Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

Pfister, Gertrud

English

Sportification, Power and Control: Ski-Jumping as a Case Study

Zellmer, Johanna

101
On second thoughts, am I? In New Zealand, my current country of residence, I must declare 
if I am:
 New Zealander.  This makes me rather
 New Zealand European as well as
 Pakeha or I might elect to choose
 Other.
Johanna Zellmer
moments beyond Control
I am German.
artist’s Pages
Zellmer – Beyond Control – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
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102
This is not the first time I have been Other. When I was 
small, I looked different enough to feel and experience 
this notion; my hair was too dark to be German, my skin 
too olive. It was something I was teased about; children 
can be cruel…
It is interesting for me, as a German, to tick the box 
Other. Germans have, since the Second World War, been 
thought of as those who took otherness to an extreme. 
As a result, Germans have felt it tremendously important 
to educate young people about their nation having done 
wrong. We learned about the Second World War inside-
out through history, sociology, political studies and 
geography classes; in fact, we learned nothing else.
We knew (nothing?) about ourselves. 
Zellmer – Beyond Control – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
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103
Nearly sixty years after the conclusion of the 
Second World War, it is standard practice 
in the Gymnasium, the German equivalent 
of high school, for students to be taught 
about the rise of Nazism, the horrors it 
unleashed, and its consequences for 
postwar Europe. The genocide of European 
Jews is a central chapter in this instruction. 
Every year, thousands of teenagers visit 
former concentration camps like Dachau or 
Buchenwald, watch films of Hitler’s adoring 
crowds and of cities in flames, participate 
in intense group discussions about moral 
responsibility, and come face to face with 
the historical burdens of their grandfathers. 
The process is disturbing for most, and 
unfailingly influences their political outlook. 
The majority of young Germans accept the 
necessity of remembrance.1
At this point, I may need to elaborate: I am German 
(at least on paper), but my second language is 
Jewellery & Metalsmithing, unusual perhaps, but 
a language nonetheless. 
In this context, it felt good to look Other. It provided a sense of freedom from the necessity 
to carry a historical burden that didn’t feel like mine. I was grateful for not being blond and 
blue-eyed, without ever associating myself with the possibility of being Jewish either. I just 
looked ‘normal’, able to fit in anywhere like others who did not appear to be branded.
Since leaving my home country, I still am just that: Other. However, living and studying in 
colonised countries and being immersed in visual arts practices bring new awareness. It 
became, for example, very popular in the arts towards the end of the 20th century to address 
colonisation, immigration and identity issues in one’s work. 
Zellmer – Beyond Control – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
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104
In the use of language – visual, spoken or written 
– fluency appears at unguarded moments; moments 
outside of control, when one is at ease. 
These can be unexpected simple moments; such as 
when
• catching oneself stringing words together which 
don’t exist in order to make sense or
• choosing to employ the most basic skills within a 
discipline that becomes too easily subsumed in 
technicality.
I’ll explain in a moment, but would like to talk about the peculiarity of fluency first.  
Choosing to learn a second language always brings about the relentless challenge of fluency. 
Yet, fluency is indeed not something one can achieve purely by studying more and more 
extensively.
Naturally, good comprehension, good technical skills and good communication skills are 
achieved only through great commitment, immersion and a significant measure of control. 
But fluency is as much about letting go as it is about immersion and commitment; it needs 
a kind of juxtaposing between extremes of control and freedom.
