Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

Round here, we don’t just break the news, we make it. Actually, make that: round here, we don’t just break the news.

I made the front page again over the weekend, but you won’t have read about it. This paper was printed locally, and only ran to five copies. It was a one-off edition – the first, and possibly only -- of The Family News, rushed into print by the eight-year-old after a hilarious accident in the back yard involving a downhill slope, an old wooden wagon with a faulty axle, and his younger brother.

History will know it as The Breaking Trolley Incedent [sic].

The funniest bit wasn’t the thump as the rear axle parted company from the trolley and the younger brother introduced himself to the ground. Nor was it the look of mixed horror and delight on the face of the older brother as he realized he’d pulled off in real life the sort of gravity-confirming spectacle previously seen only in Tom and Jerry cartoons.

It wasn’t even the tabloid style “interview” I was subsequently subjected to by the trolley-puller turned reporter (“So, when you said you heard a thump, would you say it was more of a huge splintering crashing thump? Because that would be way more interesting for my readers...”).

I gave young William de Worde the beady eye and the lecture on journalistic ethics, but he was unmoved. “Look, honestly, which would you rather read? A boring old thump, or a huge splintering crashing thump?” Fair point, although I would never feed quotes to a witness, myself. (I would, however, do whatever it took to smuggle the phrase “axle rose” into the headline.)

No, the funniest bit was shortly after that, when the younger brother -- unharmed in the huge splintering crash, by the way, not even a scratch, there I go burying the lede again -- came rushing into the kitchen, utterly panic-stricken, and attached himself to my knee like a bulldog clip.

“Brubba says he’s going to put me in the newspaper!” he gasped, his mouth fairly rectangular with anxiety. “That’s not OK, right?”

The extent of his existential terror seemed out of proportion. But when I calmed him down a bit, he explained, shuddering, that he thought he was going to wrapped up in newspaper and put in the bin to be picked up by the rubbish truck.

The horror!

(He’s onto something, though, isn’t he? Budgie cage, fish and chip paper, compost bin, god’s recycling truck. We’re all newspaper in the end, whether we ever made it to the front page or not. Shh, don’t tell the children!)

After we reassured him that there is a world of difference between being in newspaper and in THE newspaper -- although some might disagree -- he was happy to cooperate with the interview in exchange for the promise of seeing his smiling face in print. Soon enough, there was his mugshot, glued to the page alongside in-depth debriefings of all participants and witnesses. Also, some shock-horror-flashbulb photos a la Weegee of the debris, a full-page set of four diagrams explicating the mechanical failure and its unfortunate consequences -- and, for light relief, a comics page at the back.

The entire print edition was completed in the hours between the accident and bedtime and sold out in minutes, with copies already winging their way to grandparents. But in the spirit of journalism in the age of the internet, I have repackaged the story for your consumption and put my own name on it. It might not have the charm or immediacy of the original, but you read it here first.

--
Good grief, it's December. As you may recall, a dog ate some homework and then proceeded to consume a great chunk of November. I seem to remember promising a round-up and a book-club; I’ll be back in the next couple of days with something that's a bit of both.

Witi Ihimaera, after being awarded an Arts Laureate, has offered to buy back the warehouse stock of The Trowenna Sea, and Penguin is offering to purchase remaining bookshop stocks of the novel.

So is this what they mean when they say "pulp fiction"?

It's certainly a welcome step towards, as Prof. Ihimaera puts it, "preserv[ing] the mana and integrity of the novel." Not the first edition of the novel, which will always be overshadowed by the aura of cut-and-paste. But the novel that remains to be written, which will tell the story afresh, in the writer's own words.

I note that Penguin promises a new edition "containing a new section with an explanation by Ihimaera and full acknowledgement of the writers whose work he used." Really? Personally, I'd prefer just a novel, thanks, with no need for acknowledgement or explanation.

Ihimaera's conversation with Stuff.co.nz is even more, uh, illuminating:

"Normally with historic fiction what you get is a piece of work where history is treated as fiction. But with The Trowenna Sea, I have always tried to be on the cutting edge of fictional devices, what I have been attempting to do with that book is to create fiction as history. So I think what Trowenna Sea is, is the beginning of a hybrid book in which [you have] the problematics of acknowledgement of historical material and historical inspirations. Where you have non fiction writers traversing that area then they can use footnotes but fiction writers can't so I am having to try to figure out creative ways of addressing that and I think that what we will end up with is in fact a very, very exciting new approach to creating a framework to those new fictions."

