I am reading 'The Unconquerable World' ('why peaceful protest is stronger than war') by Jonathan Schell. I say reading because I am only half way through and already he has struck a chord and I need to put the ideas down to get them straight in my mind.
The biggest revelation is the simple statement that after violent action the conqueror must have the vanquished do his bidding and unless that happens he has lost the war. In earlier history 'military victory made rule possible by turning bold, angry enemies into frightened obedient subjects' but in recent history with the advent of 'peoples war' usually linked with independence or self determination this has changed as the British found in India, the French in Algiers, the Japanese in China, the Americans in Vietnam etc. This is also being played out in Iraq where the invading forces thought the people would welcome them with open arms to be freed from their dictator but the opposite happened and the country with the biggest military arsenal in the world is again heading for an inevitable defeat, not only because of the will of the Iraq people but also through the (non violent) will of the American people who have gone against the war.
But the premise that we can live without war is even more surprising. The super powers do it between themselves now because of their nuclear arms deterrent, if you get me I'll get you! Schell shows that even revolutions are relatively bloodless, it is their foundation that becomes bloody. The will of the people can endure without violent action and of course Gandhi was the foremost practitioner of this with his withdrawing of cooperation with the invaders. But strangely even he preferred violence to impotence. He said that non violence requires more action than violence and I think pacifism is linked to passivity and is doomed if it is.
Growing up in the sixties where as hippies we honestly believed love could change the world was mostly passive and therefore doomed but maybe there is another way!
The book is highly recommended by this old but not disallusioned hippy!

The big C word

The big C word has been cropping up everywhere around the world and now little old N.Z. is leading the race to become the first country to sign a free trade agreement with them. Of course I'm referring to China, what did you think I meant? This gives us the opportunity to trade our wonderful home grown produce for the worst made goods in the history of mankind (which quickly find their way into our landfills) and with a country with a terrible human rights history as millions of dead Tibetians could testify if they were alive. The Dalai Lama is visiting our country at the moment and China has threatened our trade agreement if our Prime Minister meets him formally. What price do we put on our independence! Initially our free trade is only going to bring in $37 million which is a drop in the bucket.
It's difficult when our country is so dependent on trade and a lot of other countries have human rights abuses. We can't be black and white ( we aren't lily white ourselves) but we must make a stand as far as our economy can take it against anyone who is not even trying or is denying that abuses are taking place.
Remember our borders are open. We have no protectionism. Our farmers get no subsidies, they must stand on their own two feet in the world markets, so when we ask for a free trade agreement we are only asking for equality. The US won't give us one because of our no nuclear policy so I don't have to take a stand about the killing of innocent people in Iraq but Britain is a traditional and one of our largest trading partners and is just as culpable.
We are only a small country and don't make much difference in world affairs but it is important that we can live with ourselves. That if we treat people fairly in our own lives then it should spill over into our foreign affairs.

What makes an artist

What makes an artist? Is it a need to express inner feelings? But anger is an inner feeling that can be expressed in a destructive way. So is it creativity or the pursuit of beauty that is the definition? But an angry artist can express himself beautifully (although more likely with ugliness). So is it what a person produces that make them an artist or who they are? What comes first the chicken or the egg? In my experience, of the artists I know, they tend to be nice people ( although as Milan Kundera says 'Franz's weakness is called goodness') who care about the environment and people, who wouldn't go to war and are concerned about a better society. So do people with those tendencies become artists or does becoming an artist make them like that.
Talent obviously helps. If you can draw at an early age you will be interested in the arts. I was behind the door when 'he upstairs' gave out talent. He gave me a head full of ideas and no means to put them down so it took me 50 years of hard work to get a somewhat passable artwork!
I started with collage, the putting on and sanding off of paper (construction and deconstruction), taught to me by my good friend Felix, then painting (again on and off), followed by stone sculpture (deconstruction) and now I am working with wood sculpture (construction again). Each piece takes a long time but I find it very satisfying, as if it is fulfilling a basic need most of us have of building something.
Spent last night designing a chair. Looks OK on paper but haven't a clue whether it will work in practice.

