Tides of change
About half of Aotearoa’s more than 2500 schools are near the coast or inland waterways, putting them at potential risk of flooding or erosion. As climate change increases the risk of exposure, Gianina Schwanecke and Brett Kerr-Laurie look at how the Minis
Granity School has battled the relentless tides of the West Coast for decades and learned long ago “mother nature has no rules”. In 2015, a large “rock dune” was constructed to combat savage waves soaking the playground and faster-thanexpected erosion eating away at the 30-pupil coastal school.
But the 2 to 3-metre-high wall wasn’t enough during a particularly fierce storm two years ago that took “big chunks” out of the bank and tossed sizeable rocks on to the school field.
The wall was repaired last year and is “by far and away doing the job we need it to do”, but principal Gemma Rout will “never say never”.
“For the foreseeable future we are in a really good position to maintain what we have, but who knows what the future holds.”
The last few storms and king tides haven’t washed out the wall, but the school has maintained open conversations with the Ministry of Education and Buller District Council.
“The ministry seems to be happy the wall we now have in place is definitely doing its job, the end of the building is safe from erosion … so for now we are sitting tight.”
How will climate change impact education?
It’s only more recently that the ministry undertook work to understand the extent of flooding risks posed to schools.
In 2022, it carried out assessments to determine what schools might be at risk, identifying 103 schools – 50 in the South Island and 53 in the North Island, of which 15 were in the Wellington region.
The project was later expanded to include the risk of flooding for at-risk schools away from the coast, those near rivers or other erosion impacts.
More recently, a briefing supplied to Education Minister Erica Stanford late last year warned that 1102 schools were at risk of flooding.
Reports for 10 pilot schools, in Wellington and along the West Coast (including Granity School), were developed using river and overland flow information from available council data, with further analysis undertaken by Tonkin + Taylor to better understand the potential risk.
The ministry was working closely with local councils and territorial authorities to develop an understanding of the challenges and create adaptive pathways for schools.
Sam Fowler, the ministry’s head of property, infrastructure and digital, said the National Flood Risk Management Programme was relatively new and the impacts faced by each school varied greatly.
“The work that’s been done to identify where these priorities are will enable us to develop programmes of investment that can make that bigger impact, but can also be done efficiently and effectively to the benefit of schools.”
Climate change is a key driver behind the growing risk facing many schools.
Extreme rainfall events not only brought the risk of flooding, but could have compounding risks from extreme winds and landslides, resulting in property damage, power outages or even challenges in students accessing school grounds.
“We expect extreme weather events to be more regular and likely to be more severe,” Fowler said. “That’s going to test our existing infrastructure, and it’s going to mean that the investments we make in that infrastructure are going to have to consider the best response to those challenges, and may ensure that their facilities are as resilient as they need to be.”
This included questions about “putting them in the right place at the sites, as the right levels”. Asked whether some schools may need to consider relocating, Fowler said the ministry would have to work with individual schools and communities about “responding appropriately”.
He said there was “plenty of work” that could be done on existing sites, with existing facilities, to make sure schools were more resilient.
Costs relating to climate change resilience would have to be integrated within the ministry’s planning and delivery. “We’re just going to have to make sure that is part of the investment that we make.”
Events like the Auckland floods and Cyclone Gabrielle had highlighted broader infrastructure resilience problems which impacted schooling, such as road washouts and communication systems going down.
“The Auckland floods actually showed that these are challenges that all our schools are going to be facing.”
The ministry was working closely with local councils and territorial authorities to develop an understanding of the challenges and create adaptive pathways for affected schools.
Not just floods, climate change presents heat risks too
Climate change also creates challenges relating to rising temperatures, especially in early childhood centres.
Dr Luke Harrington, a senior lecturer in Climate Change at Waikato University, said the two main climate-related risks for early childcare settings and schools were extreme rainfall and heatwaves.
“In a warming world, extreme heat is the fastest-changing climate hazard over land. Any rise in global temperatures will make things incrementally worse, and we’ll have to adapt to a perpetually warmer future even once carbon emissions reach net zero.”
