This website for the first time collects all of my writing for Naked in Nuhaka, the first two dozen columns of a new line of thinking for the sentient isles. Despatches from down under; a safety zone amidst a world in turmoil. A gift to the world at the start of another strange year.
   The writing is presented unashamedly as the voice of a new generation, as a Maori intellectual voice, as an alternative voice, as the voice of one who is passionate about people and about the future of our great planet Earth.
   My writing is inspired by a new generation of kiwi journalists such as Steve Braunias and Russell Brown and similar next-gen American writers like David Sedaris and Dave Eggers. I am yet to identify any great new generation of Maori writers; Alan Duff and Witi Ihimaera inspire me, but they are not “me”; I find myself relating more to the new voices emerging in modern Maori magazine Tu Mai . Perhaps this book will bring these great Maori intellectuals and free-thinkers out of their “closets”?

 Most of all, my writing is intended to honour the heritage of my kaumatua. Before I left the US to return to NZ two years ago, a number of great people I knew through my environmental work passed away. The wonderful Don Michaels, inventor of the term “cybernetic” and lifetime member of the Club of Rome. The great David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute, saviour of the Grand Canyon, and very much more.
   Returning home to Nuhaka, I found many kaumatua lost here, too. Cambridge Pani, who once spent a whole day banging a whaikorero into my head that I never delivered. Denil Meihana, Kahu Jones, and my wonderful pop William Henry Christy. All great men who once seemed so permanent.
   November 2001, this roster of great men lost was joined by Harry Hay, founder of the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries. I’d often thought in San Francisco that an inspiring meeting of minds would be Harry Hay and David Brower, two fiercely independent brink thinkers from quite disparate fields, from each side of the Bay. When Harry died at the grand old age of 90, I felt that a window of opportunity for me had passed. That now, all I can do to honour their heritage is to be as much of a brink thinker as they were.

 Before David Brower passed gently off of this mortal coil, he said something quite important and profound. It went something like this: “We are all made up of dust that has drifted through this cosmos for an infinitesemal amount of time. I’ve had quite a lot of fun with my dust, and when I pass on, I hope others have just as much fun with it as I did.”
   Amidst the stacks of ephemera I dragged back with me from the U.S. last year is a book, David Brower’s “For Earth’s Sake”, now out of print. I remember that I had had it signed by David at his 80th birthday gathering. He had written “Persevere!”.
   The other day, I found the book at the bottom of a stack of boxes.
I touched it, thinking of his quote. And I thought, “Well, there must be a little David dust on this book, and a little bit of it has somehow made it all the way here to little old Nuhaka, where I’m indeed having a lot of fun.”
   And I smiled.

Leo Koziol, Nuhaka Aotearoa New Zealand, March 2004