Books and Memory

Books have been part of my life for as long as I can remember and of course age changes the remembering. When I was 30 I could remember what I had for lunch at my Grandmothers when I was 7, at 40 pre teen years were gone and of the teenage years only the catastrophic remained, Elizabeth Mason, pimples, The Graduate, Bob Dylan, Elizabeth Mason (and it wasn't the girl anymore only the memory that it mattered!).. Now yesterdays lunch is a problem! My father wasn't a great talker but he was a great reader and I tried hard to read his Great Books but Plato and Euclid and Kant were couched in this old fashioned difficult language and it wasn't until I met the philosophers through Bertrand Russels' History of Western Philosophy that I realised I needed an interpreter who understood the big ideas and could couch them in laymans terms. Like Henry Miller, a bit of philosophy, a lot of sex, a bit of philosophy etc. much more palatable.
At first I could remember everything, title, author, publisher, colour of the jacket and even cheap thrillers I only had to read the first page to know I had read it before. Now I'm almost finished before I realise it is familiar!
However there are advantages. I am visiting my old books and I know I have read them and remember how they affected me but not why. So the words are new but the ideas aren't and in 40 years I've changed so I view the ideas differently. I'm excited. My dear mother in her late Altzeimer years would visit with a book and every hour or so would pick it up and read the same page. Imagine that. What you could do is find the most provoking, life changing page in your reading history and put it aside to enjoy again and again.
What am I reading? 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter', Bruce Chatwins 'In Patagonia', E.E. Schumachers 'Small is Beautiful', 'Catch 22' and poetry by Gerald Manley Hopkins and our own James K Baxter.
Five shelves to go, by the time I'm finished the memory will be diminished further and I'll be able to start again. What a saving!

Nuclear free NZ

Wow, twenty years have gone by since we became a nuclear free country by legislation. The Labour Party in opposition during the early 80's promised it to the NZ people if they were elected to govern which happened in 1986 and it became law in 1987, the first country in the world to do so. By refusing the American Navy entry to our ports because of their policy not to divulge whether the ships were nuclear armed or not we earned their wrath and they pulled out of Anzus (a treaty between NZ, Australia and the US) and threatened trade sanctions which is still in force with Australia getting a free trade agreement recently and not us.
How relavent is it today? Probably not very with the Berlin Wall down, tactical nuclear weapons off American ships and the vessels wouldn't fit in our ports anyway. However when the National Party made noises about watering the policy down, opinion polls showed a large proportion of people want it to stay in place
It's not about nuclear anymore it's about the fact that a little country at the end of the world had the guts to stand on it's own two feet and give a big fat finger to a superpower and we may have been snubbed but we haven't nuked or sunk and we hopefully continue on our way with respect.
Winter has a few problems, the worst being the layering on of chubbiness at my age! So I have started my usual mandarin diet which means nothing but coffee and mandarins (homegrown of course) until dinner when I eat whatever I want. Probably not recommended but it works for me and the hunger pains are a gentle reminder of all those hungry mouths out there.
Hi to Petra and Rainer from Berlin, we are looking after Flaxmill Bay until your return and the stocks of lamb and mussels are finally starting to recover!

Snapper recipe

Ex chef Ronny with a fine snapper

Grilled snapper on spinach and potato rosti with a red wine reduction sauce

I love to fish. It's doing something when not doing something. Sitting quietly with anticipation, watching my line and dreaming. I have this Western problem of the need of filling up spaces in time and fishing does this without the feeling of being busy. And of course I walk in the door with food for the family and it feeds the primeval hunter/gatherer in me.
We have a good quota sytem in NZ to retain fish stocks, where only so much fish is allocated to fishermen and once they have caught that they can't catch any more. We also have many marine reserves where no fishing is allowed so fish stocks can build up unhindered. One of the largest is just two kilometres from our home so it is rare to come back with no fish. Our boat, called 'The Beast', is small and rough, is fast and we can go far but we catch most 200 metres from the beach so we just get up speed then it's time to stop and anchor. Snapper is our predominant fish with a sweet, white flesh and because of the export price costs close to $30 a kilo in the shops.
Son Sam and I caught some nice fat fish yesterday and this is how I cooked them.

Grilled Snapper on Spinach and Potato Rosti with a Red Wine Reduction Sauce
For the sauce - put 1 1/4 cups of red wine and 1/4 cup good red wine vinegar in a saucepan and add 1 peeled carrot, 1 clove peeled garlic, 1/2 onion thinly sliced, 1/2 teaspoon pepercorns, 1/4 teaspoon fennel seeds and over a medium heat reduce by half, about 25 minutes. Meanwhle put a cup of port wine in another saucepan and reduce by half about 15 minutes. Strain first reduction into the second and set aside.
For the potato rosti - grate 4 medium potatoes, 1 carrot and 1/2 an onion in a bowl add 1/2 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, salt and freshly ground pepper and deep fry big spoonfulls in a pan until golden brown.
The snapper - generously season both sides with salt and pepper and cook in a little light oil over a high heat approx. 4 minutes each side until just cooked (depends a lot on thickness of fillet)
To assemble - put 2 rosti in the centre of the plate, add some lightly steamed spinach and the fish. Finish the sauce - bring to the boil then off the heat add 4 tablespoons butter and swirl until the butter is dissolved and the sauce becomes shiny. Pour around the food and garnish with chopped parsley.