"The first draft for instance was completely historical. With historical fiction what you traditionally get is the history as background but I wasn't happy with that because as a Maori writer detail is important to me and so therefore making sure that detail wasn't background but fully integrated into the whole novel itself is what I was attempting."

He said the controversy had helped him in the "continuing conversation that all writers must have about their craft and where they are going."

"What I like about it is that it has engaged me in issues of ownership of property, which I have now addressed and my publisher and I are working on addressing those in the second edition by making sure that all of the appropriate apologies have been made and that all of the acknowledgements and other inadvertent copying, all of that has also been addressed, so we are hoping that new edition will come out in 2010."

(Thanks/apologies to Stuff.co.nz for the extremely long quotes - please do go and check out the full article over here).

The Trowenna Sea: top-selling NZ fiction book for the last two weeks running. I dunno, people. Are you buying it?

Mistakes were made, and apologies have been tendered. So what now? In the NZ Herald article rather impertinently headlined “How Witi Was Found Out,” Geoff Walker of Penguin Books says, of The Trowenna Sea, "It deserves to be read and it's a terrible shame that this has happened."

Yes, it is a terrible shame.

A quick clarification: the Herald article missed one crucial point, probably because its author used quotes from my blog rather than contacting me directly. I didn’t find the borrowed material “by Googling phrases from the novel.” Rather, I found it by Googling the subject of the novel.

I had never heard of Hohepa Te Umuroa, the young man from up the Whanganui River who was convicted of rebellion and transported to Tasmania with four of his countrymen in 1846, died there barely half a year after his arrival, and was eventually brought home again in 1988. So I looked him up. The first hit is the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and the second is the Google Books extract from Karen Sinclair’s book Maori Times, Maori Places: Prophetic Histories.

Lines from the latter sounded awfully familiar. Sure enough, there were uncanny similarities between Ihimaera’s text and the words of both Karen Sinclair and the diary by Joan (Hoana) Akapita that Sinclair quoted. Only then was I moved to re-examine some of the passages that had set my antennae quivering while reading the book. And that’s when I started “Googling phrases from the novel.”

It’s a persnickety point, but one with the clang of irony: to use unattributed material on an obscure subject from one of the only books on the subject is to seriously booby-trap your work.

So yes, it is a terrible shame that this happened, but it was always going to happen. I just happened to happen on it first.

(And what priceless irony that the predatory Google Books was the instrument of detection, although they do say that retired poachers make the best gamekeepers).

In any case, the Listener article is now widely available (although not yet online), and readers can draw their own conclusions from Guy Somerset’s factual reporting and my book review.

In the meantime, we are meant to be consoled by the fact that “only 0.4%” of the book was questionable; surely such a tiny proportion should not cast a pall over the rest of the book. It is true that roughly 1000 words out of 528 pages is a very small number, mathematically speaking. But my search was limited - by deadline, by my willingness to neglect children and housework, and, crucially, by what was readily available via Google. I found further examples after the Listener article went to press. Other readers might too. Or they might not. Who can say, without a closer look at the author’s notes and drafts and a good bit of time in the library (after all, not everything is known to Google).

Even if the figure is only 0.4% and therefore (somehow) not a biggie, how much is too much? Obviously, 100% is the upper limit (check out a dramatic example from elsewhere that comes alarmingly close!). But what is the lower limit? Does Auckland University or Penguin have a number in mind? Any number of essay-procrastinators and aspiring authors would love to know!

Some would argue that literature is - or should be - held to a different standard. Is it? Should it? In recent literary memory, Kaavya Viswanathan echoed dozens of sentences from several different sources in her debut teen/chick-lit novel. She was wide-eyed with disbelief that her “internalization” of her favourite books had gotten her into such trouble, but her book was eventually pulped.

Closer to home, Murray Bail dealt graciously with the discovery that he had failed to credit several encyclopedia descriptions of gum trees in his fine short novel Eucalyptus. His publisher came up with the excellent phrase “the novelist as bowerbird,” and it turned out that the infringed-upon author wasn’t terribly bothered about it anyway.

