A turning point
When I was growing up in West Auckland, Guy Fawkes – or Bonfire Night, as my English mother called it – was both exciting and frustrating.
Each year the fireworks factory, one of my father’s printing contacts, gave him a paper bag of rockets and Catherine Wheels.
Sometimes one of our neighbours had a bonfire. Usually everything took place in daylight, including rockets launched from milk bottles in our back garden, because November is early summer and darkness descends way too late for families with small children.
It was only when I was studying at university in York that Bonfire Night made any sense, in the dark and cold of early winter, and where the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 had a cultural context.
Guy Fawkes, a York native and one of the conspirators protesting against Catholic persecution, was tortured and executed. In England, almost 400 years later, I saw children hauling around scarecrow-like effigies to raise money – the old ‘‘penny for the Guy’’ custom – then tossing the Guy Fawkes stand-in on to bonfires.
Many of my Catholic friends told me their families never celebrated on November 5, because it was an anti-Catholic festivity, gleeful in its violent commemorations. In the late 17th century, the burnt effigy represented the Pope. It began to feel more sinister than exciting.
I moved to the US, where the celebration doesn’t exist, and firework displays are the province of night-time July 4th celebrations and New Year’s Eve.
In 2015, I returned to a New Zealand that no longer clung quite so fervently to imported
‘‘. . . the loss of language meant losses of knowledge, of Māori astronomy, customs and the lunar calendar.’’
British traditions. Instead, there was increased knowledge of Matariki, the cluster of stars known in Europe as the Pleiades, or Subaru in Japan. Its rise in early winter signals the turning point of the traditional Ma¯ ori year.
A century ago, Ma¯ ori celebrations of Matariki were common, but urbanisation and the loss of language meant other losses: of knowledge, of Ma¯ ori astronomy, customs and the lunar calendar.
Any celebrations of our own natural seasons were replaced by European traditions at seasonally inappropriate times: Easter in autumn, Halloween in spring, Christmas and a solar New Year celebration in summer.
Matariki is observed across the South Pacific, from Easter Island to Hawaii, to Kiribati to the Solomon Islands.
This year, for the first time, New Zealand celebrates Matariki with a national holiday. The more we learn about it, the more we honour our own place and our own unique place in the world.
The Matariki cluster was created when Ta¯ whirima¯ tea, god of winds and weather, sided with his father, Rangi, over the forced separation of earth and sky. Enraged with his brothers, he plucked out his own eyes, crushed them and flung them on to the chest of Rangi.
The Pleiades may be known as the Seven Sisters, but there are nine stars visible to us here in the Matariki cluster, and they are not all female.
In one account, described by Rangi Ma¯ ta¯ mua in Matariki: The Star of the New Year, Matariki herself is the mother, the central star in the cluster, and the seven others are her children, fathered by Rehua (Antares), the paramount chief of the heavens.
Daughter Po¯ hutukawa is the star of the deceased, a reminder to mourn those we’ve lost the previous year. Her sister Tupua¯ nuku and brother Tupua¯ rangi represent the food of the earth and of the skies (birds).
Another brother/sister pairing, Waitı¯ and Waita¯ , represent food gathered from fresh water and the sea. Waipunarangi links the cluster to rain, and her brother Ururangi to the wind.
My favourite of the siblings is the last, Hiwa-i-te-rangi. She represents our hopes and dreams. If you want to wish on a star for a change in your life, search out Hiwa. Matariki is ours, connecting with the natural world and with the sacred, with those we’ve lost and with our deepest desires. All we have to do is look up into our own night sky.