I am a contemporary storyteller. I live for stories. And conversely, I like to hoover up stories that I come across in my travels. That is one of the main reasons I travel, perhaps why we all travel. The world is a smorgasbord of stories and adventures waiting to be experienced and then told. I’ve always felt Air Canada should use that in their advertising.
Most recently, I went on a three-week trip through Aotearoa (known to settlers as New Zealand) and Australia for my documentary series on APTN, Going Native.
The trip was magical. I’d been to Aotearoa thirty-two years and twenty pounds ago. It was amazing, back then and today. Australia I had visited several times in the past twenty years but never to Cairns, up in the far north. The rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef… all would take your breath away. And it did mine.
Writing “up in the far north” sounds odd when writing that about Australia. Here I Canada, we immediately think of tundra, the Inuit, and snow. Maybe mosquitos. But in Australia, that means 35 C degree weather with a sizable wall of humidity, and a completely tropical environment. Obviously, their north is our south. I never did try water going down the toilet bowl thing clockwise/counter-clockwise thing. Next trip.
But I digress. During both trips I hung out with the indigenous people. The Maori in Aotearoa and the Aboriginies in Australia. I mean, as an Anishnaabe man, why else would I spent twenty hours on a plane? I’m not crazy.
And as is common, the stories we shared was gravy for the meat of the trip. This kind of tale telling won’t make it in the documentary show but its still merits remembering.
For instance, in Rotorua I met a Maori man who told of the brilliance of his ancestors regarding how they navigated the south Pacific. Using only the stars, the waves and the clouds, they managed to travel thousands of kilometres from Easter Island, to Hawaii, to Aotearoa and every place in-between.
As a result, they had a unique method for navigating the waves. According to him, and only him so far, the man with the biggest penis would stand at the front of the boat, as the waves bounced the boat back and forth at a rhythmic rate. Accordingly, his penis would also rock back and forth, with a loud and regular thwack against his thighs. As long as you heard the “thwack, thwack, thwack”, you were following the proper currents. All was good.
But if the was a disturbance in the “thwackness”, it was registering an alien current disturbing the clockwork waves carrying the boat. This meant there was possibly a storm coming, or maybe another island nearby, course-affecting things like that. At this point decisions would have to be made to investigate, ignore, or adjust the course of the boat. Very clever these Maori.
Whether this is true or not, I don’t know. I wasn’t that interested in investigating the authenticity of such a story. Looking back on my travels, I don’t remember hearing such tales from other Indigenous sea faring people like the Haida or even the masters of my people’s birch bark canoe. Still, I will leave you with this visual image ‘bouncing’ around in your head.
Here are some pictures of my adventures in New Zealand… but not those kind of pictures.
