Island Life by David Slack

It is common for your current affairs presenter to strap on the bow and arrow and style himself - it's invariably a him - as a latter-day Robin Hood. Righter of wrongs, exacter of justice, champion of the meek.

Paul Henry is no exception, although his particular schtick seems to be to pose the question: "Honestly, aren't we a being a bit hard on the Sheriff of Nottingham?"

So on Friday night we saw the Close-Up team fan out across the country to fly JetStar for themselves and report the results, without fear or favour. In two out of the three cases, the intrepid reporters found that they had been allocated a seat at the front. And so on. The planes ran on time, more or less. More or less, everything was all good.

It's almost as if they knew I was coming, declared Donna-Maree Lever standing to the side of the checkin counter, speaking to the camera.

It was as if no-one had been shut out from flights after arriving on time, and no police had been called to any airport to sort out stroppy passengers.

It was also as if Jet Star had latterly been on a charm offensive, desperately trying to clean up the PR mess and, for reasons best known to themselves, the country's pre-eminent truth-finding current affairs team had decided that travelling genuinely incognito would be, oh, what's the expression? A hassle?

After a few weeks of chaos, a few things seem clear: JetStar needs more practice. It looks as though they deliberately overbooked their flights - business as usual in the airline game, because it mostly works - but got their ratio wrong and ended up having to bump a lot of passengers. So far, so normal. The point at which it comes unstuck is the part where they fail to fess up. Instead they declare that passengers who had turned up in time were, by some other rules of time travel known only to them, too late.

This is not to say that the fault is all with the airline. Some travellers seem to be failing to acquaint themselves with the rules of engagement of a budget carrier: come prepared, and don't expect to get any frill of any character without paying for it, up to and including eighty bucks for an extra toilet bag. If you didn't understand that to be the meaning of millions of marketing dollars Air New Zealand has been spending, then clearly there is no margin left for for subtlety in advertising. It might also explain why this Good old sheriff thing is working out so well for Paul Henry.

Where would we be without Lee Harvey Oswald? Without him, no assassination. Without an assassination, no mantra.

"I will always remember where I was when I heard he/she/the music died," people say, with wide eyes. You could hear it said often last Friday.

No concept is too awesome, no notion so potent that it is not capable of being trivialised by modern culture. They say: I will always remember where I was when I heard about this! Perhaps they mean: Finally, my life is exciting!





I remember where I was when Lisa-Marie's father died. In the seventh form common room, we played LPs on an old radio-gram I had bought from a second hand store in Palmerston North and carted back to Feilding on the back of my Dad's Vanguard ute. It had a stylus so prejudicial to the well-being of vinyl it was a cultural crime, but I couldn't get a replacement, so that was that. We put on the platters and spun them, because we had to hear the music.

Hamish Watson liked Bruce Springsteen. I can still see him arriving back home from lunch with the Greetings From Ashbury Park album tucked under his arm. "Elvis Presley died," he said, "it was on the radio."
"No way" we said,
"how about that." I lifted off the Yes album I was playing and dropped the needle onto Bruce.

This is my roundabout way of disclosing my voting intentions in the coming referendum. All my friends say they will be voting Yes and this gladdens my heart, because there was a time when it was shameful to be a fan of that band.

Yeah, I know it's not really about that. But you can't tell me you haven't already had your fill.* Let's talk about progressive rock. So bloated, so lumbering, so indulgent, God had to give the world his only Sid Vicious to save the world from stadium bands.

Too bad. I was a bookish kid in a country town who liked reading about existentialism and playing Tales from Topographic Oceans and Close to the Edge. That music has never stopped being my friend, through punk, through ska, through new wave, on to my diversion to Nashville and then Austin and the alt.country that I can never get enough of. I still like the Yes music. But you try to tell your friends…

Only in middle age have I truly gained the courage of my convictions. A few months ago I made a deal with Mark Graham. I would get up early on a Sunday morning to talk on his excellent radio show if he agreed to play side 4 of Tales from Topographic Oceans in the background. What a good sport he is. He only hesitated for a long moment. We even bought a new digitally remastered edition off iTunes for the purpose. One each. Doonesbury has started a story this week about legacy rock. That's where the big money is.

