Unscheduled night up a tree ...

John gets lost on the remote island of 'Eua

There are only a handful of sign-posts on the Tongan island of 'Eua, and these are in pretty poor state after the 2018 tropical cyclone Gita, which damaged most houses on the island. On the vast majority of the island that is uninhabited jungle and farmland, there are no sign posts at all.

I had set out in the morning for the Fangatave cliffs and caves on the north-eastern tip of the island. I had done this hike a number of times, and on this occasion, as so often before, I was picked up by a Tongan family returning from church, and given a lift to the end of the Houma Road. After that, it is about a three hour walk through jungle and farmland to the spectacular cliffs and caves looking out to the Tongan Trench - the second deepest point on earth.

'Eua sign-post

It had been raining for the previous few days, and when I scaled down the cliffs to the cave system using a series of fixed ropes, I found myself stuck. Rain sluicing through the caves had made them slippery and dangerous, and any attempt to navigate them without a fixed line would result in me being spat out through caves to a ten-metre drop onto the rocks below.

I reluctantly turned back, because Fangatave Beach is pristine, deserted and miles from habitation - a truly beautiful location. It was late afternoon, and as I made my way back through the jungle and farmland, I noticed that logging of the forests had changed the topography, and paths I had previously recognised had gone. And then it began to rain.

I was clad in shorts, parka, and hiking boots, and soon my GPS smartphone got wet, and stopped working. After an hour or so, I realised I had taken a wrong turn and when my GPS briefly sputtered into life, I could see I was far to the south-east of my destination. Night was coming on, and no matter how much I looked for a track to take me to the west, I was drawn inexorably away from towns, to the uninhabited coast of the island.

Night time temperatures, mid-winter, on 'Eua had been about 17 degrees, and as the rain was getting stronger, and I didn't have a tent, the situation was looking unpromising. In the last half hour before darkness fell, I would need to find shelter. I had with me a bottle of water and a can of tuna. I would save the tuna for breakfast. The smart thing to do meanwhile was to wedge myself up a tree, away from the soaking ground, and trust the canopy to protect me from the relentless drizzle.

Top of the Fangatave cliffs

As night fell, I thought how rare it is to spend time in pitch darkness. In urban life, there is always a glimmer of light. In a forest, if there is no moon, the darkness is absolute. You cannot see your hand in front of your face. So black, that if I got out of my tree, I might not find my way back up it. So I wedged myself between the branches, and settled down. It was 6pm. Dawn would be in twelve hours.

Because I was wet, I curled into a ball. A drop of as little as two degrees centigrade in the core body temperature can be dangerous: Exposure is the biggest risk to wayward hikers. I also knew that I wouldn't be able to sleep; by moving all night, my muscles would generate heat and prevent my core temperature falling.

The first few hours were spent in an obsessive review of my situation … How had I been so stupid? Why hadn't I brought waterproof leggings? What would my buddies back at the Ovava Tree Lodge be thinking? It was a hike I had done many times before, so I hadn't even told them my destination.

Hotel 'Eua

I had only a few minutes of battery life left on my smartphone, and wanted to conserve that for a GPS reading in the morning - assuming it had dried out by them. But by midnight I knew that my friends at Ovava would notice my absence. I also knew they rarely answered their phone: A very 'Eua way to live. I reluctantly called 111, not because I wanted a police search - they would never find me - but because they could visit Ovava Lodge and let my friends know I was OK.

111 rang for a long time, then a woman's voice, with a thick Chinese accent said: 'This line is under maintenance. Please call back at a later time.'

I burst into laughter. I could imagine a Chinese company, contracted to supply emergency services, late in receiving kick-backs, deciding to withdraw services until whichever official in the local bureaucracy was responsible paid up. Tongans had told me the government is riddled with corruption.

Around 2am in the morning, I entered a trance-like state; a kind of meditation, in which I was detached from an anxiety that otherwise might have exhausted me. The next four hours were spent in this reverie, interspersed now and then with violent singing of tunes I composed specially for the occasion.

The keys I invented for my songs were new to mankind, and I hope never to hear them again. Small animals in the forest ran away in terror. My songs included a passionate hymn of praise to the sickle moon (which finally emerged around 3am); an appreciative song for the tree I was in - its bounty and gracious hospitality; and a wild and tuneless ditty about the importance of taking a sanguine view of things.

My biggest concern, aside from exposure, was that I would be too disoriented by sleep loss in the morning to find my way to the coast. An hour or two before dawn, I got out of the tree and lay on the soaking ground and tried to get some sleep.

Light flooding over the horizon at dawn was the most beautiful sight I could imagine. I carefully ate my can of tuna, using the lid as a spoon. Before it abandoned me, the GPS had signaled I needed to move due west ... I knew that if I started out at dawn, with the rising sun directly behind me, I would have a true compass direction.

After half an hour of dead ends, but having enough mental freshness to retrace my steps, I began to make steady progress westwards until I topped a ridge, and saw the sea – the 30km strait between ‘Eua and Tongatapu.

