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Waitangi Church Service 2008 |
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Waitangi Church Service 2008 |
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Graham Eklund QC - address Master and Wardens of the Worshipful Company of Girdlers, High Commissioner, Ladies and Gentlemen It is not easy to follow Marion Olsen who has been singing for you. Her singing enlivens us. I have no singing voice and no musical accompaniment. Today I do not even have the privilege of reading or singing something someone else has written. And - I am a lawyer, a species of human being long vilified in these parts of the world. I will not further mention Charles Dickens, who complained of the pestilence of lawyers, but was unable to exterminate them. You might have thought I had been invited here today to address you on some serious issue of law. If you were looking forward to that, I apologise. If you were not looking forward to that, you will not be disappointed. Although law is interesting, it is mostly interesting to lawyers and since most of you are not lawyers, an address on some serious issue of law would not interest you. We have already heard from Marion, but what of Barry, her husband, who silently and in the background orchestrated an invitation for me to address you. It was with his encouragement that, Martin Conway emailed me with a copy of the service for today. The draft already had my name on it, but with the little cautionary proviso created by those letters, tbc – “to be confirmed”. Although Barry has known me for the best part of 25 years, it is probable that he had lost my email address, my telephone numbers and probably my postal address as well and was therefore unable to contact me, to tell me directly that he was recommending to Martin that I should address you. No such problem for Lieutenant-Governor Hobson in 1840, when he met the Maori representatives to explain to them that Queen Victoria was taking over sovereignty of their lands and henceforth they would come under her protectorate. But then Hobson did not have the excuse of an email address his system would not find, or a telephone number directory inquiries had no record of, or of a postal address that he could no longer find. Nor would he have had the excuse that even Google could not find Te Kemara, Chief of the Ngatikawa. And so it was, that without a specific issue to address, or a case to argue, or a brief fee to earn, I was invited to address you for a few minutes – I had a blank canvas to paint. Some time later when I met Martin, he said - “not too heavy and a little uplifting”. I hope I have fathomed what he meant. It is 168 years since the Treaty was signed, inspired, I suppose, by the will of the English to spread Englishness around the world. I began to think about inspiration and the sources and people we draw if from. I recall my child’s perspective about our country. I remember thinking NZ was quite old. When I was 10, the Treaty of Waitangi had been signed 120 years earlier- . a lot of years to a child of 10. Of course I had no appreciation of what a mere blip in the history of civilisation that was - nor did I have much of an appreciation of what had gone before in NZ. Nor did I have any appreciation of the cultural diversity and depth which in 1840 existed in other parts of the world, nor of course what inspired people to travel across continents to acquire other lands. Today, Martin has read to us “Song to the Holy Spirit” a poem by one of NZ’s most inspired and inspiring poets, J K Baxter. It is difficult not to be moved by the last verse, in particular with its reference to the love of friends and song in the hearts of the poor. I want to take you back, not to 1840, but just to 1964, via 1550 (or thereabouts) and to tell you a little of a former school teacher of mine. I met him in my first year at secondary school. I was 13 and have been very fortunate to have a continuing friendship with him to this day. I think it was Latin first (amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant – I love, you love, he loves etc). I have wondered why when it comes to Latin, that the first thing we learn, is the conjugation of the verb “to love”. I have found no answer. After Latin, it was History, which may have included imparting contemporary learning about the Treaty of Waitangi and related history. Whatever were the subjects or the lessons, I have long since forgotten the content. What I have not forgotten however is some detail of the extra curricular activities, including cricket, that wonderful game introduced to NZ, in the early 19th century. The earliest mention of cricket in NZ is apparently to be found in a churchman’s diary, written in 1832. The first definite mention of cricket in England was in a 1597 court case concerning a dispute over a school's ownership of a plot of land. A 59-year old coroner testified that he and his school friends