For rural schools, there are also potential water-availability risks from drought if the schools rely on tank water and are ill-equipped to manage an unprecedented drought.
Harrington said there was ample evidence, both here and overseas, that younger children were “most vulnerable to suffering adverse health impacts from extreme heat”, particularly because of their inability to cool themselves down as well as adults can.
“Even in mild cases, heat stress can affect our concentration levels – for adults, this means a loss of productivity; for children, this means disrupted learning.”
“Even in mild cases, heat stress can affect our concentration levels – for adults, this means a loss of productivity; for children, this means disrupted learning.” Dr Luke Harrington, senior lecturer in climate change
The risks were highest during times of the year when temperatures are hottest, he said.
“No matter where we look, almost every record-breaking high temperature recorded over the last few decades has happened in either the last week of January or the first week of February ... right around the time of the new school year starting.”
Similarly, the tropical cyclone season normally runs until late February – though he noted that risks from extreme rainfall are present year round.
Harrington thought this was a good starting point for an adaptation strategy, moving the school start date back to ensure children aren’t stuck indoors all day during the opening weeks of the first term.
“One of the biggest interventions we can make is educating teachers of the potential health risks from extreme heat, as well as how we can manage this risk by adapting what we expect our students to do during the hottest times of day.”
Improving school buildings, making sure ventilation and cooling measures were adequate, and ensuring school uniform policies were appropriate for temperatures were also important adaptation strategies.
Dr Dermot Coffey, the co-convener of OraTaiao New Zealand Climate & Health Council, agreed younger people and those with pre-existing health conditions were more vulnerable to the direct effects of heat.
Mental health was also an area of concern in relation to climate change.
“There’s a lot of evidence for individual extreme events and the mental health burden that causes. The trauma and grief responses that happens.
“What’s less clear, though there is finally decent evidence, is the impact of repeated events, cumulative disasters, and what they call climate anxiety.”
He said it was good to see funding provided for mental health support postCyclone Gabrielle.
Coffey said no New Zealand government had been “particularly proactive” about the climate crisis and he felt there had been less of a focus on adaptation.
“We have been slow to make plans and grasp the fact this is happening.
“The focus has to go on an open discussion and action about mitigation and adaptation.”
He wanted to see young people involved in these conversations too, because the effects would be felt most by their generations.
Adaptation v mitigation
Tracy Finlayson, is the programme director overseeing the ministry’s emissions reductions. Her work focuses largely on how to reduce the impacts of climate change through lowering emissions.
She said there were many challenges as it was a “big emissions profile”.
The ministry, one of the largest government organisations, also includes emissions created by the state schools it represents in its calculations.
Work to understand the ministry’s emissions profile began in 2021, with its first carbon footprint profile released earlier this year.
It found it produced 1.12 million equivalent tonnes of CO2 for 2022-23. Most of this related to purchased goods and services, followed by transport and construction.
The ministry’s corporate operation produced 23,912 tonnes.
Finlayson said she couldn’t comment on what each individual school was doing, but said they “are involved in this process”.
“Emission reductions are happening in schools every day and they care about it,” she said. “I think that heaps of schools are doing heaps of cool stuff, and investigating different ways to engage the students and learning about this.”
This included initiatives such as reducing waste, transitioning to cleaner energy and selecting low-emissions materials in buildings.
In 2022, the ministry announced a decarbonisation project to see all coal boilers which are used to heat schools replaced by June 2025 – they produce about 9000 tonnes of CO2 annually.
Harrington said moving away from coal boilers made complete sense.
Extending that further, a policy of rooftop solar energy generation for schools also seemed a “no-brainer” to him, particularly given the typically large amount of roof space to leverage on school buildings, energy-demand peaks during the daytime, and the potential for community benefit for any excess generation, which could then be fed back to the grid.
A changing tide
Some schools are making bigger waves when it comes to adaptation and futureproofing against the effects of climate change.
Those like Te Raekura Redcliffs School, a coastal school in Christchurch, which has made big changes, including building “boatshed”-style classrooms.
Architect Hugh Tennent said the school was designed to accommodate aspects of climate change, after earthquakes closed the original campus and it was rebuilt overlooking the sea.