Nice to be home

John Dory - the fish with a design fault!

Nice to be home to cool mornings and cloudless days, my own bed and john dory on the beach.
Just a last look at the differences between us and our Australian cousins. Reading their newspapers there is less international news and comment than ours and is this because they don't bother or that the country is much larger and with the newspapers being the same size as ours there is enough Australian news to fill them. This is fine because they are well informed about their own country but don't seem so well informed about others. Is this true of other large countries? In America a lot of people don't know where NZ is!
I am so very proud of my fiercely independent little country ( is it so little? If laid on Europe it would stretch from Denmark to the heel of Italy) I know isolation helps with threats a long way away but trade is very important to us and can be used against us if we don't align with larger powers' foreign policies
John dory on the beach? These ugly but beautiful eating fish have a design fault which makes them fall over in shallow water while chasing small fish and become stranded as the tide goes out so I can pick them up off the beach. It only happens in autumn when the early mornings are cold and at a certain tide. If you see them in the water you can also chase them ashore. Last year the count was around 40 so we don't want for fresh fish!

Last day in Sydney

Spent my last day in the land of Oz visiting the cluster of private art galleries off Oxford Road in Paddington. Set in little side streets among old terraced houses they are hard to find but the act of discovery makes them good fun. Some wonderful digital prints (I must remember to take down artists names!) from a distance looking a little like wallpaper but on close inspection little pictorial stories leading to other stories so you find yourself following along almost like a film reel. A lot of aboriginal art with some exciting crossovers from traditional to contemporary, sculptures made from alumimium fly screen, bent and coloured, simple but effective, bronze figures of little short people, naive but provoking, the new, the old, the boring, the exciting, I love the journey that artists take in their quest to express themselves.
Out to Oxford Road to do some shopping and found more artworks. The shoes and the dresses and the mens cardigans! Yes it seems the humble cardy is making a fashion comeback so don't throw it out. I abhor shopping centres where everything is dumbed down and the same and love little shops where the owners are trying to be different.
Dinner was at the Pier in Rose Bay, the Doyle familys' finest restaurant, which started off badly with a glass of champagne offered at the bar, before we had seen the winelist, costing $25 for 1/2 a flute but a corner table with great views over the water brought us round. The service was professional without being stuffy and the ambience relaxed. I had the entree of blue swimmer crab in gaspacho, which was a nice contrast of sweet and sour, and the main of crispy skinned salmon was delicious. It is expensive with entrees upwards of $20 and mains upwards of $40 and I applaud the chefs maxim of not playing around to much with the fish to retain it's delicate flavour but at that price I want the dish to wow me and felt he could have been braver with his flavours.
It's hard being in the business, youbecome very critical.
Looking forward to quiet home to put some of this vibrant city energy to good use

Australian Kulture?

Sydney sits on the harbour like a large mouth with the North Shore ferries being extracted and replaced like bottom teeth and sporting an extravagent headdress of tall buildings above it. The arcs of the Opera House turn away from it as if ashamed of the money merry go round but there is no contest about the winner between culture and cash. It's an executive city with 'suits' and cellphones occupying the footpath cafes but it doesn't take long to walk out to the botanical gardens and up to the impressive NSW Gallery where they are preparing for a Anselm Kiefer exhibition dominated by a large dead phoenix palm. Drawings by the greats such as Picasso, Matisse, Lucian Freud, etc are being aired and I get the feeling of being close to their hands which I don't get from a picture book. Brett Whitelys' very large and complex mural of his life is up and although I enjoy small parts of it, it's hard to understand in one gulp and that reminds me how hard it is to view so much art in one day especially the cerebral stuff! Perhaps he should have written a book.
The Contemporary Museum on Circular Quay also has its disappointments with Stephen Birchs' installations having no good ideas and no sense of entering and a newly donated collection of a Melbourne couple failing to inspire. What does a museum do when they are offered a large collection gathered by an individuals' criteria? Do they accept it all because it is free even though some of the works aren't very good?
Enjoyed a video installation of five screens with the centre one occupied by a mothers hands while she relates stories of her family whose faces occupy the other four screens and the change in their facial expressions fill in between the line stories and gradually build up an emotional family history.
Back to Greys Point where my daughter lives a little inland from the Cronulla coast. A community of large houses with too much room for the people but not enough room for their three expensive cars and flash boat and they are all pursuing the Australian dream of owning a large mortgage! Apart from my daughter and hubby of course who I dearly love and can do no wrong!

