Remember Gandalf? He’s baaack….

Stars of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit have re-convened here in Wellington NZ for final pick-up shooting.

I took this just before the premier of the Hobbit movie in 2012.

I’m undecided whether I’ll see the rest of the trilogy. I saw the first – and wasn’t impressed.

My gripes? The cast couldn’t be faulted. Wonderful, wonderful performers. But The Hobbit (novel) was a tightly constructed hero journey. Jackson’s first-part movie wasn’t. It rambled. It brought sub-plots and details that Tolkien never wrote.

It seemed to veer between epic serious – on a scale well above the novel – and Jackson-style visual slapstick, which didn’t bear much resemblance to Tolkien’s quietly intellectual jokes.

I am a huge Tolkien fan. And a huge Jackson fan. Movies don’t have to follow books – but they do have to work as a movie.

This time? Meh.

Have you seen The Hobbit – what are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

OK, so I had a new author photo taken

I am very uneasy about publishing author photos.

Go on, smile, the photographer said. ‘Say “Payday”‘.

In part it’s because I hate having my photo taken. I much prefer to be on the other side of the viewfinder. There’s also the fact that, here in New Zealand, the only time strangers approach authors recognised from photos is to have a crack at them. My last incident was so unpleasant I stopped publishing my author photo in my books.

But image counts these days. Publishers keep asking me for photos. I’ve been using photos taken by my wife, but the other day I went to see a professional photographer.

Here’s the result.

I may swap yet with another from the same session. We’ll see. Editing tool of choice for getting it sized to web use? I have Photoshop – but for this job, Irfanview is my friend.

Do you have an author photo? Have you ever been recognised from it?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

A visit to Tyne Cot cemetery and the solemnity of remembrance

It is nine years since I stood under the Menin Gate on ANZAC day, with other New Zealanders, marking our day of national memorial for the wars of the twentieth century.

My photo of soldiers’ graves at Tyne Cot, 2004.

The gate spans the Menin Road that leads out of Ypres, a town in Flanders; and during the First World War, soldiers from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and other places walked down that road, usually to their deaths. Part of that road, not far from the town, was under German artillery fire from 1915 until 1918; Hellfire Corner, it was called, and hessian screens were raised – not to stop the shells, but to prevent anyone sniping the troops. The gate, a huge arch, is lined with the names of soldiers who disappeared, their bodies never found, in the churned muck of the trenches.

Later, my wife and I walked the quiet lawns of Tyne Cot cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the area and a silent reminder of the lethality of the Western Front. A rotunda carried names – including those of New Zealanders – who had fallen during the Western Front campaign, and were never found.

For me that campaign defined the futility of the human condition – the way we intellectualise ourselves into corners. Militarily it was a cleft stick; the triumph of defence over offence. Industrial technology could bring men to a battlefield in unprecedented numbers. It expanded the battlefield to colossal scales. However, it could not move men on it, nor could infantry overcome the barriers posed by machine gun and wire. Once that had developed it was difficult to find a military way out, without new technologies – which were developed. But that took time, and meanwhile men died, and political solutions were never explored.

At the time, of course, it seemed rational and logical. But that is true, I think, of every war humanity has fought through its long history.

We keep falling into wars, just as we keep insisting that we must never fight them again. It is a relentless cycle which, I fear, is a part of the human condition.

As I walked those silent gravestones in 2004 – and as I sit here now remembering the solemnnity of that day, and thinking about the intellectualised rationality, the stubbornness and the horrors of the war that led to these deaths - it gives pause for thought.

What do you figure on this one?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

ANZAC Day 2013: remembering why we fought

It’s ANZAC Day this week in New Zealand – 25 April,  our equivalent of Memorial Day in the US or Armistice Day in Britain.

It’s iconoclastic. Most nations remember their military dead on days when a war ended – typically, for Commonwealth countries, 11 November, when the guns fell silent over the Western Front in 1918.

But not New Zealand and Australia. Here we remember our war dead on the day we began our first big overseas military campaign, the ground assault on Gallipoli that began on 25 April 1915.