The lowest floor levels were 1.8m above the adjacent road, stormwater drainage infrastructure in the area was upgraded and solar panels were used, he said.
Rose McInerney, past principal at Redcliffs, said “it was definitely a school built for the future”.
“In the three and a half years that I was on that site we had some really heavy rainfalls, and we didn’t have any flooding at all.”
Although basic flooding shouldn’t be an issue, current Redcliffs principal Nick Leith said tsunamis were still on the radar, with at least yearly evacuation drills despite pretty aware students.
“Recent disasters over the last 10, 15 years have highlighted the real risk because until then a tidal wave was something everyone heard of but didn’t see.
“People are aware of the devastating effects so it has a lot more importance, for sure.”
It would be a complete understatement if I said that Geraldine Cinema has to be my favourite cinema in the whole world. As you stride up those six steps from Talbot St, each step takes you back 14 years in history. As you go through the front doors, the only contemporary things you will see until you leave at the end of the show are the chocolate bars, packets of crisps and ice creams on sale, and of course the movie.
Long gone are the traditional cinema seats – these have been replaced by an eclectic mix of sofas of every style fashionable in the 1950s and if it’s a cold night there are snuggly blankets for your comfort. If you take the time to put your ear to the walls you just might hear a nostalgic cacophony of past shows, Edwardian ballads, appreciative applause and generations of laughter.
In 1924, when the foundation stone was laid for what was to be the Geraldine Town Hall, there was not even electricity in the town, so when the building opened in August the following year the locals marvelled at the way their new building was future proofed with the newfangled electric wires.
Electricity came to Geraldine that year and quickly the Town Hall became the centre of entertainment for the whole district.
To the delight of everyone on the opening day, a Mr Cuth Knight showed a movie called North of the Yukon. On the strength of this, Cuth was approached by the council to show movies regularly in the new Town Hall.
Cuth had to locate the necessary equipment to construct a screen that, with the help of ropes and pulleys, could fold down from the ceiling so it didn’t get in the way of stage shows.
The breathtakingly modern projector took reels of film that were more than 300m long and each reel lasted only 10 to 14 minutes. When the spool finished, the next one had to be rethreaded and the gap in the film was usually filled by a local pianist or a small orchestra.
When the first projector was installed in the projection box, they had to cut through the thick concrete wall to create a port for the projector and another for the operator to keep an eye on the screen. The trial run didn’t go swimmingly as sadly the projector was not high enough, so only some of the movie could be seen on the screen.
A platform with steps was hurriedly built and now the projector was 2.3m off the ground. Eventually everything was sorted and the show could begin.
It wasn’t all plain sailing, however, as the films in these early days were highly flammable and there were many instances of cinemas catching fire. Tough regulations were put in place requiring non-combustible walls and metal-clad doors to be installed.
It was fortuitous that Cuth Knight, the cinema manager, was not only an A-grade projectionist, but from 1928 until 1967 he was also chief fire officer for the district.
Cuth had grown up in nearby Timaru and turned down an offer to work at a smart cinema in Dunedin as he needed to go to Geraldine to do some serious courting. As with everything he turned his hand to, he was also good in the courting department and it wasn’t long
before he married Olive.
Going to the movies in the 1920s was a very special event as the patrons would come for the whole evening. Firstwouldbethefilmandthen everyone would leave and wait outside while the staff pushed back the seats and then everyone could traipse back in and the dance would begin. Life was certainly jumping in downtown Geraldine.
It wasn’t long before the 10-minute film spools were replaced with the newfangled 18-minute spools as movies were getting longer. The Geraldine Cinema had to invest in two projectors and if things went to plan the second projector could kick into action seamlessly.
More projection ports had to be cut through that thick concrete wall and there was even less space in the projection box. There was no way in the world that Geraldine Cinema was going to be left behind with all this cutting edge technology.
More change came in the shape of the Talkies and the first successful production film was The Jazz Singer, starring the one and only Al Jolson. His opening line was “You ain’t heard nothing yet”, which was certainly a prophetic statement.
