Apocalypse hide-outs
The rich are coming over here and getting ready for the end to be nigh... apparently. James Belfield is on it.
While New Zealand wrestles to break down the barriers between #Them and #Us, one marginalised community remains fair game for exclusion: the superwealthy global elite.
For all intents and purposes, these misunderstood, skittish folk look and sound very much like ourselves, but their rites and customs mean they naturally gather at the very edges of society and their secretive lifestyles give rise to easy rumour and innuendo. And, of course, prejudice.
But the days of baying mobs touting torches and pitchforks are surely long gone – if regular, hardworking Kiwis want to pillory these poor billionaires, they have only one real resource: wry, tabloid hackery.
Step forward Baz Macdonald. This reporter sports the perfect mix of bald pate and bewhiskered chin to allow him to come across as both Wellington hipster and rural bushrange – the sworn, natural enemies of the uber-rich.
And in his investigative documentary Hunt for the Bunker People, he plays on both traits as he stalks the extreme net-worth community living in and around Queenstown.
His schtick is simple: New Zealand has become a bolthole for the international elite, many of whom are so fearful of revolution and reprisals that they’ve started secreting bunkers in their mansions so they can wait out the collapse of society.
He talks to the owner of one peddler of these pristine panic rooms – the surprisingly un-elitish Gary Lynch of Rising S Bunkers – who states he’s fitted out 38 hidey holes in New Zealand and then drops the bombshell: ‘‘If you knew some of the people that own shelters as well as people who own shelters in New Zealand, it would make you scratch your head and ask yourself: what do they know that I don’t?’’
Heck, he’s right. What don’t we know? Could be anything. Baz does his best to explain that it’s patently impossible to prove the existence of any secret bunkers by dint of their being, well, secret, but by then the seeds of mistrust are sown. Look at #Them: coming over here, taking our bunkers and our waterfront views, potentially flouting our planning regs. Clearly the apocalypse is nigh and no-one told us.
The rest of Baz’s relentless pursuit of the truth unfolds simply. We meet the haves and the havenots and witness the dry riverbed of Queenstown’s trickle-down economy; we hear stories about stacks of gold bricks in one underground bombshelter, about people so powerful that they can keep the ski fields open at Cardrona an extra half-hour because they’re in a conference call; and we take long, lingering looks at garages and wine cellars that might conceivably not be garages and wine cellars.
We even head right into the heart of the super-elite stronghold of Wyuna Preserve on the shores of Lake Wakatipu and talk to a digger driver about what he thinks might go into the giant hole he’s been tasked with creating.
Baz is unequivocal: ‘‘There may not be a bunker here, but these are definitely the bunker people.’’ Unfortunately though, the bunker people remain elusive. Ah, but that’s because they’re the bunker people, isn’t it?
‘‘The wealthy people buying in Queenstown seem inaccessible, hidden behind companies or representatives and usually living somewhere else entirely,’’ says the insistent Baz. ‘‘But with their money and influence they’re changing Queenstown in ways that seem to be hurting normal people on regular wages. It made me wonder how safe New Zealand actually is from the problems of the world.’’
And there you have it. The global elite, the nought-pointnought-nought-one-per-centers. It’s their fault. Quick! To Bunnings: it’s time to stock up on pitchforks. #TheyAreNotUs.
Avery different exploration of who ‘‘we’’ are can be found this week in the third episode of the BBC series Handmade in the Pacific which looks at the creation of traditional art in our region.
The series visits Hawaii, an Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land, the Polynesian island of Rurutu, and, this week, Ma¯ ori sculptor Logan Okiwi Shipgood as he carves a two-metre pou for his gallery in Whakarewarewa.
Baz does his best to explain that it’s impossible to prove the existence of any secret bunkers by dint of their being, well, secret.
Everything about this film is lovingly slow. Shipgood’s chainsaws, adze, gouges and chisels roar and then tap out a beat as the form emerges over a series of weeks from an 800-year-old piece of timber. All the while the artist explains everything from the impact of tourism on Rotorua to the meaning of moko.
The camera lingers on sawdust floating through a shaft of sunlight, or Shipgood’s 5-year-old son chuckling his way around the gallery.
Yes, Shipgood can see change coming – he’s open to using 3D printers for his art, for example – but the people in his story are secondary to the stories and artform he works with.
The timber he carves has ‘‘seen mankind come and go… that’s where its value lies’’. #Them, #Us: we are unimportant, the differences immaterial.
Hunt for the Bunker People screens on Vice TV at 7.30pm on April 25.
The third episode of Handmade in the Pacific screens on April 26 at 9.30pm on Sky Arts.