‘We didn’t behave very well in NZ’, says Wakefield heir

I knew Taika Waititi quite well when he was a kid. His mother lived in a tall narrow house in Aro St, and my youngest sister had a similar house two doors along. They were both single mums, they each had a son aged seven. Taika and my nephew Stepan were soon best friends, and were then were joined by a famous three-legged dog who even at an advanced age still had the name Puppy Walker, and for the next 10 years all three roamed the hillsides of Brooklyn and Kelburn.

Decades later, watching Jojo Rabbit in a London cinema I was struck by a resemblance between Jojo and Stefan. I dismissed the idea, I thought I was imagining it, but then another year or two passed and an old photograph came to light. It showed Taika, aged about 14, bursting into a room and raising his hand to give Stefan, who has his back to him at a table – it seems to be Christmas Day – a pair of rabbit ears. I sent the pic to Taika suggesting that here was evidence that years before the auteur had any idea of the matter, the universe was already planning a movie to be named Jojo Rabbit far off in the future.

Taika’s reply was admirably succinct and lapidary. Three paragraphs, each consisting of one word:

Oh.

My.

Goodness.

This I took to be guarded assent to the flimsy notion.

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I spent 10 years writing my latest book Hard by the Cloud House, about the giant Haast’s eagle,  and will admit to another four years of thinking about it before I actually started. Naturally during this lengthy term of commitment I asked myself from time to time: “Have I gone crazy?” and “Why am I doing this?” and “Where does this end?”

What I did not ask was that laziest of  interviewers’ questions: “Where did you get the idea from?” Because you just don’t know. You never know. Ideas, it seems to me, come out of a very dark asteroid belt and sometimes you see them revolving towards you decades before you have begun to think consciously about the matter.

*

My book also pays attention to the largest single theft of Māori land, the Kemp Purchase in the South Island, leveraged mainly by the Wakefield gang who, back in London, had achieved what is called today “legislative capture” and who therefore had Governor Grey nicely under their thumb in New Zealand. Making many beautiful promises that were never kept, they snaffled up millions of acres for a song.

It was only when my book was coming to completion that I looked back and saw that, some years before I thought of writing it, both these components – a mighty eagle and the Wakefields – had presented themselves to me in a single 12-hour period and in vivid real life.

First the eagle: I was driving through the English Midlands on a foggy winter morning when I saw a sign for a falconry centre. I drove in – like most people, I suppose, I had always wanted to visit one – and was soon being outfitted with a mighty glove, a leather gauntlet, old, heavy, hard as iron and a little whiffy. (The last person to wear this, I was told, was the Prince of Wales who had visited the centre the day before. This was a royal gauntlet. If it had last been worn by the Black Prince, or the Prince Regent, I would hardly have been surprised.) Following instructions, I then held out my gauntleted forearm, held up a piece of raw meat in the other hand, and waited. Five seconds went past, then seven, then eight, then suddenly, a rush of pinions and an incredible creature swooped out of the fog. I was expecting a hawk, or indeed a falcon, but this was a great eagle – the golden eagle of Eurasia, the symbol of Zeus and Jupiter and Napoleon’s legions and also to be found on the pennant of Wehrmacht staff cars.

It sat on my gauntlet glaring at me, like a kind of living machete, then snatched the meat and flew away with it into the fog. Later, I read that the golden eagle weighs up to 4.5 kilogram, but the New Zealand eagle, Te Hokioi, may have reached 17kg or 18 kg; I remembered the encounter in the fog, and thought that by then perhaps the book was already in the process of formation….

But a few hours before that, there was an even stranger encounter. This was at an exhibition of photographs which opened the night before. It was a very grand occasion. One of the snappers was the daughter of a 17^th earl and the other was the legendary Wilfred Thesiger, who photographed the Marsh Arabs and the Empty Quarter in the 1940s. The show was held in a stately house in the Midlands, so stately they even had their own beasts – a lion, long, rangy, hungry, tawny, with a very black mane, and a rhinoceros which trotted up and down, a belligerent tilt to its horn. The animals were separated from the house by a deep ditch, a ha-ha, but you couldn’t see that below the sill and as they roamed about looking in the window at dusk, the rhinoceros vaguely put you in mind of a unicorn. The lion and the unicorn! I was in the heart of old, moneyed England.

Then came the dreaded sound of someone tinkling a teaspoon against a wine-glass stem. A man named Sir Humphrey Wakefield had bounded onto a chair and there began a speech with the craziest opening line I have ever heard.

“Everyone in this room,” he announced, “comes from very good family.”

“Except for you,” I said.  

Well, no, I didn’t – I wasn’t quite brave enough, but I should have really, for in my view the Wakefields – Edward Gibbon, Arthur, Jerningham – and their NZ Company were responsible for much of the racial disharmony we still experience in Aotearoa. They hated the Treaty of Waitangi, tried to stop it before it was signed and later took a jemmy to it which prevented it functioning properly for the next hundred years.

Later that night, however, I had the pleasure of talking to Sir Humphrey.

“I’m from New Zealand,” I said. “We know all about the Wakefields there. You know what the Māori called you, don’t you?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. What did they call us?”

“Rēwera.”

“What does that mean?”

“The devils.”

“Oh dear,” he said. “Perhaps we didn’t behave very well in New Zealand.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, “why don’t you come and visit us at Chillingham? We can talk it all over, it’s a most fascinating subject. By the way,” he added, “I’m starting a new wildlife fund. Would you like to join?”

Well, he was a friendly and plausible baronet and I’d drunk some champagne so I hauled out my wallet and handed him the only note I had – unfortunately twenty pounds – and gave him my name and address and so we parted, I to a rendezvous with an eagle and Sir Humphrey back to Chillingham Castle.

I never received an invitation there, and never heard a word more about the wildlife fund. A year or two later I asked the daughter of the 17^th earl about it.

“Oh, that?’’ she said. “I think it’s just something to do with his cattle.”

For some reason I didn’t feel annoyed. On the contrary, it gave me a strange sense of privilege. It took a while to work out why, and then it came to me.  At last, I thought, I have something in common with nineteenth-century iwi. It was of course, only on a modest scale but I too had been – how shall I put this? – bamboozled by a Wakefield.

ReadingRoom is devoting all week to covering the new brilliant book of natural history Hard by the Cloud House by Peter Walker (Massey University Press, $38), which tells the story of the giant Haast’s eagle, and is available in bookstores nationwide. Monday: the opening chapter, about the mean-spirited landowner of North Canterbury who gave his name to the extinct eagle. Tuesday: An interview with an auto electrician who helped discover an almost complete skeleton of the bird. Tomorrow: a review by Ashleigh Young.