From the Depot Takirua Second Edition

From the Depot-Takirua



Second Edition





Peter Cleave






ISBN

978-1-877229-29-9

Campus Press
26 Sycamore Crescent
Palmerston North

Thanks to Micah and the team
at Warehouse Stationery
Palmerston North


Bound by New Life Bookbindings
28 Avenue Rd
Greenmeadows
Napier

Introduction

There was something of a moment in the late eighties and early nineties in Wellington theatre and over the years From the Depot Takirua has been there as an attempt to grapple with what happened.

This Second Edition of the book begins with an older essay containing reviews of work done at the Depot Takirua. Some of the original essays have been retained and new work on Peter Jackson and Maori Television has been included.

The moment at the Depot Takirua, if such it was, quickly became overtaken by other things. Matters were complicated and, it must be said, enriched by film. The workshopping of the warrior proceeded to the film Once were Warriors and elsewhere. Peter Jackson happened from the early nineties and there was a shift of attention and resources to film. A connection between the work of Peter Jackson and the kind of work work done at the Depot-Takirua is found in the writing of Harry and Stephen Sinclair.

With the advent of Maori Television it is possible to see people who were involved in theatre in the early nineties moving to film and then to television.

But, I think, there was a period in the early nineties at the Depot Theatre when things came together. The question now, nearly twenty years later, is how they might line up again in a comparable blaze of creativity or whatever. It might involve the same people. I note that Stephen Sinclair features in the Depot-Takirua story as a writer just as he does in the Peter Jackson story.

The papers on Suzie Cato and on Maori Television are offered on the grounds that television, especially Maori Television, may be the place where things come together in a creative step like that which I think was made at the Depot Takirua all those years ago. The paper on the grotesque which features the piano is offered as a route taken, as it were, out of the kind of thing happening at the Depot Takirua in the early nineties but so far at least not taken further. Something similar seems to have happened with the warrior project, if that it might be called. These sit in the corners of our minds now like dead ends or cul de sacs. Will we come back to them and will new media like Maori Television be used to do so?

Peter Cleave,
Aokautere
2008




Contents

Introduction
Page 3

1 Native voice: 1981 and all that (in Illusions 26)
Page 7

2 The Projection Of The Grotesque; Maori And Pakeha-Maori In The Piano And The Construction Of The Ignoble Savage In Aotearoa
Page 17

3 Maori Television and the internet
Page 35

4 The native the outlaw and the frontier myth: metaphor and narrative in four films
Page 49

5 Suzie Cato Says ‘Kia Ora’…
Page 61

6 Peter Jackson
Page 69


1
Native voice: 1981 and all that (in Illusions 26)

1981 And All That

The production of John Broughton's play 1981 at Taki Rua Theatre towards the end of the 1996 Wellington Arts Festival left me with a number of thoughts, most of them to do with comparative historical perspectives. First of all, what changes have occurred in the context of Maori theatre in Wellington since the production of Broughton's Michael James Manaia in 1991? Secondly, what development has there been in Broughton the playwright as evidenced by 1981?

In 1991, Hone Kouka, for example, was a novice playwright. But since then his work has developed considerably with a succession of increasingly confident plays: Five Angels, Nga Tangata Toa, and Waiora. Much has happened over the last few years and yet 1981 at Taki Rua had a flatness, even a sense of retrogression.

The play takes its basic idea from the fact that the tour divided families and otherwise close-knit groups. Three members of a family are involved. The older brother, Rusty is a police officer in the Red Squad. His brother is a drug-using (and dealing), happy-go-lucky, rugby supporter, a spectator; and the younger sister is a university student opposed to the tour. The plot generated by this division of political interest and labour is fairly predictable with a couple of variations, one involving child abuse and another showing the drift into criminality by the drug dealer, yet another being the discovery that the sister is pregnant.

