I have decided to build an Earthship

I have decided to build an Earthship on my house site at Awaawaroa.  Actually, the Earthship people found me and I jumped at the opportunity.  I had been trying to build a house out of phone books and recycled materials for some time, and had collected planks of Oregon pine from an 1800’s warehouse in Grey Lynn and 10 or so hardwood telephone poles.  I had thought of post and beam and chuck in the phone books as infill.  The idea received a brief flurry of media interest with tv wanting to fly a helicopter over the site to film the house.  I told them I only had a small model of the house, but if they wanted to fly over that, be my guest.  Someone important in the architecture department of Auckland University  had been testing phone books in the lab and had written a paper presented internationally, so everyone was getting quite excited, but then the building regulations changed,  so that idea went out the window.  Since then, my house site has sat by the totara forest and waited.

My house site is also the place where Maori made they home and so there has to be an archaeologist stand by during the earthworks in case bones are found.  Everyone else in the community have built their houses in ‘noa’ areas, or the earthworks were done before the extent of Maori habitation had been fully realised. Trust me to choose somewhere which is ‘tapu’.  An Earthship fits in well with the feel of the place, and there is the Transfer Station in Ostend from where to get all the Earthship building materials.  Post and beam with glass and adobe, rammed earth tyres and bricks made out of cans and/or plastic bottles.  It’s a self-sustaining system and a part of the Earthship is an internal garden, which feeds you.   They’ve built them all over the world,  run as an educational workshop. They gather a crew who work together intensively over a period of time, bonding and thriving on the collective energy.  They fall in love with what they are doing and in the end, they create these masterpieces of functional living that blend into the landscape as if they had been birthed by mother nature herself. I can imagine they would hum with a special energy and that to sleep in one would be like kissing god.

Sometimes, on an island, you run into people you would really rather not see.  They find it hard to look you in the eye because you know something about them that they would really rather you didn’t.  Because of the work I have done, and still do in some cases, I enter the twilight world of drugs, abuse, violence and crime.  Maori children are the worst affected. There was a case of the murder of 3-month old twins, in a house with 12 people,  and no-one would say who had killed the babies, yet everyone was there at the time.  This closing in and total silence is immensely frustrating to anyone involved in any kind of work with dysfunctional whanau. There are certain people I see here, out and about, who know that I know they nearly killed their kids in a drunken frenzy.  Nothing could be done about the situation because the family closed in, stood by the perpertrator and tried to silence me.  When they couldn’t silence me, they threatened me.  So, every time I see them now, or they see me, they are reminded that I carry that dirty secret of theirs within me. Yes, even in paradise there are dirty secrets.

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