More recently, Ian McEwan came out fighting when he was taken to task for insufficiently rewording passages from a wartime memoir by Lucilla Andrews in his prize-winning novel Atonement. His response was swift and assertive. He noted that he had explicitly cited the book as a source and had credited the author at every public opportunity. Furthermore, he argued, “as one crosses and re-crosses the lines between fantasy and the historical record, one feels a weighty obligation to strict accuracy.”

McEwan was defended by a whole posse of other big name writers who took the position that “taking for their own use extracts of contemporary accounts is completely acceptable as long as the source is acknowledged.”

Emphasis on “as long as the source is acknowledged.”

Of course Shakespeare would be laughing up his sleeve at that one (as is at least one Shakespearean scholar of my acquaintance). The bard plundered like a pirate, delivering to deadline without anything in the way of acknowledgements or footnotes. But for better or for worse, we live in slightly different times. The Trowenna Sea’s copyright page includes the assertion that “Witi Ihimaera is the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994.”

--

Even when sources are acknowledged, there’s still the question of how, or whether, including secondary material enhances the work. The descriptions of eucalypts are integral to Bail’s novel; had he simply used them as epigraphs he’d never have drawn comment at all. Perhaps McEwan should have done a better job of processing his borrowed material through his own aesthetic filter, but the novel is brilliant, and the ghastly details of wartime nursing are a crucial part of Briony’s personal purgatory. Some people weren’t entirely convinced but on the whole, he got a compassionate pass.

If you aren’t one of the people whose words were borrowed, you might feel the same kindly urge to absolve Ihimaera absolutely. And if you haven’t read the novel, you might also assume that the borrowings must be there for a good literary reason.

The, shall-we-say, intertextuality in The Trowenna Sea falls into several categories. Some quotations, especially those from historical figures, are clearly marked as such. Other snippets are taken from credited works, but are not marked as quotes. The most troublesome are not credited or marked at all. All have been used to apply a patina of McEwanesque “strict accuracy,” with varying degrees of success.

I think a case can be made for using occasional phrases from the record. Ihimaera’s account of the attack on Boulcott’s farm, for example, strikes me as nicely re-imagined from the Maori point of view. He has clearly read the history, but then sat down and thought his way through events as Hohepa and friends would have seen them. His descriptions chime with the record, and are also a persuasive and enjoyable read.

Conversely, using Colenso’s words verbatim to help Hohepa describe the scene at Waitangi is problematic. It’s fanciful enough to send Hohepa to Waitangi on Treaty Day; in order to make the trip worthwhile, I want to see events through that character’s eyes, not via a well-worn missionary account. Would Hohepa have noticed the dogskin cloaks and the blankets worn by his countrymen? Or would he only have had eyes for the freaky uniforms sported by the British delegation? Would he have bothered to sneer at Pompallier in his Frenchy Catholic purple pomp and circumstances?

The problem here is one of register, with the voice of the young man from the Whanganui River slipping and sliding all over the place. (It’s also a lost opportunity for a spot of ostranenie, something I’d have thought a writer would leap at.)

The Tasmanian parts of the novel were heavily researched, as indicated by the long list of books in the author’s afterword (at least one of which was borrowed from, several times). Readers familiar with that history are better placed than me to judge how well it’s integrated.

And New Zealand historians may have bells rung by some sections that hew closely to the historical record and borrow dialogue from the history books, e.g. the account of the Wairau Massacre, which echoes the way it’s told by Thomas Lindsay Buick. But readers might not mind that degree of faithfulness in what is, after all, a historical novel.

The uncredited material from Karen Sinclair’s book that first caught my eye (including her citations from Hoana Akapita’s diary) appears in the final section of the novel, which describes the mission to Tasmania to bring home Te Umuroa’s remains. With the scrupulousness befitting a professional anthropologist, Prof. Sinclair has referred all enquiries to the iwi, who have apparently pronounced themselves satisfied with the use of the material. So I'll desist from further comment there, too.