The day is tied into our national identity. That wasn’t always the case. When the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) embarked on that campaign it was to do duty for Empire – for Britain, a country we called ‘home’ even though most of our young men had never been there.

I used to write histories of our twentieth century wars. In my final foray into that field, Shattered Glory (Penguin 2010), I explored the virtually spontaneous celebrations on 25 April 1916, the anniversary of the landings – at which time the Gallipoli campaign was turned, by sleight of hand, from an ignominious defeat (which it was) into a triumph of New Zealand’s contribution to Empire.

It became nationalist towards the end of the war, a spontaneous focus for grief flowing from the terrible death toll of the Western Front, New Zealand’s most lethal campaign of all time and the definition of what the First World War meant, socially and historically.

Of late, 25 April has become New Zealand’s de-facto national day – a moment to remember those who gave their lives – the young men who were never wearied by age.

To me it is also a day to ask a simple question. Why? Why did they go to war?

It is easy to suppose that young men were fooled by Boys’ Own images of war as glorious, a superior sports event that showered honour on soldiers, family and especially school.

I have found letters and diaries suggesting that this may have been true for the Boer War of 1899-1902, our first military campaign. But not the First World War. Not really. Most of the young Kiwis who went to fight even in 1914 knew what war entailed, even if they had yet to learn the true lethality of industrial age fire-power. That lesson had been driven home by 1916; and certainly most of their sons were cynical enough in 1939, when Europe again plunged into war and New Zealand’s young men flocked to sign up.

They did not go because it was glorious. They went because it was necessary.

We forget how close the world was, then, to a new dark age. In the 1930s democracy was but one of three competing systems, and it was on the back foot. In New Zealand of the day, the government of Michael Joseph Savage opposed fascism wherever it stood, even at risk of annoying a British government that felt appeasement was a cheaper option. But Savage was right. So was Winston Churchill, a politician, writer and historian who knew very well what both Nazi and Communist flavours of totalitarianism stood for. But such voices of warning were not heard until almost too late. And for a while in 1940-41, as Britain and her Comonwealth stood alone as the last main bastions of civilised western democracy outside the United States, things stood on a knife edge.

New Zealand’s part in that war took our fighting division from Greece to Crete to Egypt to the Western Desert to Syria, to Libya, Tripolitania, Tunisia, and finally Italy and – in the last hectic days of the struggle – Trieste. They did so under a remarkable commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, VC, DSO (3 bars), etc. (It is nearly a decade since Penguin published my biography of this incredible man; I still think it is one of my best books).

Other Kiwis fought with our navy, with the Royal Navy and with the Merchant Marine. Still others fought in the skies, with the RNZAF and RAF among other services. And we had a presence in the Pacific, where a New Zealander, Major-General Sir Harold Barrowclough, led forces that included a US contingent under Richard M. Nixon. Yes, that Richard M. Nixon.

All this was done not for glory, or rewards of heroism, but because it had to be done. Whatever it took. The alternatives – a world dominated by Nazi evil, fuelled by what Churchill called the ‘dark lights of perverted science’, were too horrible to contemplate. And we knew it.

Today we must remember those who died to make the world a better place, safe for democracy - who helped make the modern world what it is. Both here in New Zealand – and around the world.

Please join me in remembering them.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Celtic history conspiracies, anyone? No? Good.

As humans, I fear, we suffer from an uncanny ability to intellectualise ourselves into believing things that are really, really stupid.

Take the crackpot theories about secret history that have become popular ever since Charles Fort was a lad. Every country seems to have their variations – ‘ancient astronauts’ building pyramids, hidden past civilisations in the Americas, even Atlantis discovered in Google Maps, having eluded everybody on the planet including Google’s mapping teams.

Never mind that the ‘city’ on the Atlantic floor was actually an artefact of Google’s digital mapping process. Or that the ‘Atlantis’ legend itself has been shown to have come from Egypt, and was really about the destruction of Santorini (Thera) and the Minoan civilisation by volcano.

Here in New Zealand, crank ideas have included efforts to ‘prove’ that that everybody from Phoenicians to Celts arrived before Polynesians (always, wrongly, called ‘Maori’ in these accounts). The ‘proofs’, as far as I can tell, pivot on assigning human patterns to natural rock formations, or identifying boulders shifted by a county council during excavations as an ancient observatory. Literally joining the dots, though in a peculiar way.

