Start planning for the coolest festival in town
Art Deco Festival recovery from the Covid lockdown era continues with next week's launch of ticket sales for what they're calling Napier's coolest boutique festival.
Sales for the July 18-20 Winter Deco Weekend – two years after the mid-year event came to the party when Cyclone Gabrielle forced the cancellation
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Newsroom
2 days ago
- Newsroom
Jacinda, glossed over
There are gaps, big gaps, in the new memoir by Jacinda Ardern. It is not a book which gives the full political context of her rise and fall, or at least her rise and exit. There's not as much as might be expected on the Covid years. No mention at all of her 2020 election opponent Judith Collins, with very little on other Nats. Bare references to the Covid-era economic borrowing and spending, or of the suite of second-term political quicksands like Three Waters that dragged her government and Ardern personally down. It is a global book, not local. New Zealand politics in the abstract. Yet she opens up in many areas, and avoids the traps of political autobiographies in which the great and good name drop, show off, reinvent history and attack their opponents. There's minimal retailing of conversations with world leaders. She shares observations about Prince William from close quarters, warms to Angela Merkel, reveals her message on the phone to Donald Trump after the mosque terror attacks – for the US (and by implication the President) to show sympathy and love to 'all Muslims' – and recalls Malcolm Turnbull helping her at an Apec security check. No indulgences with Trudeau or Xi or Boris, no Bolger-style 'As I was telling the President'. For someone so studied, prepared and self-aware, it's remarkable how often Ardern just blurted out her most famous lines. 'Let's Do This', the election slogan that helped Labour win power in 2017, was at first a throwaway line on one of her Instagram posts. 'Kindness' came out as the essence of what she wanted her Government to exhibit, in a conversation with John Campbell as she drove to Government House to be sworn in as Prime Minister in 2017. 'They Are Us', the nation's unifying cry after the Christchurch mosque massacres in 2019, was something she said as she downloaded to her friend Grant Robertson in a moment of dread and despair, when about to address the nation. He told her, 'Just say that.' The origins of the phrases are gently revealed among the scores of anecdotes and insights in A Different Kind of Power. In each instance she appears surprised at herself, a 'chronic overthinker' who has realtime discoveries of the mot juste, of the historic. 'Kindness,' she muses after recalling the Campbell conversation. 'It is a child's word, in a way. Simple. And yet it encompassed everything that had left an imprint on me.' The book also peels back the deeper origins of her ability, on the spot, to capture a mood, to distil her purpose and look to inspire – and the origins of her senses of compassion and social justice. It leans heavily on Ardern's personal formation and challenges. It is a different kind of memoir. And that will make it stand out among the reminiscences and revelations of New Zealand political leaders. She writes at some length about growing up in Te Aroha, Murupara and Morrinsville, about her family, and about her life in the Mormon church. The family memories are powerful: The primary school-aged Jacinda coming across her father Ross, the police sergeant in Murupara, surrounded by menacing men 'in leather pants and jackets' outside his station, and being told 'Keep walking Jacinda', unable to help. Her mother Laurel's mental breakdown in the same forestry town. Murupara was tough. Poverty, struggle, gangs, unfairness. Ardern writes that years later, when asked when she first became political, she realised it was there in that central North Island community. 'I became political because I lived in Murupara.' Then in an ordered, chronological way A Different Kind of Power traverses high school, knocking on doors for the church, university, initial political awakenings, OE and the pull of national politics. In every phase there is a building of the picture of a woman who is at once sensitive to a fault, image-conscious, self-conscious, media-conscious and trying to live by her own conscience. Open and closed Ardern can write. No surprises there, with the talent for communicating, messaging and indentifying with her audiences that she showed us over 14 years in politics. She professes herself, in the acknowledgements, to have been a 'speechwriter' since the age of 13, and implies the book benefited hugely from Ali Benjamin who she credits with being 'teacher, editor and coach all rolled into one'. Yet a ghost didn't write this; Ardern's voice is obvious from the opening dedication 'to the criers, worriers and huggers' to the final words. Memoir writing is thinking, lived experience, revelation and anticipation of what the reader might want answered. There was always going to be a mountain of material to sift through. Ardern's answer is to be relentlessly open, personally, and largely subdued and non-controversial politically. In the opening scene as she awaits a pregnancy test result in a friend's bathroom she wonders about the day's coalition talks and her feeling the equivalent of imposter syndrome. 