Sometimes, however, the borrowings could be argued to detract from the novel. For example, a few details have been cherry-picked from Mukiwa, a memoir by Peter Godwin of growing up in Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s, and revisiting it in the 1980s. These details are used to enhance the chapters in which Ihimaera’s character Gower McKissock looks back on his experiences in Tasmania, from Rhodesia in the early 20th C. (NB this is the character who pens the immortal line “…it is 1917 now, and World War I still alarms us.”)

The first part of Godwin’s book describes his childhood in Silverstream, which is at the foot of the Chimanimani range. In The Trowenna Sea, Gower McKissock sits on his farm, which is also in Silverstream, and gazes up at the mountains:

It is another night in Rhodesia.
The stars are dancing over the Mountains of the Moon.

The Mountains of the Moon are mentioned in passing in Godwin's book, when he treks over the Chimanimanis into Mozambique: a windswept rocky plain on the far side of the range is described as “the Mountains of the Moon, a barren landscape dotted with craggy rock formations.” This, the close reader infers, is a local nickname for the scenic spot.

But the actual mountain range known as the Mountains of the Moon is in Uganda. Over a thousand miles to the north.

Godwin doesn't spell out that the vista he describes is no relation to the more famous Mountains of the Moon, so it’s an easy mistake to make, especially if you're working from a single source. How handy that such a redolent and ancient place-name apparently overshadows the place you've decided to settle your character.

If you're not particular about geography, it's a trivial detail that looks marvellous on the page. But it's also a little bit like writing about a farm in Pukekohe that has a view of the stars dancing over the bustling city of Bombay.

Then there's the extended section, also from Godwin, about African death vigils, which you can find by googling "maggot larvae" and "makonye" (Godwin's book is a googlewhack, at least until this post went up). Ihimaera uses this passage as a climactic chapter-ending for Gower McKissop, and it works rather beautifully on the page as a blunt meditation on the realities of death.

But in Godwin's book, the description is part of a larger story about how as a boy, he would occasionally be brought along to watch his mother, a doctor, perform postmortems on people who had died violently. It’s gruesome and subtly political stuff: later in the book, when young Peter sees the body of his Aunt Diana, he's astonished that there are no maggots. (Coincidentally, it's a visit to the same Aunt Diana's grave that prompts the “china teacup” meditation that also made it into The Trowenna Sea).

If we read these passages not knowing their source, they are very striking and atmospheric pieces of writing. But knowing their origin changes things. What’s at stake when you put words describing a traumatic childhood in Rhodesia in the 1960s into the mouth of an elderly man at the end of his life in 1917? And what's up when a writer who is presumably well-versed in the vagaries of representations of the Other casually borrows a scene of such tempting exoticism, without seeking to contextualise it further?

Perhaps when it comes to the more general historical material, we can count on a greater yield of McEwan-style accuracy? Might we forgive the occasional “gorgeous equipage” in pursuit of a Victorian reality effect? Well, yes and no. Ihimaera has apparently gone to superhuman lengths to make sure he’s right about the details of time and place. But the effect is uneven. Often the detail has the feel of a backdrop, and plot points feel as though they are borrowed not from the world of the time, but from novels about the time.

As Nicholas Reid points out in his review, too often the characters think and speak like “early 21st-century characters dressed in 19th-century drag,” and not just because they make anachronistic references to World War I, or Aotearoa, or worry about how they should have read the English version of the Treaty as well as the Maori one.

Reid's review also pretty much answers the pertinent question David Haywood asked, in the discussion thread for my last post: "Is Ihimaera's new novel -- plagiarism questions aside -- a good book?"

But it's interesting that Reid used the same word I groped for: “ambitious.” The Trowenna Sea is a very ambitious novel in its length, its scope and its designs on the reader. Plagiarism questions aside, each reader will find different things to enjoy about the novel, and will have different quibbles. It is prodigiously researched, and informative on many subjects. Above all, the story at its heart is a fascinating one that deserves to be brought into the light: the fact that the Maori prisoners became a cause célèbre and rallying cause in mid 19th C Tasmania should absolutely be more than a footnote to history.

Trying to fathom the extent of the undigested material, I found myself reading several contemporary accounts of the events Ihimaera describes. They are so very strange. It reminded me how much of the pleasure of history is discovering, all over again, how little we know about the past. And how hard -- and rewarding -- it is to try to capture “the pastness of the past” (cheers, T.S. Eliot) or to pin down what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling” – by which he meant “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” in a given time and place.