Bless the Geraldine Borough Council for having the wisdom to take a very dim view of the threat to public good with these Talkie movies. The council wisely ruled that these evil films should not be shown at the Geraldine Town Hall.
The morally depraved folk of Geraldine weren’t deterred one bit as there was a new cinema in Timaru and within an hour they could be corrupted by the marvel of pictures with words and music.
The movie audience at the silent Geraldine Town Hall shrank and eventually the council closed the cinema down. The Town Hall was now available only for live shows and for those everso- gripping civic events.
The building lay dormant and after a few months the ever forward-thinking council put it up for lease. Thankfully, saviour Cuth Knight stepped up again and took over the lease.
In time, the entrepreneurial Cuth branched out further as he had acquired equipment to set up cinemas in Rangitata, Mayfield, Fairlie, Pleasant Point and in the 1950s he set up a cinema at Lake Tekapo.
On one occasion when the Opuha River was in flood, Cuth had to find a way of getting the film to the Fairlie Cinema for a showing. With the help of his Fairlie operator, they constructed an improvised flying fox across the raging river and they pulled the film container across by rope.
There is no doubt that Cuth was a man with an unlimited imagination. On one occasion in the 1930s, with some friends, they made a large number of metal holders and large playing cards.
In the dead of night, Cuth and his co-conspirators placed one of these metal holders and playing cards on the front lawn of every house to promote an upcoming film called The Gambler. Photographs were taken and entered in an international film competition and the ingenious Cuth won a special trophy for ingenuity from Universal Pictures.
Like me I’m sure you’re curious about Cuth’s unusual name – well, his full name was Charles Cuthbert Knight, but everyone knew this truly remarkable man as Cuth.
Whenever I’m lucky enough to be in Geraldine I make it my mission to visit the cinema, but one time in particular was truly memorable. We were in Geraldine for a week of music-making with my friends from the Café Latte Orchestra, which is made up of lovely retired folk from around Australia and New Zealand.
I phoned Patrick Walsh at the cinema to see if it would screen the movie Quartet specially for us. Quartet is a movie about a group of retired professional musicians who all end up in the same nursing home. Patrick agreed, so imagine the sight of my musical friends snuggled up on the old sofas watching a movie about themselves.
Only a few days later, I was in London and was invited to, of all places, the Musicians Drinking Club in Soho. At this basement establishment on a Monday afternoon I found a very congenial bunch of older musical folk reliving past memories and pretending they were young again. To my delight there were several of the musicians who had starred in Quartet.
Of course, I had to tell them about our recent experience on the other side of the world. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t really conjure up the magic of that night in Geraldine. After another round of drinks we all decided that a visit to the Geraldine Cinema should go to the top of their bucket list before it was too late.
In appreciation of Cuth, next time you are staying in Geraldine don’t spend the night in your motel watching Netflix but instead go along to the cinema and take those six steps up from Talbot St and enjoy the 1940s in real style.
Former Cantabrian Mark Walton, an internationally recognised clarinettist and saxophonist, has an enduring fascination with New Zealand history and writes regularly about his home country.
In October, the updates on Annemarie Hope-Cross’ Givealittle page are full of hope. “I’m totally humbled and blown away by everyone’s generosity,“she writes as donations pour in. Messages of gratitude are shared with a photo of Hope-Cross with her husband, Eric Schusser, whom she married eight weeks before the breast cancer diagnosis.
By December, she is gone.
The 54-year-old Central Otago photographer died on December 3, 2022, looking out on her garden where she spent her days capturing flowers with her camera.
“Her body was just so beaten up. The cancer was so pervasive … We didn’t manage to start it,” Schusser says.
He’s talking about a drug, Trodelvy, which can slow progression of cancer and extend a person’s life by about five months compared with traditional chemotherapy. But, like many cancer drugs, it is not funded in New Zealand.
When Hope-Cross died, the donations were about to hit $25,000. The couple needed more than four times that, to buy Annemarie a few more months with stage four breast cancer. The plan was to begin treatment and pay as they went on.