The most curious thing for this reviewer was the dialogue which was the lowest common denominator throughout. Where Michael James Manaia, as the son of a schoolteacher, was able to be articulate, the characters in 1981 are inarticulate by comparison and much given to cursing, using the word fuck at every occasion. Having said these things, however, the production did throw up a lot of questions about the history of dialogue in Maori theatre and film over the last ten years. Riwia Brown with the direct, clear dialogue of Once Were Warriors which manages to use a restricted code very coherently and Broughton himself with the monologue in Michael James Manaia are probably the finest examples here. But they both reveal how problematic the capture or the projection of a Maori voice is off the marae and in another language. The book Once Were Warriors by Alan Duff makes the most of an interior monologue conducted in a restricted code, the speech code of the pub, and of the street gang.

Whatever the fight between Riwia Brown and Alan Duff, she managed as he did in the book to coherently use a restricted code. It may be the case that the novel form allows for more reflection so that Duff's characters, particularly Jake Heke, are not as cliched as Brown's. Of particular interest is the rejection by Jake of Maori culture. This seems set to happen in Brown's script but it doesn't eventuate. Jake is left alone with his rage at the end. He has not degenerated into a homeless wretch as he does in Duff's book. The great artistic value in Duff's work is that he positions Jake between the native world and the outlaw world. Jake opts for the latter. Beth opts for the former. Jake is left a wretch, homeless. But there is a sense in the novel that Jake lives by his own lights until the very end: this is a voice of resistance to all forms of recognisable authority. He rejects the mix of nativism and social work which is served up to him in his own home by his own wife and children. He keeps a shred of outlaw dignity/identity even as his humiliation is complete.

There is rather more to this than the dignity or otherwise of the outlaw although Jake is not sophisticated enough to articulate the positions involved which form a kind of weight that is in the end too hard for him to carry. He is caught in something of an identity trap, what I have elsewhere referred to as a sovereignty game.

Lawrence McDonald in Illusions 25 suggests that Alan Duff, the author of Once Were Warriors is caught between a crude 'cultural deprivation' position from the 1960s and a cultural nationalist or at least a cultural revivalist position.

Position One involves the idea that Maori parents do not provide suitable home conditions for their children to be successful in the acquisition of 'legitimate' school knowledge and 'legitimate' school culture in general (McDonald 1996:22 - his inverted commas).

Position Two is put by Riwia Brown in an attributed quote, 'Heke family was a family in crisis because of a lack of Maori identity. I wanted to show that but also give hope with Beth and her children finding their identity as Maori'. (Te Puni Kokiri Newsletter 1994:5).

These are the positions as set out by Lawrence McDonald who, citing Roy Nash, qualifies Position Two by saying that it remains a deficit theory in that 'If Maoritanga is identified with Maori culture then those who do not possess it (and who may not wish to acquire it) are culturally deprived' (Nash 1983:56). And here, I have argued above, we find Jake Heke.

Before returning to Jake and the cast of 1981, Rusty and the others, let us stay with a consideration of these two perspectives of identity. These may be gendered spaces if not in the book then possibly in the film. McDonald draws on mateship, Jake’s world and kinship, Beth's world using a distinction employed by Bev James and Kay Saville Smith (1989). Given Riwia Brown's screenplay and Lee Tamahori's direction the film 'Once Were Warriors' puts the world of kinship directly into the universe of cultural revival. This fits with a number of slogans such as whanaungatanga kinship, relatedness first seriously employed by John Rangihau (1975). And there of course is the rub - Rangihau, as a male, orchestrated the whanau based approach while Whina Cooper and other women were as strident as Alan Duff is now in his editorials on the need for Maori to be better parents for the needs of today's world.

There is a mix of feminist ideology with state policy here, the kinship world, the 'female' world, the whanau is endorsed by the Children and Young Person's Service with its emphasis on Puaoteatatu the policy statement by John Rangihau and others of 1986 and family group conferencing. There is also the policy on adoption which encourages the rights of the whanau. Duff as an ex ward of the state is struggling with this. There has also been the corporatization of kinship as in the Tainui and Ngai Tahu Trust Boards. You need kin to make money out of fish, trees, the elements as well as from the social contacts, the Treaty and all the other promises remembered by the tribe. Sir Robert Mahuta and Sir Tipene O'Regan have lead this side of the whanau-hapu iwi revival and to suggest that this area is female dominated or even not wide open to manipulation by Maori males as agents or co-opted actors for the state would raise the ire of Annette Sykes as well as that of Alan Duff. As McDonald implies Duff's editorial columns and 'Maori, the Crisis and the Challenge' 1993 are clearly positioned against the imagined pitfalls of cultural revival while the novels, 'Once Were Warriors' and 'One night out stealing' are ambivalent or open to double or even multiple meanings (McDonald ibid 19).

