A quarter millennium since two worlds collided

All the UK hype around the Pacific this year is linked to the 250 year celebrations of Cook's first voyage around the Pacific. This includes the series Oceans Apart and Handmade Pacific on BBC4, that has been recently aired and stars members of my talented Rurutu family.
Cook left England in late August 1768, arriving in Tahiti on April 13th 1769 ( he then incidentally went on to "discover" Rurutu on August 13th 1769, with just a little help from his Tahitian interpreter-navigator Tupaia!). It seems like an appropriate moment to reflect on where history has taken both societies since then.
While we can know little of really how the Polynesians themselves experienced these first encounters, the accounts being predominantly European, it is fascinating to put yourself in the place of characters like Ahutoru, a Tahitian who returned to France with Bougainville, or Tupaia, Cook's Tahitian interpreter during the first voyage, and Omai (pictured here), a Tahitian who made it to England after Cook's second voyage, and the only one of the three who made it back to his islands - bringing livestock and a coat of armor, among other gifts (pictured right)!

The anniversary has also motivated several interesting exhibitions of Polynesian objects, many of which, much like our own ti'i A'a, are lingering in museum collections outside the Pacific. One such exhibition, called Oceania will be opening at the Royal Academy in London this week, and will be attended by the French Polynesian Minister of Culture among others! An occasion for Polynesians to reclaim their cultural identity, to make sense of all that was lost, forgotten and stolen over the intervening centuries. Today, after the far-reaching effects of introduced diseases, that literally decimated the populations of our islands, and the arrival of Christianity and the cultural upheaval that it brought, it is heart-warming to see the Polynesians rediscovering their roots, and moving forwards. The dynamism and innovation that we are seeing here in the world of contemporary art is simply thrilling. It's an exciting time to live in French Polynesia!

A momentous weekend

While I spent the weekend looking a bit like this, in Tahiti at the salon du tourisme, drumming up business, caught up in the usual social whirl..........our friends in Hawaii were hosting a Rurutu evening, to honor the trip and share Rurutu taro growing practices they learned, when they visited us back in July.... and to premier the short film they made about their experience and the traditional lifestyle here...

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, my cousin Michael married Amy, a beautiful wedding by all accounts, Aunty Sue and Uncle Dave were both looking very distinguished! Sad to have missed it but thankful for facebook! Wishing the happy couple a long and contented life together!
And if that's not enough I also just got confirmation that Viriamu will be coming soon to British screens as part of a series about the impact of first encounters in the Pacific! BBC4 September 17!

Talking about his cultural heritage, looking a bit like this!

Then just afterwards, his very talented mother will be starring in this series, showcasing Rurutu pandanus hat-weaving!

Looking a bit like this!

A veritable Rurutu bonanza on BBC4!!!

The end of the long holidays!

Yesterday it was back to school....
The kids were dutifully by the side of the road, ready and raring to go! Amai in his last year of kindergarten, Heimana in CM1 and Mato already in her second year of highschool in 5eme. It's gone real quick, but a lot has happened!

The guest house has been busy as ever, the whales arrived early this year and the season already seems to have been in swing for a while. I counted seven on my way to the store yesterday!



There was also the heiva to distract us with a couple of weeks of festivities. This is one of my favourite events, not as glam as the dancing, but worth a look! Starch weighing - heaviest taro/bananas/tapioca roots, in different categories!
There was Heimana's birthday lost in the middle of it all, along with the horse race and our Hawaiian group.

 The week of taro related and cultural exchanges were pretty intense, and Viriamu was in his element as the taro master! Here's hoping we'll make it over to visit them in a year or two, to see how it's done in Hawaii.

Mahie caused a storm by pouding taro, an activity exclusively reserved for Rurutu men.....those radical Hawaiian wahines.

 Then the rest was a blur of holiday rush and translating - Air Tahiti Nui celebrates its twentieth very soon, and boy do I know a lot about it all now!

So, here we are on the other side, looking forwards to an outing to Tahiti for our biannual salon.

A Polynesian taro saga

Taro is an important part of the lives of people here in Rurutu, you could argue that it's the foundation of our culture. Farming it definitely remains a living tradition. Viriamu's brother Meta supplies frozen taro to a supermarket in Tahiti, it earns him a modest living. I have blogged a fair bit about taro, but the subject is definitely going to be a recurring one!

We probably have the largest single expanse of taro field in French Polynesia, in our village Avera. It was being cultivated when Captain Cook quickly passed by Rurutu in 1769, and likely for a long time before that.
Last year, we were lucky enough to be featured in the Hana Hou, Hawaiian Airlines inflight magazine. Not only did we get a fabulous article in the magazine and great photos, but we also got to meet Shannon and Elyse, but now it is also bringing us a steady trickle of Hawaiian guests, interested in Rurutu and above all taro!  Turns out there are lots of kalo farmers in Hawaii, also keen to make connections with taro farmers here!


