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Frank - Stories from the South
New Zealand
Приєднався 4 тра 2017
Frank, stories from the South for national audiences. A Christchurch based team lead by Gerard Smyth produces weekly stories which are publicly funded by NZ On Air. These are published on various mainstream New Zealand online outlets.
Tusiata Avia
Racist slurs and a tin of corned beef - how award-winning poet and performer Tusiata Avia came to be the voice of New Zealand Pasifika.
There’s a moment in Tusiata Avia’s hugely successful and darkly funny performance Wild Dogs Under My Skirt when a Samoan woman saws open a can of corned beef with a machete. “The reason corned beef is so popular on the islands,” she says, “is because it so closely resembles the taste of human flesh.”
There’s an intake of breath, then laughter.
The line refers to travel writer Paul Theroux’s 1992 book The Happy Isles of Oceania, in which he argues that the reason why the “former cannibals of Oceania” feasted on Spam (or, later, corned beef) was because it came nearest to the “porky taste of human flesh.”
It was an outrageous comment by anyone’s measure but for award winning poet and performer Avia, it was “the beginning”.
“I was writing about race and justice - and why wouldn’t I be?” says Avia, sitting in her childhood home in east Christchurch where she lives with her teenage daughter and elderly mother.
“It is part of me, and it’s part of my experience.”
Avia was born in 1966, the daughter of a Pālagi mother and Samoan father. The 1970s and ‘80s were a time of dawn raids, immigration checks, racist slurs and discriminatory job and housing practices.
As a child, says Avia, “It leaked right through my skin.”
She remembers standing before the bathroom mirror, patting her face with talcum powder to see what she would look like with white skin.
“There was nothing cool about being brown, particularly in my teenage years it was something that I tried to deny, which was nonsense because” - she passes an elegantly tattooed hand across her face - “I look like this.”
Avia began writing when she was just ten. In Year 8 she was awarded the school literary prize, but by 15 she had put writing aside. “I’d lived long enough by then to realise brown girls like me do not go on to become writers. It was a decision - I remember writing my final poem.”
She studied at the University of Canterbury, began teaching, then left on an extended overseas trip. Returning to New Zealand in 1999, she found “this big flowering of Pacific and Māori arts that I had completely missed out on. I suddenly thought, these are people like me, maybe I can do this too.”
She studied creative writing at Whitireia Polytechnic then at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University.
Wild Dogs Under My Skirt was premiered at the 2002 Dunedin Fringe Festival. Since then it has been performed nationally and internationally, first by Avia then by an ensemble of actors.
Her poetry and performance work since then has earned her a New Zealand Order of Merit, an Arts Foundation laureateship and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
In 2021, her collection The Savage Coloniser Book won the poetry prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In accepting the prize she read that poem: “250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand”.
It was funny, it was tough (“I’ve got my father’s / pig-hunting knife / in my fist”) and it was provocative.
As she wrote on a Substack blog, “Strong injustice demands strong words. Why should I play nice? What was I afraid of? Who was I going to offend? And what kind of people would be offended by such a poem?”
Several kinds, it seems, including ACT leader David Seymour, broadcaster Sean Plunket and a rabid pack of anonymous persecutors. There was hate mail; there was a death threat.
“It was scary. It left me feeling particularly vulnerable because I’m the mother of a 16-year-old girl and I look after my 90-year-old Mum.”
Her third book, Big Fat Brown Bitch, includes a response to the abuse: “Oh, that’s right: / this is real life and someone really does want me gone / an actual man, with an actual name, in my actual city // has threatened me and would prefer me to be silent or hurt or maybe even dead.”
Now, as her daughter Sepela performs the graceful moves of a traditional Samoan dance, she recognises a self-confidence foreign to her at that age.
“She has a different relationship with being Samoan than I did,” says Avia. “Also, the climate in this country for young brown kids - there’s some definite pride there, when there was really none that I can remember in 1981.”
