Posts by Joe Wylie
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Glitter (or those edible silver ball things)
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Cecelia,
Quintessential back country North Island NZ
Thanks Cecelia, though never having been through there before I found it really distinctive. It's the area where Vincent Ward's Vigil was filmed, with Alun Bollinger's gorgeous cinematography.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Danielle,
Got to be Japanese, very Osamu Tezuka. Love those frosty antlers.
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Hard News: Music: In before Christmas, in reply to Hebe,
the song he wrote called Beating Hearts about Aztecs and sacrifices.
Hey maybe it's a genre.
I always liked Robyn Hitchcock's Mexican God:
Cruel, magnificent, roasting your people
I am secure at the end of your rod
Cut out my heart and it flies to the ceiling
Time will destroy you like a Mexican god -
Technically Summer.
On the so-called Forgotten World Highway, Taranaki, about ten days ago. -
Window shopping in Kawakawa.
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This is Lake Papaitonga, one of the only surviving patches of lowland forest in Manawatu/Horowhenua. The picture was taken on December 5. I hadn't been there in more than 20 years, and it was a shock to see what was once an uninterrupted sheet of water turned to mudflats. According to DOC's info, the cause is irrigation for agriculture. As far as I'm aware there's no coherent plan to save or restore this beautiful and historic spot.
The only other surviving dune lake in the area, the larger Lake Horowhenua, has long since been stripped of its surrounding forest and drastically lowered to release land for dairying. It now has permanently visible mudflats. To use Islander's words, it's close to becoming a 'stinking desert'.
From Rod McDonald's Te Hekenga (1929):
I recollect an occasion, when I was about 15 years old, when a young Englishman, travelling for his health, came up from Wellington, and, as was usual with all visitors to the district in those days, stayed at our place at the lake, remaining for some weeks.
It was during the winter, and the Tararuas were covered with snow half-way down their sides, when one day I took him to the hill called Te Maai. to see the lake from what I considered the best angle. It was one of the not infrequent winter mornings which we get on this coast, when the sun after a heavy frost, is as warm as in summer time, and the air like wine. From where we stood we could see the whole of the lake, save where the bush sweeping round the face of Raia te Karaka on our left, cut off the arm running northward to Poroutawhao.
With scarce a ripple on its surface to dim the reflections of the fleecy clouds floating overhead, the lake lay clasped in the emerald arms of the bush which surrounded it on every side save immediately about where we stood. Mile after mile the bush stretched across the flat on which the town of Levin now stands, and swept up the mountain-side to the relief of the white snow-cap. Straight and tall the timber grew to the water’s edge, fringed with flax and nodding manuka, and over the bush, flashing their white breasts as they circled and wheeled in the sunshine, pigeons flew literally in thousands, singly drifting from tree to tree, rising in flocks of half a hundred or so, with a whirring of wings plainly to be heard across the calm waters; circling round in a wide sweep with characteristic rise and dip of flight, skimming the crystal-clear surface of the lake as they passed over, to rise and sweep back over the bush and settle on some other tree which caught their errant fancy. No other sound was in the air, nor sight of life was visible, save where the smoke curled slowly upwards from the stockaded pa of Raia te Karaka. Across at Te Hou and Kouturoa, some Maoris called musically one to another: in front of us was only the lake, the unspoiled bush, and the mountains beyond, and the young Englishman—he was only in the twenties, and dying of consumption—lay there in the sunshine and gazed on it for a very long time.
“I have been all over the world, boy.” he said, “and nowhere, I think, does it hold anything so beautiful as your Horowhenua.”
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Capture: The Castle, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Last week. Ellerslie.
That'll be the real Ellerslie then, not the Chchch garden show fake.
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Capture: The Castle, in reply to Steve Barnes,
My loss Steve :-(
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Interior, Te Kao Ratana church.