Zellmer – Beyond Control – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
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105
The processes that these coins undergo create a 
constant dialogue between control – via precise sawing 
– and very entertaining unpredictability, as the material 
unfolds into a stretch.  Like in the use of language, 
control and freedom are juxtaposed. But, employing 
such ‘de-constructive’ and liberating processes was 
only possible through my immersion into Otherness, 
away from my country of origin and its long-standing 
craft traditions. Distance revealed the coin’s potential 
as a means for freedom of expression. 
The language of Jewellery & Metalsmithing is capable 
of reflecting both the need for control and the need 
for uncontrolled fluency. Only with both at play will 
a quality or essence already inherent in the source 
material become comprehensible. My ‘coinscapes’ 
emerge with the simple use of existing texts, a piercing 
saw and a cross peen hammer. I create them from 
annually minted coins commemorating events and 
iconic personalities. The ever-changing design of the 
eagle, its associations (being the emblem for Germany) 
and the momentous inscriptions on the coins intrigue 
my eye and mind.
Zellmer – Beyond Control – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
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106
Inevitably I find myself using both my second language(s) – Jewellery & Metalsmithing and 
English as well as my Otherness to try and make sense; sense of my country of origin, and of 
my living abroad here in New Zealand; sense also of my use of these second languages. 
The embossed text on the coin’s rim alone remains untouched.
It reappears in and on the open solander box:
All the while and alongside others, I remain in search of moments beyond control.
Zellmer – Beyond Control – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007
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107
 1 Jan Otakar Fischer, “Invoking the Past in Recent German Exhibition Design”, ON DESIGN, Harvard 
Design Magazine, Number 19, Fall 2003/Winter 2004. 
Photo Credits: Heeyoung Youn
  Commemorative Coin: 10 Years of German Unity (BRD 10DM Gedenkmünze 10 Jahre Deutsche 
Einheit, WIR SIND DAS VOLK-WIR SIND EIN VOLK; 28 Sept. 2000) showing reverse.
	 Commemorative Coin: 800 Years of the German Brotherhood (BRD 10DM Gedenkmünze “800 Jahre 
Deutscher Orden”, ES BLEIB IN GEDÄCHTNIS SO LANG GOTT WILL; 4. Sept. 1991) eagle removed.
	  Commemorative Coin: 800 Years of The German Brotherhood (BRD 10DM Gedenkmünze “800 Jahre 
Deutscher Orden”, ES BLEIB IN GEDÄCHTNIS SO LANG GOTT WILL; 4. Sept. 1991) view with power 
pole from Mount Cargill Road towards Otago Peninsula, Dunedin, New Zealand.
	 The artist at work in her studio, January 2007: checking the level of a coinscape. 
	 Commemorative Coins: 15 Eagles (BRD 10DM Gedenkmünzen, showing reverse (the back of the 
eagle image) or respectively averse (the remains of the readable front of the coin).
		 Commemorative Coin: Olympics – Intertwined Arms (BRD 10DM Gedenkmünze “Olympiade 
– Verschlungene Arme”, ALTIUS – FORTIUS – CITIUS; 20 July 1971) first forged sample with coin 
stretch broken in half. 
	 Commemorative Coin: Arthur Schoperhauer (BRD 10DM Gedenkmünze “Arthur Schopenhauer”, 
DIE WELT ALS WILLE UND VORSTELLUNG; 21 Sept. 1988) work in progress; forged coin stretch 
starting to unfold.
	 Twelve Commemorative Coinscapes (out of a total of 43; BRD 10DM Gedenkmünzen minted from 
1972-2001).
	 Commemorative Coin: 800 Years Port and Hamburg (BRD 10DM Gedenkmünze “800 Jahre Hafen und 
Hamburg”, HAMBURG TOR ZUR WELT; 8 Nov. 1989) in magnetic solander box, held semi-open.
	 Commemorative Coin: 800 Years Port and Hamburg (BRD 10DM Gedenkmünze “800 Jahre Hafen 
und Hamburg”, HAMBURG TOR ZUR WELT; 8 Nov. 1989) in magnetic solander box on wall.
Johanna Zellmer completed a master’s degree at the Australian National University 
Canberra School of Art and a formal apprenticeship as a goldsmith in Germany. She 
currently holds a lecturing position in the School of Art at Otago Polytechnic School/The 
Kura Matatini ki Otago and engages with research on cross-cultural matters within 
contemporary Jewellery and Metalsmithing. 
Zellmer – Beyond Control – Junctures, 8, Jun 2007


