It’s said — in the quiet between buses, down the back of the pub, in the hushed elevator rising to the penthouse — that in the late twentieth century an unstable grouping of scholars, writers and fanatics from several Ngāi Tahu hapū in Murihiku created what has come to be known as the Ark of Arks.
It’s said that this project aimed to catalogue all known arks from the last five millennia.
It was a failed attempt to capture previous civilisations’ failed attempts to preserve whatever was valuable to them: waka huia, time capsules, caches, burial ships, seed banks.
You will be told to visit the great wharenui at Ōraka and to find the stainless-steel waka huia. You are to take out the screens and power them up. As you have just done.
You have found the Ark of Arks. You are reading it now.
We have found you, at last.
The fifth in the ground-breaking kōrero series conceived and edited by Lloyd Jones, Little Doomsdays is another rich collaboration between an artist and a writer.
