Words and aroha for Tom Mulligan
In terms of a place to stand, for New Zealand’s Poets Laureate, there is no warmer invitation for them to feel at home than at Matahiwi marae near Clive in Hawkes Bay. It’s onto this marae that they have been welcomed since 2007 by kaumātua Tom Mulligan. And it is to Tom that Marty Smith addresses her fond acknowledgement in this recent essay.
Marty Smith, teacher, and poet has played a key role in shaping the special weekends where the Laureate, their family and friends, National Library staff, John and Wendy Buck of Te Mātā Estate Winery, artist Jacob Scott, students from local schools and others are welcomed onto Matahiwi. The weekend during which the Laureate receives their own tokotoko created by Jacob.
For Tom weaves threads of just such a weekend with a ‘party’ given to acknowledge Tom’s role in the Laureate story. For this, Marty wrote a poem for Tom, had it printed and housed. To say more will give the show away. The marvellous photographs of Matahiwi and Tom are by Florence Charvin. Words and aroha by Marty Smith.
Writing on behalf of the National Library, it is a special pleasure to share Marty’s story with you.
— Peter Ireland
For Tom
Part I — Tom
There’s a cold wind cutting in from the South, and Tom’s got his woolly Magpies hat down over his ears, jacket collar up. The urupa in behind him, he turns and pays respect to the dead, turns back to the living, raises his arm, and sweeps it out wide to Te Mata, then up to Maui Pōtiki, high and proud on top of the tekoteko, braced against Te Ika, straining on the rope that holds heaven to earth.
John’s jacket is zipped right up, he’s tucked in beside Jacob, listening, soaking everything in. On Jacob’s knees, the tokotoko is waiting, wrapped in cloth, and everyone glances away and back at it, trying to make out the shape. (What is it? Hone’s one was a wine thief). Peter’s sitting by John, head gravely tilted, listening to Tom. His team from Wellington are over with the manuhiri, in the wind a little. Beside them, the student performers are staunch, sitting up straight, trying not to shiver in thin shirts and blazers. The poets on the paepae are directly out of the southerly, warmly enfolded.
It’s always like this (except for it’s mostly sunny, and sometimes boiling) when we turn out to manaaki the new Poet Laureate at Matahiwi. John and Tom, right in the centre. Jacob, who can call him Uncle Tom, shapes every tokotoko true to the nature of its poet; each is famous in its own right. These days, Peter Ireland and the National Library run the events, and I help, and God help us if we programme anything when a Magpies game is on. Once, our night-time celebration was a real corker, jazz singers sang in a low light in front of autumn-gold grapevines draped over wineboxes from Te Mata Estate, people sipped John’s first-class wines and sighed at lines from our finest poets; John and Tom went to the rugby.
Tom needs his stick to walk now, and he tells Peter he’s going to step back. I think of Tom and John, settled in their seats, listening to the poets on the paepae, everything they’ve worked for coming alive. It’s like Maui himself above them, hauling up the patterns of words.
And I think, I’ll make Tom a poem of his own.
A picture comes of Peter and me with Tom in his office, making plans, peaceful in the space where he turns ideas. We’re quiet and patient, and wait, and the silence turns into leaves stirring in the gentle breeze. Jacob says Tom makes space for others to let their ideas unfold; space that stretches so they can build pictures like building blocks on top of their idea. He says Tom’s especially good at underpinning foundations.
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| Tom Mulligan and Marty Smith. Marty is reading Tom this story. They are laughing at the line about John and Tom going to the rugby. Photo Florence Charvin. |
Part II — Hairy process
So, the poem has chosen itself. The words that spring into shape are all single syllables with short stops, just as I think: Tom’s poem should be hand printed.
Neville did say to me once that I could come and use his press. Neville’s a sort of cousin, he’s a Smith, and we have the same great-grandparents. He has a collection of printing presses, loves them: trays of print, blocks, the works. He learned to set type and he printed with hand presses when he started in the trade, and he never gave up loving it. After he retired from Brebner Print, he moved some of his printing gear into a lock-up, along with his collection of art deco cars, which he polishes to a high shine and parks precisely. There are shelves and shelves of old valve radios in a small room to the side.