Moments Beyond Control

Laine, Leena

The Finnish Play Movement: Nationalism, Citizenship and Women’s Resistance

Bramwell, Ali

 119
CURATORIAL REVIEW
Play – An Exhibition by 
Rebecca Agnew, Jaquelyn 
Greenbank, Simon 
Lawrence, Morgan Oliver 
and Jamie Richardson 
(Dunedin: Blue Oyster Gallery, 2006)
By Ali Bramwell
Play was constructed around the work of 
particular individuals and set up a series of 
play-ful relations between histories, modes 
of practice and content. 
Jaimie Richardson’s contribution to Play is a 
return to an eighties sensibility in the form of 
a suite of cheerfully macabre ’toon-like toys. 
Zombag and Zompouf (2006) is a Zombie 
bean bag with various remains of limbs that 
gets to use its own severed head as a footrest. 
Various fatal woundings and amputations 
are sewn in novelty shop stylisation on 
a comfortably fat and soggy vinyl body. 
Completing Richardson’s contribution is 
the set of four Zomboyz, mini zombie dolls 
with maiming and dismemberment tenderly 
hand-sewn in pastel coloured felt. I can’t help 
thinking of Bart and Lisa Simpson laughing at 
the bloody mayhem of the Itchy and Scratchy 
show. 
All the visual cues suggest a formative 
attachment by the artist to best (worst, 
depending on your perspective) shlock 
horror the eighties had to offer. Jason and 
Frankenstein are both lurking as are B-
Grade splatter classics like Chopping Mall, 
Day of the Living Dead and Jackson’s The 
Frighteners. At first glance it seems that 
Richardson has mined the material in quite 
a direct way for content which reflects mass 
culture in an unselfconscious rather than 
ironic way. His enthusiasm then would be 
the geeky obsession of a genre convert who 
is attaching to post-event merchandising as 
“transitional” objects in the Lacanian sense. 
One of the first impressions is of affect and 
proximity; the work is loaded with warmth for 
the genre of pulp horror that it dips into and 
the result is almost absurdly appealing. It is 
knowingly and even sardonically referential, 
but from the soft focus of an enthusiast 
rather than cool and often arid cynicism – or 
another alternative, lugubrious anti-capitalist 
politicisation – that is often associated with 
art in the shadow of things popular and 
mass cultural. Play has imported part of 
an existing narrative about good and evil 
and de-contextualised it in the rising damp 
of our sub-urban basement gallery, where, 
in contrast with the undeniable tendency 
towards dank of the concrete rooms, the 
Zomboyz are arguably transposed from the 
Bad Guys into Good Guys (neck stump and 
exposed brains and all) by virtue of their 
unrelenting cheerfulness.
For his work Unreal Gallery (2006) Morgan 
Oliver adapts an existing game engine or 
‘interactive frame’ – commercially available 
with some recent shoot-em-up games 
–  specifically for Blue Oyster. He does 
this by carefully 3D-modelling the entire 
gallery space with obedient and attentive 
detail (including the office, although the 
administrative detritus is missing, particularly 
the staff) – an impressive undertaking in 
itself. The unreal gallery then becomes the 
game space; now one can select an avatar 
and stalk others with murderous intent 
through the rooms where art-y-facts usually 
reside. The avatars are a haphazard and 
clichéd collection of characters that are 
both silly and sinister. It is now possible to 
Reviews – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
 120
see Sponge Bob Square Pants engaged in 
a death match with a caricature of Hitler. 
The cheesy images die with the usual gouts 
of unreal gore; strangely satisfying, it has to 
be said, seeing and hearing a cliché gunned 
down. Instead of setting up systems in the 
gallery that would allow gallery visitors to 
shoot each other on the spot, Oliver played 
the game beforehand with several friends 
and projected the recorded result. The size 
of the projection created an interesting 
affect, carefully cropped so that it matched 
the room fairly seamlessly, a gallery mirror 
space that was grafted onto the existing. 
Watching the cat and mouse games inside 
the same rooms I am currently standing in, 
gradually causes an itch to develop between 
the shoulder blades as the unreal and the 
real start to merge. While watching, I turn my 
head compulsively several times towards the 
open doorways at my back, more than half 
expecting that cartoon warrior bitch to spring 
out and shoot me. This reaction is particularly 
strong for anyone already familiar with the 
gallery rooms. New visitors are often much 
slower to recognise and identify themselves 
as being immersed in the same labyrinthine 
white rooms being used as a war zone. 
Simon Lawrence manages to activate the 
gallery space in a different way. His two-
