Tapu Lifting

One of the headlines on the New Zealand Heralds web site this morning concerns the lifting of Tapu on State Highways 1 & 2 by a concerned group of Maori elders, or Kaumatuas. For my overseas readers, the state of tapu is real & a very serious thing. I have experienced its effects first hand. Something is declared tapu for a variety of reasons, the most frequent these days being violent or accidental death. For instance, if somebody drowns in the sea, then that area is declared tapu until the body is recovered & nobody gathers seafood until it is lifted. The particular tapu that I encountered involved a large carved panel stored in a museum that I was working in as a handyman at the time. It needed to be shifted, but for some reason , I just didnt feel inclined to touch it. We found out that it was tapu for religious reasons & I also found out that one of the other employees at the museum had handled it, gone home & cooked tea for her family, & the entire family ended up ill for 6 weeks, so I dont scoff or mock tapu at all, because to me it is a real thing & is to be respected

Anyway, back to the gondolas as the Monty Python team is wont to say. This group of Kaumatuas is involved in a joint effort involving themselves, the New Zealand Police, The Fire Service & Fulton Hogan Construction to lift the tapu on 2 very notorious stretches of highway & free the Wairua or spirits of those killed violently in road accidents on both stretches of highway by spraying 10 000 litres of water taken from the Waikato river along the road & prayers spoken at two strategic points along the way. The MP for Clevedon, Judith Collins has suggested that this is a waste of time & effort, & that the police would be better involved in fighting the rising crime rate in South Auckland.

This may be so, but frankly, I think she should keep her big mouth shut. Anything that may reduce the road toll along these two stretches of highway has to be good. The police are going to work it in to their existing patrol schedules & the convoy will be moving at 80 km/h, so there will be minimal disruption to traffic. As someone who has not only worked the sharp end of vehicular accidents & death for more years than I care to remember, but also experienced the gut wrenching agony & trauma of losing a family member in a motor accident, my prayers are with them this morning. Anything to make these two bits of road a little safer to travel.

Now all we have to do is find some form of ceremony to instill common sense & sanity into the average lemming like driver commuting to & fro from his metropolitan residence to his weekend retreat.