GERARD HINDMARSH
Words, wisdom and weka at Wainui Bay
Ilove the way your understanding of some people gets built layer by layer, over years and years even. I first met Judith Hoch of Wainui Bay back when I reported on her winning the Bay Art competition in 1993 with her painted series of wood cutouts called Golden Bay Dance Do You Believe in Magick?. I still have my notes: ‘‘Innate artistic talent,’’ I put at the top.
Later, I found out that Judith had been a career anthropologist, having completed her doctoral research living amongst the Yoruba people in western Nigeria. Her Masters research before that was done amongst the Cree Indians of north central Quebec, and continuous participant research amongst the Lucumi community in Miami.
This work made her very aware of the negative, long-lasting aspects of white colonisation.
Half a century after her study, at 73, Judith still obviously has all the sentiments. She’s written an anthropological book with a very personal difference, about her own journey to discover the spirit of Waitaha.
Prophecy on the River is about her magical experiences with the people, land and history of New Zealand.
It’s one of four books put out by Attar Books in Auckland in the series – Mystical Encounters in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Spiritual in a way that includes ancestors, dreams, magical encounters and mythology, her story is also deeply compelling. In graceful, eloquent prose, this memoir tells in her own heartfelt and visceral way how she came to realise that her own spiritual rejuvenation was tied up with acquiring a deep respect for the environment, in particular our rivers and forests.
‘‘It’s about appreciating the natural world and the need for its revitalisation,’’ she tells me. ‘‘And I believe the process is the same for both Maori people and descendants of colonial settlers.
‘‘The mother of my godson had a grandma named Erina Rawinia Pucher who was born in Jerusalem on the Wanganui River, where she grew up playing on the river with her sister Thelma, an opera singer.
‘‘I met her two decades ago, when Erina quickly became my teacher, and I her interpreter of dreams. She impressed deeply into me the need to wrest control of the Wanganui from DOC and Genesis
Energy. I have to say that two Ma¯ ori women were the inspiration for this book.’’
Another of the story’s core threads is Judith’s revelatory relationship with her Waitaha Ma¯ ori friend Aroha Wainui Ropata, whose warmth, love and love of Bob Marley reminded Judith of her friends from the Caribbean and Miami.
Throughout the book there are tales of strange appearances of lights, divination and mediumship for the Wainui River and its woes, and appropriate solutions for the increasing toxicity which saddens everyone.
It’s not surprising that much of the book is set around Wainui Bay on the eastern side of Golden Bay, where the author and her husband John McKie have come and gone for 40 years.
Their 16-hectare forest block running up the hillside from the Wainui River has become their life’s work; making tracks, planting trees and caring for them, and setting trap lines for predators. Real struggles have come from the environment, like the massive 2012 flood, which isolated them for weeks.
At the book’s launch in Takaka in October, I had to ask: how could a rationally trained anthropologist write such a mystical book?
Her answer: ‘‘I’m 73 – it’s time for me to write how I feel, and bring together all I’ve learned over the years. In addition, in anthropology we have a tradition of researchers learning a new world view from the people they work with, who hold quite different perspectives on the world of spirit. Carlos Casteneda is a classic example, and I used his books in my introductory classes. If anything can crack a tightly held Western viewpoint, it might be his early works.’’
Looking back at where Judith came from makes you understand. After receiving her PhD from McGill University, she held two faculty posts at two Florida universities, where she taught anthropology and oversaw research students.
When her artistic talents evolved, she exhibited widely, often accompanied by lectures and workshops. During that time her focus was on the longest holocaust in history: the witch trials of early modern Europe. One of her past books is titled Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles (1980, Plenum Press).
While living in Miami, Judith met a Cuban-Yoruba priest, Ernesto Pichardo, who challenged (and still does) her cultural assumptions about ‘‘whiteness’’ and introduced her to her personal ‘‘teacher’’, Orisha, Eleggua/Eshu, the trickster.
Judith also studied yoga with senior teachers of B K S Iyengar, teaching for a while at the Yoga Institute of Miami and in Takaka, and most recently at Tui Community and her own facility, which she calls her Yoga Temple.
Visiting Judith and John is a forest treat. The sign on the lower gate declares the weka haven you are about to enter, and visitors are not disappointed. Five followed at my feet the moment I left my car, and by the time I approached the house, I could count a dozen.
Judith tells me they have names for 24, and there are little gates and barricades made specially to keep them out of the couple’s self-built, off-the-grid house.
This main building is spectacular but simple – three storeys of heavy timbered construction, fronted in glass. Like his father in Miami, John’s
This memoir tells in her own heartfelt and visceral way how she came to realise that her own spiritual rejuvenation was tied up with acquiring a deep respect for the environment, in particular our rivers and forests.
background is as a commercial builder, which explains the existence of the associated yoga temple and office, art studio and sauna, where a wooden walkway through the forest festooned with lichen and mosses leads over and down to a sparkling creek, one of three on the property.
Half of their block now has a QEII Trust covenant over it to preserve it in perpetuity. John has also been involved as treasurer of Project De Vine and Forest & Bird, helps to trap pests with Friends of the Cobb, and is a trustee of Mangarakau Swamp.
Says Judith, quoting a wellknown Maori whakatauki, central to Prophecy on the River: ‘‘Look after the birds and the forest flourishes. If the forest flourishes, the birds flourish.’’
Prophecy on the River can be purchased online at attarbooks.com or from Take Note Takaka, or is downloadable from amazon. Judith can be contacted via her website, judithhoch.com.