Last night my friend and comrade Alistair Hulett and I did the last of ten gigs in New Zealand.  We spent two weeks traversing the country, driving thousands of miles, spending time here and there in New Zealand's largest cities (relatively speaking) and some of its smallest towns.  What follows are some of my experiences in and impressions of this lovely country just north of Antarctica.

Alistair and I were picked up at Auckland airport by the booking agent who had organized our tour, Gill, who had taken care of every detail of our time in the country.  She handed us each our own copy of our itineraries, directions to each venue, directions to each house at which we were being billeted, and so on.  Timing was tight to get from the airport to our first gig, and our mild-mannered booking agent took us to that one herself, speeding the whole way through the countryside.

As in the US, national elections had just taken place days before we arrived.  Unlike in the US, the more rightward-leaning party had won the most seats.  As in the US, however, the victorious National Party was one of two main parties, both of which support neoliberal economic policies.  It was, in fact, under a Labor Party government that the dismantling of New Zealand's social democracy began.  It has been a typical process of privatizing major industries that may have had need of improvement, but that have only become less functional and more expensive under their new corporate owners, to the extent that some of them have actually recently been sold back to the state.  Faced with a choice between the "center-left" party that initiated this disaster in the first place and the "center-right" party that supported the process, many voters went for the latter.

Speeding through the countryside outside Auckland, we indeed went through a park that looked like it was right out of Lord of the Rings.  From my two weeks driving up and down the coasts and inland areas of both the north and south islands, however, I found places like this beautiful park to be the rare exception to the rule.  The rule, I discovered, is that of the world's most cultivated crop:  grass.  The vast majority of New Zealand's once-majestic old-growth forests have long ago been cleared.  What remains in most of the country of these native forests are tiny stands of third-generation native trees, surrounded by green, rolling hills as far as the eye can see.

The decimation of New Zealand's forests, though, resulted in nothing less than a stunningly beautiful country, a nation of sheep, cows, and grass-covered hills, interrupted by the occasional little town, and the even more occasional little city.  As a result, almost the entire country smells like shit.  Having partially grown up in the country myself, and having had many positive experiences in farming communities around the world, I have nothing but a positive association with the scent of cow and sheep manure, but the singular domination of this particular odor over an entire nation was something new to me.  There are so many farm animals in New Zealand (far more than the human population, I'm told), that even many of the cities smell like, um, farms.  Asking around a bit, I determined unequivocally that Kiwis themselves seem to have universally lost the ability to smell manure, much like your average resident of Los Angeles has long ago stopped noticing that their every breath tastes like car exhaust.

Our first gig was in one of many picturesque farming towns, Katikati.  Many of the residents of the smaller towns we played in were elderly dairy farmers.  As in much of the world, the countryside of New Zealand is becoming increasingly depopulated, as more and more people, especially younger people, were moving to the cities.  I was told that many of the farmers in Katikati who were loyal participants of the monthly Folk Club in town were the ones who had just voted the National Party into power.  While there were not many CD sales among the dairy farmers, though, no one ever walked out of a show or anything like that, no matter how much I was haranguing them with leftwing rhetoric.

Alistair and I didn't have a concrete plan in mind for how we were going to do our shows, who was going to go first, etc., but upon seeing our first audience Alistair posited the notion that he should go first.  Alistair is a brilliant interpreter of old folk songs from around the world, as well as a great songwriter himself.  Although his very pro-labor, socialist politics may have made some of the more conservative elements of our audiences uncomfortable, he was always able to win them over with his expert finger-picking, his endearing Glasgow accent and his haunting interpretation of songs like "The Wife of Usher's Well," a song about the plague, a subject which everybody can agree upon.

Alistair's theory was that he would soften up the audiences with his more mild version of leftwing folk music, and I could then more easily go for the jugular with my comparatively frenetic and cuss-filled original songs about burning down Wal-Mart and massacring Halliburton board members.  It seemed the theory worked well, and we stuck to that format for every gig from then on.

Along with the Tories there were some wonderful folks in those little towns, including folks who had known Alistair when he was a wee lad.  Ally was dragged to little New Zealand as a teenager from his home in the big city of Glasgow, Scotland in the late 60's, moving from a city full of sex, drugs and rock & roll to the town of Christchurch, where women were still wearing white hats and white gloves and saying nice things about the Queen.  But he quickly discovered the budding folk music scene of New Zealand, and it discovered him.  Among the people we visited with all over NZ were veritable musicologists.  The folks we stayed with in Katikati were not only fine musicians in their own right, but had a massive collection of music, including hundreds of hours of shows they had recorded in folk clubs since the 60's.

When we left Katikati we took with us a copy of a concert Alistair did when he was 17, along with a CD that included a very moving song about the last terrorist attack committed on New Zealand soil, when French military commandos blew up Greenpeace's ship, the Rainbow Warrior, while it was docked in the harbor, killing a Portuguese photographer who was on board.  And even among the Tories you will be hard-pressed to find anyone in New Zealand who approves of nuclear weapons, nuclear testing, Bush, the war in Iraq, or French commandos committing terrorist attacks in the harbor.  So there's actually lots of common ground to work with.