channel moving image work PFFFFT (2006) 
shows a pair of domestic living spaces with 
the artist-as-conjurer transporting himself 
endlessly from one space to the other. In Harry 
Potter meets The Fly, the trainee magician 
decorporealises – discombobulates? 
decomposes his atoms? disappears at any 
rate –  from a seventies-style living room with 
the traditional puff of smoke and reincarnates 
himself some seconds afterwards in a 
seventies-style hallway on the other side of 
the gallery, and back again, ad nauseum. 
It’s easy to imagine his particles streaming 
invisibly through the air between the two 
Jaimie Richardson, 2006, Zomboyz, mixed media 
(image source: The Blue Oyster Gallery, photograph: 
Charlotte Dick).
Morgan Oliver, 2006, still image from Unreal Gallery, 
3D-modelled projection (image courtesy of the artist).
Reviews – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
 121
moving images, and equally easy to expect 
something to go wrong with the transmission. 
Even though the event doesn’t change, 
average viewers patiently wait for several 
cycles, turning their heads in a slow motion 
Wimbledon swivel; perhaps mesmerised by 
the possibility of catastrophe or simply by 
the movement of something shiny (as are 
sheep and magpies) and the enviable, albeit 
demonically repetitious, powers of the mind 
on display.
Rebecca Agnew’s work Runner Up (2004) 
consists of six fibreglass figurative works, 
busts of sportswomen mounted on wall 
plaques. The multiplicity of sporting references 
have become a cacophony within the group, 
with each figure fairly literally representing a 
different sporting code: power lifting, javelin, 
tennis, shooting and the sexual gaming of the 
sexes. The entire group has exaggeratedly 
long fingernails which makes the busts less 
credible as sportswomen. The nails are long 
enough to be talons: women as a naturally 
dangerous and predatory adversary like 
the lion or bear, the kind that offers better 
sport and greater prestige, especially when 
stuffed and mounted over the mantlepiece 
Images (top to bottom):
Simon Lawrence, 2006, still from PFFFT, 2-channel 
moving image (image source: The Blue Oyster 
Gallery, photograph: Charlotte Dick).
Rebecca Agnew, 2004, Runner-up, fibreglass 
(image source: The Blue Oyster Gallery, photograph: 
Charlotte Dick). 
Jacquelyn Greenbank, 2005, St Edwards Crown, 
crocheting (image source: The Blue Oyster Gallery, 
photograph: Charlotte Dick). 
Reviews – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006
 122
of the successful hunter. They are also the 
same nails that fifties ‘trophy women’ wore; 
the kind of woman that only a rich man 
could maintain, one who never used her 
hands for any form of work. The references 
to different kinds of female prowess may 
have been intended as celebratory; the 
busts are bronze-coloured and could be 
seen as achievement awards. However, using 
physical beauty and sexuality as a source of 
power makes this reading a lot more murky 
and unstable. The question becomes: what 
kind of achievement is marked by a powder 
compact? The six were wall-mounted in a 
tight group at eye height, surrounding the 
would-be viewer in a threatening manner. The 
rifle woman’s gun barrel was pointed directly 
at your face as you entered the gallery, the 
javelin and tennis racquet also in potentially 
lethal arrangements. All these implications 
suggest a contest far from finished and 
despite the artist’s stated intention to 
disrupt conventions, the combat appears to 
be continuing in a game pattern well-worn 
enough to be ritualised. 
Jacquelyn Greenbank leverages nostalgia in 
several different ways, using traditional craft 
techniques of crochet to create a down-home 
facsimile of a royal heirloom, St. Edwards 
Crown (2005). It is a peculiarly old school 
New Zealand thing to do to make a craft 
homage to things royal; not forgetting for 
instance that Charles and Di’s royal wedding 
merchandising took the form of domestic 
items: tea cloths and biscuit tins. The crown 
depicted is the one that has been used to 
crown British monarchs since Charles II 
(except for Queen Vic and Edward VII, both 
of whom thought the thing was too heavy 
to wear). To make such an object from a 
humble cottage process could be read as a 
power reversal, a democratising impulse. Any 
housewife can make herself queen in her own 
kitchen if Woman’s Day would only publish 
the construction pattern. Alternatively, the act 
could be seen as an expression of the way we 
still claim a connection with the Royal Family 
despite all rational evidence, like children 
making excuses for a perpetually missing 
parent. At any rate, when Liz comes over for 
a cup of tea we can all put our crowns on and 
have a lovely chat.
 
