Bungy or Bungee

Aotea's Birdman

I have been absent from this plog (painting Log) as I sort out problems with my on-line gallery supplier - the US concern SMUGMUG. I am trying to feed one of my galleries into my Plog (inangawiremu.blogspot.com) - probably Tuscany as it is a colour explosion. In between this technological tweaking and twittering (without Twitter) I chanced upon this painting I had executed a few years back.

It may look comical but its intent was serious. I suppose it comes down to what were the moai all about. They are giant statues found on Easter Island; the island is described by New Zealand's pre-Maori Waitaha as Waitangi-ki-roto or Island of the Weeping Waters. The plot thus thickens...

I wonder if it is less conceivable to believe that a highly sophisticated civilisation once existed on Easter Island than it is to believe that in this explosion of the web that we can now talk face to face on Skype, download galleries of megapixelled photos and paintings, and disseminate our ideas worldwide in a nanosecond? That was a long rhetorical question (but such fare is fast becoming the diet of the Blogger or Plogger). The mere techno revolution, that we in the first world are part of, throws up daily hitherto undreamed of possibilities.

Why don't I like Twitter - it makes people lazy and less intelligent. The restriction on characters lends itself to paraphrasing, short-cutting and abbreviation. All throw up subtle changes in language rendering it less meaningful and forceful - in essence, it leads to language losing its oomph!

But Twitter is the call of the Birdman.

And our Birdman visiting Easter Island at this instant is AJ Hackett, the Kiwi who popularised (and dare I say commercialised) bungy-jumping. AJ didn't invent it. That distinction belongs to the Bougainville islanders in Vanuatu. Annually there is a rite of passage there where young men tie vines to their ankles and leap from high wooden structures. It is highly dangerous and potentially lethal, and one islander leapt to his death as Queen Elizabeth II was watching.

There is also recorded the Mexican tradition of the Dance of the Papantla Flyers (Danza de los Voladores de Papantla), that has bungy-cord like associations stretching as far back as the Aztecs. About the stretched length of my much-overused pun.

The next evolution of this 'leap of faith' happened at the Clifton Suspension Bridge on April Fool's Day (appropriately) in 1979. Members of the Oxford Dangerous Sports Club (in the spirit of other adventurers such as Philby, Burgess and MacLean) took their champagne- and cigar-feulled leap of faith before being arrested. They made later jumps, including one on the TV show That's Incredible. Bungee (bungy) jumping had emerged from myth and island vines into reality.

AJ as a Kiwi was a flightless and somewhat frustrated Bird. Without the benefit of Twitter (then) he took his first leap of faith from the Greenhithe Bridge in Auckland, and later took the much-publicised leap from the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Just had a thought for another Painting... The next step, commercialisation of the Bungy, owes its genesis to the advances in birth control. Not the vasectomy or the pill, but to advances in the security of the condom. In particular to latex. No more vines, the new strings attached are rubber. So now you could climb to the top of a high object, attach a rubber-band to your ankles and dive head-first into the abyss and not have the added outcome of an accident such as an head-splitting death (or unwanted pregnancy).

The condom made commercial bungy-jumping possible. A safe-sex jump, a protected leap. If it is not on (around your ankles) it is not on! I took my first leap of faith at AJ's first commercial site, the Kawarau Bridge near Queenstown in the South Island of New Zealand, with the latex band attached to my ankles. The water below was cold, and at that time sobering. My next jump was at AJ Hackett's Nevis Gondola, which was for a short time the highest commercial jump in the world. I wrote the experience up in one of the many editions of Lonely Planet's New Zealand travel survival kit.

I was looking at some pictures of the moai (giant statues) that looked out from Easter Island across the Pacific to where I live - Aotearoa (New Zealand) - and realised that one Kiwi in particular, AJ Hackett, had overcome one of the problems of gravity. We now had a Birdman!

But our Bird-man was a mammal not a real Bird. Isolated New Zealand, with its wealth of unique avian fauna (both extinct and still extant) had very little in the way of mammal representation apart from short-tailed and long-tailed bats, an a single species of rat, before the coming of the white explorers. So AJ was given the mammalian title of Short-tailed Bat (or as it is in Maori - pekapeka). I suppose the appelation is my way of saying thanks to a Kiwi who had the foresight to take the right protection at the right time, and give us usually flightless mammals the opportunity to take our own leaps of faith with a rubber-band around our ankles.

As in the tradition of this fledling Plog I will not say much more than the painting started as an illustration of the Birdman ceremonies that were once conducted on Easter Island (Rapanui as it is also called). Kevin Costner covered this subject matter in his film of the same name. The moai became the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, each with one of the seven main colours of the spectrum. AJ dropped in with a slab of greenstone (pounamu) protecting his head, and the island exploded in colour. When lowered down to the ground of Easter Island, and at the time of writing, he wasn't able to Twitter his location. That problem is now solved, as Twitter IS, but I fear the devolution of both language and the story attached.

Just one thing before this Plog ends - I find it curious that the Easter Islanders (Rapanuians) called their giant statues moa-i. The biggest bird ever recorded is the flightless giant moa of New Zealand, now extinct. Yes bigger than a dodo, ostrich and emu combined. It was a herbivorous ground-dweller, and surprisingly its young were preyed upon by the gigantic flying Haast's eagle (also now extinct). That is a big, big raptor with a four-metre wingspan. There is a lot more going on here than in 120 characters of a Twitter.

So let's leave the last word to the Birds.

acrylic, oil, gouache, glitter, paua, greenstone (pounamu), Biro and collage on A2 paper, 2007

inanga (a type of fish)