Racism, however, seems to be alive and well in New Zealand.  New Zealand is apparently the most recent land mass to be colonized by humans.  Or by mammals of any kind, for that matter.  The only critters on the islands for a long, long time were birds.  With no mammalian or other types of predators, some of the birds evolved into flightless landlubbers, nesting on the ground next to the big trees.  Anyway, the Maori people came to New Zealand from the South Pacific islands around 700 years ago, I hear.  The English settled in New Zealand several hundred years later and have been treating the Maori like shit ever since.

It's a familiar story from all the settler countries, such as my own.  Farms, crops and houses burned by settlers, war after war fought against the Maori, systematic discrimination.  The Maori were farming people, not hunter-gatherers, so the "Terra Nullius" argument was particularly hard to make, though it was often made anyway, and their land was systematically taken away from them.  The land they were left with was not the best land in the country (though far from the arid deserts bequeathed to the Native Americans, since New Zealand doesn't have any deserts).  Today Maori make up 15% of the population of the country, and 60% of the prison population.  Most Maori today live in cities.

There's been lots of reconciliation over the past several decades.  In the Land Courts some Maori victories have been won.  The Maori language is spoken commonly and is now taught in schools, including Maori-only immersion schools for little white kids along with the Maori kids.  It's easy to find white New Zealanders who are very happy about these developments, but it's about as easy to find white New Zealanders who resent what's being "given" to the Maori.  The attitude towards Maori coming from many older whites seems identical to the attitude towards Native Americans you can easily find in most reservation border towns in the US.  They don't want to work, they just want handouts, they don't know how to manage their money when they have it, and so on.  Once we even ran into a guy who started out a sentence with "I'm not a racist, but..."  (In fairness, though, it should be pointed out that that dude was a Dutch-speaker from South Africa, there amongst the dairy farmers by the beautiful volcanic mountain that the Maori call Taranaki, which many of the settlers insist on calling Mount Egmont.)

It didn't take long to meet at least two distinct groups of militants, who know where they stand in the politics of New Zealand and in the world at large.  The English-speaking left is well-connected through the internet (at least in the countries that can afford such luxuries as computers), and our arrival in New Zealand was anticipated.

We got to Auckland early because I wanted to check out the big city.  I was billeted with some very nice folks who run the Auckland Folk Festival as well as a folk club called the Bunker, where Ally and I were to play the next day.  The Bunker is the world's only folk club in an old military bunker on the side of a volcano.  The panoramic view, during the day or night, from that hill in the middle of Devonport, a short ferry ride from downtown Auckland, is breathtaking.  People got to the show early to go hiking around the mountain, and at the end of the show it's time for star-gazing.

The day before the show at the Bunker I was sitting in a cafe in swanky Devonport amongst all the other tourists, when I got a phone call.  It was a man named Peter, a friend of Ciaron O'Reilly, who had turned him on to my music and told him I'd be coming to Auckland.  Ciaron is an inspiring and lovable human being who has spent time in prison on several continents, originally from Australia, currently living in Ireland.  So I knew Peter would be a good egg, and he sure is.

I met Peter at the ferry dock and we spent the evening talking, walking around the hills of Devonport, drinking coffee, and then moving on to beer -- speaking of coffee, incidentally, New Zealand is espresso heaven.  If a small town has only one business in it, it is likely to be a cafe that serves fantastic espresso drinks and great, fresh food.  And in the cities you can't walk a block without running into another top-notch espresso bar.  Anyway, turns out Peter is a Franciscan priest in his late 60's.  He started out conservative, but grew into the radical he is today.

A couple months ago Peter and two cohorts cut through the fence surrounding the NSA spy base in the town of Waihopai and attacked it with a sickle, allegedly doing close to a million dollars worth of damage.  As with Plowshares activists around the world, they then waited to be discovered and arrested.  As is also often the case in these situations, it took the authorities a half hour to notice what had happened.

Peter is originally from Australia, and is working on a book about reconciliation between the Aboriginals and the settlers.  He's been involved with this struggle with the world's poor and oppressed for most of his adult life.  To make things more interesting, his own family history also includes men who in the past committed less than charitable acts towards the indigenous inhabitants of Australia.

But Peter and his co-conspirators are not the only terrorists in New Zealand.  The show at the Bunker the next night included not only a fine array of older folk music aficionados, but a group of several dozen young anarchists.  Sitting there in the audience were not one, but two people both facing potential prison time for their acts of conscience.  With Peter the charges are fairly explicit -- he took a sickle to an NSA spy base.  With Omar it's a bit murkier.

Omar was one of 18 people including the well-known Maori activist Tame Iti who were arrested last October and charged under an anti-terror law.  It seems the terrorism charges have been dropped because the government didn't have enough on them for these charges to hold up in court, but they're still being charged with all sorts of other things, including illegal possession of firearms.  Illegal possession of firearms is apparently a fairly common charge among the Tuhoe tribe which Tame Iti is from.  The Tuhoe never signed a treaty with New Zealand and generally have little regard for New Zealand's laws, since they regard themselves as sovereign.  Most of the 18 people charged are Maori, but Omar is one of many non-Maori supporters in places like Auckland and Wellington also charged.

