Bill Hammond: Playing the Drums

A vision of New Zealand’s past from 1995:

Europeans first imagined New Zealand as “a garden and a pasture in which the best elements of British society might grow into an ideal nation”... When the smoke of the colonists’ fires cleared at the end of the 19th century, New Zealand had become a different country. Māori had lost their most precious life-support system. Only in the hilliest places did the forest still come down to the sea. Huge slices of the ancient ecosystem were missing, evicted and extinguished. Our histories, however, have had neither the sense of place nor ecological consciousness to explain what has happened.

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Extinction has claimed nearly fifty per cent of Aotearoa New Zealand’s bird species over the past 650 years. The persistent myth has it that European settlement in the nineteenth century swept away a pristine past. And most obviously, because we know their names and can catalogue (literally) their infamy, that story includes the professional bird collectors as the cause of those extinctions.

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Welcome to the winter edition of Bulletin. It’s impossible to talk about the last few months in Christchurch now without acknowledging the terrible events of 15 March. The mosque shootings were a horrific act that changed this city, and indeed our country, forever. Such brutality and hate is something we could never have imagined. But what also eventuated was an outpouring of love, unity, compassion, courage and incredible leadership. That is something that our city needs to hold on to and never forget. Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery has always been a place for people to gather, regardless of race, gender or religion—we welcome all, and our doors are open. But I know we all can, and must, do so much more.

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“Bill Hammond is long, lithe and tired, and was born several years ago. Is currently pursuing a Fine Arts course and trying hard to catch up. He is deeply interested in the aesthetic implications of sleep, sports the Rat-Chewed Look in coiffures for ’68, and dreams about blind mice in bikinis. He has never been known to sing outside the confines of his bedroom. Shows a marked but languid preference for the subtle textural nuances and dynamic shadings of washboard, cowbell, woodblocks, claves, cymbal, spoons, thimbles, tambourine, and the palms of the hands in percussive contact.”

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