Hope-Cross had spent more than five years on a treadmill of radiation and chemotherapy after a late-stage diagnosis, when it had started to spread. Hope-Cross had kept up with screening, it just hadn’t been found. “We had a couple of GPs say to Annemarie, ‘it’s all in your head.’ We didn’t think it was.”
Schusser credits a Dunedin Hospital nurse who performed a physical exam after a “sandy” mammogram and found a lump straight away.
“She probably kept Annemarie alive a lot longer because she really pushed to have a scan on that side and a biopsy. That took a bit of courage on her part.”
Schusser offered to refund the donors, but they agreed a donation should be made in Annemarie’s name to the Breast Cancer Foundation.
According to the Rachel Smalleyfounded initiative The Medicine Gap, New Zealand sits at the bottom of the OECD for per capita spending on medicines.
“Most of these things essentially come down to money,” cancer epidemiology Professor Mark Elwood stated in an editorial on different cancer outcomes in Australia and
New Zealand, published yesterday in the New Zealand Medical Journal. “Countries with greater total health expenditure per capita have higher relative cancer survival rates.”
Australia was ranked fifth in expenditure and second in survival while New Zealand was 15th in health expenditure and 22nd in survival, in a 2019 review of 30 developed countries, Elwood says.
“Good as gold” and out of options
Charles Gribble is at pains to say he’s not in pain. The liver cancer diagnosis came last June, but the 82 year-old former bookbinder still feels
“good as gold”.
“I wouldn’t know there was anything wrong with me,” the 82-year-old says.
The Foxton Beach home where he lives alone is spotless, including the football and golf trophies on the shelf.
He still golfs on Tuesdays and Thursdays, plays twilight bowls and is even dating, with an old childhood friend visiting this week from the UK.
But despite all this, Charles is someone who is out of options.
“The doors have been shut,” his daughter, Gabrielle Gribble, says.
“You hear about people who can’t get certain drugs, but to hear there’s nothing ... it’s just ‘go and live your life’.”
He should have been on a drug trial that would have provided access to medicine called Atezolizumab and Bevacizumab, but when his blood protein level failed to rise he became ineligible in December.
Charles’ cancer is known as hepatocellular carcinoma with grade A cirrhosis, not amenable
to local therapies. This means the treatment options started out extremely limited, then vanished when he no longer qualified for the drug trial.
He received this news at an appointment on January 17, where an oncology registrar told him the disease “will progress from this point”.
He was discharged and offered a referral to palliative care.
“It was ‘bye bye’,” Charles says. The drug Charles was hoping to access through the trial is on a list of 13 treatments the National Party campaigned on funding.
If things go to plan, the drug he needs will be funded for his type of liver cancer. But no timeline has been set. And for Charles, any timeline may be too late.
“We know he’s going to pass away,” Gabrielle Gribble says, tears falling. “I guess I don’t want him to be in pain.”
No timeline for 13 treatments
The National Party campaigned on making 13 new treatments available for cancer. Along with Gribble’s liver cancer treatment, the list includes drug therapies for lung, bowel, bladder, kidney, skin and head and neck cancers, that provide clinical benefits and are already funded in Australia.
Health Minister Dr Shane Reti was unavailable to be interviewed for this story and did not directly answer questions about when they might be available, how many lives the new drugs will save, how costings were worked out and whether resourcing costs are included.
ThePost also asked whether he would look at further cuts to health funding if the $300m set aside to fund them over four years is not enough. As it stands, National intends to fund the drugs by reinstating the $5 prescription fee for most people, which would leave net gains of $75m a year. Instead, he provided a statement telling New Zealanders with cancers they aren’t forgotten and empathising with the frustration of people “trying to access the best possible treatment“.
“These cancer medicines were to be funded by targeted co-payment reintroduction, and this is progressing.”
He says he is still taking advice and considering the wider scope of work needed in the cancer diagnosis and treatment space.
Last month Pharmac announced funding of two new cancer treatments, for advanced breast cancer and for blood cancer, which will improve health outcomes for hundreds of New Zealanders, Reti said.
Drug list ‘out of date’ – oncologist
Oncologist Dr Chris Jackson, a professor at Otago University, backs the list of drugs – he was one of the people who wrote it.
