the Blenheim hotel before the crush prevents his departure and asks him to keep an eye out for Kellie along the way. ‘You were good, Aldous, absolutely,’ says Miles with his half-smile. ‘You could sell anything with sincerity like that. No wonder Marianne Dunne is writing a paper for the medical journals on your case.’ Yet of all the day he’s seen he remembers best the arrival when they had the place to themselves and the intimate stories of Paul Hurinui of Ngati Toa.
Thackeray Thomas addresses the people, then Eula Fitzsimmons at last and all the time the crowd burgeons and with its growth comes a heightening of atmosphere, a strange, tacit awareness that something of significance is happening here. Some of the original supporters depart, but not many and only then if they can extricate their cars from the press and the chaos. A television crew arrives in the late afternoon when already the shadows of winter evening are moving out from the clouded slopes. The children have barely the light to gather the gumnuts which lie like the bowls of pipes around the memorial and on its cracked concrete surface. The mist presses lower and the cars turning off to Tuamarina begin to use their lights. The television crew takes footage of the people pressing steadily and insistently towards the meeting place on the hill where the Rev Thomas, Paul Hurinui, Eula Fitzsimmons and an informal Maori concert party all have their turn. Fires are started for light and warmth. The red flames leap and the sparks glitter in the darkening sky when new branches are thrown on. The fires are the particular focal point for younger people who arrive in greater numbers. They sing the old protest songs like We Will Overcome and newer ones, Welfare Heaven and Remember Greenpeace. Mobile caterers move in with pies, pizza, wontons, hot-dogs and kiwi juice.
Now that Slaven is rested and ready to speak again, even people from Nelson have begun to arrive, city people with knee-length coats who stand next to the clansfolk of Renwick, Springcreek, Koromiko, Havelock and the townies of Picton and Blenheim. There must be over six thousand people on the slope here at dusk when Slaven speaks again.Thackeray Thomas has had Croad rig up a flat deck truck to act as a platform which can be seen by the expanded audience. Slaven is helped up there and his voice is hoarse in starting, but comes back to him once he has settled in. As he looks out from the back of the truck the detail of his view, so familiar during the day, is indistinct, features and demarcations fading in the night, or obscured by the press of such a crowd. The new, red fires catch rings of exultant faces, the media crews jostle for prime positions at the edge of the tray.
‘What we’re part of here at Tuamarina is a reaffirmation of faith in collective action. Even more, it is an assertion of trust in the existence of a collective will and sympathy which must precede action. The greatest fear is not death, but futility, not mortality, but inconsequence, not failure, but alienation. A united people instructs its representatives; a divided and selfish people are manipulated by their leaders.’ There is still movement in the crowd and singing around the fires which grow brighter in the night and are far out from the original chairs from the Angels. Slaven has no microphone and for a time many don’t notice that he has returned to speak, but his voice stills those before him with its unhurried insistence and they can see the aura forming at his head again. Attention spreads outwards until almost all are listening and voices which before had their own direction become individual or chorused exclamations of endorsement which fill the pauses in Slaven’s speech, buoy up his delivery and gestures for them all.
‘This is the message.’
‘Power to the People.’
‘Brotherhood and sisterhood is all.’
‘Back to the heartland.’
Slaven feels a sense almost of exultation, not from personal
Thackeray Thomas addresses the people, then Eula Fitzsimmons at last and all the time the crowd burgeons and with its growth comes a heightening of atmosphere, a strange, tacit awareness that something of significance is happening here. Some of the original supporters depart, but not many and only then if they can extricate their cars from the press and the chaos. A television crew arrives in the late afternoon when already the shadows of winter evening are moving out from the clouded slopes. The children have barely the light to gather the gumnuts which lie like the bowls of pipes around the memorial and on its cracked concrete surface. The mist presses lower and the cars turning off to Tuamarina begin to use their lights. The television crew takes footage of the people pressing steadily and insistently towards the meeting place on the hill where the Rev Thomas, Paul Hurinui, Eula Fitzsimmons and an informal Maori concert party all have their turn. Fires are started for light and warmth. The red flames leap and the sparks glitter in the darkening sky when new branches are thrown on. The fires are the particular focal point for younger people who arrive in greater numbers. They sing the old protest songs like We Will Overcome and newer ones, Welfare Heaven and Remember Greenpeace. Mobile caterers move in with pies, pizza, wontons, hot-dogs and kiwi juice.
Now that Slaven is rested and ready to speak again, even people from Nelson have begun to arrive, city people with knee-length coats who stand next to the clansfolk of Renwick, Springcreek, Koromiko, Havelock and the townies of Picton and Blenheim. There must be over six thousand people on the slope here at dusk when Slaven speaks again.Thackeray Thomas has had Croad rig up a flat deck truck to act as a platform which can be seen by the expanded audience. Slaven is helped up there and his voice is hoarse in starting, but comes back to him once he has settled in. As he looks out from the back of the truck the detail of his view, so familiar during the day, is indistinct, features and demarcations fading in the night, or obscured by the press of such a crowd. The new, red fires catch rings of exultant faces, the media crews jostle for prime positions at the edge of the tray.
‘What we’re part of here at Tuamarina is a reaffirmation of faith in collective action. Even more, it is an assertion of trust in the existence of a collective will and sympathy which must precede action. The greatest fear is not death, but futility, not mortality, but inconsequence, not failure, but alienation. A united people instructs its representatives; a divided and selfish people are manipulated by their leaders.’ There is still movement in the crowd and singing around the fires which grow brighter in the night and are far out from the original chairs from the Angels. Slaven has no microphone and for a time many don’t notice that he has returned to speak, but his voice stills those before him with its unhurried insistence and they can see the aura forming at his head again. Attention spreads outwards until almost all are listening and voices which before had their own direction become individual or chorused exclamations of endorsement which fill the pauses in Slaven’s speech, buoy up his delivery and gestures for them all.
‘This is the message.’
‘Power to the People.’
‘Brotherhood and sisterhood is all.’
‘Back to the heartland.’
Slaven feels a sense almost of exultation, not from personal
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