Stephen Smithyman is one of the poets featured in Te Purere/The Exodus: The Anthology of Expatriate New Zealand Poets, edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and John Gallas, Cold Hub Press, 2025, which will have it’s Sydney launch on Saturday, 6 Dec from 3pm – 5pm at the Stanley Street Gallery, 1/52-54 Stanley St, Darlinghurst NSW 2010. This is a Poetry Sydney event. Tickets are $15 and are available from   https://events.humanitix. com/sydney-launch-te-purere-the-exodus

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 NORTHBOUND (MYTHOLOGIES)

In those days, when I had nothing better to do,
I would simply head out on the road. It was a way
of escaping my parents’ never-ending war, but it
was also travel for its own sake, a basic urge
to move. In this way, I saw most of New Zealand
before I was eighteen. One time, towards
the end of my travels, I decided to head north.
This was a journey into my father’s country,
the birthplace he’d mythologised, the landscape
and history he’d made his own. Eventually,
I left the towns and tourist centres far behind
and headed out along the flat, sandy spit
that leads to the land’s end. Chiefly, I remember
that narrowing down to the point where blue water
and breaking waves could be seen on either side,
the white gauze of the sky arching overhead,
the local children emerging from the shadows
of the sandhills, staring at the bus which carried
me and the other passengers, then running away…
it was like we were entering another world, one
which was dissolving into a mist of wind-blown sand
and salt spray before our very eyes, with its mysterious,
ghostlike inhabitants. Finally, there was the lighthouse;
there was the bay where a friend of mine spent
a whole summer, once, and never left it behind;
there was the ancient, twisted tree, half-way down
the cliff, the Maori believed their souls travelled
the length of the land to find and jump off into eternity;
there was the famous meeting of sea and ocean,
their conflicting currents butting up against each other,
a line of clashing whitecaps, heading straight out
towards the horizon, only to vanish, before they got there,
in the all-consuming, sun-dazzled haze…
I had reached the end of my journey; I could go no further;
like my friend and my father, I had been to the place
where life became mythology, mythology life,
and I will remember it till the end of my days.

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ULURU

A journey of the heart…I travel with my wife
and children to Uluru. I am wearing my bone fish hook –
hei matau – and thinking about my other family,
of whom there is only my younger brother left now…
from the heart of New Zealand to the heart of Australia.
We circumambulate the rock, complying with the request
of the local inhabitants that we refrain from climbing it,
angry at the other tourists, who brush right past the signs
asking them not to do so, in their eagerness to begin
the ascent. ‘Let the monolith retain its mystery’ we think,
as we discover a world of different environments at its base,
from dry, sandy desert to densely bushed waterholes,
from giant geological features, which suggested stories
of the Dreamtime, to handprints and drawings of animals
in the cave galleries – humbler evidence of human occupation.
It is a matter of respect and disrespect, of knowledge
of what is appropriate and what is not appropriate,
like those subtle morals at the end of Dreamtime stories,
a deeper teaching, embodied in the place itself, to take
the time to sit, to breathe, to listen…to feel the peace
and hear the silence, which is not silence at all, but life
stirring in the leaves of the trees, in the birds, singing
on their branches, in the running water, in the blades of grass
rubbing softly together, in the loose, rolling grains of desert sand.

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Stephen Smithyman is the son of New Zealand poets, Kendrick Smithyman and Mary Stanley. He has lived and worked in Naarm/Melbourne for many years and is now retired there. A late developer, he has published two books of poetry and one of short stories, in recent years – all with Ginninderra Press, Adelaide. ‘Uluru’ is from his second book of poetry, ‘Halfway and Back’. ‘Northbound: Mythologies’ is included in his next poetry book, ‘Reading ‘Anna Karenina’ on the Beach’, which is due out from Melbourne Poets Union in early 2026. Stephen regards himself as an Antipodean poet, not belonging exclusively to either Aotearoa/New Zealand or Australia, but rather to both and believing that, for all their differences, there are many powerful affinities between them.