So here I am, baring myself with my Yes vote. I'm out and I'm proud. And you know what? I have illustrious company. You start telling people that you got someone to play your favourite progressive rock music on the radio and out come the fellow fans. They emerge from all over the place, in their ones and twos. Chris Barton - as fine and discerning a journalist as you'll find working in New Zealand today - admits to a fondness for the Yes albums. And look, what's this, elsewhere - so to speak - in the Herald? Don McGlashan <a href="
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10573043&pnum=2" target="blank">muses that maybe in his old age he might be "lurching blindly towards concept albums."

Well, despite having come of age musically in the post-punk years of Blam Blam Blam, McGlashan admits he used to listen to 1970s prog-rock outfits like Yes in his younger years.

"Had I been in Yes and tried to write about a comet, I probably would have done half the song in Sanskrit, so count yourself lucky. And a lot of it would have been in 7/8 [time signature] - maybe that's the next album."

I can still remember where I was when I read that.

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*Although if you want to know my opinion, I wholly endorse what he said.

Forget about the men who sit around John Key's cabinet table. If you want action, if you want decisiveness, if you want certainty of purpose, Judith 'Crusher' Collins is your man.

The talkback callers love her because she sorts people out: the boy racers, Barry Matthews - well maybe not Barry - and now the crims. Stick 'em in a container. It's the only language they understand etc.

This is sublime politics. The rednecks think she's one of their own, but we greenies know what's up. She's playing the most artful of games, and we are really warming to her.

Look again. Crush the boy racers' cars; take one in every ten cop cars off the road, convert used shipping containers into prison cells. Judith's a tree hugger! Finally I understand why the police let us onto the harbour bridge. Their minister is anti-car! She loves the bikes, prefers to walk, and dies a little every time her driver holds opens the BMW door for her.

This is what you overlook when you deride a greenie as loopy and fanciful: they're thrifty, frugal, and bursting with common sense. And this is where I now let the air out of the tyres. I'm not going to bag Judith's Collin's stick-them-in-shipping-containers idea. I have to say it: this might not be a bad idea.

You will find chapter and verse on this web page, by someone who has collected examples from all over the world of containers being adapted to other purposes including, but by no means limited to, the following:

emergency shelters, school buildings, urban homes, rural homes, large houses, apartment and office buildings, artists’ studios, sleeping rooms, stores, shopping malls, transportable factories, mobile exhibition spaces, telco hubs, bank vaults, medical clinics, radar stations, abstract art, data centers, experimental labs, and relocatable marijuana gardens

Here is a house made out of six of them.

As ever, so much lies in the language. If you call them containers, it just sounds cruel. But this here is what you call an inter-modal steel building unit.

There is another alternative, and Brian Rudman has been quick to notice it. He suggests you could buy accommodation for less than replacement cost in downtown Auckland. Stick the overflowing prisoners - the ones near the end of their sentence - in some of the CBD apartment blocks. All very well, but I fear Mr Rudman is speaking from the comfortable remove of the middle class. Has he been inside one of these places? I have. I'm not familiar with the fine print of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but I'm pretty sure your typical Auckland city apartment violates some minimum standard.

This is not a good time to be a doubter or nay-sayer. The tale of Auckland is your cartoon standard: two men in rags, lost in the Sahara, a cruel sun beating down on them. A drink of water. Any water. For pity's sake, we want water. Finally, a pond; a tiny pond. One staggers towards it, reaches down, scoops. The other one sees, from a few steps back, that the water looks a suspicious colour. Yellow. Like camel piss. Wait! he says. The other wheels around, eyes wild and accusing. You've been moaning for days for water, and now that we find some, you moan about that!

I'm sorry, I can't help it. If I think I see camel piss, I have to say something. That stadium looked like camel piss. The viaduct redevelopment is not bad as far as it goes, but when you stand it up against Wellington's waterfront: camel piss. Super City? Well, I want to believe, and God knows, when you get emails from Hamish Keith chiding you for your negativity, you wonder if you're being unduly cautious.