She turns to her daughter. “You’re proud, eh?”
By Sally Blundell for Frank Film
Credits:
Producer/Director/Cameraman/Interviewer: Gerard Smyth
Writer/Researcher: Sally Blundell
Editor: Oliver Dawe
Researcher/Second Camera: Ellie Adams
Line Producer: Erina Ellis
Sound Design/Mix: Chris Sinclair
Production Manager: Jo Ffitch
Attributions:
'Wild dogs under my skirt' Auckland Arts Festival footage - courtesy of Benjamin Brooking, Popular.nz / Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival.
Ockham New Zealand Book Awards photos by Marcel Tromp
Ockham New Zealand Awards night footage - courtesy of Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
There’s a moment in Tusiata Avia’s hugely successful and darkly funny performance Wild Dogs Under My Skirt when a Samoan woman saws open a can of corned beef with a machete. “The reason corned beef is so popular on the islands,” she says, “is because it so closely resembles the taste of human flesh.”
There’s an intake of breath, then laughter.
The line refers to travel writer Paul Theroux’s 1992 book The Happy Isles of Oceania, in which he argues that the reason why the “former cannibals of Oceania” feasted on Spam (or, later, corned beef) was because it came nearest to the “porky taste of human flesh.”
It was an outrageous comment by anyone’s measure but for award winning poet and performer Avia, it was “the beginning”.
“I was writing about race and justice - and why wouldn’t I be?” says Avia, sitting in her childhood home in east Christchurch where she lives with her teenage daughter and elderly mother.
“It is part of me, and it’s part of my experience.”
Avia was born in 1966, the daughter of a Pālagi mother and Samoan father. The 1970s and ‘80s were a time of dawn raids, immigration checks, racist slurs and discriminatory job and housing practices.
As a child, says Avia, “It leaked right through my skin.”
She remembers standing before the bathroom mirror, patting her face with talcum powder to see what she would look like with white skin.
“There was nothing cool about being brown, particularly in my teenage years it was something that I tried to deny, which was nonsense because” - she passes an elegantly tattooed hand across her face - “I look like this.”
Avia began writing when she was just ten. In Year 8 she was awarded the school literary prize, but by 15 she had put writing aside. “I’d lived long enough by then to realise brown girls like me do not go on to become writers. It was a decision - I remember writing my final poem.”
She studied at the University of Canterbury, began teaching, then left on an extended overseas trip. Returning to New Zealand in 1999, she found “this big flowering of Pacific and Māori arts that I had completely missed out on. I suddenly thought, these are people like me, maybe I can do this too.”
She studied creative writing at Whitireia Polytechnic then at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University.
Wild Dogs Under My Skirt was premiered at the 2002 Dunedin Fringe Festival. Since then it has been performed nationally and internationally, first by Avia then by an ensemble of actors.
Her poetry and performance work since then has earned her a New Zealand Order of Merit, an Arts Foundation laureateship and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
In 2021, her collection The Savage Coloniser Book won the poetry prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In accepting the prize she read that poem: “250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand”.
It was funny, it was tough (“I’ve got my father’s / pig-hunting knife / in my fist”) and it was provocative.
As she wrote on a Substack blog, “Strong injustice demands strong words. Why should I play nice? What was I afraid of? Who was I going to offend? And what kind of people would be offended by such a poem?”
Several kinds, it seems, including ACT leader David Seymour, broadcaster Sean Plunket and a rabid pack of anonymous persecutors. There was hate mail; there was a death threat.
“It was scary. It left me feeling particularly vulnerable because I’m the mother of a 16-year-old girl and I look after my 90-year-old Mum.”
Her third book, Big Fat Brown Bitch, includes a response to the abuse: “Oh, that’s right: / this is real life and someone really does want me gone / an actual man, with an actual name, in my actual city // has threatened me and would prefer me to be silent or hurt or maybe even dead.”
