Thomas W. Devine's Blog, page 31

Abortion and Ignorance

Miles Lacey (Kapi-Mana News 4.5.13) says: “Nothing amuses me more than reading the hypocritical wailing of anti-abortionists condemning the evils of abortion when they are the ones who are largely responsible for creating the problem in the first place.”

Really?

In the first place I would have thought the problem of abortion starts with two people deciding to have unprotected sex (or taking the lesser risk of protected sex) when they are not ready to become parents.

It seems to me that, in our society, some individuals all too readily use excuses to try and lessen the blame for their own decisions.

Miles Lacey puts a degree of culpability for abortion on “sleazy old money-grabbing perverts in the Vatican and Salt Lake City...”

Such a sweeping and derogatory statement is contemptible in my opinion.

Lacey accuses anti-abortionists of ignorance and wants them to “teach their children about how to use artificial contraception”. That’s an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Far better that all children should be taught by their parents (and at school) about how to make ethical judgements and accept personal responsibility.

From my point of view, any justification of abortion is just an excuse.

Gifts & Dining Alone

Columnist, Peta Mathias (Your Weekend) says the last time anyone thanked her for a present was in 1956.

She was certainly implying that gratitude was old hat and not, I’m sure, that she hasn’t given anyone a present for quite awhile.

She came up with the morally plausible reason that “you give out of the goodness of your heart, not to receive gratification”.

That’s a good ideal but, even if you do give that way, a “thank you” is nice to receive and still good manners.

Children are being brought up to say “please” and “thank you” aren’t they? Or has the “me” culture even corrupted that etiquette?
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“There’s a perception that dining alone is best avoided. No one wants to be the sad loser in the corner.” This from a blogger quoted by Sophie Speer and Elle Hunt in the Dominion Post 23.4.13.

Dining out alone sometimes makes me worry that other diners will think I have no friends or family or that I have but they don’t care to dine with me.

I suppose such a human feeling stems from insecurity and wanting to be likeable to everyone.

Though, if I wear my writer’s cap and observe those around me, I tend to forget that worry. I'm even happy to deliberately lunch alone on Tuesdays while my wife is out. It's a weekly reward to myself and,so long as there are enough people around to add interest, I do enjoy it.

Writer’s Lives Measuring up to What They Write Part II?

While my past career as a public servant did inhibit my creativity for many years, it was not dull.

I’ll just recount, by way of example, that it let me meet two Hollywood stars who were scouting locations in New Zealand for a proposed movie. They were John Derek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Derek ) and his wife Bo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Derek ).

At the time, I held the position in New Zealand of Deputy Director of National Parks and Reserves and got to front for the Directorate. While Bo Derek had obvious appeal for her looks, gender and stardom I was somewhat more overwhelmed by meeting her husband, a lead actor in adventure movies I went to in my childhood. All the same, I’ll always have a memory of Bo, in Jeans, sitting cross-legged on the carpet of the chief executive’s office at the government agency I was working for.

Afterwards, some of my colleagues used the internal mail (then paper) to send me magazine pictures of Bo wearing much less than she did when I met her.

Shame on them.

Economy & Conservation

The next generation will judge us on our environmental management during a time of economic hardship. There is a growing threat to the sustainable management of New Zealand’s natural resources.

Bathurst Resources, a mining company, claims our environmental consent process results in never-ending appeals from opposition groups “until an application makes its costly and time-consuming way to the Supreme Court”.

The Dominion Post columnist, David Long (11.9.12) says “we could assist with book balancing and job creation by approving plans such as Bathurst Resources’ coking coalmine on the West Coast’s Denniston Plateau”. He supports streamlining the Resource Management Act under which the Bathurst consent application will be considered.

Short term self-interest by the current generation does not do anything for the welfare of future generations. If the Bathurst proposal was friendly to the environment it would not meet with opposition from environmentalists.

Politically and socially, New Zealand reached a pinnacle of conservation awareness in 1987 when the Department of Conservation was established. Now the current National-led government is depriving that government agency of some of its funding while threats to our indigenous flora and fauna continue and more and more pressure is applied for commercial use of the conservation estate. The Department has even changed its basic ethic in the interests, in my view, of keeping political support.

