Adventure Divas (26 page)

New Zealand’s antinuclear policy led the country to ban the United States from parking its nuclear submarines in its waters, a stance that strains political relations between the two countries to this day.

Marilyn picks a chunk of hardened mud from the nape of one of the goats. She might have been one of few women in government in the seventies, but things are considerably different now.

“With all the women currently in power in New Zealand, do you think there has been real institutional change?”

“Kind of. You know, with a woman prime minister and leader of the opposition and governor general designate and chief justice and mayor of Auckland. Having that range of women in important or figurehead positions still doesn’t mean that you have a kind of substantive equality, but it
is
very different. One of the former women governors general used to tell this wonderful story about primary schools and one little boy putting his hand up and saying, ‘Can a
man
ever be governor general?’ ” she says with a laugh, illustrating how quickly norms can change.

“It doesn’t by any means change things like the distribution of wealth or racial inequity or the whole range of other things. . . . A lot of the women are in power in some of the very last bastions of patriarchal structures, to use the old language, so I guess they start to change language in small ways. They start to change the priorities that are on the agenda and some significant legal changes, of course. So, it’s an evolution just as long as you’re not too impatient,” she concludes, somewhat hopefully.

“I’ve always thought of New Zealand as being conservative in a blokey-bloke kind of way, but in terms of women in power, in terms of women’s right to vote, New Zealand has really led the way globally, right?”

“Yeah, there’s some good stuff. It’s because New Zealand is so small and so a lot of the politics are pretty transparent. It’s very difficult to be highly corrupt here because everybody knows everybody and there aren’t many of us.”

Pub intelligence. When you are so small that the politicians and constituents share pastures and pints, it’s tough to pull the wool over.

CHORE #3: MUCKING OUT THE SHED

While we are chatting, Marilyn mentions the goat shed, our next stop, more than once. The problem is, her accent, with its inflected vowels, makes it sound as if she is saying goat
shit
(
goat shiiiid,
in Kiwi). Every time she says
goat shed
I wince, knowing PBS censors won’t like a potty mouth. And bleeping a diva goes against my libertarian principles.

“I’m going in there to sort this lot out,” she says, entering the crowded wooden shed. “Excuse me, babies.” She nudges a pair of confused goats in her way. “Just pull that gate,” she tells me, “so they don’t slip out. Push them. Push them! No, no push them up there,” she yells as one dashes through my legs, snagging the wire from my radio mic and dragging it through a pile of fresh goat
shed.

“What inspires you more these days, farm life or, ah, politics?” I ask, as I latch the wooden gate to curb further goat attrition. I delicately sniff my mic before clipping it back on my collar.

“Farm life!” she declares instantly. “Good intensive labor that keeps you fit but doesn’t require a vast amount of cerebral activity. You’re free to think creatively. I certainly wrote some of the most significant parts of
Counting for Nothing
in the goat shiiiid.”

Wince.

“I probably have some of my best ideas in the goat shiiiid.”

Wince.

Her best ideas resulted in
Counting for Nothing,
a book that posits the simple yet radical idea that women’s unpaid work, and the environment, should be valued and figured into the global economy. Across the world, 65 percent of women’s work time is unpaid, whereas men’s unpaid work is about 30 percent of their total work time. Unpaid work includes housework, informal enterprises, and family businesses. In many of the so-called superpower First World nations, women account for 50 percent or more of the unpaid workers in family businesses.*
 
¹

Why is it, Marilyn asked in her work, that market economies are all that count? Often economic policies pretend to be objective, but are in fact elitist and mask political agendas. Her ideas challenge many of the economic policies that drive modern-day globalization. Just as Jimmy Carter demonstrated that human rights can be a part of foreign policy, Marilyn Waring’s is an unapologetically value-based economic paradigm. She says economic models should include humane ways of measuring quality of life, and that community well-being is data worth measuring. If only more of the world’s thinkers spent their time in goat sheds instead of ivory towers.

“What’s easier to handle, goats or members of Parliament?” I ask, stumbling after a kid that has wandered off.

“Well, goats are invariably all intelligent,” she responds. “They can be very stubborn.”