There is an addition to the mix in form of Maori feminism. Cheryll Te Waerea Smith (in Murphy 1994) argues that Maori society is being split at least two ways. Males are being sucked into the interface between government and the tribe which compromises their position and females are leading in the politics of the village, on the home front. The latter includes kohanga reo, kura kaupapa and wananga, the local educational project as well as the domestic economy. A second split is between those caught in the 'cultural cage' of Kapa haka and cultural performance and those who are engaged in political protest. These splits fragment the Maori voice just as they give it texture.

Despite McDonald's uncritical acceptance of the easy divide offered by James and Saville Smith between male 'mateship' and female 'kinship' we can return to the consideration of voice and dialogue in Maori theatre and film enriched by the idea of gender. Given the influence of Robin Scholes and Riwia Brown in Once Were Warriors there is a strongly gendered voice which calls out in a hundred ways for kinship support.

But from the point of view of Jake or even Rusty in 1981 these calls for support are appeals to a seriously flawed sense of authority, the higher, moral ground of the whanau. In Jakes case he looks distinctly pale around the gills as Beth waxes lyrical about her own whanau when they go for a drive to ostensibly visit their son Boogie. As McDonald (ibid) points out this scene is a break in the intense socioscapes of the Heke home and the pub. Jake remembers only that they shut him out, treating him as a descendant of a slave. He then reacts by going on a binge with his mates first at the pub and then bringing them home where his daughter Grace is raped, in her bed by his mate, his 'brother', Bully. This is turn leads to Grace, his daughter's, suicide which leads to Jake attacking Bully with ferocity. The film ends after this 'fight' with Jake sitting outside the pub, his family going home without him clustered around Beth his (former?) wife and Bully, broken and beaten or dead lying on the floor inside. One imagines the police are on their way.

The whole latter sequence of the film is sparked then by a reflection on the nature of the whanau. Rusty in 1981 has his own similar negative memories - in his case it is sexual molestation as a child by his Uncle Tip. It is hard, in May 1996, given the media attention, to disassociate this with the recent sentencing of the South Auckland serial rapist's father for sexual molestation of his own son and daughter, the idea of a web of dark shapes rather than a shining light at the heart of the whanau seems widespread. It is even difficult to get rid of the image of Bully leaning over and coming down upon Grace this being the most potent representation we have of this sort of thing. To get an idea of the silence around sexual abuse/(forced) incest one has to look hard for references to it in the researched area of Maori society. In his book on Whina Cooper Michael King mentions the problem with respect to housing policies and thats about it. The policy emphasis has been the other way - Puaoteatatu called for the return of control to the whanau and in many respects the Children and Young Persons Act have gone along with it. '1981', the play gives a negative view from the point of view of Rusty a Maori policeman to sit alongside that of Jake Heke.

There is, I suppose, the tribe and the state, the local culture and the system that is meant to transcend the local, the tino rangatiratanga and the kawanatanga. Beyond these two are lawlessness which Jake Heke finds most acceptable.

The narrative of the play '1981' proceeds within the wider sequence of events. The springboks arrive, they play rugby, there are protests, the rugby continues, the protest escalates, the rugby wavers at Hamilton where the game is called off and then carries on with much police protection and even more daring acts of protest until the end of the rugby, the fourth test at Eden park. To abstract this we could say that the authority of rugby is asserted (with the arrival of the Springboks) that authority is challenged by the protesters, the authority of the state is called into question, of law and order, that authority wavers at Hamilton and is then reasserted for the duration of the rugby. What kind of story is this? The Springbok Tour story is a story about the cause of the native. The native is, directly, South African, the South African Black. Indirectly the native is the Maori of Aotearoa. These blur, overlap and, toward the end of the tour get downright messy. But the concepts native, as in African or Maori and outlaw as in the African National Congress then outlawed/banned in South Africa and a gaggle of local organisations such as H.A.R.T, M.O.S.T, the Mongrel Mob and the Black Power who are virtually outlawed in Aotearoa, these concepts are pivotal in any narrative of the tour.