Writer’s Lives Measuring up to What They Write

In an earlier post I promised to let you see if my life measured up to what I write. I’m starting with employment.

I began my career in the year Marilyn Monroe died.

The juxtaposition of two facts above is simply to make the first more interesting, a technique I’m sure a lot of writers use in order to have their lives sound less mundane.

I worked for 43 years in various jobs in the New Zealand Public Service. ( If that had been in the USA, I would have been a federal administrator).

The working environment in the early years was very repressive. I learnt to fit in better by being non-descript rather than colourful, to use passive rather than active language, and to have absolute respect for authority.

Above all, a public servant wasn’t allowed to make mistakes so, if one did, it was always a desperate struggle for a plausible excuse or for a way of letting others share the blame. I picked up the art of covering my ‘ass’.

My taste for thrill and excitement was also smothered along the way. I did not find it exciting to be lost with a park ranger overnight in the wilderness on the Mamaku Plateau (with no shelter, food or water) or, with another park ranger, to sit in a boat watching the water gush in after the bow struck a rock on Lake Tarawera.

I can’t say it wasn’t a thrill, though, to set foot in the crater of an active volcano on White Island or to visit the teeming wildlife on Snares Island or to fly around outlying parts of New Zealand in the Sub Antarctic on a Royal New Zealand Air Force patrol.

All the same, in public service, I lost my true self. I have regained something like it since I started writing and promoting my books.

My early career was not all bad. I had work experiences that some might find glamorous – like giving oral and written policy advice to government ministers, or being an expert adviser for Parliamentary Select Committees in law-making, or working on settling treaty grievances with indigenous people, or playing a part in establishing new protected natural areas and historic sites.

In my latest book (Green Expectations) there’s more of my past working life than in the earlier ones.

For the Sake of Human Rights

Sometimes the news out of the United States makes it sound like a truly great country that has lost its way when it comes to human rights. Not that I want to offend.

The prolonged police (FBI, CIA?) fusillade during the attempted arrest of the two suspects for the Boston bombing, as shown on TV internationally, was like a scene straight out of some Hollywood movie. Was it true life imitating fiction?

It sounded too trigger-happy from my point of view and not how a just police force should behave.

Surely, for the sake of human rights and justice, it is far better that punishment for crime (no matter how heinous) results from a proper court process rather than the police acting as jury, judge and executioner?

With the USA so shell-shocked by the bombing, I can’t help wondering, deep down, if evidence of guilt was too lightly gathered and the reaction too hasty and over the top.

The country legitimately wanted a guilty party to be identified so I hope Dzhocbar Tsarnaev and his brother were not scapegoats, with the real guilty parties still free.

I can’t help wondering (though I may have read too many thrillers) if the authorities (FBI? CIA?) didn’t want the suspects to live to tell a story of innocence rather than guilt. Interesting that the surviving suspect cannot speak because of his injury and the dead one is silenced forever.

The fact the survivor has been denied his Miranda rights makes me even more suspicious.

From the other side of the Pacific, where I live, the claim by US authorities that the scene of the shooting was ‘loaded with unexploded IEDs’ (The Dominion Post April 23, 2013) reminds me unpleasantly of the war on Iraq being instigated ostensibly because of mythical ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

Will the truth ever be known?

Does it Matter?

I was struck by something said by celebrated NZ author Sir James McNeish in the annual Janet Frame Memorial lecture at the Wellington City Gallery: “Writer’s lives seldom measure up to what they write about...” (NZ Author Issue 292 April/May 2013).

I doubt that matters.

I’ve written contemporary novels about criminals and abductions in France (mainly because I’m a Francophile) and in the Marlborough Sounds of New Zealand (because of family connections there dating from 1864) and one about the taking of hostages in the West Indies (on account of some of my forebears coming to New Zealand from there). But that’s all they have to do with my personal life.

Next I wrote a book, set in New Zealand, with suicides, a murder and an abortion – none of which I have first-hand experience of.