Moving towards the ocean, which was about three kilometres away, I came to successively bigger tracks, like tributaries. Finally I stumbled upon a workman’s hut, with oily abandoned overalls in it (warm clothing!). The sense of exhilaration I felt was indescribable - a surge of joy so deep, I felt giddy.

Buddhists say: 'Live with the Prince of Death at your shoulder at all times.' We should think about death daily, because only through this familiarity will we truly live each day in the present. While far from death, I had had enough of a glimpse of my own mortality to unleash in me the most profound gratitude for being on the earth - and simply breathing. I knelt down by the workman's hut and kissed the damp, sweet-smelling grass.

My grandmother ... artiste with a shotgun

John remembers his mother of all grandmothers

Elsie was a small, bird-like woman, a former London school-teacher, whose house in Saunders Avenue, Morrinsville, was marked out with a large warning cross on the maps of the Waikato chapter of the Jehovah's Witness Church.

Something in her past had left her with a deep animosity to fundamentalist Christians, and when they came to her door, she would trap them on the porch, and deliver to them a harangue of such ferocity that they were often left white-faced and trembling, before she ushered them from the property.

In those years, before the Mormon Church sent its crisp-white-shirted emissaries door to door in small Waikato towns, the Jehovah's Witnesses enjoyed a prolonged ascendancy ... hawking copies of their magazine The Watch Tower, which was illustrated by terrifying cartoons featuring lurid threats of eternal damnation to the unbeliever.

(Strange but true fact: Jacinda Adern comes from a family of Morrinsville Mormons. History is silent on whether she ever encountered my grandmother.)

Elsie Beswetherick  had endured many things, including the death of two of her children in infancy, the death of her mother at the age of ten, and Zeppelin airship raids over London in WW I. She was known to have exterminated the rat population on her property in England with a shotgun, a weapon that was taller than she was, when she posed beside it with a sorry gaggle of slaughtered rodents.

Her son, Roger: "A single-barreled full choke 12-bore shotgun ... stood by the window in their bedroom, close to the hand of anyone overlooking the chicken run ...  The hens and their food attracted the occasional rat ...  One day I was mooching about in the chicken run, obscured from the house by apple trees ... there was the roar of the gun, a swish of shot and a stinging sensation in my forehead and arm.  A few flattened ricochets had struck me with just enough force to lodge in my skin.  What are you doing? Says I.  I’ve just shot a rat, shouts Mum! On another occasion, a plague of jackdaws was infesting the run at feeding time, accounting for a proportion of the chicken’s grain.  Mum caught the jackdaws clustered in the Victoria apple-tree ... The old gun roared, and nine jackdaws flopped to the ground."

She was a music teacher, had perfect pitch, and I still have her elegant Bannerman piano in my bedroom. A shot-gun-toting music-teacher seemed to me to be an ideal model for a grandmother - a perfect balance of yin and yang, of the masculine and feminine principles. Although ferocious in her attacks on rodents, jackdaws and Jehovah's Witnesses, to me, her oldest grandson, she was always gentle, unassuming and fun.

She had Cornish ancestry, and once a year, she would import fine red threads of saffron from Spain, and make a ceremonial batch of saffron buns; a Cornish traditional dish ... pale yellow, doughy and delicious.

Elsie and Stanley

When my grand-father, a man wrecked by WW I, an arduous life as a blacksmith, and grief for the loss of his home country, began crying eight hours a day, seven days a week, and was incarcerated in Tokanui Mental Hospital for a savage round of electric shock treatment, she maintained an imperturbable calm, as if he was on a prolonged business trip, and rarely if ever mentioned his absence.

When he returned, all Stanley could manage was to do was sit in the porch and knit scarfs, an incongruous activity for a massive ex-blacksmith, and in order to cheer him up, I would tell him my twelve-year-old's jokes, which sparked uncontrollable laughter, laughter that wracked his body until once again he broke into violent sobs, the tears falling onto his half-completed knitting.

Elsie, London school teacher to the core, wasn't keen on these open displays of emotion, and would chide him on misbehaving in front of his grand-children. I remember feeling a mixture of sorrow, pity, and a certain fascination at this spectacular disintegration of masculinity.

By coincidence, my own father, Elsie's son-in-law, was also a music teacher, and the whole question of what constituted real masculinity became a pressing question in our home in Morrinsville, stamping ground of the renowned All Black Don 'The Boot' Clark, and his famous brothers.

I compensated for this lack of masculine credibility in our men-folk by becoming a ferocious rugby enthusiast, playing at No 13 and was known for my kamikaze attitude to tackling. Sometimes, Elsie, a firm proponent of the principle that men should be men, would come to see me play, a tiny figure standing on the side-line and cheering me on - something my own father never did, lost as he was in his Bach fugues and Beethovian caprices.

Elsie with my brother, Andrew. c 1980

When Stanley finally died, and Elsie was incarcerated in a rest home in Hamilton with alleged Altzheimer's disease, I remained convinced during my teenage years, that her dementia was an act, that she had decided 'not to be a nuisance' and had gone quietly to the zombie domain of the aged and infirm rather than be a burden on the family, and that behind her octogenarian demeanor her school-teacher's mind was just as sharp as ever.

