a sign

Yesterday’s blog didn’t happen because I was on a weekend trip to the Hunter Valley with Michelle and Ness. Actually, I’m writing this on Saturday evening at the table in the hotel room we’re staying in and will upload it onto the blog tomorrow. No, it’s not that I sampled so much wine I forgot to post the blog – it was a simple case of choosing to spend the $9.95 on wine rather than getting online. (Yes, the wine helped with the rhyme – hahaha it’s okay I’ll stop now.)

Anyway, on the way to the Hunter Valley, we passed this sign to Toronto and Sydney! I did a double-take and Michelle kindly turned the car around so I could get a photo of the sign which points in the direction of my sabbatical. Yes, the year I’ve planned to spend a month in Sydney and ten months in Toronto.

I might let the picture speak a thousand words tonite – a 'sign' I’m heading in the right direction maybe?

And if it’s a sign, a chocolate fish for anyone who wants to suggest what the ‘82’ might mean. J 

Grandad was a writer...

Well, team, I did what I promised when I wrote my blog last nite. Okay, not in the order I'd planned (I was going to do writing for one of my own projects before doing anything else), but after a full and productive and fun day doing other things, this evening I finally started typing up the letters Grandad wrote back to his friend Oxley during WWII.

Our family only saw these letters for the first time shortly after we buried Grandad this year, and they are significant because they are written by him, in the handwriting that I've seen on Christmas gift tags, Birthday cards, letters, forms and envelopes all my life. Because they're all handwritten, I took some time typing them up so they're easier to read and to share with the rest of the whanau. I've been doing some other transcribing since I've been here in Australia, but the other letters I've typed up and are now filed as .docx documents on my laptop and on a backup memory stick were written by Hamuera, Grandad's father, and they were the letters I'd found in Adelaide.

This evening I remembered sitting next to cousin Mark on the big couch in Auntie Jill's lounge just a few weeks ago, reading the letters for the first time, voicing them aloud into a room full of relatives, realising what a gift - a real gift - they were going to be. Tonight it was time to type Grandad's letters, and as I worked on them, zooming and times and reading aloud at others, decoding and mentally unwrapping the letters where words were tricky to decipher, I realised something about Grandad. Grandad's writing is vivid, funny, compelling. He's a writer.

The letters are all written by Grandad while he was with the 28th Maori Battalion, written from Papakura at the training camp and also from overseas. They describe war, sure, but they also describe a young Maori man who was experiencing war and, necessarily but poignantly alongside, life in all of its complexity. There are hilarious anecdotes about drinking and late nite haka sessions on the ship and ordering beer in Cairo at a classy establishment which didn't stoop to such beverages, and there are acknowledgements of death and fear and the moment of hearing his elder brother my Uncle Paul had been killed. There is a long and moving section where he marvels at the gap between his university studies and the routine of military life. Beautifully written, evocative, rich, compelling, haunting in an uncliched sense of the word if there is one.  

Of course I'll go to bed tonite with a sense of regret: like so many times over the past weeks and months I'm struck by the length of the list of questions I wish I'd thought to ask when I had the chance. Now I have more questions, more wishes, but also more words.  And with more words, more insights.

I always knew thhat Grandad wrote. He wrote in Te Ao Hou, he wrote in birthday cards, and he wrote to apply to our trusts for crumbs of scholarship money for his grandchildren. It's not just that Grandad wrote, though: it's that Grandad was a writer. To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, my blog post tonight will finish not with my words but with his. In this letter, Grandad has just finished extolling the virtues of a mutual friend of himself and Oxley. 

"He was about 200 yds from me when the bomb struck his truck. We dashed over but he had died instantly. The Bn was on the move at the time and one of the saddest things of all in war happened here. A grave scooped out, a short prayer by the padre, a wooden cross and the whole show moved inexorably on. Nothing looks as forlorn as the pitiful little crosses that one comes across in the vast expanses of the desert. They seem to be the supreme expressions of loneliness, forlornness, and sadness."