Like overseas theories of similar ilk, these tell us more about the people proposing them than anything real. What’s more, some of these ideas – Celtic especially – float on a repugnant racial agenda, underscoring what’s actually going on.

New Zealand is far from alone. All this begs the question. How do these ideas gain traction?

Unconscious incompetence plays a part; often these theories are presented by people who are flat ignorant of the state of understanding of the field – so ignorant they don’t know how ignorant they are. That’s coupled with the assertion that ‘I don’t know myself, therefore nobody can know.’

A friend of mine argues it’s the result of people trying to fit the universe into their heads, it’s just a pity their heads are so tiny. It’s to do with their own sense of place, of identity; with constraining the wild unknowns of the world and controlling them – with, in effect, feeling secure, in their own way.

The other tack these fringe theorists try is claiming deliberate deception, a ‘conspiracy’ among ‘the establishment’ to ‘hide the truth’.

I’m part of that establishment, so any denial I make isn’t going to wash. Apart from one small point. Here in New Zealand, certainly, my experience has been that academic historians loathe each other – most of the ones I’ve run across regard the work of their peers as an assault on their own personal self-worth that must be avenged in kind. There is no chance whatsoever of a ‘conspiracy’ even being agreed on – still less sustained – in this viciously hostile intellectual environment.

Again, I think, the ‘establishment conspiracy’ notion is part of that phenomenon of the fringe thinkers keeping the universe small – of cutting the ‘system’ down to size.

Ultimately I don’t think there’s much point arguing against any of the crank theorists. They won’t accept rebuttals; and for every theory that is exploded – sometimes by simply falling out of fashion - a new idea always seems to arise to take its place.

But I still think it’s a pity. As I always say, the real world -  including its history – is wonderful and amazing enough, and still full of great and awesome things to discover, without us having to create fantasies about it.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Does Thatcher’s death mean the 80s are really over?

Former British PM Margaret Thatcher’s death this week has not, it seems, provoked a sense in Britain or even around the world that the deceased can do no wrong.

The ‘Iron Lady’ steered Britain away from a failed post-war course. But the cost was division, bitterness and dispossession. She polarised; and the bitterness re-emerged this week to the point where the Telegraph apparently had to shut down its twitter stream.

Thatcher was not alone. Many developed nations, one way or another, had their ‘Thatcher’ in the 1980s. Including my country, New Zealand.

It was unsurprising. Thatcher’s brand of conviction politics – certainties based not on pragmatic understanding of human nature, but theoretical dogma – was on the rise around the world. It was of its time, framed in the ideological oppositions of the late twentieth century, the moment when the new generation got hold of the tiller on various ships of state around the western world and, probably unintentionally, steered their societies unerringly into a riotous exaltation of self.

Eighties glitz and glam; a photo I took in a Wellington central city mall at the height of the yuppie boom, 1987.

On the back of it the eighties became an age of arrogance, of asserted certainties, of big hair, big shoulder pads, wedge-shaped cars, over-priced and under-sized food, greed, status, displays of power – and bad behaviour.

Was it any good for us? I was in my early twenties when New Zealand followed the Thatcher lead. There were winners, other young twenty-somethings around me who partied up large – for whom the display and assertion of power was an end in itself. The future didn’t matter. What counted was now.

And there were losers. Anybody over 40 was a has-been, unemployable – a dinosaur. Failures. Because they were old. Because they hadn’t made life exciting. Whatever.

Some of the young, selfish, upwardly mobile and badly behaved party animals in white shirts and wide ties crashed and burned in 1987. I don’t know where most of them are now. For myself, I recall it was hard to get work.

I survived; so did others who thought the same way I did. But it wasn’t easy. And every visit I made to my home province brought heartbreak; closures, derelict buildings, a sense of gloom – even as city office workers partied up amidst chromed, neon-lit bars with their revolting ‘goldfish laybacks’ (don’t ask) and Corona beer swilled straight out of the bottle.