Now, as her daughter Sepela performs the graceful moves of a traditional Samoan dance, she recognises a self-confidence foreign to her at that age.
“She has a different relationship with being Samoan than I did,” says Avia. “Also, the climate in this country for young brown kids - there’s some definite pride there, when there was really none that I can remember in 1981.”
She turns to her daughter. “You’re proud, eh?”
By Sally Blundell for Frank Film
Credits:
Producer/Director/Cameraman/Interviewer: Gerard Smyth
Writer/Researcher: Sally Blundell
Editor: Oliver Dawe
Researcher/Second Camera: Ellie Adams
Line Producer: Erina Ellis
Sound Design/Mix: Chris Sinclair
Production Manager: Jo Ffitch
Attributions:
'Wild dogs under my skirt' Auckland Arts Festival footage - courtesy of Benjamin Brooking, Popular.nz / Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival.
Ockham New Zealand Book Awards photos by Marcel Tromp
Ockham New Zealand Awards night footage - courtesy of Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
Переглядів: 7 341
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#shorts
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In Waitati, 15 minutes north of Ōtepoti Dunedin, a BMX is lodged in the branches of a cabbage tree. “A terrible accident,” explains pirate queen, Dunedin City councillor and mayoral hopeful Mandy Mayhem. “ET trying to get home.” Waitati is not your archetypal coastal settlement. Yes, it is small, with a population of about 400. It is seaside, with views overlooking Blueskin Bay. But it is anyth...
This racist pos?
According to University of Otago conservation biologist Professor Philip Seddon, it's prooven that as there doing with mammoths and other animals science plans to bring back the gene-based de-extinction efforts would be successful for the Haast's eagle, which has been extinct for centuries. Seddon says that species like the Haast's eagle would likely be maladapted to modern ecosystems, even if they were brought back as scientific curiosities.The Haast's eagle (Hieraaetus moorei) is the largest eagle ever known, with a wingspan of up to three meters and a weight of 13 kilograms. It was a powerful predator that hunted large New Zealand birds, including the moa, kererū, ducks, swans, geese, and rails. The eagle's extinction is likely due to humans overhunting its moa a similar bird to the ostrich and emu prey, and some suggest that a pair may have been killed as late as the 1860s... and as said the hasst and even it's prey the moa can even be brought back.
Funny as and so talented!
Mighty fine establishment
Size is growth in relation to the physical dementions of the environment, it has nothing to do with what one eats. Height and Weight(wing span and physical presence) is formed by the Nest, interior of the home(what ever tree, cave, or sidewalls). There is a possibility of a much larger bird alive today, if a place demanded its growth to fill that space. This means many tightly grouped=small and few far spaced=large, one of a kind from a never ending expanisveness could be 35 ft wingspan. Don't doubt generous reports, like the guy said, people in Europe did not belive the reports, well today there are limitations on cameras field of view, so continue to listen to 1st person reports. If there is an area off limits, or "sedated" uneducated locals in the dark, I bet there is a massive raptor, a big bird, a birdman condor there, think upper plateau and bald mt, where Giants walk today, birds never stop growing every single year of their life, they keep growing and growing, and growing. Peace.
I thought the bird's name was Frank
you can always put your meal up a couple more dollars. Then it gives your more options to add variety, People wont mind paying that, because you are giving them such a good home cooked healthy meal. absolutely amazing what you guys are doing,so much hard work goes into doing all of this.
Great work, Frank Films.
Spenta lot of recreation time there. As worked in Timaru in my younger days
God bless you brother🙏🏽
Seems to be the town with the most real history along that west coast. Enjoyable, thanks.
That watermelon analogy was spot on
Doesn't look that big to me 🤨🤷🏻♂️...
We saw him in a tiny hall in Island Bay, he is a fantastically generous authentic guy Love you Adam
Prison is a Holiday camp ....its not punishment its a Time out place .... Make the inmate pay fo there own food and clothing and rent etc...if you cant afford it ...its going to be a sad stay aint it 😂😢😂😂.
