Celebrating our toxic history
Some of the McGillicuddy Clan meeting at Jester House, Tasman. Photo: Fiona Nelson.
Clan McGillicuddy held their biannual ‘extreme picnic’ event on New Year’s Eve year at Māpua’s Waterfront Park.
Riding for Team D-D-T, Clan McGillicuddy member and Tasman resident Judy van den Yssel-Richards received first place in the inaugural mutant hobby-horse croquet game at Mapua’s He Taiopenga O Tāoke/Carnival of Toxicity.
Thirty-five clan members were able to attend and travelled from around New Zealand.
Staying at Jester House, the group spent two days designing and building their props - mutant hobbyhorses with extra legs, hoops and other paraphernalia for the croquet course and performance.
“It was decided to do a street performance, or rather, a field performance on Mapua’s green reserve, once the most toxic site in New Zealand,” says Mark Servian, organiser of this event and longtime clan member.
Clan McGillicuddy formed in 1977 in Hamilton. They entered the political arena with McGillicuddy Serious Party in 1984, running three candidates in Waikato for the General Election.
The party continued trying to put a candidate up in every electorate and were able to sign up 666 members and register for the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system in the 1996 election.
The McGillicuddy Serious Party formally closed down in 1999, calling itself a ‘failed millennial cult’.
Leader Graeme Cairns (A.B. McGillicuddy) was put in stocks in Garden Place, Hamilton and publicly humiliated.
Clan McGillicuddy continues as a social and artistic formation, and since 1998 they have been meeting biannually. This was Clan McGillicuddy’s 13th extreme picnic (XP).
The Carnival of Toxicity was held next to where Fruit Growers Chemical Company (FCC) had manufactured many poisons, including 245-T and 2,4-D, for over 50 years.
They disposed of their waste into local rubbish tips, the estuary, and even into offal pits on Rabbit Island for a period of time.
With much community activism from Campaign Against Noxious Substances (CANS), Mapua Resident and Ratepayers Association and environment groups, the company finished production in 1988.
Tasman District Council (TDC) bought the 3.4-hectare site in 1996, and after sampling of groundwater, soil and marine sediments, trialling methods of treatment, and Environment Court hearings and appeals, the clean-up finally started in 2004.
With the Ministry of Environment and community support, TDC undertook three years of remediation work using an unproven technology to denature the toxic soil in the world’s first full-scale Mechano Chemical Dehalogenation (MCD) plant at Mapua.
The ‘decontaminated’ soil was then returned to its extraction site. Once completed, the project was signed-off in 2009 after an independent audit saying that ‘remediation work by-and-large had achieved its aims’.
Steve Richards, who has stood in the last two general elections for the Green Party and was also a candidate for the McGillicuddy Serious Party from 1990 until the party closed, hosted the event.
“This event is to give Māpua a chance to celebrate its history, its heritage of being New Zealand’s most toxic site. A lot has been swept under the carpet but we’re not debating the clean-up. It’s a chance for Mapua to celebrate our toxic past,” he says.
“We like to be positive about things, so we are celebrating the history of it,” Mark adds.
“It’s an absurd thing to be doing and that is the point. Street Theatre is the kernel, or the essence, of what we do. It’s open to interpretation, and like any art form there’s a message that you can or can’t push… in the first instance, everything we do is for our own amusement.”
After setting up the performance space, mutant hobby horses with riders paraded through the wharf precinct, and then the carnival began. Forms of toxicity in six teams competed for national title: Team D-D-T, Team Radioactivity, Team Algae Bloomers, Team Masculinity, Team Positivity and Team Passion.
XP TV broadcaster Kuith Quinn gave an exemplary commentary as horses and riders completed the course despite various obstacles, like getting through the toxic pink slime.
“What Clan McGillicuddy has always been about is ‘funism’ which is our core ideology,” says Steve.
“The greatest amount of fun for the largest number of people is the basic philosophy in whatever forms that takes.”
And, by the way, no toxic materials were used in the performance.