Hīkoi is a Māori word for walking and talking. But its meaning is deeper than that: it harbours something about movement, something about community and something about a world view that links land to life to ancestry; we might call it holistic, maybe situationist. Languages often have words that tell secrets about the culture and give suggestions of its landscape. Hīkoi is one of these words.
The landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand has this sort of effect. It is not just present, it is ever-present: moving, haunting, alive. Janet Frame, a local author, contrives characters that are forever running away from, and back to, the landscape’s “undermass” – the place beneath the surface of an apparent reality (Living in the Maniototo, 1979). Vincent Ward, a local filmmaker, portrays the unsettling…