This is absolutely wonderful, i love it!
Baby boomers aren’t strong enough to face their demons. What I’ve seen only gen z and gen alpha are breaking the cycle and hauhake te matemate
A baby boomer resurrected the Māori reo
@@user-cv9cm6kz1i diamond in the rough but they didn’t fix everything. They’re buried now but the deamons still haunt us
Hone Heke buckled and re erected the flag pole. Get it straight. Even been to Kororāreka? And fyi they intimately knew every aspect of the natural/supernatural world and everything has whakapapa whether animate or inanimate. ‘Ko te kai a te rangatira he kōrero he kōrero he kōrero’ haere ki te kura bao. Dont even speak to Hone Heke bcuz your people wouldn’t bow down and thats the reason we were all (almost) conquered. There is no such thing as inanimate in te ao Māori, neither is there in “‘western’ science” so they say
World's largest eagle's Talon is seems smallest 😅,like anything
Is there a way to help with the planting ? Māuri ora! Nga mini Uncle Robyn!👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Live on the Peninsula in purau. For the last 10 years. Amazing video super awesome for everone with the planting of the trees.. and the land returning. Often pop over on the motorbike to port Levy and connect with the Māori Spirits who are still connected to the land. They still call me chieftain. Ib this life . Thanks for sharing frank
Te Rauparaha had already destroyed most of Ngai Tahu before 1840 - first Kaikoura, then Kaipoi and lastly Onawe. Few survived that. Funny he never ever mentions that fact.
You do realize there were hundreds of Ngāi Tahu people living in Otago, Southland, The West Coast, and other pā's around the bank's peninsula area such as rāpaki near lyttelton that were safe. As well as that, many of the people in Kaiapoi pā had moved to other places prior to Te Rauparaha's attack because they knew one was imminent.
Argh. Walter Mantell was "Commissioner for Extinguishing Native Titles".
Would love to help with the replanting - are there volunteer planting days?
I also need to add in the Wedge-Tailed Eagle. Another currently living giant raptor of Australia and New Guinea. Wingspans of 9ft and body lengths a little over 3ft are not uncommon for this species.
Take into consideration folks. Were talking about a bird that was anywhere between 3-4ft in length. Weighed about 40lbs and had a max wingspan of nearly 10ft. After 40yrs in the avian field dealing with everything from warblers to birds of prey. I can't say i ever came close to a bird of prey matching this raptor's size. But i can tell you one that exists to this day that would rival it's strength. That being the Harpy Eagle. When i traveled to South America i watched this eagle kill sloths and monkeys right off trees. When i went to Africa it's equivalent in strength was there being the Martial Eagle. These two are some of the strongest birds of prey we have living today. Far stronger than a Bald or Golden Eagle. Steller's Sea Eagles are also large raptors but are mainly fish eaters like Bald Eagles are. So this eagle they are talking about would have definitely ruled the skies if still alive today. Such a beautifully preserved specimen on display in this video.
And fun fact: Haast's Eagle had the largest increase in weight overall of any vertebrate animal over the course of its existence, likely owing to the size of its prey and the lack of competition from other predators, meaning it could eat as much as it wanted to.
My bro had a farm up magnet bay, a few issues and think his mum sold it to an added to this wonderful story
I hope future generations appreciate seeing tui, korimako and kererū ...
Ngā mihi Jim! Ngā mihi Robin! Ngā mihi nui! Rawe
Awesome
Awesome korero the understanding that you now know is a korero that many Maori have carried with us through intergenerational trauma. Finding out your whakapapa gave you an intrinsic sense of belonging to the whenua and indeed changed your life and outlook to involve yourself in your marae. Identity is important for all Maori to feel connected to their own iwi, hapu and whanau and why we link ourselves to maunga, moana, waka and marae.