Bringing this back to the play the policeman has a restricted 'I'm just following orders' voice. He falls into a 'dumb cop' or 'dumb soldier' routine or, manner or code. The spectator falls into a 'dumb worker' or 'dumb crook' role. This leaves the female student to be the loose verbal canon, the 'lippy' one, the free range critic. It is interesting that the word 'lippy' has survived Alan Duff's book 'Once Were Warriors', Riwia Brown's film treatment and several critiques of the film. In this culture it ranks alongside 'stirrer' as a pejorative. It means to engage ones tongue before thinking before 'getting it right', before getting the authority situation worked out.

The monologue is an interesting way of telling a story employed in 'Michael James Manaia', 'Mauri Tu' by Hone Kouka, 'Once Were Warriors', 'The Piano', 'An Angel at my Table' and, as a fantasy diary kept by two teenagers in 'Heavenly Creatures'.

Grace Heke keeps a diary which 'tells on' Bully within Jake's monologue. This is talking it out inside yourself. It relates to but is not the same thing as getting 'lippy'. It is all very internal and self referential.

Looking out, at American films of the 1970s influential in the decade before the tour we have 'Tell them Willy Boy was Here' which challenges the equation of the native and outlaw in the tradition of the American 'Wild West'. We also have 'Chato's land' which goes further and suggests that the native is not only not an outlaw but given local knowledge likely to win in any conflict. The parallel here is with the 'natives' of Vietnam. Note that the natives in these American films do not talk a lot. They do not philosophise or reflect on greivances. Charles Bronson as Chato acts, he does not engage with voice.

Hard on the heels of the Springbok Tour we have the story of the land wars told in 'Utu' of 1983. The film takes a lot of time early on to slow the crossing of the native from the side of the state to the outlaw condition. The film is an elaborate criss-crossing (and even, perhaps an obscuring of this line) with the conclusion showing Te Wheke's cousin who had chosen the side of the state claiming the right to execute, to finally punish Te Wheke.

Between Utu and Once Were Warriors in the local history of film and theatre there is a play by Stephen Sinclair 'Caramel Cream' (c.f. Cleave 1991) which has several interesting features - a nativist Maori criminal, an anti nativist Pakeha criminal both male 'mates' and a female Pakeha social worker who falls in love with the Maori criminal. These two use the nativism of Maoritanga as a shell or a mask behind which to hide a mess of problems. She, like the Maori female student in 1981 or Beth in 'Once Were Warriros' is articulate but powerless, the free range antic, the lippy one who talks without authority. The elliptic moral code of the criminal makes for a restricted speech code between the two males which does not allow the womanÕs voice to penetrate. This happens in Once Were Warriors, when Beth comes into the pub all inside brace themselves for a discordant voice. In his own twisted way Bully is punishing Grace for talking back to her father. The Pakeha is voiceless in this situation as per Trambert the neighbour of the Heke's in 'Once Were Warriors'. As McDonald (ibid 18) points out this is a matter of social space but the neighbours simply don't talk, they donÕt have a shared code. The white male, Trambert, is not only not 'lippy' he simply does not engage with voice.

In 'Once Were Warriors' the book and film the role of the native is challenged I think, through a conversation, an argument, a tiff between Beth and Jake. In the film the challenge takes place with the drive in the countryside where Beth tells her children of the idyllic home place, the wa kainga and Jake rejects this. In the book it is more explicit and is a deepening undercurrent growing until the end. It is not only the whanau that is challenged, it is the so called higher moral ground of nativism.