Following that was a story, with crime involved, of a treasure hunt on Sub Antarctic Campbell Island. Now I’ve been lucky enough to make a short visit to Campbell Island by ship but the only treasure I was seeking was the experience of nature in a protected place.

My latest book (“Green Expectations” https://www.createspace.com/4153773 ) does have a little to do with my former career but has, as characters, a radical conservationist (when I’ve always been a conservative one) and a villainous businessperson (when I’ve only known public service).

Interestingly, all my books except the first have had a character who commits suicide. And, even in the first, a character gives up her life to save another.

Now, in times of extreme stress or distress, I’ve a number of times been tempted by suicide, as probably many of us are. (I was a one-time poet, so it’s probably not surprising.) In my teens, in a misguided attempt to change someone’s mind, I’ve even taken a prescription drug overdose with a half-hearted resolve to end it all. I guess that’s where my subconscious fascination with the subject springs from.

Anyhow, in balance, you may agree that my life does not exactly measure up to what I write about. It’s certainly less thrilling than the lives of some of my characters, even of other writers. The latter is a theme I’ll explore further in a future blog post.

Same-Sex “Marriage”

Parliament has just joined New Zealand with that group of countries which have legalised so-called “same sex marriage”. There is jubilation among the Gay community and shaking of heads by those citizens concerned about moral decline.

The legal battle was won on the grounds of human equality; the so called right of homosexual and heterosexual couples to have the opportunity to cement a committed relationship in exactly the same way.

The pictures on New Zealand television last night, of homosexual men cavorting in the street in Wellington in wedding dresses, did not suggest the Gay community has particular respect for the institution of marriage.

Q & A – Green Expectations by Thomas W Devine

I’ve provided earlier blog posts featuring my soon to be released 6th novel, including excerpts. Now, here’s a Q & A about it:

Q1. You’ve written two novels about women being abducted, one set in France (Reversal Point) and one in New Zealand (Relinquished) and one about hostages being held in the West Indies (Tortolona). Did you intend to break new ground with "Green Expectations"?

A. The book certainly has no kidnappings or abductions or hostage-taking but it does develop a theme started in "Island of Regrets" and, to a greater extent, in "Relinquished" which both touched on conservation issues. "Green Expectations", as the title suggests, has a central environmental plot.

Q2. Why did you write this book?

A. I was following the literary maxim that an author should write, as uniquely as possible, about what he or she is familiar with. At the time of writing my first draft of "Green Expectations" I was working in the Department of Conservation and, among other duties, dealt with the Ministry of Forestry over management plans under the Forests Act and followed developments in the forestry industry.

Years earlier, I was a branch committee member of a large non-government conservation organization and, over years of public service, had a lot to do with national conservation and environmental organizations.

All this experience came together in writing "Green Expectations". I wanted to dramatise a footnote in the history of environmental management in New Zealand in an entertaining way. All characters are a total fiction, of course.

Q3. Who did you write this book for?

A. A pre-release reader thinks the book will appeal to 'environmentalists and the mystery-thriller aficionado'. I am, however, rather inclined to agree with my editor that, 'with action, romance and a plot that touches on deeper issues', "Green Expectations" has something for everyone. So, does that answer the question?.

At the start, maybe I just wanted it to be non-genre. My manuscript assessor did, however, have a big influence in shaping the final version.

Q4. The roles of protagonist and antagonist seem at first glance to get a bit blurred in this book. Was that intentional?

A. I want each reader to take a side at the start (conservation or development) and, in the course of the story, discover whether logging or protection becomes the fate of Mathews Bush, a fictionalised tract of indigenous forest. So, which character becomes the protagonist or antagonist depends on the point of view of the reader.

The lead characters, John Baron and Michael Simmiss, have competing objectives and do their best to frustrate each other. John Baron’s developmental objective is abetted by a more villainous character, Ed Somerville, and Mike Simmiss’s conservation aspirations by an environmental radical, Vanessa Denton. The Mathews family, as farmers, are caught in the middle.

Q5. Which side of the fence do you sit as narrator – development or conservation?

A. My passion for nature is revealed in my dedication of the book "to all those who love the New Zealand bush". But I did try to be even-handed to some extent.