Superb ❤ Ngā mihi nui. 🙏
This can only be good for everybody.
Amazing
So beautiful creatures ❤
Oh My God Rod you are pretty absolutey have No conception of how Water let alone all these wind solar and now huge Tesla batteries which will add to more Another thing is there are not enough special Ev mechanics for maintenance of EV vehicles How much mining will kill our ecosystems even more 🧐
Our Aotearoa nz country is being so Wooded by our Northern Hemisphere blind economy By By Shite happens but there are a small few who knows what truly lies ahead. The Great Simplication here we Welcome 🕊🌏❤️
Sorry Rod Carr but you are Green Energy on the greatest gullible extreme
We bloody well need to drastically Save our Farmers and be proactive on Not putting up these Wind and Solar farms for this shall add to such a Huge Wasteland of when these things are not usable after 5-8years China are pumping these out as they are the only ones who can produce do must in a short time span that They are cunning as these Green Energy products are shocking only lasting up to 5 years maximum 🧐
great job team, great to see New Zealands endemic species coming back
By the way our global economy is going to collapse a lot Sooner that our shady stock markets let alone global banks are covering up Highly recommend you for a bit of Hope and Preparation to watch Nate Hagens incredibly informative UA-cam podcast The Great Simplication with in-depth Petroleum geologist Art Berman and Professor of minerals metals and the so called blind Green Energy future Simon Michaux 😇🕊🌏
Bless you all We as a huge export global produce to the ever Hungry growing greed Economy of the World Is to Wake the F Up for our own population of our precious Aotearoa New Zealand I have been following Luke Gromen for he has done his historical research regarding Empires collapsing when there is not enough produce of food energies eg firewood before the Industrial Age As every 150years there ends up being an Empire Collapse because the Super powers of the Rich do not look far enough into the future to sustain All humans beings let alone our precious ecosystems Our Indigenous Tribes were the Gaia worshippers of her and all the sea air earth wind and fire of living in a Balance of Equality to survive 🕊🌏❤️
It is heartwarming to see that instead of our council fighting against sea level rise but to adapt to its future rebirth of our historic return of our Delta And so our city council is rejuvenating Ferrymead area for plants that are adaptable to Saltwater intrusion So this may involve because of our ever changing weather warming temperatures we must prepare for even possibly mangrove introduce to bring a more sustainable future Watch Andrew Millison’s Adaptation of how to change from waterways to more inundation of saltwater but also at times glacier North and South Pole melts Mire studies must be researched with urgency for our earths average temperature will exceed beyond 1.5degrees Celsius As James Hanson has researched with Data to show 🕊🌏🙏🏼
I so Love Lyttelton As I have such fond memories of when my ex hubby Mum and I used to fish off no 6 Wharf to catch untold Red Cod and never had any with sea lice let alone one poor Stingray which was massive A good hard workout for an hour till we cut the string to let it live another day Even still catching Cod till late warm summer evenings Get Shark n Tatey for a feed with our refreshments 🎣🕊🌊🌞🌖💖
The Haast's Eagle made the grave mistake of targeting small/young humans as prey. Would've been easy for the Maori to track the adults to the nests, kill the young/eggs and eventually hunt/trap the adults as well. That, along with the loss of the Moa, resulted in its swift extinction.
I........don't think that's what happened. At all.
love it, they should feel proud
I seen a bigger native new Zealand bird that needs protection asap the manu ariki its real and they are back they fly at night 20 ft wingspan the size of a bus I saw it about a year ago I swear its the truth I know were it is. help sos
I truly believe these maybe not these but more ancient larger ones living with early humans , I believe the wild ones killed early humans but also that the early humans took the eggs from the nest risking death if the mama bird came back and raised them for flight , they probably weaved a human carrying holster vest for these early dragon Relative of the dinosaur
joshua charles porter no judgment
Thank you.