The idyll of the heartland, the homeland, the wa kainga is a countrywide matter as the popularity of Gary McCormick's 'Heartlands' documentary shows. In BroughtonÕs play the idyll is threatened. The revelations that marijuana is being grown in or near the urupa, the burial ground and that sexual molestation of young people has been done by a 'kindly' uncle threaten the idea of innocence in the home garden.

There is a convention that the people at home, the locals, the true, salt of the earth natives can accurately process information, they sort things out. There are proverbs that ask people to go back to their mountains to be cleansed by the wind. This convention is followed in the anthropology of Anne Salmond, the history of Judith Binney and the writing of Riwia Brown or Witi Ihimaera for whom the native seems to have a kind of transcendence but not, or not necessarily in the writings of Alan Duff, Lita Barrie (who eschews the idea of women as natives, as earth mothers) the history of Francis Pound or the anthropology of, say, Steve Webster.

Dialogue is interesting in this history and context. Riwia Brown in Once Were Warriors and Broughton himself with the monologue in Michael James Manama probably get the prizes here. But they both reveal how problematic the capture or the projection of a Maori voice is. The book Once Were Warriors by Alan Duff makes the most of an interior monologue conducted in a restricted code, the speech code of the pub, of the street gang.

As Lawrence McDonald has pointed out, the film is highly internal. McDonald argues that the film is 'broken' by a road sequence. The irony in this is that Maori as a communal, highly social culture seems to be best represented by high degrees of internalisation’s. Interestingly this 'model' would seem to fit with the recent set of acclaimed local films - The Piano, An Angel at my Table and Heavenly Creatures.

A large number of questions arise out of this. If there is a culture and genre of internalised experience, is it appropriate to divide it up along ethnic lines simply because the actors have different ethnic backgrounds? This might be a beginning of a set of questions about 'national personalities' and appropriation. Within or alongside these questions is the matter of ethnography and representation. On the one hand we have Ihimaera's early work, say in Pounamu, Pounamu, where the individual is subsumed by the small group, the whanau. This fits directly with Barry Barclay's Ngati. Communitas rules. Barclay could not handle the highly tailored individuals in Te Rua but Tamahori, three years later, gets it right in Once Were Warriors, using an outlaw mode - the film fits with Romper Stomper and Metalskin. The subtext is not community but random violence. KubrickÕs A Clockwork Orange is not far away. Jake's boots look like Alex's boots. The culture of the alienate rules not the culture of the citizen. Jake rejects Maoritanga, he rejects communitas. He accepts and embraces the rush: 'Ya having a good time bro?' The parlance of getting everyone up where they belong is very much his.

This gives a twist to the eurovision found elsewhere. The existential alienate has gone elemental - Ada in The Piano, Jake in Once Were Warriors, the teen killers from Cashmere in Heavenly Creatures, Baines in The Piano, the road warriors in Kingpin and Mark II, the Mike Walker films which Lawrence McDonald rightly points out are highly influential in all this - all these protagonists are going back to basics or baseness. This has meant that the voice in this set of representation is as to oneself - it is often in a monotone, it does not 'paragraph' easily, it is a stream of talk if not consciousness - it has an unmediated feel, it is not crowded, it is at the frontier of the self and this, I think is a large part of its appeal locally and overseas.

There is a range of options in Aotearoa within what might be called a native-revel complex. Some actors, Bruno Lawrence for example, portray a rebel type. This type draws on the 'man alone' idea set down in John Mulgan's book of the same name. As Sam Neil says in 'A cinema of Unease' (1995) his generation didn't read it. Thats a pity really because Mulgan sees a group of Maori at the end - they are like gypsies, like Christopher Perkins' painting 'Maori Meeting' (1932-4). They can't talk to Mulgan nor he to them. Michael James Manaia is alone. So is Rusty in 1981. So, in his way, is Jake Heke. Like Sam Neill or John Mulgan Jake and Rusty can't talk to the ethnic cast, the whanau. Michael James Manaia, Jake Heke and Rusty are cries of rage. But the alienation frames, the cultural traps of the pub, the fight, the party, the brawl, the baton charger themselves form a kind of cultural safety - at least a man knows where he stands even if he is alone.