With hindsight, I think that whole social mix of the eighties was symptomatic of its time, the antidote for the world wars that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century; a reaction to the safe, solid, protected, grey societies that followed. It made a selected few from a new generation into winners. But I cannot forget the way it also dispossessed. And the generation who had made that 1980s world possible – who had laid their lives on the line to defeat fascism and make democracy safe – were the generation who lost. A twentieth century phenomenon.

We’re well into the twenty-first now. The Cold War is long over. New technology is transforming the way we interact – and the way we can produce and earn. And yet, I have to wonder. It seems to me that the eighties, fundamentally, tapped into an aspect of the human condition. It’s always been around, one way or another, for our entire history. Sometimes society lets it out. And I wonder if that particular genie has really been put back into the bottle, even today.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Why go for woo woo when we have science? Checking out New Zealand’s amazing Moeraki Boulders

I am often amazed at the way perfectly explicable – if unusual – parts of the natural world get layered with what, politely, we might call ‘woo woo’.

Here in New Zealand we have a few – the ‘Kaimanawa wall’, for instance, a few ‘stone blocks’ that are meant to be part of a pyramid and therefore proof that a ‘pre-Maori’ nation existed in New Zealand, despite a total lack of any other evidence, including the rest of the supposed ’pyramid’. Actually the wall is part of an inigbrimite outcrop, naturally formed about 330,000 years ago and since cracked.

Best of them all, though, are the Moeraki boulders, which have attracted enormous speculation, probably because they are well known and easy to get to.

Back in 1848, early settler land buyer and moa enthusiast Walter Mantell – the man whose father, back in England, found the first ever dinosaur fossil – reached Kohekohe beach in New Zealand’s deep south. And beheld an extraordinary sight.

I took this photo of the Moeraki boulders in 2007. They fact that they are not perfect spheres is evident. Note the septarium (split) visible across the top of the boulder in the foreground.

It was strewn with boulders, some up to 3 metres across, weighing 7 tonnes or more, all roughly spherical. Just what they were – and how they got there – has been one of the more remarkable stories of New Zealand’s history.  Not because there is any mystery – but because of the way so many people seemed to think there should be.

Maori explained them by allegory; they were the remnants of calbashes and other cargo held by an ancestral canoe which, legend put it, piled up on this part of the coast.

Settler scientists had the physical origin pinned by 1856; the boulders were natural formations that had eroded out of the bank bordering the beach. That did not stop speculation from people who either didn’t know, or wouldn’t accept, the scientific explanation.

One of the silliest notions was that they were counter-weights for raising sails on 1200-foot long Chinese super-junks. Alas, there was not a shred of evidence, such as any sign that such vessels ever existed. (Technically, a wooden vessel that long would break in the first swells – it’s to do with the required strength of hull girder vs the tensile strength of wood. That is why even short sailing ships had a distinct sheer line, and really big ships had to wait on iron and steel – but I digress.)

Even sillier is the notion that they are alien eggs, some of which have hatched. Or some sort of alien dropping, anyway. Scarily, 27.2 percent of those who responded to an online straw poll thought this was the actual answer.

The reality? There’s no mystery. Spherical objects aren’t common in geology, but they occur. Similar boulders have been found on the Hokianga Harbour in northern New Zealand. There are other formations in Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota and also ‘Bowling Ball’ beach in California, among other places.

In fact the Moeraki boulders are septarian concretions of sand, clay and mud, held together with calcite, which formed in mud about 60 million years ago.

The shape – which is not perfectly spherical – is an outcome of the way this material diffused. It was an imperceptible process that took about four million years – maybe 55,500 human lifespans. To put that in another perspective, to make a 3 metre boulder in that time the calcite need have diffused at only 0.00075 mm a year.

This natural origin makes those boulders utterly ancient, utterly precious – and explains why it’s illegal to damage or deface them.

To me this is way cooler, and way more interesting, than silly explanations involving mystery ancient civilisations or aliens.

What’s more, spherical objects on a smaller scale – much like grapes – have been found on Mars by the Opportunity rover – evidence of past water flows. How cool is that?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Something to share for Easter

St Alban’s church at Pauahatanui is one of the more historic buildings around where I live in New Zealand.

