Don McGlashan: ‘All we can do is keep our tools sharp’ – lecture on music, water, time and creative uncertainty

Introduction

New Zealand musician Don McGlashan reflects on how bodies of water shape his life, his songwriting, and his sense of time and possibility. The lecture connects swimming, the subconscious, history, and the New Zealand seascape into a single creative metaphor.

Swimming and songwriting

McGlashan spends much of his time swimming, either in English Bay in Vancouver, where he lives part of the year with his wife Ann, or in Auckland at Point Chevalier and the tidal bays near Titirangi. For him, the plunge into cold water mirrors the leap into writing a new song, with an initial fear of failure followed by a sense of being carried along when things go well.

Fear and transformation

He describes the onset of a new song as a moment filled with anxiety about producing something clichéd or pointless. On a good day, that fear gives way to a feeling that the song has its own current, and he is simply moving within it rather than forcing it.

Water and the subconscious

McGlashan links water to the subconscious, drawing on literary critic C.K. Stead, who writes about the subconscious as the source of an artist’s most truthful work and authentic voice. While the subconscious provides the “good stuff”, artists cannot control when those insights will surface.

“All we can do is to keep our tools sharp so that when it does arrive, we can go to work on it effectively.”

As writers, he suggests, every creative decision is like reaching a fork in the road and consulting the deeper mind; when the subconscious agrees with a choice, there is a satisfying internal “click”, like the door of a well‑made car closing.

Water and time

McGlashan also sees water as a way of understanding past, present, and future. In this image, the sky is the future, unreachable and unknown, the depths of the water are the past, and the surface is the present, a thin, precarious layer where people actually live.

Living on this shifting surface, he argues, means focusing on immediate tasks and worries, leaving the past as the main source of material an artist can draw on. He likens the past to a lake formed by a hydro scheme, where older events are submerged but still shape everything that lies above them.

The literal sea of Aotearoa

Beyond metaphor, McGlashan emphasises the real ocean surrounding Aotearoa New Zealand, describing it as huge, dangerous, and fundamental to the country’s history. It was an immense challenge for the first Polynesian navigators, a daunting voyage for European settlers, and it now acts as both barrier and protection, keeping New Zealand distant yet relatively safe.

For musicians, this separation has practical consequences: unlike bands in Europe who can tour many countries by driving, New Zealand bands cannot simply load a van and reach large audiences overland. McGlashan compares the sea, in the New Zealand imagination, to outer space, inspiring both awe and an existential fear.

Love, fear, and identity

Despite that fear, New Zealanders are deeply drawn to the ocean, paying high prices to live near it and spending their leisure time swimming, surfing, paddling, diving, walking, sailing, or fishing. This combination of rational fear and intense attachment, he argues, is central to New Zealand identity, much as prairie landscapes are for Albertans or mountains for Tibetans.

This awareness of vast emptiness and isolation should, in his view, sharpen the sense of responsibility to care for the land and sea of Aotearoa. The country becomes a shared raft in a wide ocean, the only one available to its people.

New islands and new futures

McGlashan returns to his opening theme of water as subconscious, as historical time, and as the fear that sits at the start of every new piece of work. About sixteen years before this lecture, he drove an overseas musician around Auckland’s eastern bays to Karaka Bay, a quiet place he visits when he needs to regain his bearings.

During that drive, he explained how the Hauraki Gulf and its islands shape local life and mentioned Rangitoto, the volcanic island that emerged from the sea less than a thousand years ago. At that point in his life his marriage was ending, he felt adrift, and he admits to making a bleak comment about not being able to see his future or his place within it.

In response, his companion told him, “You never know, though. New islands might appear suddenly without warning.” McGlashan seized on this as an image of renewal: new islands imply new options, whether discovered by choosing a fresh direction, as poet Allen Curnow once wrote, or thrown up unexpectedly like Rangitoto—harsh at first, but astonishing and full of potential.

New islands, new possibilities: they might be found simply by sailing a different way, or they might rise from nowhere, jagged and miraculous like a young volcano.

Author’s summary

McGlashan’s lecture uses seas, shores, and submerged landscapes to show how fear, memory, and geography shape creative work, urging artists to stay ready for the sudden appearance of “new islands” of possibility.

RNZ — 2025-11-30