The list was a comparison between New Zealand and Australia at the time it was written, he says. “Australia has funded more drugs in the last 18 months and so has New Zealand and the emphasis has changed. So it’s important to make sure this remains the most appropriate list.”
For that reason, he’s urging Reti to review it before funding the medicines. “That list was lifted from a report myself and colleagues wrote about 18 months ago and it will be daft to use that list, that’s out of date,” Jackson says.
“It wouldn’t be a big undertaking to do that ... That’s what any responsible minister should do and I’m pretty certain that’s exactly what they will do.”
Jackson says when the Government announced it would fund the 13 drugs, it showed its hand to drug companies.
“It leaves [Pharmac] completely hamstrung. If you tell a guy you’re going to buy their car off them, they’re not going to drop the price. It would have been much smarter to have announced a funding boost for Pharmac and let them get on with their job, which is to prioritise drugs and get good deals.”
Jackson says no-one should expect movement on the list until at least May, when Pharmac’s annual medicines spending is set at the national Budget.
Rami Rahal, head of the Cancer Control Agency, has warned that most of the 13 treatments don’t have a curative effect and therefore will not impact overall survival rate.
Jackson agrees, but caveats it: “Most cancer drugs don’t cure. To improve the cure rates, most of that is in screening, early detection, surgery and the timing of treatments.”
Oncologist Dr George Laking (Te Whakatōhea) backs the list of treatments, but agrees the Government has undermined Pharmac’s bargaining power by getting involved.
“A big part of the reason for creating Pharmac was to push these rather ghastly decisions back from the public domain, and into a much more technocratic realm,” says Laking, speaking as part of Hei Ahuru Mowai Māori Cancer Leadership Group.
Laking worked for Pharmac’s pharmacology and therapeutics advisory committee until about eight years ago.
He says although the Government has “gone a bit quiet” on the plan to fund the 13 cancer therapies, he is confident it will follow through, “based on their unwavering commitment to the election promises in the first 100 days”.
“I would expect them to be equally diligent in making this happen.”
Some treatments have been declined before
Pharmac would not answer questions on whether the Government’s announcement affected its negotiating power, but did provide information on the application statuses of the 13 treatments National wants to fund.
While six of them are ranked on the agency’s funding wish list, others have no existing application, or have had applications declined in previous years.
One of the treatments, cetuximab, as a first line treatment for bowel cancer, was recommended by an overarching medicines committee to be declined in 2018 and 2020, but recommended by its cancer treatments committee with medium priority in 2019.
The Government also wants to fund this medicine as a second line bowel cancer treatment. Pharmac declined a funding application for this in 2022.
Pharmac has not received applications for nivolumab for head and neck cancer, nivolumab for melanoma, or dabrafenib with trametinib for melanoma.
Another treatment, BRAF/
MEK inhibitors for unresectable melanoma, was also recommended for the decline list in June 2017.
Pharmac’s cancer treatments advisory committee has recommended two others be funded, kidney cancer treatment nivolumab with ipilimumab and pembrolizumab for adjuvant melanoma.
The six treatments already on the funding wish list are: osimertinib for both first and second line therapies for lung cancer, atezolizumab with bevacizumab for liver cancer, nivolumab and axitinib as second-line therapies for kidney cancer, and pembrolizumab as a second line treatment for bladder cancer.
Paying more for less
Jackson says the price of cancer drugs are rising, but the gains are getting smaller. At a College of Surgeons conference last year, Director-General of Health Dr Diana Sarfati laid out why this is and what it means.
“Back in the 50s, we were getting like 50 or 60 new medicines for every billion dollars spent. This is inflation adjusted. Now we’re getting well under one [drug] if we use cancer medicines or cancer, pharmaceuticals as an example,” Sarfati, formerly head of Te Aho o Te Kahu — the Cancer Control Agency, said.
“There is no relationship between a cancer medicine’s efficacy – how good it is, how much benefit it provides, the cost of [research and development], the cost of manufacture – and its price.
“The relationship is all driven by market forces, often out of America. And so we pay more and more for less and less in health, which makes it a hugely complex environment to make sure that our health system is sustainable.’’