“Goats or Parliament?” I say.

“Oh, goats, but of course people in Parliament are stubborn. I mean, if I thought Parliament was easy I would still be there,” says Marilyn. “Aren’t you a little beauty!” she declares to a small angora. It’s clear she doesn’t want to talk about Parliament anymore.

“So do you think there is a direct correlation between being out here”—I gesture to the rolling hills and the shed—“and your economic philosophies?”

“Absolutely. Because there is a whole different sense of value operating out here,” she says.

If policy makers the world over were the ones carrying buckets of water three miles every morning, like the women in India, policies might look different, and unpaid work might be a part of economic models. You value what you sweat for.

Marilyn wrestles one of the goats and brings the analogy even closer to home. She shows me the goat’s ear, which is heavy with a brown, crusty square-inch chunk of . . . something. “It’s cancer,” she says when she realizes it’s not obvious to me what I am looking at. “See, this goat’s ear is developing a big skin cancer because of the ozone layer depletion. It’s not something I suppose people in the northern hemisphere think about very much, but in terms of the hole over Antarctica, we here live with the effects of the discharge up north,” she says. “The best we can do is try and wait for it to dry off a little bit and then actually just cut if off,” she says, scruffing the animal’s good ear, “to make it more pleasant for her. She’s healthy, you know, at the moment, but I mean the ear is very close to the brain and she’s an older girl. This is the kind of thing we’re having to watch for all the time now.”

“Does this kind of thing change the atmosphere around environmental politics?” I ask, petting the ailing goat.

“Yeah, I think it’s hard to live in this country and not have a certain attitude about environmental politics. A huge percentage of New Zealand land is locked up in national parks and forests or reserves. There’s a tremendous consciousness especially among those that have the privilege to travel,” she says.

In fact, one third of New Zealand is protected as national parks and forests and wildlife areas. They are considered
taonga
(treasures) of irreplaceable value.

CHORE #4: COMBATING TOE JAM

“C’mon, it’s time for a footbath!” Marilyn hollers to the troops. “In you go. C’mon, little beauty.” She encourages a few rogue goats through a treated puddle. The solution of water and zinc combats skold, a nasty inflammation between halves of the cloven hoof that can cause foot rot.

“That’s it?” I say after we hustle several more into the treated puddle.

“No, they are going to stand there for about ten minutes,” she says. “In you go, in you go,” she says, shoving a few more into the bath. She hauls the gate into place, leaving the goats to their pedicure soak.

“What sort of mistakes do people make, in terms of activism—environmental, political, feminist, what have you?” I ask, noting that this is the first time I’ve competed with goats for an interviewee’s attention.

“Well, I think too many of us are taught to think that you have to embrace a political ideology, or it could be a religious ideology—any ideology. That somehow there’s a central committee, you know, determining the right way to do something. Sometimes I think there is too much internecine warfare, even in terms of advocacy for the environment, for the feminist movement, or for the indigenous people’s movement. There’s not one way, you know.”

Marilyn Waring doesn’t seem fond of orthodoxy or fundamentalism in her political views. Reminds me of former Black Panther Assata Shakur in Cuba, who mentioned her evolving relationship to revolution, which I interpreted to mean a relaxing of orthodoxy, a recognition of the hazards of fundamentalism. Marilyn appreciates a diversity of methods in progressive politics. I wonder how strategic her political path has been.

“Have you ever felt or do you feel now that you have a mission or has life just unfolded?” I ask.

“Ahh. Life’s just unfolded. I don’t have a kind of zeal, you know. I’ve just happened to find myself in some unusual places at some unusual times,” she says, with what I now understand to be characteristic understatement.

“But there are certainly times when I wish my brain would stop,” she says, panting because she’s just heaved aside a fence post, but I also sense another kind of fatigue in her voice, too. The fatigue of thirty years of activism.

“It’s also one of the great things about farming . . . the fact that I can have a little bit of time off from, you know, worrying about the war crimes tribunal, or the conflict in Bougainville.*
 
²
But of course, I can’t stop worrying about foot-and-mouth disease.” She laughs and wipes her hands on her pants. “Yeahhh.”

