancestrall inheritance – Westminster’s Houses of Parliament, red double decker buses, black cabs and English humour, I imagined – in some vague way – I would easily be able to simply assume the mantle of my forebears.
Twenty thousand kilometres away from where I was born I would easily be able to feel at home. Yeah, right.
Bad mistake. I soon found I could never really be at home in England or Britain no matter how hard I tried. They just weren’t going to let me become one of them. Ever. Why is a whole other story but with hindsight, I know my heart was never really in the contest. But still, it was a lesson and it was confronting.
If I couldn’t feel truly home in my Pākehā origins like I been told I would, then where could I feel it?
I compromised and decided, in a city of immigrants, to dump my over-inflated sense of colonial self-importance and become like so many of those around me. Home would be Aoteoaroa New Zealand but while I was living in a city which harvests identities and changes them forever, I could also belong. I would be one more immigrant Londoner.
It brought a huge sense of liberation but in all this searching and floundering around, looking for who I was, what I was and where I really came from, a strange thing happened. It was things Māori that most seemed to be able to give my new immigrant identity the solidity and depth I craved.
It was the sounds, flowing koru and aroha of te ao Māori that called the loudest across the hemispheres and maintained the strongest link to Aotearoa New Zealand. And it went way, way beyond the All Black haka.
I don’t know why. For a Pākehā without any previous links to and only a fleeting, shallow knowledge of te ao Māori, the slow acknowledgement of this call was both unexpected and undeserved. But, nevertheless, I couldn’t deny that it was loud and clear and it appeared to be what made my birth home, real.
It gave Aoteoaroa New Zealand a proper identity among all those other immigrant cultures, creeds, skin colours, sounds and smells ricocheting around me in the London streets. It meant my home was more than just a place where a few vagabond and chancer Europeans had washed up a couple of centuries earlier, finding themselves well and truly at the end of the road with nowhere else to go.
It was astonishing how Aotearoa New Zealand suddenly acquired a singular and much richer uniqueness than what I’d seen and believed in before. How this skitter of green stuck on the arse end of the world always wanting to be something bigger and better, always wanting to be something and somewhere else, actually had its own identity all along ....and that identity most definitely was not the one I had grown up with.
So, I’m home now. “Home” home, birth home. Proper home, as a Londoner might say. London, for all her sins, is still part of me. Although I have no intention of going back to see her ever again. I guess the best way to describe her now is like the memories of an old family crib or a bach sold to a ruthless, profit-hungry developer.
And home? What’s it like to be home and living in the day to day rather than the desperate imagination of it? Truth be told, I don’t know, and after two years here, it’s still a work in progress. My inner Kiwi which I clung to for three decades is proving to be a very elusive bird now that we’re both back in the homeland. But, with huge relief, I see te ao Māori proud and strong and everywhere, even in my old Boomer Pākehā everyday world and that is wonderful and grounding.
Sometimes, I wonder if I will ever be home again. Leaving and returning is almost always seen as a circle. The traveller leaves, learns, returns and lives happily ever after. But this is starting to feel like a complete fiction.
The only thing I can say with confidence is something of a cop out – and it is that in this land, everything has changed and nothing has changed. A bit like me. And with so many Kiwis returning to Aotearoa New Zealand in this 21st Century pandemic world, there will be a lot of us struggling to find out if we will ever really be home again.
The late sci-fi author, Ursula Le Guin, wrote eloquent stories about her characters leaving and returning only to pay the price of never truly belonging again. In her last interview in 2018, she put it like this:
“There’s this whole difference between the circle and the spiral. We say the Earth has a circular orbit around the sun, but of course it doesn’t. The sun moves too. You never come back to the same place, you just come back to the same point on the spiral.”