I think capturing that spirit of pastness requires not just research but an act of translation. In the case of this novel, that possibility of translation into an imagined world has been inadvertently squelched by the sheer tonnage of research.

Fortunately, Ihimaera has taken to revisiting his older works. In an interview with the Listener five years ago, he said of his early fiction, “I wanted to write like Frank Sargeson or Janet Frame. I thought if I could slip into their skin, people would admire my work. The terror was writing the other strong, dark stuff that was there.”

I want to read that strong, dark stuff, and I doubt I’m alone. That’s what art is for. Ihimaera, again: “Art should be wielded like a taiaha; the further in you push the spear, the better.”

The short, tragic story of Hohepa Te Umuroa has strong, dark stuff to spare. (Or spear).

Plagiarism questions aside, Ihimaera wants to use this story as the basis for an impassioned argument about how all sorts of people suffered and prospered and travelled and conversed, alone and together, in moments of solidarity and mutual incomprehension, in those early days of encounter and settlement. And that’s a story that deserves to be read.

So when the author sits down to rewrite this book - and I trust he will - I hope for something less like a history textbook and more like… a novel. In his own words, a journey into the mind and life of Te Umuroa, or a fictional equivalent thereof. It wouldn't need to take a Cook's Tour of empire. It could still travel through the minds and lives of the British characters. It might, in the end, only be a few hundred pages long.

I would definitely read that book. I might even love that book.

Because, plagiarism questions aside, those were the bits in The Trowenna Sea that worked for me: the scenes that opened a window into a long-gone world, and showed me unfamiliar events seen through unfamiliar eyes. Some were mawkish, others funny, several bawdy, and a few heart-breaking. But those were the moments when, as a reader, I felt - forgive me - transported.

I haven’t written for a while. My father died in August, and all my pretty words flew away. Actually, if only they had. Instead, they swooped and soared in my brain, coalescing into ominous shapes. They landed in musical lines on telephone wires, singing me awake night after night, as my mind furiously tried to make sense of the absolute affront of the fact of death, a lifetime’s conversation forever interrupted.

I didn’t trust my words because they strung themselves together into tidy, familiar units, like Orwell’s “phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.” I couldn’t be sure I would write anything original, so I didn’t write anything at all.

One thing that kept me busy was reading other people’s words. I was thrilled to be a judge for the Commonwealth Short Story Competition. As regional judge for the Pacific region, I read dozens of stories from writers, professional and new to the business, from New Zealand and Australia. Then, with the other regional judges, I read the best from each region and winnowed them down to a subset of finalists. Look at these lovely faces, and, if you have an idle moment, you can listen to their work.

My Dad got an enormous kick out of this gig. Mainly because I was finally using my hard-won degree in Comparative Literature to actually compare some literature!

The arrival of the long-listed stories coincided with my last visit home (innocent days, when I was sure I would be seeing him again at Christmas), so we spent an afternoon printing them out.

With the bizarre range of fonts, the conflicting page sizes, and Dad’s temperamental printer, the job took three times as long as it should have. But Dad was in his element: technology, efficiency, and helping his daughter out while avoiding conversations about the meaning of life. (This is the man whose idea of a holiday was to fly to the other side of the world and paint our house, from top to bottom).

He helped me collate and staple the stories, and I brought them along with me to his chemo session, where we sat and busied ourselves with our respective reading matter. He wasn't much of a one for sitting around, and even less of a one for sitting around watching other people sitting around watching him sit around, so it was nice to be able to bury ourselves in the written word. In forty years of being father and daughter, we didn't always find ourselves on the same page, but right up to the last week of his life, we never stopped swapping recommendations for a good read.

So I'm deeply glad he got that one last peek at my world, in which I get to read things before other people do and work my private thoughts about them into complex public statements. And how beautifully ironic that the story that eventually won is one that caught our eye as it chuntered out of the balky printer in Dad's upstairs office that day, a story that skims the subject of death with grace and humour.

Speaking of difficult subjects and public statements, you might be interested in the cover story in the upcoming Listener, in which a mild-mannered book reviewer finds herself in it up to the neck after discovering uncanny resemblances between a review book and other sources.

