Dialogue: Artistic creativity main way to find ourselves

By MIKE CHUNN*

In the late 1960s, a song called My Elusive Dreams was all over New Zealand radio.

It went:

I followed you to Texas

I followed you to Utah

We didn't find it there

So we moved on.

I recall singing it to some classmates, as you do. I changed some of the words:

'I followed you to Raglan

I followed you to Wellington.


They laughed. It was unanimous. The sound of New Zealand place names in a song was simply stupid.

Three decades later (late last year, actually), I was gazing into space as befits an evening on Auckland's west coast when the wedding reception on the next property burst into life. The New Zealand group the Muttonbirds were on the sound system and the opening verse went:

Dominion Rd is bending under its own weight,

Shining like a strip cut from a sheet metal plate

Cos it's just been raining.

I jumped to my feet and looked over the fence. They were on their feet, too. Elevated. The week before, I had driven down Dominion Rd, and guess what? It had just been raining.

Times have changed. New Zealand place names quite often stand proudly in our song lyrics. Just as they do in other countries. This evolution might seem flippant to you. To me, it has been a crucial forward step.

Our sense of identity has for too long been a flapping bird, its feet always on the ground. Might it now be taking to the air?

The call by the Herald for contributions to the Common Core Debate has yielded a wide range of opinions, philosophies and strategies. And in perusing these articles, I have noticed the dimension of time varying from day to day.

One writer thinks the past is where we find our future. Another thinks the present is all that matters. Time plays fast and loose with the best of us but give me the future any day.

New Zealand's past is just a moment gone. When we look at a Buzzy Bee or a £10 note through the glass of a museum case, a French person on the other side of the world is getting to grips with the centuries of genocide, plagues, conquest, literary genius, military persecution, art, religious persecution, music and scientific discovery that have fashioned his world.

That's not to say Buzzy Bees and £10 notes are not worth putting in a glass case. You have to start somewhere. But I cannot see New Zealand's short history as dictating to any degree where we are going.

In time, of course, our young people will, indeed, learn about hundreds of years of New Zealand life that has preceded them. And there will be little about mass genocide, plagues, scientific revolutions or military and religious persecution.

There will, however, be a clear, analytical and rewarding evolution of art, music and literature to savour. How do we achieve this?

We do it by acknowledging our role in shaping the future, and we plan for what will be a tradition of creative excellence. We concoct and bring to reality a concerted regime of cultivation and stimulation of the imagination of our young people.

The imagination is not stimulated by watching television, going from 0 to 100 km/h in less than six seconds, or riding a joy stick. It is not stimulated by economics, law, civil engineering or political aptitude. It doesn't even matter if you live in a street where people have two cars and a swimming pool. Stimulating the imagination is easy. Anybody can do it.

It happens when a child paints a picture, you frame it and hang it on the wall. It doesn't go into the green wheelie bin. It happens when a class of kids writes a song and performs it at the end-of-year concert instead of singing Yellow Submarine. It happens when you ask your child to play the piano at a family concert and they finally get to smell the grease-paint and hear the roar of the crowd.

Or when a teacher takes the best short stories written by her students and has them printed in a hard-cover book. It's easy to do these days. And each child gets a copy.

The imagination is about original creation. It is about achievement.

Imaginations are to the fore. Imaginations are running free. But too often we, the adults, don't see them for the stock exchange top 40 or Sunday golf. And they don't cost.

You don't have to put a proposal to the Hillary Commission, an application form to Creative New Zealand or a submission to the local council's creative communities fund to invigorate young minds.

With a simple and enduring prominence in school and home environments on the prompting and performance/exhibition of the fruits of a young person's imagination, we will find that in the coming centuries, our museums will have more than Buzzy Bees, old war helmets and replicas of ancient dwellings.

There will be a pictorial and aural parade of excellence that will mirror the trials, burdens, glory and virtue of what it has meant to live in this country.

And the beautiful thing is that most of us can do something about it from this very moment.

Oh, I haven't mentioned sport. How could I forget that quasi-religious fervour which permeates all media, siphons vast tracts of cash from corporate sponsors and throws up celebrities across the nation? Easy. Sport and history don't mix.

Sport is all about expectation and the ephemeral quest to score more points than someone else. It is about rivalries that rise and fall and are, in essence, meaningless.

In 300 years, New Zealanders will not care who won the 2003 America's Cup. In the same way, our French person still standing in the Lyon Musee isn't reading about the huge upset in 1755 when Comblanchien beat Rouen to take the Grand Prix in Gallic footy (against all odds, I might add).

Sport rests on television for its mass adulation and thus will for ever be confined to the present.

And the future of the past? Some James K. Baxter poem will be studied in schools in 300 years. Old Jim would have liked that.

* Mike Chunn is the Australasian Performing Right Association's director of New Zealand operations.

Herald Online feature: Common core values

We invite to you to contribute to the debate on core values. E-mail dialogue@herald.co.nz.