Next week we are privileged to welcome a group from Oahu, from the Ho'okua'aina project, seeking a cultural exchange and taro farming bonanza. They've chosen the perfect (if chilly) time of year, slap bang in the middle of the heiva festivities! It's going to be lots of fun!

Heimana goes to Tahiti

Just before the end of term Heimana went on a school outing to Tahiti for a primary schools choir shindig, there were 800 primary school pupils performing in Vairao, on Tahiti iti. It was quite a thing, and required special hats, dresses, even t-shirts for the event! We mothers had been ridden hard to take part in baking sales and all kinds. Heimana is maybe less adventuresome than her big sister (only maybe) but I think she enjoyed her first outing without her family, a little space to breathe away from her two sibs.

My beach

A moment of perfect stillness punctuated by the booming rumble of surf on the reef. The sun melts into the horizon, throwing rusty pink reflections at the coconut palms, shooting tendrils of vermillion, gold, neon pink and violet, that guild the sober clouds, creating a shadow-play in the sky. Framed by ironwoods, their delicate needle-like leaves softly shed, carpeting the white-sand underfoot. Solitary rocks jut from the glassy lagoon, like petulant beasts. A quiet peace reigns that never fails to uplift my spirit.

Brits are like buses!

Here in Rurutu English-speakers are few and far between, let alone Brits, but weirdly enough these last few weeks there’s been a dearth, just like London buses, you wait for ages then three show up at once! And so it was, between various film crews and a soul-searching Londoner, it was a great opportunity to speak some English, as well as to share some British humor (quite unlike French or Polynesian incidentally). I’m a big fan of self-exploration, meeting people from back home is always interesting, particularly here, it’s a reminder of where I’ve come from, but also how I’ve changed too. And I do marvel at the journey, a self-absorbed past-time I know, but I like where I am now. I’ve had helping hands along the way, I’ve always read lots and there’s a lot of wisdom out there to be gleaned from other amazing people that cross your path.

Quite by accident Elizabeth Gilbert’s Creative Living fell into my lap and it kept me amused, she’s quite an eccentric (of course who’s to call the kettle black), but her creative philosophy is spot on. As for me, I’m slowly embracing my creativity, which I’ve never fully given the space it deserves. Concerns about being frivolous and making a real contribution somewhere along the way. But here I am back where I started, after way too many years in further education, a cook and a writer, two vague dreams that I’d toyed with in high school, before putting them aside …. So, in some ways I may have come full circle, or maybe it’s more of a spiral.

Roller coaster

It’s been a roller-coaster ride since the end of March.

The hard drive of my poor suffering laptop finally packed in, leaving me high and dry, grieving the loss of non-backed up or inaccessible data. It’s not the first time I’ve lost data, and I only have myself to blame, but it’s still a traumatic experience. And I never learn! Anyway, now I have a nice new shiny computer, but the internet connection is so spectacularly slow here that I can’t install the updates or get to any of the data I had backed up! It’s tragicomedy, it happened several days before our tax returns were due! Oh yes, and the nearest hard disk recovery service is in NZ! So, once more, like island life in general, you have to figure out how to manage and make the best of it, and believe me, you can, you just need to trust in yourself. But that was just the start!

Two days after that I headed to Tahiti with my daughter, for the final of her orero competition. A moment rich in emotion, particularly for her! Of course, she was magnificent, but it was a tough few days, with highs and lows. Funnily enough she didn’t win, she came fourth out of four, having fluffed a few lines of her hugely long recitation, but the power of her presentation was electrifying, and she was interviewed and featured on the evening news! So, I like to think she got the public’s prize!

Straight after that we were taken to McDonald’s to celebrate (!), by her Tahitian language teacher, then a bit of commercial therapy (including buying a new laptop, for me). Then back to Rurutu lickety split, for the Easter hols, and our horse races the next day!

Predictably Viriamu’s horse won easily, no sign of the imported competition – a “white” horse (Rurutu horses are brown, yellow or black) retired from racing in Tahiti, as well his “uncle”, another racehorse from Tahiti, both no shows! Let’s try again in July. Anyway, we still sold three hundred plates of chicken and chips to cover costs, so that went fine.

One more year

Love is a homemade birthday cake, baked by my kids. Who cares about the extra year!

Another big birthday!

Quick 80th birthday wish to Uncle Dave, back in the UK, the second of the Claridge brothers to make it to fourscore! That's over 160 years of wisdom shared between you!