(Note: Bn = Battalion)

trivial

Tonite I was at a pub quiz with Michelle, Ness, and two of my new Aussie friends Davina and Claudia. Our other mate Cambo was going to come too, so we'd called ourselves 'Cambo's Angels' although he got held up at work so (story of my life) we proceeded without a man. I've always wanted to have a group of mates that goes to trivia nites, and I'm very pleased I've had a chance to be that girl, even just for a nite. (And, well, we plan to go back next week too.) It was really fun - lots of good questions that had us guessing, and I had a few chances to contribute... I'm usually pretty bad at trivia so I was pleased to be able to help out in a couple of places.

It all got me thinking abut trivia: the stuff that's not actually very important and yet is very interesting. Small, little bits of information that you could look up or google if you needed to but which it's fun to know off the top of your head. We all had our strengths, and I realised how large the gaps now are in my recollection of literature, my supposed field of specialisation. Luckily the main question was about Robert Louis Stevenson, including an extra point if you knew where he was buried; most other 'literature' topics and I suspect my team would have wondered whether i had a PhD in English at all. I also realised what small things I remembered, and why, and felt a bit like the main character in Slumdog Millionaire who has a speific account for every piece of information he knows - I know that agar comes from seaweed because I studied high school science with my friend Kirsty Agar, I know that a spinaker is a sail rather than a type of boat because i grew up in Auckland and remember driving around Tamaki Drive with Dad saying 'look the boats have got their spinnakers out,' and for some reason I know that amethysts are purple even though I'm not sure what that reason is.

Part of being an academic is being an specialist, but you're also called on to be a generalist much of the time. In teaching the early undergrad classes, especially, I find myself introducing students to writers and histories with which I only have a passing acquaintance myself, and when supervising postgraduate topics the student is necessarily doing something about which they know more than me (because otherwise it's not original and therefore not suitable for postgraduate level research) which means I spend a lot of time giving feedback about things I know less well than the student. When examining theses, I find myself providing specific feedback and having to make judgments about topics with which I am  familiar but, again, are not my own specific expertise. The same goes for reviewing articles, chapters, book manuscripts, published books, and fellowship applications; I know the general area but possibly not the subject under discussion.

Since starting sabbatical (and in 3 days I will be at my one month anniversary of being on sabbatical!) I have done all of these kinds of 'generalist' reading... this work is often framed as a kind of 'service' in whcih I am contributing to the big 'pay it forward' system of scholarly writing and reading: I read someone else's chapter now, and someone else will read my chapter later. I read my supervisees' writing now because someone did the same for me. And so on.

When I was telling my students about going on sabbatical, I would explain it as a chance to write, and also a chance to read. I suppose I'd been thinking about the specific reading I was looking forward to doing in my own research area and for my own specific purposes rather than the more generalist (and perhaps 'service') reading I've spent more time doing over the past month than any other task. I admit that I feel a bit frustrated that since being on sabbatical I've read so much of this other writing, which requires a different kind of reading than when I'm reading 'for me,' compared to the reading I've been doing for my own projects or interest (likewise, I've written heaps of reports and feedback but little of my own original work). Actually, with the exception of writing this blog each evening, this whole week has been taken up with focussing on doing this kind of reading and writing.

One option is to think about this generalist 'trivial' reading and writing as a distraction from what I should 'really' be doing - reading and writing my own specific stuff - and, while this is tempting, I am also keen to see what happens when I think about it in another way. If I focus on the 'pay it forward' system then this is just a part of a bigger process. An ecosystem of thoughts and ideas. An organism of many codependent parts.

I made an appointment yesterday to get my eyes checked when I'm home in Wellington, and I remember being told by an optometrist that the best thing to do for my eyes when I'm working on the computer for long periods is to move my eyes away from the screen to focus on the furthest visible point every once in a while. Maybe this 'other' (distracting, trivial) reading and writing is a refreshing break from all the focussed work, and so the problem isn't the existence of these things on my 'to do' lists but the proportion of time spent on them rather than on my focussed work. All of us know in our own parts of the universe that there is a fine line between a break and procrastination after all! Tomorrow I'm going to make sure I write something and read something 'for me' - I'll try to do this first, before any of the rest, and so will treat it as the protein on the dinnerplate rather than the dessert I will get to eat if I've got room after a necessarily big meal. I'll let you know how it goes.  

