MAORI COCK AND CHRISTIAN BULLSHIT

With the seemingly permanent road closure of the spectacular Manawatu river gorge road, a couple of years back the Conservation Department came up with the excellent substitution idea of creating a walking track through the gorge.

A Woodville local Milton Wainwright and other volunteers commendably got stuck in and assisted while carver Craig Kawana created a series of traditional Maori carvings called Te Hononga Maunga for the track, which supposedly offered a welcome and safe passage.

I have before me a Dominion Post photograph of the carver standing on one side of the figure and on the other, the smiling figure of Conservation Minister Eugene Sage. Here’s where it gets interesting for Wainwright, an avowed Christian, objected to the figure in the photo for the heinous crime of revealing a penis. I refer to the carving and not Eugene, although “in this day and age” one can’t be certain about these matters. Still, if Eugene does have one it was certainly not exposed.

The fact that the Dom’ published it should tell you the offending appendage was hardly erect and 10 inches long, indeed to the contrary for it’s so small as to be barely discernible. If anyone should be upset it should be Maori men for this (presumably) grossly under representation, although I speak with no expertise on that.

Nevertheless Wainwright, evidentially a world-class wowser, complained to the Police, the District Council and the Conservation Department and was rightly given the bum’s rush.

Saying it was a “moral imperative” to remove the cock and “beyond the pale” he chainsawed it off and will soon appear before the court for vandalism. He defended his action by saying he couldn’t recall seeing phalluses on other such carvings although Massey’s Maori Arts Professors Bob Jahnke dismissed that as cock.

I dug out my copy of Alexander Hamilton’s massive tome on Maori Art published in 1896, filled with hundreds of Maori carvings’ photos, none of which showed a phallus, but that I imagine Jahnke would claim reflected Victorian prudery.

Wainwright has the rather curious hobby of collecting organs, not though of the sexual variety otherwise he’d be climbing through bedroom windows with his chainsaw at the ready. Instead his specialty is church organs and with the rapid collapse of churches across the land I imagine he has an ever-increasing supply.  In his action he represented the worst element of his supernaturalist nonsense in wanting to dictate to others.

Just as the woman I wrote of last week, happily using our free gym and personal trainer service, if offended need not have looked at the splendid Anna Kournikova poster, so too with Wainwright in that sizeable walkway when encountering the carving. Readers will recall the gym user’s memorable “in this day and age” justification. Both she and Wainwright need to wake to the reality that the driving force of this day and age, despite resistance from the we know best brigade, is each to their own tolerance.