Ali Bramwell is a sculptor who works in New 
Zealand, Australia, Korea and in various 
European countries. She is also a curator, a 
director of The Blue Oyster Gallery and a 
lecturer in Art Theory & History in the School 
of Art, Otago Polytechnic/Te Kura Matatini ki 
Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
Reviews – Junctures, 7, Dec 2006


Review: "Play" – An Exhibition by Rebecca Agnew, Jaquelyn Greenbank, Simon Lawrence, Morgan Oliver and Jamie Richardson (Dunedin: Blue Oyster Gallery, 2006)

Ferriss, Suzanne

Young, Mallory

Chicks, Girls and Choice: Redefining Feminism

Thompson, Kelly

Barton, Margo

A Conversation: Virtual and Actual Spaces – Textile Practices in an Era of New Technologies

Human, Suzanne

Body Fluids and Gender in Picaresque Art and Writing

McKinlay, Pam

98 Junctures 13, December 2010
Dr. Susan Ballard is a writer, curator and the editor 
of Junctures. Su is section manager of electronic 
arts and photography at the Dunedin School of Art, 
Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Recent publications 
examine utopia, noise, and media cultures in gallery 
environments. She co-edited The Aotearoa Digital Arts 
Reader in 2008.
Claire Beynon is an artist and writer based in 
Dunedin, New Zealand. She exhibits nationally and 
internationally, and has won awards for her visual 
art, poetry and short stories. Increasingly drawn to 
interdisciplinary exchange, Claire has established 
collaborative partnerships with scientists, filmmakers, 
musicians and fellow artists and writers. Antarctica 
has her under its spell; she visited the continent in 
2005 and 2008. Two further trips are in the offing.
Pete Gorman is a long-time musician and artist 
based in Dunedin, New Zealand. Recent work has 
involved circuit-building, including radio transmitters, 
video transmitters, and audio oscillators, and also the 
use of these in instrument-building, installation and 
interactivity. Research areas include the sonification 
of man-made and naturally occurring signals.
David Green has lectured at the Dunedin School 
of Art in time-based media for the last ten years. His 
work as a director, director of photography and visual 
effects supervisor began at R/GA film studios in 
New York City through the analogue/digital cusp. His 
current research documents the nexus between artist 
and material during the making process.
David Haines and Joyce Hinterding live and 
work in the Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia. Their 
collaborative work has produced large-scale immersive 
installations that explore the tension between the 
fictive and the phenomenal. These works incorporate 
Joyce’s investigations into energetic forces and 
David’s concern with the intersection of hallucination 
and landscape. EarthStar was awarded an Award 
of Distinction in Hybrid Arts at Ars Electronica, 
2009. They are represented by Breenspace, 
http://www.breenspace.com.
Yuk Hui is the PhD researcher of the Metadata 
Project in the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, 
University of London. He was trained in computer 
science, philosophy and cultural theory. He is currently 
completing his thesis titled “On the Existence of Digital 
Objects.”
Bridie Lonie has an MA in art history and theory 
from the University of Otago and a BFA in painting from 
the University of Auckland. She is section manager 
of art history and theory and drawing at the Dunedin 
School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Bridie 
is the reviews editor for Junctures.
Dr. Cushla McKinney has a PhD in biochemistry 
and a Masters in bioethics and health law, and is 
interested in the relationships between science, 
ethics and society. She divides her time between 
research, writing and motherhood, thus ensuring life 
is seldom dull and never boring.
Dr. Margaret Pack is a senior lecturer in the BSW 
programme at Whitireia NZ. Her previous teaching 
experience was as programme co-ordinator for a 
national postgraduate mental health programme for 
allied health professionals within the Graduate School 
of Nursing, Midwifery and Health at Victoria University 
of Wellington, New Zealand. Her doctorate, completed 
in 2001, explores sexual abuse therapists’ responses 
to stress and trauma.
Julian Priest was co-founder of early wireless-
free network community Consume.net and has been 
active in spectrum politics in support of an open 
spectrum in the public interest. His current artistic 
practice concerns the boundaries of technology 
and environment with a focus on energy. He shows, 
performs and writes internationally. He is a trustee 
of Aotearoa Digital Arts, and runs The Green Bench 
project space in Whanganui, New Zealand.
Allan Smith is a senior lecturer at Elam School of 
Fine Arts, Auckland University, New Zealand. He has 
worked as a curator of contemporary art at City Gallery, 
Wellington, and Auckland Art Gallery and writes on a 
wide range of topics in contemporary art.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES


Author Biographies

Smith, Allan

Shining and Vanishing: Seen and Unseen in the Art of Leigh Martin

Wootton, Sue

97Wootton – Snow Kindness – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
CREATIVE FICTION SuE WOOTTON
Snow Kindness
Virginia had been awake on and off during the night, watching enormous flakes blow past 
her bedroom window. She’d left the curtains open deliberately. This was rare, these days, 
a snowstorm. The wind was wild and confused. Mostly the snow came from the south, but 
sometimes from the north, and from time to time from below as if trying to climb back to 
the sky. In the small hours of the morning Virginia dozed, floating in a dreamy, whited-out 
dimension, so that when she eventually woke properly and glimpsed clear sky through the 
pane, she was thoroughly disorientated.
She wondered if the storm had really happened, but from the window saw the landscape 
utterly transformed. The sun was rising from behind the white peninsula, casting sparkles 
across the city. In the kitchen Martin sat at the table in his dressing gown, putting the finishing 
touches to seven-year-old Laura’s Michelin Man look. “Out you go,” he said, patting her padded 
backside. She waddled off. “Shut the door!” yelled Virginia and Martin in unison.
Martin leaned back in his chair and smiled.“Snow Day! We haven’t had one of these for years. 
School’s off. I’ve phoned the office, said I’ll work from home.”
Virginia pulled up the kitchen blind. Ten-year-old Ben stood grinning in what yesterday had 
been the sandpit. He hurled his snowball. It exploded with a thop on the pane. “Where are your 
gloves?” shouted Virginia, but he only rolled his eyes and bent down to scoop more snow.
It was an astonishing snowfall. The snow was dry, puffy and generous – genuine Snow with a 
capital S, quite unlike the occasional miserable sleet of recent years. By ten-thirty the street 
was alive. Children and adults alike were chucking snowballs and towing makeshift toboggans. 
Yelps and bursts of laughter rang crystal-clear against a background silence. Snowed in and 
useless, the cars were white mounds. Like igloos, thought Virginia, abandoned igloos. With 
a shiver she suddenly remembered Johnny. Little Johnny-up-the-road, the kid from Tuvalu, 
the solemn wee boy she minded every day after school while his parents worked. Not that 
Johnny had ever been anywhere near an igloo. This would be his first experience of snow. 
He must be freezing. She glanced at the snowed-over sandpit – “Johnny’s sandpit,” as the 
whole family now called it. 
98
By now it was eleven in the morning. It struck Virginia that Johnny’s parents would probably 
have to go to work today, snow or no snow. So who was looking after Johnny? Virginia cringed 
to think that she hadn’t spared a thought for any of them until this moment. She decided to 
walk up to their place immediately. She was pretty sure she knew which one it was. 
* * *
Virginia’s breath came out in clouds and the cold nipped her lungs when she inhaled. It would 
freeze tonight. Tomorrow the footpaths and roads would be like glass. How long since there’d 
been a Snow Day? Five years? Six?  Nothing like this though. This was a real old-fashioned 
dumping. Later in the week it’d be ugly, all dirty ice and cold-in-your-bones. Meanwhile it was 
beautiful, beautiful to be crunching up the street on such pristine whiteness, beautiful that it 
was a Snow Day, that school was cancelled, that the whole street seemed to be out walking, 
and with the walking greeting one another – calling hellos, chatting, catching up on months 
of news. Everyone was pink-cheeked, exhilarated.
Two boys were making a snowman in the middle of the road. Virginia recognised them from 
Ben’s year at school. The snowman’s fat torso was almost as tall as the boys themselves. 
They had manoeuvred a pumpkin-sized snowball into position for the head, but it wobbled, 
threatening to fall off. 
“Here, I’ll help,” offered Virginia. She gathered more snow to form a neck, and showed them 
how to firm the connection. “Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t the snow beautiful? Isn’t it great having 
a Snow Day?” They worked together to secure the head, Virginia chirping like a finch, the 
boys saying nothing. 
“Goodness,” she said, stepping back, and suddenly noticing the structure’s snowy breasts 
and its carrot penis. She recovered herself. “Is it a boygirl or a girlboy?”
One of the boys attached a snow nipple to the right breast; the other was wadding up more 
snow for buttocks. “It’s a snowtran,” muttered the shorter boy.
Virginia coughed. “Well,” she said, “it’s very good. I’d better go. I’m on my way to get Johnny 
from up the road. He’s at your school. Do you know Johnny?”
“Johnny Coconut,” muttered the tall boy. Virginia flushed. She walked on.
* * *
She was right to go and fetch Johnny. His father beamed with relief when she reached their 
door. “I should be gone,” he said, “but I didn’t know what to do with Johnny. And my wife had 
an early shift. This is really a great help – are you sure it’s not a problem?”
“It’s good as gold, honestly,” replied Virginia. “Martin’s working from home today, but I thought 
you’d probably have to go to work, and I’m happy to take Johnny, he can play with Ben and 
Laura, just play – this is nothing to do with the after-school arrangement, I mean there’ll be 
no charge – they can make a snowman and – .”  
Wootton – Snow Kindness – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
99
She was burbling, but how could she say what she felt, which was something about adversity 
and snow making people magnanimous, and this tradition, in the south, of Snow Kindness 
… No, she couldn’t say what she felt, standing there on the freezing doorstep of Johnny’s 
