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Authors: Owen Marshall
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vanity he assures himself, but because here in the gathering winter night of Tuamarina, individual, ineffective, disparate identities are being supplanted by a holistic mood, the personality of a community, a sum greater in wisdom than its parts. It’s here only fitfully at first, a quick current through the crowd when the people are most united in their response. It is a change of aspect inaccordance with a force, as the contours of a familiar face alter in a headstand because of gravity. ‘Any cause which makes a good neighbour is a cause to uphold,’ Slaven tells them.
‘Here is our drummer.’
‘A new start, thank God, at last.’
‘Politics is not a party,’ says Slaven, and they love to hear it. The mood is palpable, so that the audience even though now grown so much greater, draws together again, tighter, revelling in a unity of purpose. ‘All we need is honesty and agreement. Anything shared benevolently with others bears interest. You and I know that for too long the centre ground of politics has been left to those of personal ambition and professional attitudes, while the rest of us have concentrated on our personal lifestyles. It’s time for all of us here, and more like us elsewhere, to direct this country again. Isn’t it? Isn’t it time for spiritual values to be as powerful in the formation of manifestos as any other motivation. There’s nothing so crippling in a citizen as a lack of self-respect and that self-respect comes most readily from involvement with our fellows.’
‘It is time.’
‘Politics isn’t a party.’
‘Remember Greenpeace.’
‘We’re getting to the guts of it here.’
‘Fucken true.’
Slaven is still speaking at seven-thirty when the helicopter comes from Television South to hover with its red eye cameras which penetrate the dark to give home viewers an excellent picture, but the scene as viewed without augmentation is the more authentic. See the great crowd as a dark pelt on the hill and spilling to the paddocks beneath, Slaven on the truck deck lit by car headlights and the unstable, wheeling flames around which the people sway. Many children lift their arms and faces to the helicopter, trying for their moment of national exposure on the screen. ‘Jesus,’ says the pilot. The main road to Tuamarina is lit by a press of vehicles, a capillary in which the glowing cells flow, gather when checked and flow again. Picton is hidden by the hills, but on the plain of the Wairau the lights ofBlenheim just show. To the east however, where Cook Strait lies unpopulated and unseen, there is no movement, no light at all, no surface life to hint at what goes on beneath.
Rain begins: the finest drizzle which stirs and drifts like smoke and like smoke is grey and ethereal when caught in the car lights, or illuminated by the prancing red-yellow fires. So delicate and seemingly weightless are the drops that even when they settle the surface tension keeps them intact on fabric, leaf, hair, skin, on the cow dung slickered in the grass. As small jewels the droplets add their opaque spangles when caught in light. The mist gathers on the blue rug which Slaven wears over his shoulders as he speaks so that it becomes silver-grey in the headlights, and droplets tickle on the fine hairs high on his cheeks.
Slaven has kept the people pumped up for another hour, casting out his ideas again and again and drawing them back like a net through the crowd. Now the fervour leaves him and he climbs stiffly down from the truck against the great roar of supporters. He takes his turn along the beaten track to that portaloo set aside for officials, then sits in his air-conditioned car and watches new speakers who have been drawn to the meeting to capitalise on its vast success: the Actuarian Legislator for Marlborough, a celebrity herbalist from Pelorus, and Professor Marian Pesetsky who has retired in Picton, but won fame in the twenties for her successful campaign to outlaw male circumcision.
But
‘Here is our drummer.’
‘A new start, thank God, at last.’
‘Politics is not a party,’ says Slaven, and they love to hear it. The mood is palpable, so that the audience even though now grown so much greater, draws together again, tighter, revelling in a unity of purpose. ‘All we need is honesty and agreement. Anything shared benevolently with others bears interest. You and I know that for too long the centre ground of politics has been left to those of personal ambition and professional attitudes, while the rest of us have concentrated on our personal lifestyles. It’s time for all of us here, and more like us elsewhere, to direct this country again. Isn’t it? Isn’t it time for spiritual values to be as powerful in the formation of manifestos as any other motivation. There’s nothing so crippling in a citizen as a lack of self-respect and that self-respect comes most readily from involvement with our fellows.’
‘It is time.’
‘Politics isn’t a party.’
‘Remember Greenpeace.’
‘We’re getting to the guts of it here.’
‘Fucken true.’
Slaven is still speaking at seven-thirty when the helicopter comes from Television South to hover with its red eye cameras which penetrate the dark to give home viewers an excellent picture, but the scene as viewed without augmentation is the more authentic. See the great crowd as a dark pelt on the hill and spilling to the paddocks beneath, Slaven on the truck deck lit by car headlights and the unstable, wheeling flames around which the people sway. Many children lift their arms and faces to the helicopter, trying for their moment of national exposure on the screen. ‘Jesus,’ says the pilot. The main road to Tuamarina is lit by a press of vehicles, a capillary in which the glowing cells flow, gather when checked and flow again. Picton is hidden by the hills, but on the plain of the Wairau the lights ofBlenheim just show. To the east however, where Cook Strait lies unpopulated and unseen, there is no movement, no light at all, no surface life to hint at what goes on beneath.
Rain begins: the finest drizzle which stirs and drifts like smoke and like smoke is grey and ethereal when caught in the car lights, or illuminated by the prancing red-yellow fires. So delicate and seemingly weightless are the drops that even when they settle the surface tension keeps them intact on fabric, leaf, hair, skin, on the cow dung slickered in the grass. As small jewels the droplets add their opaque spangles when caught in light. The mist gathers on the blue rug which Slaven wears over his shoulders as he speaks so that it becomes silver-grey in the headlights, and droplets tickle on the fine hairs high on his cheeks.
Slaven has kept the people pumped up for another hour, casting out his ideas again and again and drawing them back like a net through the crowd. Now the fervour leaves him and he climbs stiffly down from the truck against the great roar of supporters. He takes his turn along the beaten track to that portaloo set aside for officials, then sits in his air-conditioned car and watches new speakers who have been drawn to the meeting to capitalise on its vast success: the Actuarian Legislator for Marlborough, a celebrity herbalist from Pelorus, and Professor Marian Pesetsky who has retired in Picton, but won fame in the twenties for her successful campaign to outlaw male circumcision.
But
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