Back to Nature

The holiday long weekend, to mark the arrival of the gospel in French Polynesia, was an opportunity for us to kick back and relax - being as the guesthouse was empty and the sun was shining! Viriamu took the opportunity to take the kids out on the reef, gathering food, like when he was young. The kids loved it, though eating the shellfish, hermit crabs and seaweed feast was less to their liking. We topped it all off by car-camping up on the plateau (OK, it was hardly roughing it, but it made for a change and an excuse to build a campfire and toast marshmallows). All very wholesome family fun!

St.David's irises

Not a daffodil nor leek in sight, and only a few rather freezer-burnt lamb chops to be found in the local store, so St. David's day passed uncelebrated here in Rurutu, or almost, there were these rather lovely irises blooming, and, we broke out a bottle of Welsh mineral water, on sale in supermarkets in Tahiti!
Also, as always, I took a pause for thought about my homeland (enjoying exceptionally cold temperatures, blanketed in snow and ice), and what being Welsh still means to me, after more than a decade on the other side of the world.
Identity (cultural or otherwise) is a subject that I spend more and more time musing about at the moment, between the genealogical sagas here and the kid's school projects. It's funny to say, but I definitely identify with many aspects of  Polynesian culture these days. I have actually always felt that Polynesians and Welsh have a fair bit in common, Robert L Stevenson was struck by likenesses between the Scottish Celts and Marquesans, in his Tales of the South Pacific, I can't vouch for the Scots, but I often feel like the mindset here is a bit like small villages in Wales, even today. And the Polynesians have a spicy character that I identify with the Welsh, I am a great fan of Dylan Thomas, a great anglo-welsh poet, and if you've ever read the radio play Under Milk Wood, I like to think that I've found my own Polynesian Llareggub.

There we have valleys not islands, sheep not coconut palms, but the small town gossip and colorful characters abound!

Or maybe it's just that we are all really the same in the end.

Five years of Amai

 

A week in town

We were just in Tahiti for a week, coinciding with our twice annual tourism fair. It was a wet week, under torrential rain almost the whole time. For once I was not at all in need of a week in the "big city", having had a good dose of "civilisation" in NZ. The traffic, relentless rain and noise was wearing, particularly as I was on a training course for a few days, getting anywhere by 8am is a big hassle in Tahiti, welcome to gridlock! But it was interesting learning about the "fundamentals of management" from a large hotel manager, I guess it's never too late to learn, though it does feel a lot like we're being squeezed into the hotel bracket by our Association and the Ministry of Tourism. Yes, we need to be regulated, but it kind of strangles out the rustic charm, that I fell in love with personally, so part of me resists this professionalization, though it seems inevitable. If you want a hotel, there are hotels, but we are a guesthouse, and I'm happy with that, though I agree that there's something to be said for a well run guesthouse! Aside from the opportunity to meet our public at the fair and fill our rooms, it's always a chance to see a whole host of friends and connections, dropping by to pick up a few packets of Rurutu coffee or some homemade jam and honey from the garden! Particularly exciting was the chance to meet Cécile, a journalist for a large local French TV channel, who was with us back in March for the Fa'afaite expedition. She was here from Paris, to cover the FIFO (Oceanian Documentary Film Festival), which happily coincides with the tourism fair. The FIFO is a beautiful event exposing a huge diversity of Oceanian films and cutting edge issues in the Pacific, from Papuan deforestation, Samoan transvestites to Polynesian identity crises and cultural renaissance, as well as the political history of French Polynesia. She is now launching the idea for a documentary about A'a, the Rurutu ti'i, alongside a local production company, maybe a FIFO entry for the future. She has been to see the original in London and met with the curator Julie Adams, and is now keen to take it further. I'm excited by the buzz, there is also an article about the sculpture and us in the Tahitian women's magazines Fenua Orama. Another exciting development is the unveiling of a new island logo by our mayor's office, inspired by drawings made by the primary school, guess who has pride of place in the middle of the logo, yes it's A'a, a huge recognition of his significance for our island. There's hope yet that we can get him here someday!

 

The passing of a Rurutu legend

In early February, Rurutu lost one if its great ladies, Taaria Walker, known as Mamie Pare.
Born in 1930 she experienced a life of change, as a young girl she earned a scholarship to study in Tahiti, the journey being undertaken by schooner back then. She became the first qualified nurse from Rurutu. A pionner and striking beauty, she married for love at a time when arranged marriages were the norm, she was a charismatic and outspoken character, best known for having written a book about her life, and Rurutu legends more generally, her take on oral history causing outrage amongst the council of elders! I will also remember her dancing on the table in the local snack!