As a writing teacher, I’d occasionally come across a phrase or a paragraph that was somehow out of kilter with the surrounding text. It’s a curiously physical phenomenon: the hairs on the back of your neck go up, and your heart sinks.

(Sometimes it’s a false alarm, thankfully. One of the Commonwealth short stories gave me that unhappy sensation: I googled a few significant phrases and quickly discovered hard evidence that the writer had ... oh. Posted his own work on his own webpage. Phew. Turns out, he was just a really accomplished writer.)

But I never expected to encounter that feeling as a book reviewer, let alone with a major new work by a respected writer.

Google was my first port of call -- it turns out that Google Books is bad news for authors, in at least one more way than previously suspected -- and then the extraordinarily well-stocked Yale University library.

You'll be able to read the results in the Listener on Monday, or earlier, if you are a subscriber. In the meantime, the Herald has gotten wind of it, and Radio NZ is following up the story as well. Given the 21st C way things are unfolding, I’ve caved in and joined twitter, where you will find me as nzdodo.

It’s been an odd, difficult, unsettling week. There really is no joy in stumbling across a story like this one. Dad would have appreciated my discomfort with the whole affair, but ever skeptical of my soft-spoken ways and excessively tender heart, he would have encouraged me to speak up. And I think he would be really tickled (more so than I am) to see me on the front pages - especially since I got there by comparing the literature.

Travelling without children is like... well, let’s just say this fish didn’t miss those little bicycles as much as she expected to. When I headed home for a quick visit this month, I flew unencumbered. Even my suitcase, which took mere hours to pack rather than the usual week-long logistical exercise, felt feather-light. And it still felt light on the way home, when it was full of books and food and frocks (my happy little greenback contribution to the New Zealand economy).

It was my heart that was heavy. Living so far from home is difficult in many small and a few large ways, and although I’ve been doing it for most of my adult life and, good lord, for half of my entire life, I’m still not used to it. I’m very good at it, but I’m not used to it.

At first, it was hard and exciting. The internet made it a bit easier. Splitting my heart between three different places (family, partner, me) was horrendous. Consolidating into merely two locations again was a relief. The arrival of children (and their far flung cuzzies, whose growth we witness in abrupt stop-motion) made it hard again. And harder still is the knowledge we push away every time the plane pushes away from the gate: that there’s a chance we might not see someone next time.

I’m optimistic, because the alternative is simply uncountenanceable, and I don’t even care whether that’s a real word or not. I refuse to countenance it, anyway.

But every parting – at the front gate as much as at the departure gate -- is a little rehearsal for a more final farewell somewhere down the line. I’ve mastered the stiff upper lip, swallowing any unseemly display of emotion (although I’m not sure why, or whom I think I’m helping by doing so, apart from sticking it to the manufacturers of tissues), but I flew back to the US with a tummy full of tears.

I’ve been thinking of a play I once saw about Irish emigrants to the New World, in which one character, a daughter, calls from the departing boat to a parent on the dock, “I’ll write!”

The parent waves, and then pauses. “But I can’t read!”

And the daughter says, all tragicomically glum, as if she’d completely forgotten: “Oh and I can’t write, either.”

I just don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t write, and they couldn’t read.

--

Trail of tears aside, travelling without children was a revelation in so many ways. That ringing in my ears – what was it? There’s a name for it… oh, that’s right, silence! And look at those things at the end of my arms! Two of them! Suddenly empty, and strangely useful! Not to mention: you know that feeling of waking up every day all bright and refreshed and ready to go, because you’ve had exactly enough sleep? Me neither, but I had it for two weeks.

Travelling sans enfants changes your vision, too. My eyes are usually directed downwards and around in an unceasing whirl of surveillance. Every parent of smaller children knows this feeling: half lighthouse, half police helicopter. But this time my eyes were free to lift themselves unto the horizon and take a leisurely look around.

I usually visit NZ with rose-coloured glasses planted firmly on my nose, but this time: Auckland, what the hell??!! Where did you go? What are you doing? And what idiot taught you to drive?

