picking tired tongues from the pristine floor

July 9, 2021 8:47 AM

Great Works by Oscar Mardell consists of thirteen poems [four of them here], each about a different freezing works in Aotearoa New Zealand. Satirising the colonial-pastoral mythologies through which the local landscape has often been interpreted, the collection gives due attention to an industry which, in spite of its centrality to the nation’s economic history, has remained conspicuously absent from its art and literature. [CW: slaughterhouses]
posted by chavenet (6 comments total)

I don't know if the long-gone Gear Meat Processing Plant in Petone is one of the 13 but I remember as a young kid moving nearby and it was still operational at the time (though closed soon after). My god the smell. Simply indescribable - and right on the waterfront where the ocean breeze would send the scent all the way across the valley. When they tore it down and built the IBM datacenter on part of it - we used to skateboard up the concrete embankments they put in....

This part from J.C. Maddison's Belfast Freezing Works poem is bringing back some memories

th slaughterhouse preserving house
manure factory fellmongery
th chimneystack & railways
to connect thm

ws evr such a shambles so designed
colonial goose so close to th realthing

Thanks for sharing!
posted by inflatablekiwi at 12:14 PM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

That Whakatu vid is potent, thanks for putting this together chavenet. Mardell sure doesn't shy away from hard, difficult, complex sites and themes.

Freezing works (animal processing nowadays) are generally a lot better now pollution-wise, they're quite odd inside, despite the name, many internal spaces are warm, humid and very aseptic. Hard work, but also somewhat seasonal, and often controlled by very large offshore corps so it's hard on communities as the third video shows.

Nice to see some industrial sites on mefi.
posted by unearthed at 4:55 PM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

NZ band The Skeptics had 'AFFCO' (CW don't watch the video if you don't want to see a slaughterhouse in action) in 1987, with the video intercut with slaughterhouse scenes ('We are meatpackers, we pack meat!'). Needless to saw it was banned from TV at the time. AFFCO stands for Auckland Farmers Freezing Company. At some point I'll have to put together a post on one of the great antithetical Flying Nun bands of the era.
posted by phigmov at 5:09 PM on July 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

Friends of mine here in NZ work at a company working on automating the work in freezing works (ie slaughterhouses) - think "robots with knives and xray cameras" ....
posted by mbo at 6:02 PM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

mbo I've seen the slaughterbot in action, very, very weird, fascinating, knowing one is seeing ... a future. The one I saw was clad in see-thru polythene to keep the blood off.
posted by unearthed at 6:49 PM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Self-link to one of the most ancient parts of my site, but very relevant: a first person account of the making of the AFFCO video.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:45 PM on July 9, 2021 [3 favorites]