Spent yesterday walking the inner city streets of Auckland. It's a lovely city if you haven't an agenda and don't need to get anywhere fast on the roads. The heart you can walk round in about an hour and it's great the way it spills down to the harbour. The main drag, Queen St, is a bit mainstream but the little streets surrounding it have quirky little cafes, bookshops and galleries. Saw a marvellous video installation at the New Gallery as part of the 'Turbulence' exhibition by, I'm sorry I can't remember the name of the artist. It showed a close up of a stream of large ants travelling right to left and carrying pieces of bright green leaf. Then minature flags of the world started appearing interspersed with peace signs which the artist had painted and left for the ants to pick up. It had become a minature protest rally for world peace. Ideas in art can give you a jolt out of your normal thinking and become all the more poignant.
Not a lot else sung to me. Peter Wallers' realist landscapes at the Soca Gallery were far too tight, like looking at scenes frozen in time with no past or future. What do we look for in art? Lucian Freud demands it to " astonish, disturb, seduce and convince" but I think you have to live with a piece for it to do all those things. It becomes difficult in a limited time frame to see so many images because the good ones tend to take time to reveal themselves and you notice the ones where the artist has shown everything but they won't stand the test of time.
In Sydney now amongst gum trees overlooking the water where possums are a protected beast, we should send them some of the 60 million of ours that are chewing through our native forest!

Off to Sydney today for my daughters' 40th and to see my son and grandchildren. I enjoy the energy of cities after peaceful Flaxmill Bay and wander the streets watching people. We have a similar history to Australia yet every time I go there I'm struck by how different we are. I think it's the landscape with theirs being large, hot and open like their character and here wherever you look apart from the ocean horizon there are mountains and their attendant clouds leading to our more introspective nature. They tend to treat us as the poorer cousin because of our size but small is beautiful, making us light on our feet and more adaptable to change.
The art scene always seems vibrant with lots of sold stickers on artworks in the inner city but overall I think we have more interest in the arts just not the population base to support it.

Lonely Bay is framed at both ends by soaring sandstone cliffs soft in some places and hard in others so weathering has left wonderful curves with sharp edges. Accidental sculptures or part of a greater plan? Does it matter? Pohutukawa trees, saviours of the NZ coastline with their gnarled roots holding back erosion by the sea, hang low over the sand and the tidal drift leaves banks of shells of all descriptions but in particular circular ones which you can put on your finger as a ring or use as he does in tree sculptures.
Every year he organises an 'Andy Goldsworthy Day'. Andy, an English sculptor, goes into the environment and builts sculptures from found objects, records them on camera and video then lets nature reclaim the materials. Suits Lonely Bay because it's untamed and has no visible evidence of man apart from footprints in the sand and after a few days there is nothing left.
At the far end of the beach he sheds his clothes. The sea is clear green, blue and the lazy swell is regurgitating sand and foam on the shore. The dog is swimming far out chasing a stick, almost invisible in the reflected sun. It's bloody cold! But it's bloody freedom.

food for the soul

He walks every morning now the restaurant is closed for the winter. The dog is glad to see him and freed, pees on everything upright he can find, once forward then turning around, once again the other way. He stops at the feijoa tree and pockets a couple of the fruit lying on the ground and biting the top off another,
squeezes the sweet/sour flesh into his mouth reminding himself to pick them all up later to freeze. Their season is too short and they usually get wasted.
Crossing the road onto Flaxmill Bay beach the sea is flat calm and the wet sand soft and hard to walk on. No john dory left high and dry but the resident pair of oyster catchers are cracking open pipis left by the overnight tide. The dog leaves them alone, remembering the dive bombing in the summer when they were nesting, but chases the seagulls off the end of the beach barking and plunging.
Climbing the cliff track it's darker and cooler as the bush closes in, a lone fantail chases the disturbed insects while the dog follows rabbit trails and the earthy smell of wet decay takes over the sea scents. It's a stiff climb and he has to stop to rest, not as fit as he would like to be after seven months in the kitchen. At the top where it opens out to a grassy paddock with huge scattered pohutukawa trees, the sun has risen and the view over Mercury Bay and right out to the Mercury Islands amazing.
Again the bush on the track down to Lonely Bay and onto the Democracy Steps designed by Japanese artist Akio Hizume on a musical score so walking them the body gets a rythym and they become easier and more interesting. The artists' three week stay opened up new creative possibilities with his mathematical principles based on the Fibonacci Series found in nature and the Eastern idea of the space being just as important as the object.
Checking his kinetic sculpture (water pouring from a chute into open bamboo on a pivot, when full, dips, empties and comes back with a thud to fill again) in the stream beside the steps he walks out through the flax onto his favourite beach.

Continued soon...