freezing house. The truth was, these people were refugees whose homeland was being steadily 
swallowed by the Pacific Ocean, and she felt sorry for them. Protective even. She supposed it 
was Johnny. She’d had him after school for six months now, six months during which he’d done 
nothing but play in the sandpit. She corrected herself: work in the sandpit. Five afternoons 
a week for half a year the child had laboured, silent and absorbed, constructing intricate 
towns. At five minutes to five, always – she could set her watch by it – he put the finishing 
touches to the last house on the last street. By five past five everything was gone, ritually 
and systematically drowned with a couple of buckets of water. At ten past five Johnny’s father 
came through the gate to take him home, and Johnny was always cleaned up, a sand-free 
zone, ready and quietly waiting, school bag on his back.  
* * *
Johnny and she retraced her footprints through the snow. He was cold. She would dig out some 
of Ben’s cast-off clothes for him, a jersey, a pair of gloves, a hat. His eyes were enormous, 
taking it all in. The snowtran was finished. The boys had a new project. They rolled a huge 
snowball along the street. “We’re gonna take it to the top of the park and drop it down on the 
cars,” said the shorter boy. “Gidday Johnny. Whaddya reckon? Awesome, eh.”
Johnny stared at the snowtran. Virginia wasn’t certain if she should point out its non-traditional 
nature. She didn’t want him drawing pictures of his first Snow Day in New Zealand complete 
with transvestite snow…person. What on earth would his grandmother back in Tuvalu think? 
This was the grandmother who’d refused to leave. I was born here and I’ll die here, she’d said. 
Johnny’s father had repeated this to Virginia, and Virginia’s heart had tightened, or shrunk, 
like a poked anemone. She saw the grandmother stiffly defying the encroaching sea, a woman 
as insubstantial as a piece of driftwood, yet fierce, made solid by her sheer determination not 
to be washed away. Tacked to the thin wall inside her house, imagined Virginia, would be all 
the photographs from New Zealand, and little Johnny’s letters and drawings. Curling at the 
edges, each one, and a little more with every tide.
* * *
Virginia made Johnny a hot chocolate, and rummaged in Ben’s wardrobe for warm clothes. 
“That’s better,” she declared, once she had him rugged up like a woolly lamb. “Here,” she 
added, “a good luck snowman”. She tucked into the pocket of his jacket a plastic snowman 
she’d found in the toy box. It was something off a Christmas tree, a trinket she’d always found 
ridiculous hanging off a pine branch in warm December. “Away you go now.”
Johnny trudged outside obediently. He went to where the sandpit was hidden under snow, 
and stood there. Virginia knocked on the window. “Hey, Ben!” she shouted at her son. “Show 
Johnny how to make a snowman. He’s never seen snow before.”
Wootton – Snow Kindness – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
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Ben made a face. He didn’t usually bother with Johnny. Johnny was so much younger, only 
six to Ben’s ten. And quiet, the kid was virtually mute. Every day after school, he’d politely 
eat his fruit and biscuits then head straight out to the sandpit. Every day making those silly 
villages full of twig people and plastic pigs, pushing those rusty matchbox toys around on 
pretend roads.
But Johnny was already piling a mound of snow over the sandpit. He was more animated 
than Virginia had ever seen him, bossing Laura around, sending her scurrying round the 
garden to find bits and pieces of greenery. He had Ben gather armfuls of snow, and together 
they mounded a solid phalanx, higher than Johnny himself. Laura brought snapped-off 
rhododendron and camellia, and Johnny set about foresting the mini-mountain. Virginia smiled. 
It wasn’t exactly a snowman, but it was very pretty anyhow. The snowtran, she thought with 
relief, had obviously not made much of an impact. 
Johnny smoothed the top carefully, and from his pocket pulled the little plastic snowman. He 
positioned it reverently on the very apex. Like an angel, thought Virginia. Maybe it was a wintry 
trick of light, but the snowman no longer looked like a piece of mass-produced throw-away 
junk. She glowed with Good Samaritan happiness. Johnny had finally made some friends: 
he’d be all right now. His life in this new country would work. He would adapt, to the people, 
to the climate. He’d look back on this day – on her – with affection.  She imagined him telling 
his own children about the wonderful snowfall the year of his arrival in New Zealand, and 
how he and the neighbourhood kids ran wild all day, coming inside only briefly, to eat the hot 
pikelets his friends’ mother had whipped up. How the pikelets dripped with butter, how the 
steam in the kitchen smelled so sweet.
Virginia banged on the window. “Ben!” she shouted. “Now show Johnny how to make a real 
snowman!”  She watched them choose a spot in the corner of the lawn and start kicking snow 
into place. Still smiling, she rolled up her sleeves and found the mixing bowl.
* * *
At half past five, Johnny’s father arrived. “I’m sorry to be late. It was slippery.”
“Wait until tomorrow,” said Virginia. “It’ll be like a slide. Here, I found some warm clothes 
that used to belong to Ben. Johnny can have them. School will be shut again tomorrow by the 
looks of it. I’ll take Johnny again if you like. They’ve had heaps of fun.”
“Dad! Dad!” Johnny was yelling from the yard. “Come and see!”
Virginia turned on the outside light, illuminating the children and their afternoon’s work.  “It’s 
a snow gangster,” announced Johnny importantly.
 