Jackson says this is exactly why price control and cost constraints are needed “otherwise you’re writing drug companies a blank cheque”.
So as the number of people with cancer is projected to double over the next two decades, can a country like New Zealand afford to pay undisclosed million-dollar sums for treatments that may buy a few months of life, at the expense of other lives?
Laking stresses we cannot ignore treatments that may provide a shortterm benefit only. “It kind of throws into question, what’s the point of anything we do? Surely the point is that we can all be present in each other’s lives, rather than vanishing in a Logan’s Run type of dystopian future.”
Eric Schusser is still working with his late wife’s photographs, as she was until two days before she died.
Hope-Cross was choosing the cover for a photography book, A Garden is a Long Time, which was made with poet Jenny Bornholdt. Had she got Trodelvy in time, the extra five months may have enabled her to see it go to print.
“The idea is that yes, [the drug] might only give you another five months, but there’s so much research all over the world and so many possibilities that suddenly emerge,” Schusser says.
“You’re hoping – OK, you can’t get a cure at the moment. But if you can have enough options to keep you going, with a decent quality of life, then you might get to that point where there is one of those things.”
Dr Shane Reti will be interviewed live for this series on Tuesday, March 12. This will be streamed on thepost.co.nz.
“It kind of throws into question, what’s the point of anything we do? Surely the point is that we can all be present in each other’s lives, rather than vanishing in a Logan’s Run type of dystopian future.” Dr George Laking
In 1921, 25 Chinese women were permitted entry into Aotearoa New Zealand. In 1925 there were none. A decade later, 10 Chinese women were allowed.
“Due to the lack of marriageable Chinese women in New Zealand, many young Chinese men must travel to China or Hong Kong to find a suitable spouse,” quotes poet Grace
Yee in her debut poetry book, Chinese Fish.
“This unfortunately increases the Chinese population here, but (truth be told, the Chow is a lecherous monster, a menace to the purity of the white races) the alternative – Chinese men taking European or Māori women as partners – is far worse.”
That shocking statement is one of many which Yee quotes from a trove of archives and which would now be considered outrageous. The documentation of that blatant and pervasive racism is an element of the poetry book’s narrative, which follows multiple generations of a Chinese family in Aotearoa between the 1960s and 80s.
But it also offers an intimate insight into the lives of women and girls in the community and the narratives that surrounded them, both from within the culture in their families and a Pākehā-dominated society with the racist legislation that existed.
Based in Melbourne, Yee says she flipped a lot of the “absurd” narratives, based on stereotypes and tropes, through her book. “I’ve taken the Orientalist voice and [made it] a parody.”
It is illustrated alongside and interwoven with Chinese settler women’s voices, often not heard or documented, presented in an unflinchingly honest and authentic way.
Yee became the first poet in a decade to win the top award at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards this year and was this week longlisted in the New Zealand Ockham Book Awards.
Award-winning poet and novelist Alison Wong said Yee’s research was thorough, using interviews and sourcing text from newspapers, legislation, academic papers, advertisements, popular books and songs.
Yee “skilfully brings everything together with her own words and imagination to create her distinctive poetry. [It] draws the reader in with its rich characters, relationships and stories, just like in a good novel”, Wong said.
“Chinese Fish stands out because it is technically innovative, revelatory and complex, yet at the same time accessible and entertaining. It’s sharp, sad and also very funny. It’s a compulsive and fast read.”
The poetry was first written as the creative component of Yee’s PhD at the University of Melbourne. She graduated in 2016 and the paper sat in her top draw for a number of years before she revisited it and considered submitting it for publication.
Yee’s research was driven by the two types of dominant characterisations of Chinese women in Aotearoa: The dominant public domain which saw them as the “model minority” (a myth referring to the stereotype of certain minority groups, particularly Asian Americans, as successful and welladjusted) and the “yellow peril” (a racist colour metaphor depicting East and Southeast Asian people as an existential threat to the Western World), versus the inside characterisation of Chinese women within the traditional patriarchal Chinese family.
Both were limiting and she sought to discover whether there could be anything else; whether Chinese women were destined to be one or the other, and whether there was any agency or autonomy to create a separate identity.