Neville says he’ll help me make Tom’s poem, he’s glad to. He knows Tom through the Magpies and Hawkes Bay Rugby Union.
It’s a hairy process. You have to pick the letters out from the print tray one at a time and put them into the composing stick back to front and upside down. They have a nick in the front, and if all the nicks line up, they’re right. The trouble is you can’t find them in the print tray by looking at them: very little looks like what it is. The ‘p’s look like ’b’s, and they’re right beside each other in the tray, and that’s just the start of it. You have to follow a chart to pick the right one out and some of them are bastard ones – crooked, or italics, or with a worn bit. Neville throws them straight on the floor. I’m cack-handed and he gets impatient with me for not remembering to keep the pressure on the letters with my thumb, because if they fall out, it’s a disaster. The letters are tiny and hard to read and only an expert – Neville – could put them back, and it would take ages. And he’s wanting to go back to working on the car he’s fixing. When he’s (fairly) sure I’m not going to drop them, he goes off to glue something inside it. I’m nosing around in his trays and trays of letters, and he comes to show me the printer’s blocks. Pictures. Now we’re talking. He patiently pulls out one drawer after another, and in the Sports drawer, he finds a silver fern. Yes, for the Magpies. So, I hunt through the trays, sliding them in and out. Some of them are Victorian. He finds me the rugby block, and I find a tūī in ‘Birds’. I want a tūī, my gardening tūī walks on the ground beside me.
I get right down to the second to the last line and then I run into the amateur’s mistake: there are too many letters in my line to fit into the composing stick. It only has twenty-four spaces. I have to change the line. And change it quickly because Neville is waiting to put it into the chase and lock it in safely (before I drop it and lose the morning’s work and create an afternoon’s work for him) and get off to his afternoon.
And I’m panic rearranging the lines in my head while I’m arranging the letters and hoping for the best.
‘You won’t change anything, will you? Because that’s it, it’s all done.’
‘No,’ I say, ‘I won’t.’
Then later that night I have a cold horror because I forgot to put my name on it.
Part III — Plate glass photos
And all this is happening the weekend after the Christchurch Mosque shootings, after I’d been to Blenheim to see Mum, about to shift out of her home and into a ‘home’. We’d sorted through dozens of Aunty’s plate glass photos from the early 1900s. We’d held them to the light to see her grandfather and father, each on the handle of a cross-saw, heads only half as high as the trunk of the tree beside them. Silver collodion plates of bullock trains and packhorses; lilies in glass bottles; eleven cats on a ladder, all sitting still.
Mum’s the only person left alive who saw them moving, who knows what their voices sound like. She never heard her grandmother speak Māori in the house. She got a hiding for it at school, Mum says, and only spoke with her brother in the garden, when he came down from Taranaki to visit. Her garden was all flax, no flowers. Mum used to hide in the flax bushes and listen. Miriam Ellen, her fierce cheekbones in silver light against the flowered wallpaper, frozen in glass by her daughter.
I like to think they helped me make that last line.
Part IV — Last say to the home side
I run my poem by Hinemoana Baker, who lives in Berlin now. We’ve been writing together for twenty years, and she knows Tom. She came to Matahiwi as one of Ian Wedde’s poets, and sang a waiata to Ian, and to Maui, who is of the sea, as she is. Hinemoana says it’s right that the last word should be Tom, because on most marae, the home side have the last say.
I’m listening to the memorial service on the car radio the next morning, then I go back to the print shop, and I’m thinking, I just straight up have to say to Neville that I’m sorry, but the name really has to be on there, for Tom. He doesn’t turn a hair, and he lets me change two more words around, too.
‘Are you sure?’, he asks, looking at me hard.
He screws it back into the chase, and then he puts it in its place in the press. It’s an electric press and it’s only a small job, so he has to paint the ink on by hand.
‘Can I have two colours?’
‘Are you sure?’
I say I want the text to be green for the marae, and the tūī and the fern to be black.
He just looks at me. He doesn’t say that it will take him another two hours, he
just patiently picks out the tūī and the fern and screws the case back, puts it in its place in the press, and paints the green ink onto the roller.
