Rod Oram: Who I am and what I care about

Maelstrom is one way to describe United Nations’ climate negotiations. After all, life is intense when people from every country, dealing with every human condition, confront an existential crisis. If you’re trying to make some sense of it, perhaps it helps if you have an idea of who you are, where you’re from and what you stand for.

With that in mind last Saturday, I began my journey to Glasgow for the 26th annual UN negotiations. I biked to the top of Maungakiekie, stood under John Logan Campbell’s tribute to tangata whenua, and let my gaze wander over my favourite places in Tāmaki Makaurau, my family’s home for almost 25 years to date.

The glorious panorama of ranges and city, sea and islands had first entranced us the evening before Auckland Anniversary Day 1997. We picnicked by the summit’s ailing, lone tree and asked ourselves a question:

What would our lives be like if we moved here from London? Gavin Ellis, then the editor of the New Zealand Herald, had offered me a job. We’d come to get our first feel for city and country before we decided.

Our answer was a resounding ‘Yes!’ We believed New Zealand was offering us much: a country making its future rather than defending its past; a small scale so we could multitask rather than specialise; close connections to help us make more diverse friends; and a natural environment with some remnants of truly wild places, to name a few of the many attractions.

Aotearoa has given us all that, and much more. Speaking for myself, I’m broader in perspective and skills, more committed to justice for people and nature, and more deeply attached to culture and place. Many experiences have made me the New Zealander I am. Here are four:

● I spent the afternoon of Saturday, February 28, 2004, in Ngāti Whātua’s wharenui on their Ōrākei Marae. The timbers of the building creaked as the tail end of a cyclone whipped in from the northeast. It was almost as if Don Brash’s Orewa speech a month before, in which he claimed The Treaty of Waitangi was dividing and diminishing us as a nation, had summoned up the storm.

Yet, inside the wharenui Sir Hugh Kāwharu, the iwi’s leader, gave a very warm welcome to the first cohort of the Future Auckland Leaders programme of the Committee for Auckland. They were a couple of dozen young professionals, from many of the city’s ethnic communities, and I was one of their mentors. We were typical of our city, which is the fourth most ethnically diverse in the world. More than 40 percent of Aucklanders were born outside New Zealand.

Sir Hugh told us some of Ngāti Whatua’s story such as its gift of land to the Crown for the creation of Auckland, of its welcome to the first Pākeha settlers such as Logan Campbell, of Te Tiriti, and of the iwi’s hopes for itself, the city and nation. In reply, Pat Snedden and Rob Fenwick, two leading Pākeha members of the city’s business community, told us of their long and close relationships with the iwi. In July the following year, Pat published his book Pāakeha and the Treaty: Why It’s Our Treaty Too.

● In 2008, the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance hired me to write a research paper on what the city might be like in 2060. I greatly enjoy working on such ‘standing-in-the future’ exercises with others. This one, though, is still the only one set beyond my expected lifespan.

I was very grateful for the opportunity given to me by Sir Peter Salmon, the commission’s chair. I consulted widely and deeply with others on how the great shifts and transformations underway, and others we could foresee, might shape the city’s future.

One way I expressed what I learnt was to imagine a day in the life of Auckland in 2060. I chose its Anniversary Day, starting on Mount Hobson at dawn and ending near midnight on Queen Street. Every few years, I re-read the piece to check what still makes sense and what already does not.

● In 2017, the Going West Festival gave me the great privilege of making me its Sir Graham Douglas Orator that year. To express what I felt about Auckland past, present and future, I wrote Between Here and There, using my words and those of others, including some of Logan Campbell’s reflections on his first encounter with the Waitemata’s sea, land and people. In his memoirs, he wrote:

“How silent and peaceful were Waitemata’s lovely slopping shore… the open country stretched away in vast fields of fern, and Nature reigned supreme.

“We followed a native path skirting closely, when halfway there was a volcanic hill on summit of which grew one solitary and stately tree. We christened it One Tree Hill then and there and to this day it bears that name.”

“…He [Māori] is inclosed within a limited area, with a seaboard penetrated by innumerable harbours, with a fertile soil, with a climate the most genial the world knows, and by its speedy occupation he will be crowded out.

“For this land of which I write is destined to be the happy pleasure-ground of all the Great South lands of the Pacific.”

As I performed the piece at the opening night of that year’s festival, to a soundscape created by my daughter Celeste, a composer, I felt a profound sense of timeless belonging to the people of Tāmaki Makaurau and the place that nurtures us all.