Yee’s great-grandfather migrated in the early 19th century to join his brother who had a laundry in Wellington.
Men were wanted for their labour but women were strictly excluded, Yee says. “The bottom line is – and it doesn’t sound very nice but it’s true – they didn’t want us to breed.”
Bringing in quotas for Chinese women was a way to choose “the lesser of the two evils”.
Eventually the laws changed and Chinese men could bring back a Chinese wife if they were married in Hong Kong – a British colony and therefore seen as a “valid marriage”.
It was under such circumstances that Yee migrated to Aotearoa as a 4-month-old baby with her mother from Hong Kong, where Yee was born, and her father – a third-generation Kiwi.
Growing up in Christchurch, Yee recalled a lot of racism but it was not often spoken about, just joked about occasionally with her friends.
“Especially when you are a visible ethnic minority, you see how people treat you in a certain way or make assumptions about you, but, at the same time, the same things happen within families; the expectation that you’ll be this serial Chinese daughter/ wife.”
Her research was partly inspired by her lived experience, as well as by the stories she heard and her observations of the community. The rest of it was “a hell of a lot of research”.
She was inspired by other women who had come before and descended from settler Chinese families, such as ground-breaking playwright Lynda Chanwai-Earle, author Eva Wong Ng, Alison Wong and author Helene Wong, who became social policy adviser to Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon in 1978, and the first woman to be appointed to his advisory group.
“They were all pioneers in their own way.”
When Yee looked for other books written in New Zealand about Chinese settler women, “there really wasn’t much”.
She used a variety of formatting in the book. Its main purpose was to be able to distinguish between the multiple narrators.
One of the protagonists, Ping, who leaves Hong Kong to live in the South Island, speaks in broken English, italicised and in narrow columns on the page.
The narrow columns represented the way settler Chinese women had a long history of “self-minimising”.
“They knew they were marginalised, but they just made themselves invisible ... They really didn’t think they had any significance or importance.”
The italics represented the significance of a Chinese woman being given a voice at all.
Meanwhile, Ping’s daughter Cherry is portrayed in lyric poems because it was the main kind of poetry people thought of when thinking about poetry – representing a bridge between two different worlds.
For Ping, her four children are “monolingual aliens”. Yee imagined they did not learn their heritage languages.
It shadowed her own experience, where Yee’s mother did not speak fluent English but Yee’s grasp of Cantonese and Taishanese or Hoisanwa is “basically worse than Ping’s broken English in the book”.
While Yee had an understanding of the languages, her own children had none.
However, throughout the book, Yee uses phrases, terms or sentences written in Chinese characters because they could not be translated into English. “I also wanted these visual interjections of Chinese.”
In part, it was a way for the reader to witness the language in a way they might in real life, she says.
The translations were intentionally placed at the back of the book.
A scholar voice was also integrated, taken from her thesis, referencing some of the legislation.
“Everyone knows about the racism but a lot of people still don’t know about how that racism was legislated.”
Since the book came out, Yee had many people comment on how the story resonated with their own lived experiences, being “an other, ethnic minority” or their family stories of migration and resettlement.
“I think it’s sort of a universal experience for migrants and anyone who’s not part of the dominant mainstream, making those adjustments.”
Although she did not have an audience in mind when writing Chinese Fish, she hoped it would expand people’s idea of what poetry is and could be and for people to learn about the history of settler Chinese people in Aotearoa.
“I think most people agree, they are silly, that Orientalist voice, but at the same time, everybody understands [it]. Even though a lot of those extracts are from 100 years ago or 80 years ago, everybody understands what they're saying so that to me says that those narratives are still current ... I just get this feeling that they’re very entrenched.”
She hoped readers would “dig a little deeper” as to why the voice might feel uncomfortable.
Yee is now working on the final revision for her second book, Light Traps: A History, a collection of poetry inspired by research into settler Chinese in Australia, which will be published later this year.
The winners of the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards will be announced on May 15 at the Auckland Writers Festival.
“The bottom line is – and it doesn’t sound very nice but it’s true – they didn’t want us to breed.”