‘Stand back,’ he says, ‘You don’t want to get hit by moving parts.’
Then he pushes the industrial button and the printer whirrs into a mass of moving parts and makes some printing noises and a poem flies out. It says, birds burst out pells and whistles.
Humming, he puts the chase back on the bench, and picks out the p with his printer’s tweezers and I hurry to the tray to get a b, like a nurse getting things for the surgeon.
He picks out a bastard o that doesn’t make a complete circle and drops it on the floor. I scurry to the tray for a round o. When he’s satisfied, he prints the green. He washes every speck of green off the roller and wipes it clean. He unscrews the chase again and puts back the tūī and the fern. He paints the roller with black ink, and then he prints the black. Then he washes off the roller and wipes it down.
‘That’s it,’ he says, ‘You put the letters away.’
And I undo my poem, letter by letter. I carry each individual letter back to the tray and check each one against the chart and the other letters in the tray before I put it in. I’m deadly serious. I’m thrilled by the ephemeral nature of printing. There are the copies for Tom, and that’s it. No going back.
Neville’s gluing carpet inside the car when I go to find him. He’s pleased. He keeps a copy for the Printers Association.
‘Tom’s a good guy,’ he says.
Part V — Little whare
So, I have my beautiful poems, and now I want a box for them. I mean to paint it the colour of Matahiwi but I can’t find my stash of boxes after the Christmas clear up, and I can’t buy one small enough. I don’t want the poems slopping around. I think of my friend, Andy Macfarlane, who makes exquisite things with wood: delicate and full of grace. He’s an artist whose art is private and prolific. I take him a rough print of the poem for size.
‘What do you think of my new head?’ he says, gesturing towards a massive standing head, staring out into the rain as if out to sea at Easter Island. It’s made all out of small pieces of off-cut wood so that it looks also like one of the giant president heads, cut from granite, staring out over America. The head has his characteristic punk earring, made from bolts and rings. All Andy’s heads have a grave bearing, with comic dashes of levity. This one’s staring at the back porch, the summer table with the canvas chairs covered with wood of all lengths, a vice, saws and clamps and all manner of tools; containers of small pieces of wood of various thicknesses. I look at these and think about sides and edges for what I think of as the arms.
‘What are you thinking of doing?’
I show him the poem so he can see the size.
‘I want it to hold all the poems. I want it to be able to stand up so you can read the poem, and take them out easily, if he wants to give one away, and for them not to fall out. I’d like it to look like a little whare, and have arms, and the little part at the top for the head. I can’t remember the names.’
‘Like a pataka?’ he says. And he rolls a smoke, while he considers it. ‘What about like that little shrine at Fernhill?’
I think about that blue and white Madonna behind the plate glass and the pure pitch of the roof pointing to the blue sky.
‘That would be the right feel, but it still has to look like a whare, eh? And I want to paint it green.’
We start picking through the wood. He takes some fine small flat pieces and says, ‘What about this for the sides?’
‘Perfect.’
‘Do you want them upright like this? Thick here? How wide would you like the bottom?’
‘Only wide enough to hold them in.’
He squints through his smoke, head back, while he considers the bits of wood.
‘We could make a little lip, and put a little wedge at the back, so they’re tilted. Then they won’t fall out.’
We wander along the table, picking up bits of wood. He has a small container of fine pieces, just like the bits which slide between each letter-print line to hold it in place and create the white space between lines. He starts pulling pieces out.
‘Which parts would you like coloured?’
‘The arms, definitely. And maybe somewhere inside, do you reckon?’
‘What do you think of this colour?’
He has a steely-grey green.
‘I need it to be the green of Matahiwi,’ I say.
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| Matahiwi marae Te Matau-a-Māui. Photo Florence Charvin. |
Part VI — Green of Matahiwi
I’ve studied the colour in photos and in the background of the video of Selina’s celebration, (so colourful, it’s changing the green). I go looking in my test pots — I have about twenty different greens — and mix the colour. I mix the colour in my deep memory of all the times I’ve gazed at Maui, listening to Tom. I have to cover the colour with clingfilm to take to Andy, it dries at least two shades lighter.