But in 1981 Broughton has gone for the group. It is probably fair to say that the individual angst of Michael James Manaia, apart from being a very hard act to follow, is a more suitable project for Broughton than the type of period piece that 1981 aims to be with its attempted representation of a fairly wide sample, or widely separated sample, of people. While the three characters all seem to scream a lot and all seem to yell all the time the play does break away from the monologue, it doesn't take true native option, in fact it opens up a critique of the wa kainga the home place through a set of explorations and conversations between characters, a critique that Jake Heke, too far gone with blind rage could not effect. At the same time Broughton does not fall into the endless whakapohane of Dunn Mihaka (someone who was engaging in criticism of his own ethnic group and the idea of the native long before Alan Duff). The characters and the play are voicing their way, very, very slowly through their own din towards the light.Campus Press Update

Review of: Works published in 2008 by Peter Cleave
Reviewer: Professor Paul Moon
Date: March 2008

In the past ten years, Peter Cleave, in conjunction with Campus Press, has been at the forefront of research into a range of topics relating to Maori in the modern world. This, in itself, may not be remarkable, but what makes Cleave’s works stand out are three things: the breadth of disciplines he draws on for his analyses; the range of subjects he explores; and his persistence in ensuring that the material he publishes is relevant to a wide spectrum of readers. At a time when much academic research is dominated either by drilling into obtuse areas, or by studying topics for which funding is provided, the latest collection of Cleave’s works to be issued by Campus Press provide a fresh and engaging perspective on issues affecting Maori.
This corpus of works covers topics as diverse as social work, Maori media, language, culture in the workplace, as well as Cleave’s groundbreaking work – now in a revised edition – ‘Rangahau pae iti kahurangi: Research in a small world of light and shade’. This wide-angle approach allows the reader to build up an impression of some of the thinking that either applies or ought to apply to current developments in these fields.

Some new titles from Campus Press (Est 1992) each priced at NZ 37.50 plus postage COD;
From the Depot Takirua, Second Edition
by Peter Cleave
Iwi Station: a discussion of print, radio and television in Aotearoa/New Zealand
by Peter Cleave
Papers on Language, Second Edition
Culture in the workplace: a book of exercises
by Peter Cleave
What do we know about the mark on the wall. A study of literacy
by Peter Cleave
Rangahau pae iti kahurangi: research in a small world of light and shade, Second Edition – most popular Campus Press book so far in 2008
by Peter Cleave
And from our back pages:
Papers to Conference- most popular Campus Press book in 2007
by Peter Cleave
Papers on Social Work - includes work on broadcasting
by Peter Cleave 
Papers of Contest, Second Edition
by Peter Cleave
 
And for a discussion on line of literacy in nineteenth century New Zealand by Peter Cleave go to;
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/01/said-heard-written-read.html
Find extended discussions of this in Iwi Station
And see the discussion of Brian Sibley's book on Peter Jackson in From the Depot Takirua, Second Edition

Forthcoming in puff books in April
Isis, the days of the voles
by
Benjamin Drum

Please order by email to puffmedia@yahoo.co.nz or Campus Press, 26, Sycamore Crescent, Palmerston North, New Zealand or telephone 0064 6 3537773


Title descriptions
Papers to Conference

Third Edition

A collection of mostly old but some new work

by Peter Cleave
ISBN

978-1-877229-17-6

The present collection starts with a paper on literacy in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the nineteenth century.This is the most recent paper. The collection finishes with a paper on literacy and there are one or two references to this subject throughout without literacy being a major theme.

In fact,the demand for his collection was largely to do with older work and this constitutes the rest of the collection. Some papers are so out of date as to be quaint. Others like the paper on Samoan and Maori may be old but they might have a current application.

One debate that may not be quaint or out of date may be the one discussed in the review of Francis Pound and Wystan Curnow from the early nineties about icons and symbols. We might well ask what happened to this discussion. We might well also ask what the conditions for a talk like this are in 2008.

