A few years ago, on a launch heading to a small island off New Zealand\u2019s south coast, I thought I saw a giant octopus. It lay beneath the waves like a bruise. It was as wide as a downed jumbo jet. I figured something that big had to be powerful and old. The horizon was built from pearl-black cloud.<\/p>\n
On the island we spent ten joyous days in knee-deep mud. Afterwards, outside the pub, a bunch of young Maori guys did burnouts on hired motorbikes. They were a roading gang over from the mainland.<\/p>\n
You gonna chase them? someone asked the local cop.<\/p>\n
Nah, he said. I know where they live.<\/p>\n
Round the same time in remote Ruatoki, where the local Tuhoe people never ceded sovereignty to the Crown, three hundred heavily armed police were kicking in doors. They\u2019d uncovered a terrorist plot. Among key evidence was a man\u2019s drunken boast that he would kill George Bush by catapulting a bus at his head. The following strategic text messages were also pivotal. They detail plans for enlisting people in the cities:<\/p>\n
KL: U mean like cells nd shit: nd then do da hit?
\nTL: Ae.
\nKL: Swt; i\u2019m in.
\nTL: C if u got mates, got to love Tuhoe, give their lives.
\nKL: Got 2 mates; dum as fuk; do nethin 4 me; can drive truks; fly planes, got kidz 2.
\nTL: Cher cuz. Da dumber da better.<\/p>\n
Eight million bucks of surveillance, national hysteria, a whole town of brown folk terrorised at gunpoint, and they found four unregistered hunting rifles.<\/p>\n
Those elements \u2013 a gang of mischievous road workers, a small island, guns, the Ruatoki raids, a vision of a giant octopus \u2013 fermented away in my head for years. \u2018Octopus\u2019, the first story in the book, is the result. It\u2019s a tale about immature, dumb-arse politics, and real, old grievances. It\u2019s about the crazed humour that takes over when you\u2019ve gone too far.<\/p>\n
When the time came to choose a cover for the book, I was stoked to see a concept sketch featuring tentacles. Text designer and artist WH Chong\u2019s idea was bold, rough and typographic. I liked it. When the finished product came through, I loved it. It was painterly and alive. More than painterly: Chong had done an actual painting.<\/p>\n
There was just one tiny detail that nagged at me. At first I couldn\u2019t place it beyond a vague desire to include some kind of patterning. Then I worked it out: in the story, the octopus has a \u2018gleaming, dripping moko\u2019 carved on its face.<\/p>\n
My iwi, Ngai Tahu, doesn\u2019t have much pre-European wood carving left. Most was destroyed in the Musket Wars, or lost in the aftermath of colonisation and disease. Only two or three pieces remain. I wanted to reference these in the design. Phone calls and emails to New Zealand ensued. I hunted high and low. I couldn\u2019t find anything.<\/p>\n
Then, from my coffee table at home, I picked up a book on Maori carving and leafed through. There it was: one of the few remaining pieces of old Ngai Tahu work, a pou with a huge stylised pukana face. The pattern that\u2019s laid into the octopus tentacles, and which graces the inside covers, is a homage to that ancestral art.<\/p>\n