'We were never meant to win. And I was never meant to be leader.' The book's title A Different Kind of Power might betray a hint of a self-help text, a motivational Ted talk or a 'how to win elections and influence history' lecture. It's much more than that. It offers up Jacinda Ardern as a lifelong doubter who through conviction, talent, political accidents and then empathy, rose to international acclaim. What's missing from this book is almost as interesting as what it covers. For example, she doesn't indulge the haters, giving a complete swerve to that daft, ubiquitous, corrosive series of online and social media rumours about her husband Clarke. Her story is not a platform to even scores – not many of them, anyway. The book is clearly for an audience extending beyond these shores, so the detail of domestic politics is relatively sparse. Don Brash, on the other side of politics, is harshly dismissed, and David Cunliffe, on her own, qualifies for the strongest and most detailed dressing down. Ardern plainly has no time for the man who famously declared he was sorry for being a man. There's a tantalising window into Labour's caucus room after Cunliffe's historic defeat in 2014. 'By convention what is said in a caucus room stays in the caucus room, and it's a convention I will always follow,' she writes, nobly but disappointingly limiting herself to describing and paraphrasing tears and anger, fury and despair. Ardern the party leader won two elections from two. In A Different Kind of Power, it's not exactly 'losers get off the stage', but her book describes John Key, the Prime Minister for the first eight years of her time in Parliament in a perfunctory paragraph. It gives his successor Bill English part of one line and a mention about the campaign debates, and ignores her 2020 opponent Judith Collins entirely. The yawning question That year, 2020, and the epoch-defining Covid deaths and lockdowns that followed into 2021, are peculiarly consigned to very late in the book, taking their chronological place from 280 pages in. For the haters who will want to pore over her justifications for the pandemic policies and their grievances, the book will disappoint. Ardern threads accounts of Level 3 crisis decisions at the Beehive alongside home bubble experiences with husband Clarke, daughter Neve and mum Laurel. These brief, fascinating two chapters on the Covid years give a glancing view into a Beehive in the time of crisis. 'It's rare that you can draw a direct line between a politician's decision and whether someone lived or died,' Ardern writes. 'But this seemed to be one of them.' Fitting the minimalist recounting of the Covid days, Sir Ashley Bloomfield rates a one-sentence cameo. Ardern reflects on the later parliamentary protest not so much as a personal or political condemnation as being a systemic lesson: 'Whatever had brought the protesters to Parliament, by the end, it was clear that is was a place and institution they didn't believe in anymore.' Years on, the ex-PM who is now a world away at Harvard, asks herself the yawning question. Does she have regrets about the Covid decisions and years? 'Yes, I think about regret,' she writes, but 'that word regret contains so much certainty. Regret says you know precisely what you would have done differently … We don't get to see the counterfactual, the outcome of the decisions we didn't make. The lives that might have been lost. One thing I am certain of is that I would want things to have been different. I would want a world where we saved lives and we brought everyone with us. Perhaps that is the difference between regret and remorse.' Or the difference between the perfect and the optimal. Resignation and new life If the book's Covid-era brevity seems a little short-changing, it is likely deliberate. After all, A Different Kind of Power is about being able to rise, in spite of your doubts or fears, to the occasion of running the country or handling a crisis – not about the detail of actually running the country or the crisis itself. Its difference is in viewing empathy and kindness, hugs, tears and compassion as political virtues in a world that judges them vices. Ardern is astonished when a social media poster at the time of the Whakaari White island disaster claimed she went to Whakatāne just so she could be photographed hugging people. And that makes her even more determined. 'The post bothered me more than I wanted to admit,' she writes, and then tells of meeting a female ambulance officer who'd helped on the day, the woman hugging her, with the cameras clicking. 