Little Doomsdays, Nic Lowe and Phil Dadson
Massey University Press, 2023

We say they unloaded all conversations, all laughter, all debate, all questions, all ways of loving, all whakapapa, all jokes, all schools of thought, all kūmara and kūmara rites, all animosity, all arts, all star paths, all curiosity, all gods, all feuds, all karakia, all seeds, all tools, all methods of war, all rites of birth, all knowledges pertaining to thriving in an unknown land.

from ‘Entry DFLKJ0022110: First arrivals I, 11 –CE’

Little Doomsdays is a collaboration between Ngāi Tahu writer Nic Low and musician and painter Phil Dadson. These are the opening words:

It’s said — in the quiet between buses, down the back of the pub, in the hushed elevator rising to the penthouse — that in the late twentieth century an unstable grouping of scholars, writers and fanatics from several Ngāi Tahu hapū in Murihiku created what has come to be known as the Ark of Arks.

It’s said that this project aimed to catalogue all known arks from the last five millennia. It was a failed attempt to capture previous civilisations’ failed attempts to preserve whatever was valuable to them: waka huia, time capsules, caches, burial ships, seed banks.

This becomes threshold into what feels like a conference of arks, inside this ark that ark, inside that ark another, and as Nic suggests, the very book we hold becomes ark. I am holding a storehouse, an instruction manual, a travel guide. We are invited to examine, admire, lay our hands, not to believe everything people say. We might “dig down into the sediment of memory that is a city”.

We are in the vessel of preservation and it is a neighbourhood of truth, fragmentation, missing bits, disappearance, change. Across time and place. In this vessel, we will find seeds, things, knowledge, aroha, museums, hapu time capsules, seeds of language, cave paintings. We will hear “time is running out”. We will fall upon the possibility of germination.

Te ao Māori is the pulse, the vein, the energy force, the lifeline.

Little Doomsdays is the fifth collaboration between artist and writer in Lloyd Jones’ ongoing kōrero series, which again invites the reader to consider the sparking links between image and text. Both prompt a curiosity that is fuelled by enigma, movement, little explosions of metaphor, depth and distance. Ideas reverberate, along with a transcendence beyond ideas to a meditative state. I look at image, I read the text, I track the arcs between one and the other, and become entranced. Ark becomes arc with its sweet curve, electric or static, and arc becomes ark wherein preservation is as much a sequence of openings as it exists in the brine of making.

Phil’s artwork springs with textured possibilities: the earth veins that might be river tributaries that might be blood vessels that might be skeletal leaf that might be umbilical cord or relief map.

Nic’s writing is fluent and fluid, it is poetic and philosophical, mysterious and multilayered. You are pulled into alcoves of thought, deposited in archival pockets, gently placed in slip sleeves of imaginings.

And what of the title with it’s ominous “doomsday” reference? How to proceed from the threat of endings, of time running out, of mayhem and annihilation – just as we are witnessing doomsday-ish manifestations on our screens. Ah we keep travelling through the book. We reach the warmth of te pō. We are not alone. We reach the possibility of germination. We reach the exquisite explosion of tiny line and vibrant colour, hard to pin down semantics, below the skin pinpricks of feeling, we are feeling the world, with finger touch, within eye sight, within hearing. It is both dark and light, heat and chill. It is the impulse to move forward. This is what I feel.

Nic and Phil produced Little Doomsdays during the difficult and uncertain constraints in the time of Covid and were unable to meet in person. I have lingered over the book at a time when the inhumanity of Gaza is breaking our hearts and the societal and cultural debasements of the new Government cuts to the bone. The book has been a much needed retreat, a meditation aid, where to dream and drift, to grieve and to construct, is a salve. Beautifully produced, rich in connections, Little Doomsdays is a fine addition to a fine series.

Nic Low (Ngāi Tahu) is the partnerships editor at NZ Geographic magazine and the former programme director of WORD Christchurch.

Phil Dadson ONZM is a transdisciplinary artist, musician/composer and improviser, whose practice spans some 50 years.

Massey University Press page