Yes, I know what you want to know: how did we do at trivia? Well, let's just say we got the same score as Matiu and his team get each week at Basketball. We won in our hearts :)   

4727

That's how many steps I walked today. My new fabulous tiny ipod nano (thanks Mum!), which clips on like my old shuffle and plays podcasts as well as music, contains a pedometer and so te tau okioki is turning out also to be te tau hikoi. (I even tried to experiment with te tau omaoma today, with hilarious but at least icebreaking effects.) The new sneakers have provided the inspiration I was hoping for and the plans to have a year of physical as well as intellectual recovery and strengthening are underway. But why do I feel like the 'non-intellectual' plans I have for my sabbatical year should be downplayed, kept to one side, 'done on my own time'? Aren't I a whole person? Certainly it's not only my brain which is exhausted at the end of my first 6 1/2 years: all of me is.

A few years ago the chaplains at Victoria Uni organised a conference called 'Critical Thoughts: Recovering higher education' in which people talked about the underlying purpose of universities, in order to challenge and find time away from the neoliberal 'educators as service providers' 'knowledge economy' perspectives that are the apparent logic of contemporary tertiary institutions. Prof Alison Phipps was a keynote from the University of Glasgow, and I remember being absolutely caught up in her spell as she spoke about the place of breath and rest in a scholar's life. This wasn't a case of wierdo time managment; it was a genuine and deep and carefully crafted reflection on the way in which scholarly life (and its holy trinity of research, teaching, service) depends on time to reflect, to read, to think, to explore ideas without necessarily needing to 'produce' an 'output' of a certain kind, to stare out the proverbial window.

I was particularly struck by the attention she paid to the ways universities use language in order to remove this kind of 'thinking' time: a key example is the word 'sabbatical' which is derived from the same word as the word 'sabbath.' The sabbatical is a period of rest following a period of work (even the proportions are Biblically derived: one year of sabbatical after six years of work) and Alison Phipps argued for (or at least this is what I think she was arguing for) a reflection on the notion of the sabbath in order to think about the purpose and scope of a sabbatical. So, the problem with universities renaming this magical year (and even reframing it; it's very unusual to get a whole year these days and much more likely to get 6 months at the end of every 3 years) something other than sabbatical is that we lose that memory of the purpose of the year which is buried in the genealogy of the word itself.

What are sabbaticals called these days? They're 'Research and Study Leave' in most places. RSL, a time for which you need to apply and for which you need to guarantee that you will 'produce' a certain set of 'outputs' before your RSL will be granted (granted either way: approved or funded). It's not that I don't genuinely *want* to do the things I've commited to in my RSL plans (my book Ghost Writers: The Maori Books You've Never Read is my main promised 'output' but also something I'm thoroughly enjoying and passionate about); I'm not saying that RSL should be a big old holiday so already-privileged academics can swan around every few years doing absolutely nothing or staring out the window. But this blog is subtitled 'the sabbatical diaries' rather than 'the RSL diaries' because even though my university thinks I'm on RSL, I think I'm on sabbatical. Sabbatical includes RSL, sure, but it's so much more. It's RSL with all of the gaps and time to reflect and holistic goals and life bits in the mix too.

Actually, I was emailing with one of my besties, Rawinia, today and she provided an alternative explanation of the acronym 'RSL.' Rest, Sleep and Live she reckoned.

Rest. Sleep. Live. Thanks I think I will :)

i (heart) identity

Today I gave a lecture on 'identity' at Macquarie University for a class of first year Indigenous Australian students.

Now, I had to giggle that I was talking about identity because I spend a lot of time defending my work against being described as "being about identity." Of course what I do is connected to identity but it can feel, as I've said elsewhere, that describing my work as 'about identity' is like an accusation: that those of us who didn't get the easy monoliths of identity (language, proximity to marae, boilup for dinner, whatever) need to take the chance to get an identity (or perhaps some identity) later. This feels like my work is understood to be kind of peripheral and navel-gazing and maybe even a bit selfish, and therefore not politically engaged, urgent or ultimately significant. Perhaps I protest too much: perhaps that is what I'm doing - of course it is, on some level. And there's nothing wrong with studying identity anyway. I just don't like the implication (felt even if not expressed) that 'identity' work is less than other work. That any research can't be doing 'identity' work as well as a few other things as well.