There has to be a place for both development and conservation but I believe it’s time to redress the imbalance and favour nature. Human survival may depend on it.
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Final Pre-Publication Release

I've previously shared parts of the Prologue and Chapter 1 of my soon to be published novel "Green Expectations" which is set in New Zealand in the late 1990s.

In the first chapter you had the chance to meet the antagonists in Jackson-Halberd (NZ) Ltd. In Chapter 2, below, you'll get to meet some of the protagonists in the Save Our Forests Association.

Please share this post with your friends if you find it interesting.

This will be my last pre-release from the novel, so here's Chapter 2:

In his late twenties, with shoulder-length blonde hair, Mike Simmiss looked as if he idly spent his summer days on a surfboard in Evans Bay. His colleagues and friends knew him, however, as a fulltime lecturer at a Wellington polytechnic and as founder and elected president of SOFA – the Save Our Forests Association. In the latter role, he stood waiting in the night-time shadows of a vacant lot opposite Wellington Railway Station.
He watched detachedly as a tall lorry and trailer left the lighted street and bumped towards him over stony ground. It swung round then, with a squeal of brakes, came to a stop alongside the blank wall of the neighbouring building. Dean Fingleton – sometimes casually referred to by his friends as Fingers – got down from the cab, hunching into his jacket against a blustery wind.
“The others coming?” he asked anxiously.
“They’re putting up posters downtown.” Mike moved past the front of the lorry so that he could see the railway station clock and check the time on his watch. “Vanessa’s running late.”
“Why didn’t she come with you? You might as well be living together from what I hear.”
“Then whoever told you got it wrong.”
Dean grinned. “That’s what you say.”
Mike changed the subject, “How’s Jemma? She must be what ... almost two by now?”
“Yeah, her birthday party’s this Saturday. Hasn’t Vanessa passed on the invitation yet?”
“Maybe she’s not planning to take me.” The corners of Mike’s lips lifted in an amused smile. “But I’ll be there. Since everyone seems to be speculating about our relationship, maybe Vanessa’ll set them straight.”
A throaty voice asked, “About your performance in bed?” Vanessa Denton had joined them from round the rear of the lorry, looking slim in a wind-breaker and tight blue jeans. She kissed both men on the cheek before she added, “You two talking about sex as usual?”
Mike quipped, “Like you with Fingers’ wife?”
“Aren’t girls’ confidences sacred anymore?”
“Shit, you two,” Dean burst out, “you’d think we were on a moonlight picnic. If the cops come along I’ll lose my job.”
“We haven’t exactly done anything yet,” Mike said.
“I feel like a goddamned tagger all the same.” Vanessa glared at him, “If you think it’s going to be nothing more than graffiti then you haven’t put your heart into defending Gaia.”
If conservation were a religion, Mike thought, then Mother Nature would be its deity in Vanessa’s eyes. Not that he was unsympathetic.
He deflected a response from Dean by hurrying them both, “Anyway, the longer we talk the more likely someone’s going to take an unwelcome interest in what we’re doing. Who’s got the stencils and paint?”
“They’re in the cab.” Dean climbed up and handed out six large oblongs of cardboard and a carton holding spray-cans.
Still with a sour expression, Vanessa let the men hold the first stencil against the white wall while she sprayed the incised words that would protest the actions of Timberlands, a state-owned enterprise logging native trees on the West Coast.
A minute or so later, a siren broke the pre-dawn quiet. The conspirators shrank into the shadow of the lorry, their hearts racing. A police car came tearing up Waterloo Quay with blue lights flashing. It carried on past the side of the railway station, heading towards Ngauranga.
“Shit,” Dean let out his breath. “I thought someone had dobbed us in.”
Vanessa gestured disdainfully at the wall, the depth of her voice compensating for her petite size, “You’re not going to go to jail for this.”
“If the boss found out his truck was here I might.” Dean glared at her. “I’m not ready to become an unemployed green martyr. Not with a wife and kid to look after.”
“I think Katey would understand.”
“She’s not in touch with this Gaia crap like you are.”
Vanessa looked ready to get her claws out and Mike quickly distracted them again, “Let’s get on with it shall we?”
They all turned back to the wall.
Mike ruefully recalled how Vanessa and Dean often clashed at SOFA Executive Committee meetings. Dean’s approach to conservation had been learnt at university and was scientific; Vanessa’s zeal had developed at an early age at the knees of her mother and father. They were both notable naturalists, her father a former president of a national conservation organization. Since the age of ten, Vanessa had single-mindedly dedicated all her spare time to fighting for the protection of indigenous forest.