'I knew this would only feed my critics, the ones who were cynical about empathy, who thought that everything was somehow a show. That's fine, I thought as I hugged her tight in return. I would rather be criticised than stop being human.' She outlines in the final brief chapters how that criticism, the cynicism, the always-on-alert responsibility of her job, helped convince her to resign. There's the story of a mystery woman sidling up to her at an airport bathroom, pressing in and hissing 'Thank you for ruining the country'. There's Ardern's fear upon being told she needed a scan for a lump in her breast and wondering 'perhaps I could leave' office, a feeling that didn't leave her despite the risk of cancer being ruled out. There are two instances of snapping at or about people – calling David Seymour an arrogant prick and pushing hard against a journalist for asking a sexist question at a press conference with the Finnish PM. And there's Ardern suggesting to her chief of staff that she worried, in 2023 at the start of an election year, she might have become a lightning rod for attack, and could damage Labour's chances of winning and of its policies enduring. And, in that most ordinary of family occurrences, young Neve asks why her mum needs to Work. So. Much. As the book rushes to a close, the announcement of her resignation, the political and public reaction and the accession of Chris Hipkins as Prime Minister to lead Labour forward are largely glossed over. That's a fail, maybe resulting from an American editor scrawling 'who, what, who cares?' in the margins and deleting. There's nothing on The Wedding, and just a mention of moving to Boston, with nothing of the new life. More importantly, also absent are all the issues of political (mis)management beyond Covid – Three Waters, ministerial conduct, law and order failures, stubborn child poverty and emergency housing – that rose up inexorably in Ardern's second term. Remember, Labour burned more political capital in that term – from an outright MMP majority to 27 percent and defeat – than probably any government other than the Fourth Labour Government of 1987-90. But A Different Kind of Power doesn't dwell on the negative or even acknowledge it. Right at the end, Ardern summarises her role-model message to any young woman doubting her right to be in a position or place. Embrace your sensitivity and empathy. 'In fact, all of the traits that you believe are your flaws will come to be your strengths.' That might well be true for Ardern, or for an individual. It's not so for a government. A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, $59.99) is available in bookstores nationwide. ReadingRoom has devoted all week to coverage of the book. Monday: experts in the book trade predict it will fly off the shelves. Tuesday: a review by Steve Braunias. Wednesday: a review by Janet Wilson.
NZ Herald
30-05-2025
- NZ Herald
Start planning for the coolest festival in town
Art Deco Festival recovery from the Covid lockdown era continues with next week's launch of ticket sales for what they're calling Napier's coolest boutique festival. Sales for the July 18-20 Winter Deco Weekend – two years after the mid-year event came to the party when Cyclone Gabrielle forced the cancellation
The Spinoff
27-05-2025
- The Spinoff
‘Kōkā-made magic': Diary of a Storylines schools tour
Claire Mabey recounts her first time travelling with Storylines, an organisation that tours writers to schools. Twenty-five schools. 2081 students. 1129 kilometres. No onion, no garlic, no gluten, no prawns, no cats. We're an allergic lot, the eight of us on the Storylines Tairāwhiti tour 2025. For years I'd heard about how the Storylines Children's Literature Charitable Trust gathers a bunch of children's writers into a van and tours them around a specific region, to visit multiple schools a day for five days straight. The kaupapa of these packed roadies is 'to inspire children and young adults to enjoy the magic of books and reading, especially reading books created for them by New Zealand writers and illustrators.' Storylines' Tairāwhiti tour 2025 is Apirana Taylor (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Ngāti Porou and Ngāti Ruanui), Moira Wairama, Maria Gill, Melanie Koster, illustrator Rebecca 'Bex' Gibbs (Rongowhakaata) and me. Anne Dickson is our driver, and Rosemary Tisdall is our wrangler. For five days we travel together across Tairāwhiti where pools of flood water still glisten under the sun and school fields are boggy with Cyclone Gabrielle 's long and destructive tail. Day One: Te Wharau School, Kaiti School, Elgin School, Riverdale School, Gisborne Boys' High School, Rere School After a coffee stop ($4 for a flat white) we drop Api and Moira to Te Wharau School (it's the first time Storylines has made kura kaupapa connections and Api and Moira – writers and storytellers of vast talent and experience in both te reo Māori and English – mostly visit those) while the rest of us travel on to Kaiti. Kaiti School is humming. Stunning murals, lots of gardens. A mihi whakatau welcomes us in and from there the four of us are led to different classrooms. 'You're with the zany teacher,' I'm told. The classroom is alive with artwork that covers the walls. The cover of my novel is up on the whiteboard. The kids are sitting on the mat and I'm ushered into a comfy chair at the front of the room. All the small faces are focussed so intently I'm almost overwhelmed. 