So here I was, talking about identity on someone else's land. And one of the things I talked about was what it means to say I am Te Atiawa. I am Te Atiawa and Te Atiawa is me. I talked about the reciprocity between individual and colelctive identification and how they're all about claims of connection: that when I tick an 'iwi' box out of a list, I would tick the box that says [ ] Te Atiawa. On the other hand, it doesn't stop with being in individual identification: if Te Atiawa was reciprocally ticking boxes, one of the boxes it (we) would tick would be [ ] Alice Te Punga Somerville.

One of the things I really noticed about this is that my discussions of being Maori were much more iwi centric than they would have been if I'd given the lecture six years ago, or even three years ago. He won't remember this at all, but a couple of years ago my good friend Paul M said to me (at 4am in Minneapolis when we were supposed to be sleeping before hs presentation at the NAISA conference the next day) that your iwi history is the closest to you. He patted his pillow as he said it: 'your iwi history is the closest to you.' I had been raving on about the limits of iwi histories and how so many Maori experiences are totally off the record/ invisibilised/ marginalised/ silenced by a set of assumptions about 'real' Maori histories and although I still agree with myself (heh heh), and although I recall that I responded by disagreeing with him at the time, I have also thought a lot about what Paul said that night. To return to my ticked boxes, my iwi history history is the closest history to me not only because I am a product of certain (Te Atiawa) experiences but, at the same time, my experiences are a part of Te Atiawa history - I'm here and so we are here. This doesn't require me to be a specifically remembered or significant part of Te Atiawa history! - but it means the contours and landscapes of Te Atiawa experiences include this one.

And what does all of this mean?

Well, the thing I'm thinking as I type this in my PJs and can feel my eyelids already getting heavy, is that my time at home over the past six years (the years between living in the USA and in Canada) has given me an opportunity to engage more deeply with my iwi identification. Other ways I've thought about myself haven't necessarily changed, but the iwi dimension of my identity has, well, deepened. This makes me stronger as I prepare to go to Toronto, but it also gives me more of a reason to come home.

And you know what they say about home. It's where the heart is. 

urgent, before toronto, toronto

I've got a piece of paper on the table next to my laptop: sideways, divided into three columns. One is headed "To do: urgent." One is "To do: before Toronto." The third is "To do: Toronto." After a day of catching up on emails (and, yes, going for a walk - the sneakers got their workout as did Matey the dog and as did I), I find myself dividing my commitments by two different axes: time, of course, but also space. Or perhaps time but also place. Or perhaps location is starting to stand in for time.

Hmm... either way, I've got long lists of things that I need to do: commitments I've made. I have things to review, things to respond to, things to organise, things to plan, things to teach, things to confirm, things to send out to other readers. Despite what I may have been accused of at times, I really don't think anyone could read these lists and blame me for being scared of commitment!

As I look through the lists with the luxury of the past few days of rest and reconnection with Auntie Nanie and Mum, plus energy from already finding such amazing things in the archives, I find myself seeing these 'to do' items not merely as a daunting parade of threatening tasks to be slaughtered one by one before they drown me in their collective quicksand, but more as a series of nodes or intersections which make visible my connections to other people. Sure, it sounds cheesy, but I'm pleased that my sabbatical seems to be giving me the opportunity to look in a way which sees each of these 'tasks' as an opportunity to connect: with students, readers, writers, family, friends, people I have never met in person, people I will never know.

Some days this job feels like a dizzying isolating whirr of a machine... but this evening it feels more like a series of connections, of links.

Taking a few minutes to write this post before I hop into bed doesn't technically cross anything else off the list - but it has helped me think about the reasons - the real reasons - the deeper reasons - I will wake up in the morning to make a cuppa and get onto the next 'task' at hand.

