Closed Encounters

In the Covid era, Aotearoa is a nation of hard borders. Our international borders have been closed for many months. Cities like Auckland and regions like Northland and the Waikato have spent weeks sealed away from the rest of the country by checkpoints. Most are run by the police, at the behest of the government, but some checkpoints set up in Tai Tokerau have been run by local iwi — a move which, it turns out, is not entirely without precedent.

One morning in the autumn of 2020, shortly after the first outbreak of Covid-19 in New Zealand, I woke up, turned on the radio, and wondered for a moment if I’d fallen through a wormhole into the past. The radio told me that a regional checkpoint had been established just south of Auckland’s Bombay Hills, close to the spot where the Mangatāwhiri Stream flows into the Waikato River. In the early 1860s the Mangatāwhiri was the border between an Auckland controlled by settlers and soldiers and the Waikato realm of