had played kreckett on the site fifty years earlier (i.e. in about 1550). The school concerned was the Royal Grammar School, Guildford. The Court record shows what a civilised place Surrey was, at least from the mid 16th century. But I digress. Picture the scene in 1964, some 4 centuries later in another school some 12,000 miles away, in a land colonised by those cricket loving people. I am in the nets as a rather scrawny, ashen faced 13 yr old padded up with bat in hand dealing easily with the fast and slow being dished up by other 13 and 14 year olds. Then the said teacher takes it upon himself to demonstrate his leg spin ability. The mismatch between a cricketer in his mid 20s and in his prime, and a young boy in his very early teens is not difficult to understand. It was not long before a ball was whistling down, pitching on middle and leg and spinning viciously, missing my forward defensive prod and crashing into my off stump. The sound of the timber being shattered was accompanied by a loud yelp of joy from the bowler. It was a delivery Shane Warne would have been proud of. I recall concentrating harder thereafter and I do not recall being beaten again. Fortunately, the bowler had no googly, no flipper and no wrongun. Those were reputedly developed after the leg spin demon became a parliamentarian. The teacher was of course our present High Commissioner, Jonathan Hunt. It was not only vicious leg spin I was introduced to – it was also serious music, good food and foreign lands. Parliament’s gain, was most certainly a loss to many schoolboys. And the relevance of referring to our High Commissioner in my address to you today? Simply that he was one of those inspirational people we have the privilege of coming across from time to time, who set me on the path towards university, leading to England, and to this great city of London - and today this wonderful church. By the time the Treaty was signed, this church had been built in its present form for 153 years, having been rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London. Which brings me to the inspiration we get from churches, music, poetry and dance, all of which we have in our service today. Churches are not just buildings – as buildings they have no inherent warmth. Yes, they inspire by their majesty and grandeur, but they are not alive, as buildings. They are but monuments. They are alive when full of song and music and prayer. Even the great cathedrals of the world are but monuments, when silent, but something else when filled with music. I learned that most vividly in Paris’s Notre Dame - a routine tourist visit of the cathedral was transformed by the music of a service which started while I was there. Baxter’s “Song to the Holy Spirit” was published in 1973, in a volume entitled Thoughts About the Holy Spirit. According to Dr Jane Simpson an historian, poet and composer, and former lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury, it was never intended to be sung. Inspiring and reflective though it is, what a pity. What joy there would be in bringing it to life in music and song. Baxter’s poem and the possibility of setting it to music, reminded me of Friedrich Schiller’s “An die Freude” or, as we know it in English, “Ode to Joy”. Schiller was a German poet, playwright and historian and wrote “Ode to Joy” in 1785. You will know it in its musical setting by Beethoven in the fourth and final movement of his Ninth Symphony (completed in 1824, some 16 years before the T of W). Several other composers have set that Ode, to music, including Schubert and Tchaikovsky (who incidentally was born in the year of the T of W), but none as successfully as Beethoven. Try it. Find a copy of it, turn up the music as loud as you can. It is a hard hearted person indeed, whose spirits would not be raised. It is surely some of the most inspirational and uplifting music ever composed. It celebrates joy.
Listen. In the English translation, the Ode begins “Joy, beautiful spark of the gods, Daughter from Elysium” Daughter from Elysium is a reference to Joy from Paradise. It is not hard to hear that in Beethoven’s music. And so I wonder, did our colonising forefathers think of Aotearoa as a form of Elysium –a form of paradise. What was it about NZ that inspired them? If they had been aware of our Benedicte Aotearoa, they would surely have been aware of the essence of paradise which we think NZ has, which inspires something in most of us in one way or another. To me, J K Baxter got that essence, when writing of the Holy Spirit by reference to various qualities of NZ’s landscape. And so to finish, with a very short poem by another fine NZ poet, Hone Tuwhare - his poem Haiku (1): His short instruction addresses the bed of a creek and is intended to uplift it. It applies equally to us.
“Stop
your snivelling, And so should we. And now to the uplifting joy of music and dance, and our next hymn.
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