The police did a real SWAT-style James Bond kind of thing, breaking down doors and terrifying children, setting up roadblocks and stopping cars on the streets, etc.  In Wellington we had another wonderful turnout of young anarchists and old folkies, and I had the privilege of meeting several more of New Zealand's finest criminals.  I think at the show in Wellington there were three people facing charges and potential jail time.  Wellington is a much smaller city than Auckland, but has a more happening activist scene, and a thriving downtown full of various sorts of bohemians, centered around Cuba Street.  Some of the best and most commonly-found coffee sold at the cafes is roasted by a company called Havana.  In the heart of downtown the anarchists have an infoshop where people can use computers and read radical literature (though apparently it has to relocate to a less ideal location soon).  Alistair and I stayed in an anarchist household a few blocks from Cuba Street, complete with living quarters for residents, a room full of bunk beds for visitors, a big practice room for bands, a well-stocked library, meeting rooms, etc.

After a too-brief stay in Wellington and a beautiful ferry ride from the north to the south island, we headed towards Christchurch.  I had gotten an email from Father Peter's lawyer, Moana.  I spent several nights based out of Moana's place there, staying with her, her husband Brizzie and their two adorable daughters.  Moana was born in New Zealand, grew up in Australia, and as a young woman went off to the US to become a terrorist.  Along with Ciaron O'Reilly and two folks from the Little Flower Catholic Worker community in Virginia, Bill and Sue, who I have seen often at SOA protests and elsewhere in the southeastern US, Moana took a sledgehammer to a missile silo and went to prison for a year.  Once she got out of prison she was deported back to the country of her birth, where she had never spent much time.  Being acclimatized to Australia's heat, Moana goes around Christchurch in a down jacket when most New Zealanders, such as her husband, are wearing shorts.

In Christchurch Moana became a lawyer in order to do legal work for activists and poor people.  She refuses to take clients who have much money, figuring they won't have a problem finding another lawyer.  She does her work in a small, windowless office a couple blocks from the court house, where you can often see a line of Maori out the door, waiting to see if they'll be doing more time in New Zealand's crowded prisons.

Inevitably, our tour involved lots of zigzagging around both islands.  It also involved getting hit by a drunk driver who managed to total her own car, the car ahead of us (who we were following back to our motel) and our rental car, but nevermind.

After our first visit to Christchurch we headed south to the town of Dunedin, which is the old Scottish word for Edinburgh.  The next day we had no gig, but a long drive.  In one day we drove across the entirety of the South Island, from Dunedin to Takaka, all the way in the north of the island.  We took the inland route through the mountains, past the hot springs resorts.  At some points gasoline became hard to find, but espresso was always plentiful.  Alistair introduced me to some great Dylan albums I hadn't gotten around to listening to, and the complete works of Gram Parsons, a psychedelic country singer who I have grown to admire almost as much as Alistair does.  He died tragically at the age of 27, but not before recording two of the best psychedelic country albums ever made, with Emmylou Harris.  I had never heard vocal duets quite as beautiful as those sung by Gram and Emmylou.

Takaka is one of a number of small towns full of hippies in New Zealand.  Many of the hippies are local, others are passing through from the US or Germany or wherever.  I'm sure there are dairy farmers mixed in amongst them as well.  Going to Takaka is quite a commitment, much like going to Bolinas, California.  You have to drive on extremely windy roads over a mountain for 30 miles or so in order to get to this remote village by the sea.  A few miles up the road from Takaka, all by itself along the main road is a place called the Mussel Inn.

Sixteen years ago Andrew and Jane built this place, which is one of the most stunning wooden buildings I have ever seen, as is the house they live in a hundred feet back into the woods from the Inn.  Everything in these structures seems to have been made by hand by them.  Not just the interlocking logs and beams that make up the walls, but the window frames, the tables, even the carved wooden toilet seats.  They also brew possibly the best beer I've ever had, a tremendous variety of different types of beer, as well as homemade nonalcoholic drinks such as lemonade and ginger beer.  And the mussel chowder is fantastic.  (As are the espresso drinks.)  Along with all that they have live music many nights of the week, and a vast outdoor area full of trees, benches, tables and a firepit for everybody to gather around.  Needless to say, it's a very popular spot among hippie backpackers and tourists of all sorts.

After spending two nights and a day relaxing at the Mussel Inn and exploring Takaka we had a little gig in the small coastal city of Nelson nearby.  We then headed back to Christchurch for the final show of our tour of New Zealand.  It was as well-attended as the packed houses we had in Auckland and Wellington, except at this show the anarchists could all fit around one table.  The rest of the crowd were folk music fans, most of whom had stories to tell about Alistair's time in Christchurch as a teenage folkie doing traditional Scottish ballads and Bob Dylan songs, before he moved to Australia to form the successful folk-punk band, Roaring Jack.  More on Australia in the next installment...