“And a snow victim,” piped Laura. The snow gangster had a cap and a machine gun. His snow 
victim lay spread-eagled on the snow, with blood pouring out of a wound in his chest.
“Tomato sauce,” said Ben. He saw Virginia’s face, and switched to his she’s-not- gonna-get-
this voice. “It’s a snow carnage thing.”
Wootton – Snow Kindness – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
101
“I’m so sorry,” said Virginia. “I had no idea. Ben!”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Johnny’s father. “It was very good of you to take him today. You didn’t 
have to.” His voice, with its deep Pacific boom, was suddenly quite uninflected, emotionless. 
Cold. He spoke to Johnny in Tuvaluan. Johnny looked up at Virginia.
“Thank you for having me,” he said. “I have to go now.”
“I’ll pick him up tomorrow then? From your place. I’ll walk over, like today…” Virginia 
faltered. 
Johnny’s father spoke again in Tuvaluan. “Thank you for having me,” repeated Johnny. “Dad 
says he doesn’t have to work tomorrow.”
* * *
Hard-edged stars filled the sky. Martin and Virginia lingered in the kitchen once the kids were 
in bed. Virginia hadn’t bothered to set out lunch boxes for the morning. “I’m really pleased 
that Johnny’s started playing with Ben and Laura. But…a snow gangster, of all things. I told 
them to make a snowman.”
Martin laughed. “You’re lucky it wasn’t a snow mass murderer.”
Virginia thought of the blown-apart snow victim oozing blood. “I think we offended them. 
They’re pretty religious.” She wondered how she knew this. She’d never been across the 
threshold at Johnny’s place. It was just…“Islanders usually are. Aren’t they?”
The snow gangster sneered from the garden. Rat-a-tat-tat he seemed to say, sotto voce, 
pointing the machine gun at her through the kitchen window.
* * *
All night, a sensation clung to her: a claggy awareness that wouldn’t lift – a thick dream that 
she knew must be a dream, but couldn’t budge. Seemingly it rained, all night long, though the 
sky, surely, was cloudless, the stars unchallengeable, the temperature sub-zero. But when she 
got up in the morning and looked out the bedroom window, nothing was left of the snow.  It was 
as if it had never fallen at all. Ragged clouds scudded past. Puddles pooled the ground.
She left Martin asleep and went into the kitchen to turn on the radio. She felt she ought to 
check the cancellations just in case. Yet the snow had definitely vanished. She stared out: 
bare trees, sodden grass, a straggly garden. 
There! Something white! The grubby remains of the snow gangster were just visible beneath 
his cap. The machine gun lay off to the side as if flung there in the mobster’s final collapse. 
The snow victim was nothing at all, merely a smudge of red on muddy grass. And the sandpit, 
Johnny’s sandpit…it was awash. No sand to be seen and the plastic snowman floating face 
down on a full tide of filthy water. 
Wootton – Snow Kindness – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009
102
Sue Wootton has published two poetry collections: Hourglass (Steele Roberts, 2006) 
and Magnetic South (Steele Roberts, 2008). Her short fiction has been variously 
anthologised and broadcast. Sue held the 2008 Robert Burns Writing Fellowship at 
the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, during which time she worked on two 
projects: a new poetry collection, and a collection of short stories.
 
Wootton – Snow Kindness – Junctures, 12, Jun 2009


"Snow Kindness"

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