And yet the fact remains, I see indecent haste and shallow thinking. Let's be Frank: Spencer or Lloyd Wright?

I may be blinkered: I heard the name 'Party Central' and recalled that tragically un-hip '40-Below' function they held for grooving Nats of the Farrar generation. I also think of the facility they set up in Paris for the Rugby World Cup. They plonked it between the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower like a wedding marquee. Inside, you found a sports bar for Kevlar credit card holders. The Eiffel tower is breathtaking. The Place du Trocadero is, to use the approved term, vibrant. But that tent was nothing special.

So there's that. There's also our history. We take on projects with a gorse-pocket mentality. I've got a mate who can get it for you wholesale. Half way through the project we take fright at the escalating price and we start to cut corners. Take our harbour bridge. Please.

And then there is the question of the fence. The big red fence. The fence that bars us from our harbour. Of course we should want to bring it down. But let's think this through. Is it really smart to have a cruise ship terminal on the same wharf as a Party Central site?

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there were no border controls. Immigrants could come and go at will. Mosquitos could come and go at will. Whisky could… well, whisky has probably always had duty owing. Here's the thing about a modern border. It has to be controlled. That's why you and I can't wander at will around Auckland International Airport. There is airside and there is our side. The one is sealed from the other.

If you want to have a cruise ship terminal on the same wharf as Party Central, then you will need to have separation, as they do right now on Princes Wharf. Go and take a look. It's the part behind the chicken wire fence. Also take a note of all trucks that come and go, provisioning the cruise ships.

So. What do you want, Slack, you whiner?
The wharf should be entirely open. No cruise ship terminal. I do agree: it's a marvellous venue for a public facility. But can it please not be a mere replication of the viaduct precinct with some kind of public auditorium? I am leery of the haste that attends this project. If you want to see how easy it is to fuck up a colossal opportunity, come over to Devonport and look at our sorry wharf building, officially opened by HRH Prince Edward in 1992. Admire the forlorn empty shops and the two upstairs restaurants - best views in Auckland! - which have not opened their doors one day in the last decade.

I'm as thirsty as the rest of you, but I'm not drinking anything yellow.

Relentless optimist that I am, I see this looming national quarantine as a teachable moment. Maybe we could all do with staying home a little more, honing our survival skills. I have been joking about it: Forced to stay inside, with nothing but a computer to look at. What will I do all day?

At times like this I wonder: "What would Garth George say?" I believe that between hoarse coughs he would remind us that in sunnier times a man was the daily breadwinner, and a woman knew her sacred place was at home, bouncing babies on her knees. I wonder: in those conditions would infection have travelled more slowly? Did folk exchange germs less? Or did a virus merely arrive home at ten past six wrapped in fumes of Brylcreem, tap beer and Pall Mall?

Mary-Margaret asked us last night what it would be like if everything closed down. I told her they had closed the schools for many months in the 1950s. There was a polio epidemic. "Did you have to stay at home?" she asked. No, I told her, I wasn't alive in the 1950s. It was mischief on my part to say "I" and not "we". Karren is the older of us. I may have heard a slight coolness in her tone as she added that she, too, was not affected.

Mary-Margaret wanted to know: What would it be like if all the schools closed - or if they should open and close repeatedly? I said: "let's ask the Internet", and found that I was out by a decade.

The Polio Epidemic of 1947 forced the closure of all North Island schools for over four months.

We learned that an epidemic of rewha-rewha (possibly influenza) killed 60% of the Māori population in the southern North Island in 1790.

Mary-Margaret will be able to get plenty of recollection from her Gran about one but little about the other.

We also learned that

The disease was very well publicised during the polio epidemics of the 1950s, with extensive media coverage of any scientific advancements that might lead to a cure. Thus, the scientists working on polio became some of the most famous of the century

Right on cue, this morning's paper has the word 'VACCINE' in large type. Let's hope we have a famous scientist soon. In the meantime, Karren is replenishing stocks of paracetemol and face masks, and making an appointment for a flu shot for our daughter. I am training for the days ahead by spending long hours in front of my computer.