Are Te Anau and the “alternative media” caught in a bad Rome-ance?
THERE ARE A LOT OF STRANGE THEORIES CIRCULATING THESE DAYS. STANDOUTS INCLUDE THE RUMOUR THAT NEW ZEALAND IS A NASA HOAX POPULATED BY PAID ACTORS; THAT KEITH RICHARDS IS, IN FACT, JFK; AND THAT REPTILES ARE SECRETLY RUNNING THE WORLD. THE LAST ONE SEEMS TO BE BASED ENTIRELY ON THE PLOT OF THE 1984 ALIEN INVASION MINISERIES ‘V’, WHICH, TO BE FAIR, SCARED THE SHIT OUT OF ME WHEN I WAS A PRE-TEEN.
Somewhere as remote as Fiordland even had its moment in the post- truth limelight late last year, with the allegation that Italian military personnel were amassing in Aotearoa. Depending on whose feed you scrolled through, they were either here to support the Jacinda Ardern-backed UN troops who were due to invade New Zealand at the end of November and impose martial law, or to free the 1000 children imprisoned under Te Anau. Who may or may not have been child actors, because the whole thing was a double bluff. Or not. Either way, Oprah was involved.
Which makes you wonder. Why Te Anau? And why Italians? How does a conspiracy theory that probably has its roots in an American pizza parlour (I’ll get to that) pop up in relation to a tiny community (population 2700) in the southernmost corner of a country at the bottom of the world? And why populate that town with soldiers from Southern Europe?
Actually, the Te Anau part is easy. Te Anau is the nearest town to the Manapōuri power station. Opened in 1972, it’s New Zealand’s largest hydroelectric project. Built to take advantage of the 178-metre elevation drop between Lake Manapōuri and Doubtful Sounds, the station itself sits 200 metres below the lake in a cavern carved out of granite. Two 10-kilometre-long tailrace tunnels deliver water through it to generate electricity.
The tunnels are the clue. There’s an American conspiracy theory which posits that the Democratic Party has somehow morphed from the party of workers’ rights, racial equity and environmental protection into a front for a global child-trafficking operation. Australian supporters of this worldview gave the story a local twist during the 2020 lockdowns, claiming that the storm drain network under Sydney and Melbourne were being used as kiddy dungeons. The hypothesis, like a 4chan-addicted Phar Lap, eventually made it to our shores, but with no suitable tunnels under Auckland or Wellington on offer, Te Anau it was.
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Which leaves the Italians. Smoking gun, or smoking anchovies (yum), number one: before it reached the sewers of Sydney, the human-trafficking ring was, apparently, headquartered in a Washington DC pizzeria. Yes, a pizzeria! Is there something about a Neapolitan with sausage that sets internet forums wagging? Are basil, salami, mozzarella, olives and yeast today’s equivalent of “The Pentavirate” referred to by Mike Myers’ dad in So I Married an Axe Murderer (“the Queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds and Colonel Sanders, before he went tets-up”)? Possibly. But there’s more to it than that.
Where conspiracy theories come from, and why they take hold, is a complicated story, one that has been studied since long before the internet started spewing confirmation bias 24/7. I know about growing up in a climate of mistrust. I was born shortly after the US government faked the moon landing and just before the CIA killed Jim Morrison. Since then, there’s been Lady Diana (brake tampering!), September 11 (controlled demolition!) and Barack Obama (Muslim/Zionist/Illuminist/alien!). Eleven seasons of the X-Files didn’t help, either. As far as my generation was concerned, politicians were always up to something, the media was in on it, and no famous person ever died from natural causes.
When I look back, I can see how those ideas, as well as being a bit of fun, were actually a source of comfort. If John F Kennedy can be picked off by a not-very-skilled lone gunman, what hope is there for the rest of us? Or, as Jackie Kennedy commented after hearing of Lee Harvey Oswald’s arrest: “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights … it had to be some silly little Communist.” Ironically, conspiracies both feed our paranoia, and make us feel safe. That’s why ‘V’ was so popular. Speaking of Communists, the lizard-invaders were an allegory for the Soviets; on TV at least, we were able to defeat them, pluckily.
Often, the theories that really take hold have grown from a seedling of truth. According to the psychologist Jovan Byford, a Senior Lecturer at the Open University in the UK and expert on conspiracies, they “often sound convincing because they start with the detailed exposition of credible scientific or historical facts. The problem is that these facts and arguments lead to extraordinary conclusions.” The hapless DC pizza joint, for example, had been considered as a venue for an actual campaign event for Hillary Clinton.
There’s a real-world link between the Italians and the tunnels in Fiordland too. Construction on the Manapōuri Power Station, which started in 1964, called for a skilled workforce the New Zealand construction industry didn’t have at the time. Specialist workers were recruited from around the world, including Greece, Ireland, Spain, Yugoslavia and, especially, Italy, because of their expertise in drill- and-blast construction. In those days, if you needed a big tunnel dug, you called the Italians. Locals still tell stories about the European influx, including about how some of the Italian workers’ kids showed up at school with tipples of wine in their lunchboxes. Scandalo!
Even better, the Manapōuri Power Station has a conspiracy theory of its very own. The scheme originally only had one tailrace tunnel, which, when the station was first fired up in 1972, underperformed. Friction between the water and the tunnel walls meant the system could only operate at 85% capacity. Friction, eh? The Manapōuri project had been the subject of industrial unrest, which isn’t surprising. Conditions were difficult, thanks to the hoards of sandflies and 200 rainy days per year, as well as to the considerable danger. Eighteen men were killed over the course of the build. Rumour has it, one Italian worker was so disgruntled, he hopped into the biggest bulldozer he could find, drove it up the tunnel, and lodged it sideways. Peak capacity was only restored when a second tunnel was opened several years later.
All of this makes it seem less odd that, late in 2021, certain nooks of the Telegram and Twitter cyberscapes started to tinkle with the very specific news that the Italians were coming, and they were coming for Te Anau’s tunnels.
The truth was a lot more boring. There were Italians in Aotearoa at the time – they had arrived in an Italian Air Force aeroplane that was being used to transport personnel to Antarctica, which happens at the start of every summer season.
There were Italians in Te Anau too. Or at least a disproportionate amount of Italian food. As one TripAdvisor user gleefully points out, Te Anau has three Italian restaurants within 100 metres of one another, “this, in a town centre which consists of one street.” These are, FYI, Ristorante Pizzeria Paradiso, La Dolce Vita and La Toscana. Which, at the end of the day, might be the most important takeaway from the whole saga. As the Twitter user with the handle @MotherOfMeeps, who might be the hero we all need right now, pointed out: “Look, as long as they brought their risotto recipes does it really matter?”
LAURA WILLIAMSON
