Diana Wichtel: Celebrating Matariki this year is making history

Auckland's Stardome Observatory and Planetarium kicked off its Matariki celebrations with an immersive light and sound installation.

OPINION

I love Christmas. We're the house with Santa in the cabbage tree out front and some tatty strings of lights, when we can get the kids to help put them up. Family, food, Boxing Day at the beach. But I've never got used to the incongruence, for a Canadian, of celebrating it in summer. We're not religious, so for the spiritual side, that just leaves us with an inappropriately rugged-up, white-bearded old guy of largely commercial provenance.

Santa terrified our children when they were small and has moved on to traumatising the grandchildren. These days we've added lighting Hannukah candles in an attempt to bring together all the family heritage we have to hand but I still miss the fire, the bite of winter.

So it was good to leave the fire, dress up warm – it felt like the coldest night this year in Auckland – and head off to celebrate something perfectly seasonal and uniquely Aotearoa.

I've never been to the Stardome Observatory and Planetarium, handily located in One Tree Hill Domain. The night we went a lot of people had turned out. We parked in the next street and, by the light of the stars and our phones, picked our way across one field to stand in another, outside the Stardome, for Matariki Lights.

The idea, according to the website, was "a celebration that grounds us in mātauranga Māori … an immersive and beautiful exterior activation that encourages manuhiri to come to Maungakiekie to celebrate Matariki". And there we were, a small, diverse crowd, watching as nine pillars of light, one for each of the stars associated with marking the season, planting and harvest, health and wellbeing and remembering those who have died, lit the sky. Music, voice and birdsong.

The night was cloudy but the lights went so high you almost fell over backwards trying to follow their path.

There was a free 10-minute show in the planetarium. We lay back and, apart from a brief hiatus while people were told once again to get off their wretched phones, there was a brisk rundown on the stars and how to pick them out in the pre-dawn sky. Everyone, except for one small baby and the repeat phone offender, was engrossed.

The last couple of years it's felt like I've been plodding along staring down at my feet, grateful I can still see them after all the self-isolation and work-from-home treats. It is good to look up to the stars, to be celebrating the start of a new year. Lord knows the country still faces a daunting mountain of intractable problems but a lot has changed: the growing use of te reo, a new history curriculum that better reflects the truth about this nation's project at the end of the Earth.

To celebrate Matariki this year is to be part of making history, an invitation to the first reinstated indigenous holiday in the world.

Our suburb is throwing a Matariki festival. During coverage by Newshub's AM show of the pre-dawn ceremony attended by more than 1000 people at Takaparawhau/Bastion Point, Auckland councillor Alf Filipaina told Oriini Kaipara he had been thinking, during the ceremony, of the brother he lost. He spoke of the impact of the holiday on Auckland. "We have 100 events, most of them free, and a lot of food."

So many people celebrating. For all the talk from change-averse quarters of a divided nation, Matariki has felt like the opposite.

Season, stars, memory, and renewal: it's a tradition to pass on to the next generations. As we came out of Stardome the light show was kicking off again. The clouds had lifted a little and the pillars of light shone brighter. As we walked out on to the grass, gazing upward, a small girl said to her dad, "I might dream about this."