Posts by Lilith __
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Kereru are trick-flyers. I've seen them soar upward so steeply they stall, plummet a few metres, then soar casually onto a branch.
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Duck Mums are like human Mums: most do a great job, others not. Caring for a tribe of ducklings is demanding, and some ducks will have 2 clutches in a season. Sometimes they just seem to get tired. Eggs and ducklings are preyed on by many creatures including cats, rats, and other birds. Predation and mischance mean only the minority reach adulthood. Lost or orphaned ducklings are sometimes chased away by other ducks, and sometimes adopted. It’s a complex world out there.
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The house I grew up in was the house my Dad built. Mum raised the 6 of us while he slowly demolished the original dwelling and raised the new one. He spent a year on the foundations, evenings after his day job and weekends when he wasn’t doing volunteer work for our local orchestra or helping his friends build their houses.
Dad died when I was a toddler, leaving us a meticulously handcrafted building to live in. I know his perfectionism irked my mother, but every little bit of our house was made by him, including the plumbing, wiring, drains, and built-in joinery.The house is still there, still looking fine and strong, as far as I can tell from the road. My family hasn’t lived there since I was 18, when my Mum was getting frail and needed a smaller house in a more convenient location.
When my parents bought that piece of land it was in the semi-rural margin of Christchurch, surrounded with market gardens and sheep farms. We had about 1/3 acre of mature trees, lawns and shrubs, no houses overlooking us, and paddocks and fields of flowers over which to roam. A bloody long walk to school, too, but even that was a kind of privilege.
When Mum put up the For Sale sign I was shocked that the house Dad had made and the garden we’d all played in had a monetary value. I knew the move made sense (and I was in the process of leaving home anyway), but not being able to come home to that place was a deep loss.
Truth was though, the neighbourhood was becoming built-up and suburban. Our house is now surrounded on all sides by other houses on small sections, and a new side-road cuts in just behind the garage. Although the building is still there, the place I knew is almost unrecognisable.
I’ve lived in many other houses since then, from very short-term student flats to long-term rentals with long-term best friends, to mostly-peaceful co-existence with assorted strangers who I sometimes liked and sometimes didn’t, to buying a house with the man I thought was my life-partner.
Until last year I always lived in Christchurch. Well you know how that went. The city I knew so intimately, in which I’d had almost all my life-experiences, good, bad, and indifferent…isn’t there anymore. I know the community persists, and the physical components will coalesce again, but I feel profoundly dislocated.
I now live on a stretch of Otago coastline where one of my sisters has lived for many years. It’s wild and beautiful (and cold, quite often). I have family here, and we brought Mum down to a local rest home. My great solace here (apart from my wonderful family) has been looking at the sea and walking on the beach, which I’ve known for decades. The beach changes shape from year to year, the sand washed out by storms and washed in by calm weather, a little less here and a little more there; sandbars and lagoons come and go.
Last June when South Dunedin was flooded, the sea surged into our dunes in a way it never has before. Since June the beach is steeply-sloping, the waves are more dangerous, and every high tide takes a little more from the dunes. Grasses and trees continue to topple into the sea. I look at the low-lying houses and roads and bridges, and wonder about the future.
I’ve been glad of this online community, this place right here. Russell and the people he’s gathered have been a fixed point when other constants have been lacking. Where even is here? A dynamically-created virtual page stored on a server in another country that we call up from whatever home, workplace, or transit lounge we happen to inhabit at that moment.
Whatever happens here next, thanks everybody, it’s been great.
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Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to James Littlewood*,
Can one argue for Being Anything You Want
Except that currently if you have a vagina, or identify as female, you can't be anything you want. Hence the quota, which seeks to counteract myriad forms of gender-discrimination by holding a proportionate number of places for women. Yes, it's rather a crude tool: obviously some women suffer greater barriers and disincentives than others. But I think it's the best we can do in the society we have.
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Up Front: How I Learned to Stop Worrying…, in reply to despud,
There was a fairly recent time when the top 5 or so positions in NZ politics were all held by women.
We can expect that every post might be filled by a woman about 50% of the time. That is what gender equality means.
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Great post.
Back in the 1990s I heard Marilyn Waring give a public lecture on why Parliament should have a gender quota: otherwise it wasn’t representative democracy. She was seeking to have the matter examined under Human Rights legislation. Unfortunately I can’t find an online reference to which piece of legislation it was.
I did find this Waring quote from this year, though:
It’s time for a new Select Committee Inquiry. Maybe it could spark patriarchal interest if every issue was subject to a market based opportunity cost assessment – just what does male violence cost the economy each year? Inequality is expensive; social injustice is not a saving – we have to pay for in the long run. The Commission on the Status of Women moving to a 2 year as opposed to an annual event – it’s apparently too much of a burden on nation states to have to assess the situation regarding female human rights annually.
Forty years of feminist activism and there are issues with no progress at all – violence against women, the recognition of unpaid work; where we are going backwards – numbers of women in parliament, numbers of women appointed to Government Boards and Commissions; and a systemic failure to provide leadership on all human rights issues. It’s an interesting day when I can conclude, from evidence, that there were greater and more female human rights legislative changes and changes in resourcing under Muldoon than there have ever been under Key. Two generations later a parliament still dominated by white middle class middle aged men needs to hear the truths of the ongoing exploitation of and discrimination against the women of New Zealand. So on International Women’s Day in 2015 I have a message for the Prime Minister: Get some guts and join the right side – but this time in your own back yard. I bet you can’t.
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Thank you, Claudia.
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Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to ,
Making a joke of deafness? That’s a really shitty thing to do. There was a deaf MP in the House, and she walked out. Show some respect.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Mary Meldrum,
Maybe the others in that thread might reflect on their own comments
Like the two moderators who told her to stop?
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Let me then appeal to you on behalf of your children.
No, I won't let you. Where the fuck do you get off?