The essay on the Pa Maori which is really just a review of Best's book may leave questions unanswered in the wider literature.

In the paper entitled Native Voice and in some of the journal work in Aotearoa, especially that found in Illusions in the nineties there is a discussion of new things happening in the arts in Aotearoa.

The discussion of o and a, the so-called case system in Maori is here through demand. It is also a discussion of commentators which is unusual in this area.

By contrast to the the work on literacy and the Pa Maori the social work papers won prizes and were published in international collections. In this sense the collection is a mix of the known and the obscure.

More on
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/papers-to-conference.html




Iwi Station. A discussion of print, radio and television
in Aotearoa/New Zealand

by Peter Cleave
ISBN
978-1-877229-27-5
This book is about communication and power from a tribal point of view in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the world at large. The tribe concerned is the iwi as distinct from the hapu, the sub-tribe or the whanau, the extended family.

The iwi is considered in several historical periods. In each there is a consideration of the communications environment of the iwi be that oral, to do with reading or writing or literacy or to do with electronic media including radio, television and the internet.

There are also two, at least, intense periods of change, the 1850s when Maori was displaced by English as the language of the majority and the period from the early 1990s until the present day characterised by the development of iwi radio and Maori television and the advent of the internet.

The discussion of the internet is really a series of questions. Does the internet allow increased specialisation as well as a greater internationalisation? Are Maori better able to identify common ground and communicate over more space and time than ever before? Is it now possible to find new ground? Does the internet offer freedom from the shackles of a small nation state?

All chapters are about the way that tribes manage communication in the context of a mainstream. Choosing the ground for communication is itself important in this context and there are recurrent issues of control and power.
For more go to
http://puffcom.blogspot.com/2008/04/iwi-station.html


From the Depot-Takirua



Second Edition


by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-29-9

There was something of a moment in the late eighties and early nineties in Wellington theatre and over the years From the Depot Takirua has been there as an attempt to grapple with what happened.

This Second Edition of the book begins with an older essay containing reviews of work done at the Depot Takirua. Some of the original essays have been retained and new work on Peter Jackson and Maori Television has been included.

The moment at the Depot Takirua, if such it was, quickly became overtaken by other things. Matters were complicated and, it must be said, enriched by film. The workshopping of the warrior proceeded to the film Once were Warriors and elsewhere. Peter Jackson happened from the early nineties and there was a shift of attention and resources to film. A connection between the work of Peter Jackson and the kind of work work done at the Depot-Takirua is found in the writing of Harry and Stephen Sinclair.

With the advent of Maori Television it is possible to see people who were involved in theatre in the early nineties moving to film and then to television.

But there was a period in the early nineties at the Depot Theatre when things came together. The question now, nearly twenty years later, is how they might line up again in a comparable blaze of creativity or whatever. It might involve the same people. Stephen Sinclair features in the Depot-Takirua story as a writer just as he does in the Peter Jackson story.

The papers on Suzie Cato and on Maori Television are offered on the grounds that television, especially Maori Television, may be the place where things come together in a creative step like that which was made at the Depot Takirua all those years ago. The paper on the grotesque which features the piano is offered as a route taken, as it were, out of the kind of thing happening at the Depot Takirua in the early nineties but so far at least not taken further. Something similar seems to have happened with the warrior project, if that it might be called. These sit in the corners of our minds now like dead ends or cul de sacs. Will we come back to them and will new media like Maori Television be used to do so?


Culture in the work place. A book of group exercises

by Peter Cleave

ISBN
978-1-877229-25-1

How do you work out how to work with other people?

This book is designed to help you do this. The first thing is to consider of culture in your workplace. Then to find better ways of working.

These are the things that matter no matter how removed they might seem from the job at hand. Religion, dress, diet, eye contact and body language. All of these things and more contribute to positive or negative work situations.

This book is not meant to be prescriptive or to tell people what to do in their own workspaces and with their own culture.

The exercises below are offered that they might allow readers to work out their own situations. The idea has been to keep it simple and to allow discussion to happen in a easy fashion.




