Joanne McNeill: Our dystopian nightmare

Art of all types, shapes and sizes, is scattered throughout the Quarry Arts Centre in Whangarei. Photo / File

The Trans Pacific Partnership talks are over but the text (that's text not txt, although boiling it down to the latter might have taken much longer) remains secret.

Breathlessly it was reported negotiations finished at 5am, as if staying up so late was some kind of rare badge of heroism.

What was the hurry? Agree in haste repent at leisure, as grandmother did not quite say. Although the punishing travel schedules of politicians and international negotiators might mean making world-shattering decisions in a state of jetlagged disorientation is standard practice, which explains a lot.

Meanwhile, in the real world, all-nighters are routine for midwives, caregivers, taxi drivers, wharfies, steel workers, gas station cashiers, airline crew, security guards, cleaners, call-centre workers ... often on low wages or dead-end contracts, to the detriment of their own health.

Even potters do it, firing kilns full of precious pots for nights and days on end controlling crucial temperatures by feeding roaring dragons.

Mind you, when trade barriers were bowled last, in the 1980s, domestic potters (along with local brick, money, clothing and glassworks) were wiped out by cheaper imports, making such dragons as wood-fired kilns an endangered species.

Julie-Ann, the venerable twin-chambered kiln at Whangarei's Quarry Arts Centre is now but a pile of bricks, and last Friday - under a bright sliver of the waning moon so close to Venus they were nearly touching - I attended a dawn blessing before demolition of the adjacent structure, known fondly as the Dungeon.

Housing a clay-making plant that operated successfully for years, and several other hobbit-like spaces, the solid Dungeon - improvised progressively from poles, corrugated-iron, concrete, the former quarry's rock-face and a great wall of stacked bricks saved from the defunct glassworks chimney - was condemned by authorities as unsafe.

The demolition did not actually have my blessing but since there was no point in lying down in front of the bulldozers (I know when I'm beaten) I went anyway, for the stories - of learning, inspiration, mountains, witches, production and diamonds which happened there - and to lament officially the passing of what the building represented; a time when it seemed possible to act autonomously and ingeniously with available resources to create unique visionary structures from scratch, as did Yvonne Rust when she built the Quarry.

Certainly it could not have been done in today's surveillance climate of conformist compliance.

Strange that as health, safety and profit obsessions bore steadily into every aspect of our lives, allegedly to facilitate well-being, the annual suicide rate increases. Maybe these things are connected?

Maybe unwittingly we have fetched up in a dystopian nightmare where as pressure to conform and fear of non-compliance grows, opportunities - for employment or to take control of our own destinies with the kind of personal spontaneous creative action which can bring success and satisfaction - diminish.

It remains to be seen, should the TPP allow free-range global corporates to ride roughshod over what remains of our shredded sovereignty, whether toppled trade barriers will prove sufficiently economically advantageous to balance the losses.

Over the next 30 days, lawyers will attack it then politicians will have a go. After that it's our turn. Will our concerns count? Not likely.