Honestly, I was shaken. Has it always been this bad? Has the city always been utterly in thrall to the car? Why did the Auckland chicken cross the road? Because it didn’t get the memo about how road-crossing has been phased out. I counted long stretches of suburban, residential roads where pedestrians were actively discouraged from crossing the road, where you had to walk a kilometer to find a pedestrian crossing. That's just wrong.

It’s funny, I’m living in a city that is currently battling car culture in favour of more pedestrian friendliness; a place where people regularly blow through red lights, and this is regular drivers, not boy racers; sometimes even cop cars. And yet a car turning off a main road into a side road will almost always concede crossing rights to a pedestrian waiting on a corner, especially if they’re accompanied by children. Whereas in Auckland, cars turn without a second thought. It’s as if the people really are invisible.

I was shocked, shocked. Here I am in America lecturing the locals on traffic-calming and showing off our excellent road safety advertisements! And there you are, busily ignoring all conventional wisdom on the subject. Oh, Auckland, like a bouncy castle with a slow leak, you’re letting us all down.

Ironically, New Haven, where I live, is currently in the process of undoing a Waterview-style motorway extension and planning to restore the neighbourhood that was demolished to make way for it. (The former Model City has developed 20/20 hindsight on the subject, alas, far too late for poor old Oak St and its residents).

I was having a chat to my parents about that Waterview motorway – as Pt Chev residents they have a vested interest in a quicker, slicker drive to the airport to pick up their prodigal daughter (and so have I). My Dad was wondering why they can’t just build the motorway along the water's edge, to join up with the causeway across the water. Apparently there’s a good reason, but I’d like to be reassured that this option was properly considered before being ruled out.

I said, the thing is, I can see the logic of linking up the ring road. But tunnels give me the willies and I'm not the only one, so I never quite saw that as a goer. And then on the third hand, I really, really don’t like the way motorways cleave neighbourhoods in half.

“So do rivers,” he said, mildly.

This was a perspective I hadn’t considered before, and a strangely attractive one. Hmm, yes. Motorways as rivers; artificial causeways channelling traffic and commerce from the high places to the low. You can’t fish or bathe in a motorway, but other than that, I kind of liked the analogy.

But no city has as many rivers as it has roads, and if all our roads are rivers, even the ones we live on, then suddenly we’re Venice, or the Irrawaddy Delta, or New Orleans, and that’s just not sustainable or even necessarily pleasant.

Actual rivers, though: there’s a point. A river is alive in a way that a road is not. (Need me to go all Pattern Language on yo' ass? OK, try this and this). Think of it. Auckland, City of Sails -- And/Or Oars!

Let’s pour water on troubled fossil fuel. Here's how it works. Take any decent-sized stream – say that one with the waterfall that runs through Waterview -- and turn it into a canal. Cut a channel across the narrow part of the isthmus (that’s why it’s called Portage Rd) to link the harbours, a nice little shortcut. Grafton Gully is a gully because it had the Waiparuru stream running down it: imagine if you could take the white water rapids route to campus. And so on across the city.

Rivers run to the sea, so you'd link working hours to high tides to encourage harbour commuting -- with free bikes at both ends, of course. In fact: every boatshed a bikeshed, and vice versa! (Yes, I've been drinking David Slack's kool-aid. It's delicious.)

Of course you'd need compulsory kayak lessons in all schools. (The awesome Matipo Primary does it already). Then row, row, row your boat full of kids to school. I'm coming over all Swallows and Amazons just thinking about it.

The waterway I’d really love to see restored -- "daylighted" is the technical term -- is the Waihorotiu Stream that runs under Queen St. Those poxy nikau, marooned in concrete, quite the wrong shape and scale, are a pathetic stab at rewilding the place. Why not go all the way? Give us running water babbling merrily down – all the way to Party Central! A sun-dappled pedestrian precinct, organized around a pristine little river planted with native bush and benches to sit on, where perky pukeko pose for photos with delighted tourists.

Seoul’s just done it. (More inspiring pics of Cheonggyecheon here). Providence did it, to great acclaim, with an ongoing summer art event that draws visitors from all over. Singapore and LA and San Antonio too.

Auckland, I'm looking at you. Take a punt. Or a skiff, or a rowboat, or just a paddle with your trousers rolled up, but don’t let me down again.