● In mid-October, 2017, I joined my fellow new recruits to the Edmund Hillary Fellowship at Castaways holiday accommodation on the cliffs above the black sands of Karioitahi Beach on Auckland’s wild west coast. There were 28 of us, a third Kiwis and two-thirds from aboard. We spent the week getting to know each other, then hosting the Fellowship’s next New Frontiers conference.

Our kaupapa, then and now, is to work with others to find solutions to our toughest challenges at home, so Aotearoa can contribute to the wellbeing of future generations here and abroad.

As I described Aotearoa to my new overseas fellows, I realised how much the place had shaped me and changed me, how much I felt at peace and at home here. For the first time ever, I wanted to explain who I was and where I came from by giving my pepeha to my new community.

So, over lunch Pekaira Rei, a kuia of Te Āti Awa and one of our wise guides, asked me about my mountain, my river, my forebears and the other anchors in my life, and translated them into te Reo for me. Later that afternoon, for the first time in my life, my naming of my people and places deeply rooted me in who I am, where I stand and what I care about.

This Saturday, my journey to Glasgow will lead me up a second summit. It is Traprain Law, a volcanic cone some 20 miles east of Edinburgh. It has been the gathering place of our family in the four decades or so my sister Kate and her family have lived nearby. As Maungakiekie does, it offers us expansive views of countryside close to our hearts, while knowing that over the horizon are places dear to us, such as Brora in the far north of Scotland where we used to holiday as a family.

A short, brisk walk will take Kate and me to the top of Traprain, which is famous for the discovery of the largest hoard of Roman silver ever found outside the Roman Empire. I’m sure we’ll scan the view as we chat about family life and the world at large, past present and future.

When we look west up the Firth of Forth to Edinburgh, weather permitting, we’ll see Arthur’s Seat, another volcanic plug in the landscape very familiar to Logan Campbell. He grew up in Edinburgh, leaving as a young doctor for the antipodes. Coming upon the Waitemata, he immediately felt at home among its cones and expanses of water. As one of Auckland’s first Pākeha settlers in 1840, he made his fortune in business and bought Maungakiekie and its surrounding land as his country estate, which he gifted to the people of Auckland in 1901.

A further 50 miles to the west of Edinburgh lies Glasgow, where the Scots will host a gathering of the UN’s climate clans from every nation on the planet October 31 to November 12.

But I’ll still have one more summit en route to Glasgow. Next Saturday, I’ll return to Birmingham, where I was born and grew up. I vividly remember the intense winter smogs we had when I was a child, caused by the coalfired boilers which powered Birmingham’s claim to being “The Workshop of the World”.

In many ways, Birmingham and its hinterland was the birthplace of the industrial revolution from the 18th century on. For the following 200 years, its engineers and entrepreneurs, inventors and scientists contributed much to many of the technologies such as steam engines and cars which have greatly enhanced our lives. But those technologies are a massive cause of our climate crisis.

Birmingham today is vastly different from when I left home 52 years ago. It’s multi-ethnic, on the cutting edge of clean technologies, restoring its natural capital, reinventing itself yet again so it can be a truly sustainable 21st century city.

So next Saturday, some childhood friends and I’ll walk to the top of the Lickey Hills, some 10 miles to the southwest of the city centre. We’ll look down at the River Rea as it flows past the long defunct Austin car plant at Longbridge, the still-producing Cadbury chocolate factory at Bourneville, the Warwickshire County Cricket ground and other landmarks on its way through the centre of town.

There, on the banks of the river in 1166, Peter de Birmingham, Lord of the manor, bought a Royal charter from Henry II permitting him to hold a weekly market “at his castle at Birmingham.” He planted the seed of today’s entrepreneurial city.

While the past means a great deal to me, I care far more about the future. So, with Glasgow very much on my mind I’ll stand with my very old Brummie friends on the Lickey Hills and I’ll give them my pepeha:

Tena tatou te whanau

He tāhutāhu korero tenei

Ko Lickey Hills te puke korero

Ko Rea te awa

Ko Brummie te iwi

Ko Birmingham te papakainga
Ko Oram te whānau
Ko Rod tōku ingoa
Ko Cathy Pacific Boeing 747-400 Jumbo Jet te waka
I te tau 1997 i hunuku au ki Aotearoa
Kei te noho au ki Kohimarama
Ko Lynn taku hoa rangatira
Ko Celeste taku tamahine
He kaipurakau au
He pononga au ki to tatou matua-nui-i-te-rangi
Nō reira tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tātou kātoa!