‘It’s this green.’
‘Put it on here,’ he says, and gives me a brush. He has an upturned white bucket.
‘On there,’ he says, ‘You can see the colour.’
I do a bit of a smear and it looks too emerald, too vivid on top of pure white. He mixes a bit of the grey-green in. It’s close, but I mix a bit more of my green in, and then make a proper mix. I reckon I’ve got it near enough, and I don’t want to dull it.
‘Do you want me to paint it?’
‘No, I’m going to put it together with little pegs to see how it looks, and get it fitted together, then I’ll paint it and glue it. I’ll give you a ring when it’s done.’
About a week later, he puts a note in my letter box to tell me it’s done. Andy eschews cell phones and we don’t have a land line any more.
I know it will be great. I’m thinking of the eerie, delicate, funny crown he made for Oberon in the school play. Wire bent delicately as twigs, nuts and berries (literally nuts and bolts) hanging like delicate charms. I’m thinking of his pop-art paintings of the queen, a gold sun like a halo behind, both mocking and elevating her beautiful coronation self. I’m thinking of the time something sad happened to Henry at school, and Andy made him a tiny perfect grand piano out of balsa wood to take with him when he left home to go to med school, that he still takes from house to house with him.
And when I see it, I really don’t know what to say. It makes me feel like crying. The little whare sits delicate and calm, the poem sitting inside, looking out. The walls, with the layers of slightly different woods, like a real home. There are always surprises – I’m not expecting the fingers at the end of the maihi to be there, or those perfect circular shapes. Later he tells me he made them by holding them down with a board while he drilled half holes through.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ I say, ‘Tom will love it.’
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| Poem Tom Mulligan by Marty Smith. Photo Marty Smith. |
Part VII — So much aroha
Peter organises a special occasion for Tom, and it’s not only the kaikaranga, bending down to shake leaves, who wear black. Maui’s eye glows white under the knot of his hair, the wind wisps streaks across a very blue sky.
We’re in the wharekai, under the murals Jacob made years ago with his art students. They tell the story of work, rows and rows of stone-fruit trees for Watties; long lines of fat chops for the works at Whakatū, closed-down for years. The site is just across the creek from where Tom is seated, to the side of the honour roll of soldiers who died in the war; some, four or five sons are on the end wall, alive and glowing as he fights the fish. The line of his frown and the perfect curves of the waves make me think, Jacob did that himself.
The space around Tom is warm; peaceful and full. He listens carefully to John telling the story of their past. Peter speaks, and John leans back in his chair, absorbed, hand against his cheek. Jacob stands, clears his throat, and walks ceremonially to the table, bearing back something wrapped. (What is it?) Everyone cranes forward. The tokotoko comes clear: a simple spiral, rich in colour like rimu, and smooth, and solid. It’s grounded by a round knob on top, to fit into Tom’s hand. Tom is overcome, and Jacob, speaking, is close to tears.
I’m completely undone when I read Tom his poem, and he seems stunned. I talk about Neville, and Andy, and the wood, and the Aunties murmur, ‘So much aroha’. When I kiss Tom, his whānau stands and sings, and everyone joins till the room fills and swells and I’m not the only one crying.
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| Tom Mulligan. Photo Florence Charvin. |
Marty Smith biography
Marty Smith’s Horse with hat was a finalist in the Poetry Award in the 2014 NZ Post Book Awards, and won the Jesse Mackay award for Best First Book of Poetry. She is writing about the people on the Hastings racecourse with the help of an arts grant from Creative New Zealand.
Marty helps Tom and the community of Matahiwi as MC for the poetry readings and performances at the inauguration of the Poet Laureate. She helps Peter and the National Library as MC for Poets Night Out, the evening celebration. Big shout out to her mate, Carla Crosbie, and the team at HB Readers and Writers, who run a beautiful event, every time.
Rosetta Lopa, Me, Anastasia Sirila and Tiresa Foma'i.
St Joseph's poetry cushions
Anne, Selina, Liz, and the Celebration Board
Ladies' Litera-Tea holding the Matua Tokotoko