It’s on a site where history extends far before settler days. In the 1840s, it was the site of the pa belonging to Ngati Toa chief Te Rangihaeata. During the war of 1846-47, the British reconnoitred and then tried to take it; Te Rangihaeata refused battle and withdrew up country where he was attacked on what became known as Battle Hill.

My photo of St Albans’ church, Pauahatanui.

The abandoned pa site became a farm and was shortly given to the Anglican church. The old rifle pits became a graveyard. Today it is kept tidy by volunteers.

We happened to pass by it yesterday, on a silvery grey day. Stopped, got out with the camera – and a few minutes later the sun sprang out. I thought I’d share the result. Enjoy.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Rain, rain nowhere, and not a drop to drink anyway…

New Zealand’s problem just now is it’s not very green. It’s brown. And yellow.

After four summers washed out by relentless rain, 2013 has opened with a one-in-seventy-year drought. Wellington region is especially hit – the municipal water supply is at crisis level. Any external use, even a watering can, is strictly forbidden – and they’re pinging people who transgress. We had a present locally last week in the form of two-and-a-bit days rain. But not enough – it sufficed only to wash rubbish into the system – throwing Wellington, where I live, on to its 10-day emergency supply.

The other Saturday I went to have a look at the Hutt River – Te Awakairangi, also called the Heretaunga river. Or, to anybody who’s seen The Fellowship of the Ring, Anduin.

The Hutt river. An American frontier-style fort was built on the bank on the left of this picture in the late 1840s. There’s no trace now, of course. What this picture doesn’t convey is the stagnant smell.

The Hutt river, looking south towards the rail bridge. Usually there’s a lot more water in it than this. Its pakeha name comes from Sir William Hutt (1801-1882), one of the shareholders of the New Zealand Company.

It’s the main source for most of Wellington region’s water. And it’s virtually dry.

Worse, New Zealand also generates a big chunk of our power with water, down south. That’s not in good order either. I’ve got a post coming up on our nifty eco-friendly hydro-power engineering. But that won’t fill the storage lakes.

Time, I think, to plan Laundry Day. That usually spurs rain. At least if I’m involved.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: more writing posts – ‘sixty second writing tips’ and ‘write it now’. More geekery. And, aside from blogging, rain… I hope.

In which your humble author foils a robbery in his own home in daylight

It was the end of another late summer day. My wife was in the kitchen. I was working on my computer. And I heard somebody call.

No knock. Just a call.

Couldn’t locate the sound. I went into the hallway to discover a large gentleman with his head through the back door, apparently on his way into the house. We’d been going in and out earlier, it wasn’t locked.

I confronted him at the door. At 182 cm I’m not short – but he was at least 10-12 cm taller than me, complete with shaved head and massive build to go with his height – 120 kg at least. Not someone to mess with. And I’d caught him trying to enter my house.

He looked at me.

‘Do you use that car?’ he said without preamble, pointing to my car. ‘Do you use it?’

‘I don’t know who you are,’ I replied.

‘I buy cars for others.’ No name, of course.

My car’s 23 years old and obscured from the street by a high gate, which this guy had opened, whereas my wife’s vehicle was in full view in the drive. And I’d stopped him coming in.

I knew what he was really up to. He knew I knew, too.

People get hurt in these moments – the intruder doesn’t care. I’ve had training in hand-to-hand combat – which told me the chances of stopping someone this big if he attacked me were low. But my wife was in the house. So I stood my ground and applied Lesson No. 1 – talk politely and play the game.

‘Car’s not for sale,’ I said. And asked him to leave, politely. I wasn’t sure it would work, but after some tense words, he turned and left, abusing me as he departed.

By the time I got to the street the light truck he’d parked part-obstructing our drive was half way down the road. I couldn’t get the number.

The police arrived within 90 seconds of my call. It was then I discovered I wasn’t able to give a detail description of the interloper’s clothes. I realised I’d been too busy looking at his face – the eyes betray intent.

All this happened in full daylight, around 5.30 pm, in a quiet residential street.

I could ask, rhetorically, what society is coming to – but I already know. And it’s sad.

Your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013