'Mōrena kōkā Claire.' I learn here that the word 'kōkā' is like 'whaea'. I will love hearing it for the next five days. I show the kids some of Margaret Mahy's picture books, copies I've had since I was their age (six) – The Boy with Two Shadows, and Jam – that inspired me so much. The kids lean in, point at the illustrations. I tell them about how my last name used to confuse me – that I didn't know it was different to the word 'maybe' and they laugh. We talk about how words can be slippery fish. One tiny girl stands up and reads me her story about Māui slowing the sun and it's terrific – so clear. We applaud her. The 'zany' teacher tells me how every day they have 'office time' – she puts on music to help get in the zone and the kids can draw or write. There's kōkā-made magic in this room. When it's time for me to go the kids sing a waiata and I am proudly gifted a huge bottle of water and bombarded with hugs. Riverdale School is next. A dip in my stamina is a signal of what's to come. You have to keep dragging up the energy: every class is different and deserving of your best. Over time I come to find that the energy comes from the eyes. The kids looking at you just like you looked at the adults who landed in front of your class as if from outer space, bearing news of another planet. After our talks in the staff room, Maria and I make instant coffee and eat cookies while the principal tells us that in this area life can be tough and they work hard to make school a safe place. She's grateful their school lunch contract is with the YMCA who consistently deliver good food. Leftovers go home with the kids. Our last stop is Rere School. It's beautiful, around 30 kids on the roll, up in the hills – we're given great big Granny Smith apples fresh from the principal's tree. They have a superb school library with old hardbacks of Mahy's novels. We do a group presentation – the first time we get to see what we each do. We're all different – Melanie brings out instruments and helps the kids create a poem inspired by sound; Bex draws Simba from The Lion King on the whiteboard and blows their minds; Maria tells true stories about animals who served in the wars; and I talk about how stories have made me. Afterward some of the kids eagerly show us the comic book they've made together. It's so good. They're so proud. Day two: Makaraka School, Te Kura o Muriwai, St Joseph's School, Te Kura Tuatahi o te Wairoa, Wairoa College, Frasertown School, Te Kura o Waikaremoana; public event at HB Williams Memorial Library We are split up. Melanie and I go to Makaraka School and marvel at their astonishing library. There must be hundreds of picture books. We do a joint presentation using AV for the first time (I learn, quickly, how to chromecast) and the kids ask a lot of questions: a good sign, I'm learning. Anne Dickson is our van driver. She and our Hertz rental van eat the kilometres with such ease while Rosemary Tisdall keeps us on schedule. They're such safe hands I don't bother to read the spreadsheet but let myself be driven into the day's activities like a rolling stone. St Joseph's is a lovely school in Wairoa, a seaside town about an hour out of Gisborne. All of the buildings are lemon yellow. I have another instant coffee, more kai, and sit in the staff room and hear a story about the local vape shop that also sells sex toys. I do two sessions, one after the other. A talk about reading and stories with the young ones, and a worldbuilding workshop with the year 7-8s. It's the best workshop I've done: the kids have such great ideas and are so respectful of each other's thoughts. I can see them all writing their ideas down. I have no idea how far this lesson will go in their lives but I do get asked if I'll be back tomorrow. Storylines have scheduled us to do a public talk at the HB Williams Library. Katarina is the librarian who has organised it and she's got all sorts of snacks ready. A handful of people show up and we each talk about how we came to be writers before answering questions. There's a reporter there from the Gisborne Herald. She takes a photo and says maybe the article will be up by Friday. I sleep like a stone. Day Three: Ngātapa School, Te Karaka Area School, Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Whatatutu, Matawai School, Mōtū School Rosemary warns that Wednesday is the hardest. When you can't bear to repeat yourself again, when your energy is on the wane. But I love this day. We all go to Ngātapa School where there are 13 kids. We each talk for five minutes and it's wonderful to finally see Moira and Api in action. Api weaves magic with taonga pūoro, a flute he was given when he toured with an indigenous artist from America, and just two words, 'manu rōreka'. Moira is like a circus master: keeping the little faces entranced. One little boy shows me his stories about Crabby and even at age six he's got a way with sentences. After that we split up again. Melanie and I journey to weka country – Mōtū School has seven kids, and three are off sick. We are given sausage rolls and tomato sauce and sandwiches with no crusts for lunch. The kids talk about the weka, how annoying they are. We tell them those weka tales would make great stories. I leave with a handful of feijoas from a box going free by the front door. On the drive back we pick up Api and Moira and they tell us they've had the best time. Api has a new story about being distracted mid-poem by the smell of pūhā and pork bones on the boil. Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Whatatutu sounds idyllic – no school bells, working on their own time, their own way. We go to Thai Sunshine for dinner and the woman who serves us remembers all our orders – allergies and all – without writing it down. The food is so good and we're in such good spirits we vow to go back. Day four: Whangara School, Tolaga Area Bay, Makarika School, Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Te Waiū o Ngāti Porou After admiring ourselves on the front page of the Gisborne Herald, we drive to Whangara School. It's picturesque: sparkling sea all the way until we ascend and climb to Whale Rider country. I have a lame urge to tell Witi Ihimaera where we're going. It was his novel that showed me it first. The school is a picture of colour and trees and there's Paikea and the whale painted and carved. I love the gumboots outside the classroom and the poi hung up with the school bags. Rosemary stays with us while Anne drives Api and Moira to Tolaga Bay. Melanie and I are in the historic part of Whangara School. Small and wooden like a treehouse. They're gorgeous kids from age five to around nine. One older boy has a mind for dark stories and loves Stranger Things and Goosebumps: great taste, I tell him. After that we head to Tolaga Bay to pick up Api and Moira and go to Tokomaru Bay for Paua Pies. Api is starving and eats two. I go and visit the secondhand shop over the road and pat Pip the fox terrier. Bex buys bone earrings. Te Puea Springs is glistening and glassy as we pass. We discuss swans: how I hate them. And geese. Bex talks about picking asparagus. Bex knows a lot of things and we all agree she'd be an asset on any pub quiz team. At some point we talk about immune systems. We cover a lot of conversational ground in the van which is an excellent distraction from car sickness. I've lost count of the number of kārearea we've spied flying up from roadkill or above fields. We drop Api and Moira to Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Te Waiū o Ngāti Porou and the rest of us go on to Makarika, which has a roll of about 38 kids. It's on this stretch of road we see the worst of the flood damage. Massive rocks tossed into a wide open gash in the land: steel reinforcements rippled like paper. Makarika is bathed in sunlight. There's a kitchen in the middle of the school building with recipes for tomato relish and banana muffins written on a huge whiteboard. Bex leaves cute little illustrations beside them. We plate up the kai (roast chicken, buns, salad, school-made tomato relish) that's been prepared for us and sit in the sun. The kids have lunch delivered in paper containers: delicious looking mac and cheese. There's a huge box of fruit too, from the fruit in schools programme: we're encouraged to tuck into as there's much of it. Perfect little Jazz apples and tart mandarins. The session is a group presentation and it's one of my favourites. The kids are attentive and offer back their own stories to us; and a waiata to close. On the drive back to Gisborne and back to Thai Sunshine, Api tells us about living in Tokomaru Bay, his mother, and stories of the powerful wāhine Māori of this land and how their mana extended far. He and Moira talk about Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira and Ngoingoi Pewhairangi and how their work was instrumental in revitalising te reo Māori. I stupidly remark that 'Tolaga' doesn't sound like kupu Māori and Api says god knows why this place is called that. The real name is 'Uawa'. The drive goes fast. Day five – Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Ngā Uri a Māui, Gisborne Girls' High School, Waerenga-o-Kuri School Last day already. We check out of Pacific Bay Motel (lovely, central spot, highly recommend it) and drive by the protestors to give them the food we've over-bought before Anne delivers us to our various final destinations. Api and Moira to Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Ngā Uri a Māui; Maria to Gisborne Girls' High School; and Melanie, Bex and I to Waerenga-o-Kuri which is up in the hills and has magnificent views and plenty of weka. I give a presentation to the senior kids (about 13 of them) and it feels like my best. Finally got the full swing of it. There's a super keen boy in the front and he's bursting with questions. He emboldens the rest and I get the best questions of the tour so far. 'Are you the hero of your own story?''What books inspired you?' 'You're pretty.' At the airport it's weird. Too soon. We swap books. Flights are delayed. We all leave Api there and suddenly I have so many more questions to ask him. He has so many stories. We only skimmed the surface of the times he spent in a writing group with Keri Hulme, Rowley Habib, Patricia Grace. We just got started and now it's over. Afterword Certain kids stand out. The 'office time' artists at Kaiti; The Stranger Things fan at Whangara; the keen-as kid at Waerenga-o-Kuri; the St Joseph's worldbuilders; the Mōtū weka stories. Lots of others. Teachers make a school: everywhere we went kōkā were creating atmospheres of safety, resilience, manaakitanga, nourishment, play, creativity and respect. It's hard to know the impact of a 45-minute visit on a child. But the impact on us, as writers, is something like passing energy forward and getting a new wave of energy back. We write for these kids because we write for the kids in us. It's like a strange, ever-turning circuit between the writers before, the writers now, the writers ahead. The writers who came before us. Kāterina Te Heikōkō Mataira and Ngoingoi Pewhairangi; Margaret Mahy, Patricia Grace, Rowley Habib. They're there with us all the time in our conversation; the ones who inspired us. School libraries. Every school we went to had a library. They're essential. If you want kids to read, give them access to books. Eyes.