I shared this thought with my mother, Elsie's daughter, who looked first horrified, then strangely impressed, as though perhaps I had hit upon something. There was an element of self-abnegation among the women-folk in my family, as though conscious that their intelligence, self-awareness and complexity was not too highly valued in a woman in that era, and that it might just be smarter to play the game and go quietly into that good night.

Christchurch terror attacks - writers must respond

On John's election as national president of the NZ Society of Authors

Tēnā koutou katoa

We send love to our Muslim brothers and sisters at this terrible time.

New Zealand writers will always stand for tolerance and understanding in the face of barbarity and ignorance.

Writers through their work, can spread understanding of other cultures and faiths. They can celebrate the dignity and mana of these faiths and cultures. They can dispel hatred and fear.

They can show that the 'other', the foreigner, the immigrant, is just like us, with the same hopes, struggles and dreams. This can help combat the anti-immigrant rhetoric of political leaders who set people against each-other for their own ends, and who encourage and give legitimacy to racists and haters.

They can shed light on the corrupting role of violence and the glorification of violence.

The Ponsonby mosque in Auckland is opposite the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Two days after the attack, the mosque was a fortress guarded by a huge Maori policeman and a tiny pakeha policewoman with loaded M4 carbines. A telling metaphor for the way Muslim communities in the West have often lived - islands in an alien sea. I could only leave my flowers outside the high walls.

A week later, things had changed. I passed the heaped up mountains of flowers left by Aucklanders, pungent but decaying, and was ushered into the domed room of the mosque by a smiling young man. I sat cross-legged on deep red carpet while the bearded imam, a Koran in one hand, reminded his flock, seated before him, that we are all living on borrowed time. He alternated Arabic with English. Above him, a huge red digital clock underlined his words.

I was aware of my own 'otherwise' in this holy place; how alien, how foreign I felt, a striking reminder of how awkward and out-of-place Muslims must often feel in our cities. I was inside the fortress looking out. I listened to the oratory for half an hour then left.

As I exited the mosque, another imam, Habib, stopped me and took my hand. He spoke of his long journey from Bangladesh, to Thailand and on to New Zealand. When I told him I was a Buddhist, he grasped my hand more firmly and smiled. 'In Thailand,' he said, 'Our friends the Buddhists lived such simple lives. They were very generous.' Perhaps out of tact, he didn't mention the genocide being perpetrated by the Buddhist majority against Muslims in neighbouring Myanmar.

Still, here were a Muslim and a Buddhist holding hands on a street outside a Catholic Church in a small country which has just been torn open by an unthinkable act of barbarity. In the wake of such terrible events, perhaps this was a little progress.

We can use these attacks to cross the moats between cultures and faiths. And we can take action as writers, too.

The greatest books of the last hundred years have opened our minds to the complexity of humanity, its miraculous variety and richness. Novelists in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and our own Maori writers have shown us how to understand and appreciate the marvelous diversity of humankind.

In 'Midnight’s Children', Salman Rushdie reveals in magical prose, the moment when the Indian sub-continent freed itself from the shackles of British colonial rule, and ran helter-skelter down a new, riotous and uncontrollable route to independence.

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, the great Kenyan writer, writes from a jail cell, on toilet paper, and reflects on the emergence of a new democratic Africa from the rule of despots and tyrants.

Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace and Albert Wendt have shown how grievously neglected our own Pacific identity has been until recent decades, and how this marginalisation and neglect has diminished us all. Their books strike a rich new vein of cultural complexity that we New Zealanders can mine for our genuinely Polynesian future.

These books are narratives of emancipation and enlightenment. Of cultures emerging from the past and establishing something precious and new.

In the face of this richness, poetry and diversity, the writing of white supremacists is shown to be arid, impoverished, and destined for the dust-bin of history.

For ten years I lived and worked with immigrants in a poor and violent part of a foreign city. Many of them, Ethiopians, Chileans. Nicaraguans, Iraqis, had fled oppressive and cruel dictatorships. They were regularly vilified in the local media and by politicians as outsiders, parasites, free-loaders.

They were among the most brave, resilient and cheerful people I have ever met. They were thankful for the relative safety of their new home. They were grateful for the smallest generosities and the kindness of their host communities. Our Muslim countrymen and women here in Aotearoa remind me of them.

The Christchurch mass-killer posted an 87-page, 16,000 word manifesto on the libertarian website 8chan. It was lucid, spell-checked, and persuasive for those who desire to hate. It was a paean to medieval notions of racial superiority that informed the Christian crusades and animated a generation of Nazis in 1939.

Racist writers around the world, egged on by a new wave of populist politicians, echo Tarrant's message on their websites and in their chat rooms.

We must use our own skills as writers to counter these messages.

Writers are opinion makers, culture bearers and influencers. The best writers aspire to the highest standards of humanity. To what we all have in common. To our brotherhood and sisterhood with other nations.

We have much work to do in 2019.

Ngā mihi 

John Cranna