“There’s a real strain of independence, a real matter-of-factness among the people around here,” I observe out loud.

“Oh, well for me, it’s just that I don’t want to make things complicated, and I want things to work, I don’t want to waste time and I want to be able to do it myself. I’m trying to do really simple things like having tools the right size for a woman’s hand. Getting things where I can maintain them. It’s like, I don’t need a beast of a machine that makes me depend upon somebody else.”

Simplicity in farm or economic theories, I’ve read, is a Marilyn trademark.

“You’re known for being able to interpret complex things like economic theory into lay language. I think you said during your time in Parliament you became ‘the master of the simple question,’ or something like that,” I say.

“The art of the dumb question,” she clarifies.

“The art of the dumb question, yes, and, um, do you think that the fact that you were so
young—
”

“One of the things you learn is that nearly anywhere you are and you ask a dumb question, like three quarters of the people in the room are really pleased you did ’cause they didn’t know either, and they were just gonna sit there and suck it up and just be ignorant, you now, and, um, it helps to cut through the bullshit, you know? Yeahhhh.”

Or goatshiiiit or sheepshit or piggy(Muldoon)shit. We load up and Marilyn continues to work in the muck, chucking sheep into their proper pens, demonstrating, it seems, an important correlation between being up to your ankles in crap and the stroppy skill of cutting the crap.

“
People love her for
bringing down Piggy Muldoon,” says Simon, as we drive back from Marilyn’s for our last night in Auckland. “And what a great interview. Who would have guessed she would be so funny.”

“Yeah, she really was,” I say, grateful. Feminist Economist isn’t exactly a title that ushers forth images of (prime-time-worthy) knee-slapping good times in the populist psyche. “And for a politico, she doesn’t seem to get mired in politics—not the conservatism of the right or the knee-jerk reactions of the left.”

“What’s with this traffic? In Auckland of all places,” he says, forced to hit the brakes three blocks from our hotel. Down the street we see the red flashes of a dozen fire trucks and cop cars. How annoying.

“Do a U-ey, Simon. Can we get to the back alley where we unloaded our equipment?” We begin to creep down the alley, avoiding the roadblocks.

“Whoa, looks like there’s a fire in our hotel,” I say. There is smoke billowing out of windows above.

TO:
J
EANNIE
FROM:
H
OLLY
SUBJECT:
A
LITTLE PROBLEM

Mom—the good news is that the crew and I are alive and nobody was hurt. Bad news is, well, we had a hotel fire last night. Two floors kinda burned.

Here’s the deal: We went to do the Waring interview and when we got back to the hotel there were fire trucks surrounding the block, preventing our movement. But then we got closer and realized it was Our Hotel; and closer, and realized it was My Floor and . . . well . . . um . . . it started in My Room. Oops.

Not my fault! One of those crazy do-it-yourself, built-in Kiwi kitchenette stoves blew up. Or maybe it was an electrical fire (yesterday the outlet sparked when I plugged in my computer). Anyway, litigiously paranoid that I am, have we paid our insurance premium lately? I was surrounded by hotel security fellows and got the full-on good-cop/bad-cop let’s-make-the-girl-cry routine. It almost worked. (I think they were in bed with the hotel’s insurance company.)

In case the insurance people want to know, nearly everything was destroyed, including my black polyester Wranglers.

Also lost:

1.  Mac G3 laptop with all my interview notes

2.  Handspring electronic organizer (never figured out how to use it anyway)

3.  All clothes and books

4.  Canon Elph camera—cute but ineffective—got enough cameras on this shoot anyway

5.  Walkman with favorite Trini Lopez tape inside (irreplaceable)

6.  Maori language tapes

I’ll borrow a shirt from camerawoman Liza as we’re loaded up with divas for the next few days. No time for shopping. We figure the hotel-burning is a bad omen, so after we leave Auckland we’ll sleep in our caravan, Old Sheila, which we rented yesterday. (We’ve pinned my orange half-burned Sleater-Kinney shirt on its wall.) Will be good for bonding and the budget anyway. Ever the optimist, and ever onward . . .