In this article Claire Mabey, founder of literary organisation, Verb Wellington; co-curator of the Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts’ writers programme; books editor at The Spinoff and children’s author, explores the impact of climate change on live literary events.
Aotearoa New Zealand is famously farflung. We have always had to look for ourselves at the bottom, near the edge, of commercial maps. The shortest flight between New Zealand and our expansive neighbour, Australia, is two and half hours. Geographic isolation has shaped our identity for as long as people have settled on this land.
Thanks to our colonial history (almost everyone here has international whakapapa/genealogy) it has been a given for many that we are somehow entitled to leave our islands for the wide world: some temporarily, some forever. Despite its location Aotearoa is in endless ebb and flow: colonisers, migrants, visitors. Over a million New Zealanders live outside of our country: in America, Britain, Ireland, Africa, Europe and Asia. Hundreds of thousands live in Australia where the money is better.
For decades, this coming and going – first on boats, then on planes – was uninterrupted and unquestioned. For many artists, our isolation has made long-haul travel part of the job. It’s hard for musicians, for example, to have a touring career in New Zealand. The market is small and most of our musicians end up living in America or the UK. Our writers are in a different situation given their art can travel without them. And yet the literary community has, for decades, relied on international travel in both directions.
When Covid closed our borders abruptly and powerfully, New Zealanders overseas couldn’t get home and those of us down on the islands at the bottom of the map couldn’t leave. It was a fraught political time and a wildly new artistic one. Like everyone else around the world our arts communities quickly adapted to restricted live environments; no international travel; and limited domestic travel. Covid revealed a lot about our ability to change systems; adapt budgets; programme hyper-locally; reimagine how to connect with audiences.
But Covid also revealed hard truths about our spot on the map. I have been thinking of the pandemic as a short, sharp shake to the shoulders. An attempt to wake us up before the real disaster hits. Before Covid I had started to receive messages from some international writers who had decided to cut long-haul travel out in an effort to reduce their carbon footprints. Climate activist and writer George Monbiot was our first ever digital guest way back in 2010. In many ways the pandemic felt like a lightning strike from the future: a glance at a world without travel.
In New Zealand the Climate Crisis is both here and not here. We have a Government that is patently disinterested in Climate-related policy. We have an arts industry that needs international exchange for stimulation, opportunity, collegiality and expansive thinking; but that is also acutely aware of the impact of long-distance travel on our environment and aligned closely with Climate action.
What does Climate Action and a world in Climate Crisis mean for our artistic health? Between 2022 – 2023 digital solutions were the primary pathway around Covid-related interruptions. At first digital solutions were popular and they worked. But interest in online events has waned significantly as live has come roaring back to life.
Since we’ve been able to welcome international artists back to our shores, and our own artists have been able to leave, we’ve been reminded that there is nothing like in-person gatherings. Nothing like the connections forged through manaakitanga (hospitality). I recently delivered the literary programme, with my colleague Anne- Marie Te Whiu, for the Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts. It was the first live festival since 2020 and the first time in four years we’d welcomed international artists back to this festival.
For decades, this coming and going – first on boats, then on planes – was uninterrupted and unquestioned.
It was euphoric! I had forgotten how wonderful it is to welcome visitors to Wellington; to take them to restaurants; connect them up with local writers; advise on the best spots for coffee, and walks and bookshops and ice cream. We’re now fast friends. Audience flooded in. The bookshops was buzzing with excited readers. Writers from here have promised to visit their new friends in Portland, and Dublin and Maine and Mexico.
So what happens if the Climate Crisis necessitates a closing off of this flow over the seas, over borders? I have no answers, only these questions:
1) How do we best communicate the current and potential impacts of the Climate Crisis on creative industries as writers, literary organisations and facilitators of fair and open conversation?
2) What opportunities might the Climate Crisisoffer the literary world?
3) Should we establish a framework for responsible travel for art-making, artistic connection and artbusiness?
4) What do we lose when we lose the ability to travel? Should we feel entitled in the way that we do?
5) Digital options are always there and I imagine they will only become slicker, more intimate, as we get increasingly creative with technology both familiar and new. How do we make digital experiences as valuable as live?
In New Zealand, down the bottom of the map, we have to weigh up the cost of flight not just in dollars but in ethics. We have to accept every rejection from a writer who has decided to limit, or eliminate, long-haul travel and consider that this might just be the beginning of a more intensive slowing down. Right now, Climate action is suspended in a quagmire of the wrong kind of Government for such a time; in post-Covid fatigue; and in the struggle to let go of our freeflowing past. It’s time to invent a future where New Zealand’s literary world is intimately and actively part of the global community but that our part in it is for the environment and not against it.
Claire Mabey is founder of literary organisation, Verb Wellington; co-curator of the Aotearoa NZ Festival of the Arts’ writers programme; and books editor at The Spinoff. Her first novel for children, The Raven’s Eye Runaways was released in July 2024 by Allen & Unwin Publishers.
The International Literature Exchange is a partnership project by National Centre for Writing and British Council, supported by Arts Council England.
