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Roger Rabbits with |
“What’s in a name?” If I’d asked that question, I would have been blessed with literary immortality. But, alas, woe is me, it wasn’t.
The phrase, from Romeo and Juliet, suggests a name doesn’t alter someone’s, or something’s, real value. Their essence is unchanged regardless of what they’re called.
Like the two new Cook Strait ferries. Regardless of whether they’re called Trevor, Barry, or Peter, they will remain just Cook Strait ferries – $596 million worth of 200 metre long, wallowing, lumbering, seagoing extensions to State Highway 1. Ferries by any other name.
But the names emblazoned on the prows of each vessel when commissioned in 2029 will be ‘Kupe’, for the first Polynesian navigator to discover NZ. And ‘Cook’, British explorer and cartographer.
“Proper names. Historic names. New Zealand names,” said Rail Minister Winston Peters. Who chose them? “History did.”
Very Blokey!
“Well, history must have been a bloke then, cos they’re very blokey names!,” said my friend Thalassa, which, interestingly enough, is Greek for sea. What a coincidence? “What about all the Kiwi women who’ve achieved in the water, on the water and out of the water? Why not a ferry named for some of them?”
Why not?
We were talking, un-noisily, about ferry names, over a cheeky cab sav and Shropshire blue last weekend. We gargled approval of Kupe. What a guy? He didn’t have sextants, nor the full funding of the Admiralty and Royal Society, when he paddled his canoe for three days and nights, using just smarts and celestial navigation, from Hawaiki to Aotearoa. Most of us couldn’t point to the Southern Cross. Very deserving of a ferry naming.
But at risk of being labelled “snivelling wokists” we ho-hummed Cook. Where’s the fire, the spirit, imagination, the romanticism? Cook already has a mountain, a strait of ill-tempered water, and no less than nine Cook Streets around the country.
And now a ferry. “How much reverence can one man cope with?” chirped Thalassa.
The Good Ship Sandra
Ferries worldwide have wonderfully quixotic, exotic and passionate names Like ‘Liberty Belle’, ‘Caledonian Princess’, and ‘Color Magic’ – romantic names that scream “buy a ticket” even if you have no need to go wherever the ferry’s headed. Like ‘The Shelley Taylor-Smith’ – Perth’s Swan River ferry named for a world marathon swimming champion. So why doesn’t our own open sea marathon swimmer Sandra Blewett get a ferry named for her?
Captain Cook, in his snappy tricorne, probably enjoyed the eponymous strait from the comfort of the quarterdeck. But Sandra got a different perspective – while straining and spitting saltwater, she looked down at all the bluebottles, white pointers and humpbacks that passed in the 130 metres of strait beneath her while taking 13 hours and 30 minutes to swim the waterway.
She had five cracks at the 22km swim before conquering its notorious tides and moods in 1984. Unlike our sad ferry fleet beset with delays, breakdowns, cancellations, Sandra, as she put it, “plugged on”. Then, sadly, in ‘24 she slipped on her bathing cap and OBE for the last time, loosened the shoulders and struck out for those eternal open waters. Persistence defined her. So ‘Persistence’ on the prow of a new Cook Strait ferry would be an ideal epitaph.
Jen, Helen, Whina
“How about Mrs Shipley!, Dame Jen?” offered another colleague over the lip of her fullbodied red. Was she making a joke, or a point, or both? “Or ‘Lisa’ for Lisa Harrington – eight Olympic gold medal paddler. She’s probably more famous globally than Cook.
And what about all our other wahine (women) who have steered this country on extraordinary voyages? The formidable pragmatist, Helen Clark, or revered Maori elder and land rights activist, Whina Cooper, who at 79, trudged 1100km to Parliament to tell Bill Rowling “not one more acre”. Celebrate her, name a ferry for her. Captain Cook wouldn’t mind. Or perhaps Kate Shepherd? The suffragist and social reformer. This raises a point. Most boats are personified as female with the pronoun ‘she’, and have, mostly, female names. Think ‘Queen Mary’, ‘Mary Celeste’, the pilgrim’s ‘Mayflower’, and Drake’s Golden Hind, the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world. Named for a doe, not a stag. And the sloop called ‘Pumpkin’…Pumpkin sloop. Made that one up.
Apparently sailors are superstitious and soft to the core, and liked to dedicate ships to goddesses to guarantee safe travel. They also named ships after wives, mothers and daughters so when they got scurvy or were shipwrecked they had an emotional connection with home.
Other options are Aunt Daisy, Jean Batten, Janet Frame. The Dames – Sister Mary Leo and Valerie Adams – Barbara Kendall and my personal favourite Lorde. And Eunice Olive – after my Mum. She would like that Minister.