Making Waikato weirder
It might be a bastion of middle class conservatism, but the Waikato is, ironically, New Zealand’s capital of weirdness.
And it is about to get weirder.
Hamilton’s Riff Raff Trust, the group behind the city’s iconic statue, has rebooted and taken on a new mission: Fostering the outlandish throughout the region.
And the new(ish)-look team of trustees have a plethora of arts, environmental and cultural projects in the pipeline to help further that goal – including an inaugural Festival of Weirdness, to take place in the last week of October.
As trust chairman Mark Servian explains, while the week of mostly-free events was, at present, mostly in the conceptual stage, it would fit well with the trust’s newlyadopted mantra of ‘‘a weirder Waikato, when-and-wherever’’.
The addition of new trustees Lauren Kerr-Bell, Kelli Pike and Kiri Crossland – who join Servian and longstanding treasurer Graham Haines – had effectively reinvigorated the organisation. The trust was established in 2003 as a vehicle for Servian’s mission to commission and erect the now-famous effigy of Rocky Horror Show star Richard O’Brien.
‘‘We’ve [now] expanded our remit in terms of both geography and scope beyond just Riff Raff and Embassy Park, so that we can carry out placemaking, activations and other grassroots art activity inside and outside, with social and/or environmental purpose, anywhere in the Waikato.’’
Although the Waikato region is, prima facie, a staid environment established to cater for the dairy and meat industries, under the surface lie enclaves of strangeness.
But why is the Waikato so weird? Servian has a theory: ‘‘Normality breeds abnormality
. . . and, to a degree, this place is a pretty blank canvas.’’
Possibly the best-known example of this phenomenon was the band Split Enz which, while not entirely a Waikato product, still had a solid component in the form of core members Tim and Neil Finn – who hail from Te Awamutu.
Much of the region’s other outlandishness over the last few decades has come in the form of bands like Mobile Stud Unit, the Big Muffin Serious Band or the robot band The Trons; or creative folk in other fields like architect Roger Walker.
Some expressions of the Waikato’s weirdness have a decidedly sinister flavour, reflective of the dark deeds that often occur in the rural hinterlands – as Servian describes it, ‘‘the Waikato gothic thing’’.
That subgenre is typified by works like Waikato filmmaker Greg Page’s 2003 feature The Locals, or the novels of Ronald Hugh Morrieson, ‘‘which, although they were set in Taranaki, could just as easily have been located here’’.
Servian himself is steeped in weirdness. The ex-president of the McGillicuddy Serious Party has a long, prestigious history of taking part of quirky, Monty Pythonesque antics alongside Graham Cairns and other stalwarts of the movement.
The trust has numerous other plans and Servian says the bottom line is to be ‘‘always imaginative, innovative and transformational, and often unconventional and progressively challenging’’.