Papers of Contest
Third Edition

by Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-28-2

The theme of this collection of papers is contest. There is a challenge in each paper.

The first paper looks at literacy in the nineteenth century in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

In the next paper conventional research is challenged with an idea of indigenous modes of inquiry.

The following paper looks at confrontational theatre and film in the 1990s.

The discussion of Francis Pound and Wystan Curnow considers images, symbols and the art of a place, a country, I suppose.

The review of Martin Blythe's book involves several of the themes so far considered as well as others and tries to describe an exciting analysis.

The consideration of the native, the outlaw and the frontier widens the perspective of the collection.

The rest of the papers in the collection take the idea of contest into different areas.

The discussion of Suzie Cato takes the discussion into mainstream media in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

By contrast the next article looks at work with perhaps more limited but nonetheless highly critical audiences and the construction of or the playing with a notion of the Pakeha-Maori.

The final paper is a consideration of the grotesque. This raises a number of questions that are left hanging and that, perhaps, is what happens in a collection with the theme of contest.







What do we know about the mark on the wall?
Images, rules and prior knowledge

by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-26-8

There is a sense in which the work here is dated referring as it does to work done in TESOL in the early nineties. That literature could be updated. There is a question though as to which direction to take from here and there is also the fact that whatever the argument is attached to it will eventually date. The advantage, I think, of the work referred to is that it is of a very high calibre.

Other applications for the argument might well be found. Work on memory from the early childhood area is one possibility but there are others such as developments in educational theory and practice over the last half century.

It may be though that no one major kind of example emerges. The book as it is or in any revision may just use examples from here and there. The theme may be a matter of constant return, going back again and again to questions of cognition and literacy.







Papers on Social Work
Second Edition
by
Peter Cleave
ISBN

978-1-877229-21-3

These papers venture into several areas of social work but there may be some features that set the collection aside.

The first is an emphasis throughout on social work education. This interest is set out in in the first chapter where there is a comparison between local and European traditions. Work by Carola Khulmann and Peter Cleave appears early in the collection and is then taken further in subsequent papers.

One emphasis or theme which keeps coming up is to do with a ethic. This is touched in the comparison of social work in Germany and Aotearoa/New Zealand, looked at in the article, An ethic of empathy, and touched on again in the article on iwi social services.

Another theme is to do with indigenous ways of research. The paper on rangahau is the most discursive in the collection and the intention here is to take the arguments as far as they might go without necessarily coming to fixed conclusions.

Yet another pertains to the dynamics of small group work in social work learning and teaching. This work is perhaps the most widely published while some of the other papers are offered to a broader readership for the first time.

The consideration of broadcasting and social work is different from the other papers in many respects and, along with the paper on iwi social services, a little tentative in its conclusions These are both new areas of work for me and it shows. In later editions the intention is to refine and develop the arguments involved.






Papers on Language

by
Peter Cleave

ISBN

978-1-877229-19-0

This collection of papers takes work from a variety of sources. The intention is to draw a fairly long bow.

There is some work on literacy which is nor about any language in particular. There is work on Maori grammar. And a paper on strategies for language retention. And there is recent work on literacy and oral communication in Aotearoa.

The transmission of an ethic through language and song is considered in another paper.

The Note on the two or three verb classes in Maori applies to the o an a categories and to the use of i and ki. They are short but hopefully important links which make sense, I think, of a range of questions that might come up.

There are also papers about voice and tone. There is even a paper about a song. These are offered in the hope that language might be considered in the broadest possible terms.










Rangahau pae iti kahurangi
Research in a small world of light and shade




Second Edition

Peter Cleave

ISBN
978-1-877229-23-7

Contents

1 Wahi Rangahau; Places of Inquiry 5
2 And on to the question... 11
3 Image and text 17
4 The critical scholars 34
5 Back to the house 41
6 Drama 47
7 What is being pursued? 51
8 Back to the image 56
9 Background to rangahau 63
10 Back to the whare again 75
11 Rangahau, ethics and social work education 78
12 Light, shade, action 88
Concluding remarks 102
Bibliography 106
Glossary 117