Mike and Dean took down the last stencil and they all stood back to admire their work. Mike asked Vanessa, “Do you want a lift home?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
They waited while the lorry moved out of the way then headed across the vacant lot and paused beside Mike’s compact Holden on Bunny Street.
“What about a burger at the pie cart before we go?”
Vanessa wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know how you can breakfast on fatty slabs of meat like that.”
“I’ll get them to make you a salad burger.”
Mike led her to the mobile trailer a few metres down the street. Once they had their takeaways, they sat in the light of the rising sun on a park bench at the railway station’s forecourt. Mike reflected, as he ate, that droves of incoming commuters would start arriving in an hour or so and see the anti-logging message painted in black on the wall across the street. With any luck, the owners of the building would not get around to having it painted over for two or three days.
Vanessa shifted her legs together. She had left a scattering of lettuce fragments between her feet. She wiped her lips with a paper serviette then said to the air in front of her, “I don’t think Dean realises how vital it is to keep up the fight and win."
Mike was thinking, instead, of how appealing her new haircut made her look. He appeased, “Fingers is a bit rough but I don’t doubt his conviction. After all, he has a science degree. He just prefers driving trucks to using it.”
Vanessa’s dark eyes turned towards him. “Poor Katey. I could never understand why she’s letting him waste his life that way.”
“It takes all sorts to make the world go round.”

At the birthday party for the Fingletons’ daughter, in a quiet corner of the backyard of their suburban home, three members of the SOFA Executive Committee took the opportunity to have a drink together and talk.
Fifteen minutes passed before Dean’s wife pursued them, “Are you lot plotting the over-throw of the government again?” Her mouth twisted in a tight smile. “Couldn’t it wait until Guy Fawkes? Everyone’s starting to get hungry, Dean. You were supposed to get the barbecue on.”
“Sorry, guys,” Dean rose. “Duty calls.”
“I’ll come and help you,” Bill Taggart offered.
The two men followed Katey’s retreating figure. Mike Simmiss, left to his own devices, wondered if Vanessa was still in the kitchen. He got up.
Most of the other adults at the party were enjoying drinks and conversation on the deck in the sunshine at the back of the house. Their colourfully- dressed offspring were either imitating monkeys, climbing over the play equipment on the lawn, or in some other way entangled with one another.
Mike found Vanessa sitting on a step at the side- door of the kitchen, a filtered cigarette held elegantly in her fingertips. She seldom indulged and Mike assumed someone had given it to her.
As Vanessa let smoke drift out between her lips he mused, not for the first time, that her face might be changed from almost pretty to quite lovely with the right nose job. Not that she lacked inner-beauty.
She said, “You look a bit down.”
Two children interrupted, screaming with delight as they ran down the path alongside the house then disappeared round the front. Their shrill noise faded and Mike was able to answer, “I just heard the news DOC missed out on buying Mathews Bush. Heather Taggart found out yesterday.”
“Oh my god.” Vanessa’s face drained of colour. The cigarette dangled from her fingers, forgotten.
Mike sat beside her and put his arm across her shoulders. “I’m sorry about the bad news. I thought you would have heard by now.”
“I haven’t talked to Heather or Bill yet. I’ve been helping Katey.” She added regretfully, “I was so sure DOC would get it for conservation.”
“I guess they weren’t the highest bidder.”
“All these years the bush has been left alone...” Vanessa’s anguished voice trailed off. Then she said with passion, “If anyone tries to log it, Mike, SOFA will have to fight them and win. No matter what the cost.”
Mike felt energised by her determination. “Sure. It goes without saying.”
He almost hoped the successful buyer, whoever it was, would try to harvest logs. It was a while since he had faced a new challenge, let alone a conservation one so close to home.