(Right after I've taken the new sneakers for another spin, of course.)

These Shoes Were Made For Walking (or, 'aspirations i noticed in the bottom of my shopping bags')

I don't know how long I'll feel like I'm in the 'getting ready' phase of my sabbatical... perhaps this initial time is already nearly over. After all, tomorrow I plan to spend the entire day parked up at the kitchen table at Michelle and Ness's place (with Matey their dog keeping me company), catching up on emails but also doing things (reviewing things, writing things, agreeing to things, saying no to things, replying to things, signing up for things) that are 'work related.'

But today? Today we went shopping... actually most of this week I've been looking at shops with Mum and Auntie Nanie... and all of this is significant because I'm not a super-materialistic sort of girl. I'm not the girl who goes on holidays in order to go shopping. Sure, I like things; but I don't rush about accumulating stuff for the sake of it. (Or so i tell myself...)

Anyway, I'm now the proud owner of new shoes: sneakers and spunky high-heeled party shoes. They're sitting here, in their boxes, ready for me to find the occassion to wear them. The sneakers I'll put on tomorrow morning when I take Matey for a walk, and I plan to wear them most days for the rest of my sabbatical. As for the heels, I am on the lookout for occassions to attend at which heels would be suitable; these occassions are unlikely to include the places I've spent most of the past six months (or maybe even the past six and a half years) - at home, in my office, marking essays, writing, reading, hanging with the whanau, spending time on Matiu/Somes Island.

I realise the two kinds of shoe represent two ways I want to extend myself this year: physically (no, not *expand* - extend! - more exercise, not more Alice!) and socially. I hope that this year away from 'it all' will give me a chance to wear these shoes (and of course their respective occassions) out.  No, I don't want to change who I am; I realise that there are all kinds of lines between behaviour and habit and desire and play and fantasy and denial and fraud. I certainly want these two extensions of myself to be additional to 'me' rather than replacing or obscuring parts of what makes me me.

But I also know that I've been thinking a lot over the past six and a half years since moving home that things have moved along lopsidedly: that some things have gone very well, some things have trotted along just fine, and some things haven't been given enough air to breathe or enough time to develop. On a personal level, I think the two major things in that last category are my physical and social lives, and this is why I've got a small tower of shoesboxes beside my bed tonite.

Although I'm always going to be happy in jeans and comfy shoes, and I am sure I've got several years yet of hooded sweatshirts and a ponytail, maybe some days when I get to Toronto I'll try out the idea of being a well-dressed city girl, sipping a latte at a chilled out urban cafe with heels and lipgloss and a yummy handbag big enough for a small laptop, or going out for drinks wearing my heels to the kinds of places people wear heels. Maybe I'll be that girl, and maybe her jeans will be a little looser because she wore her sneakers that morning when she went for a walk to start the day. Maybe when I get home to Wellington in June next year that girl will come home too, a naturally integrated part of who I am rather than an imaginary part I'm trying to play.

Tomorrow morning, I'll start moving towards being that girl - who I am sure is really this girl, when this girl gives herself the time and energy - by wearing new blue sneakers while I take someone else's dog for a walk around a nearby park.

...and I'm back!

Here I am, back in the world of wireless internet :) Although I'll admit a week away from email, fb, this blog and the internet was a bit tricky for this girl, I wouldn't have swapped the last week for anything.

This was the *resting* part of the beginning of sabbatical that I really needed. I've caught up on sleep and eaten three meals a day and avoided doing twelve things at once, and some of you will know just how much  needed this chance to stop and get back into a routine.

The week with Auntie Nanie and Mum was awesome. Here are the highlights:

Thurs - picked up Mum, went to Auntie Nanie's place
Fri - a trip to local shops (Avalon) & drive to Palm Beach then watching 'the murders' (crime shows) on TV
Sat - we head to the Warriewood Mall in Mona Vale to buy yummy coloured tights
Sun - political programmes and church music on TV
Mon - a drive to the Blue Mountains, to see the Blue Mountains and have lunch at the Paragon in Katoomba
Tues - a day at Macquarie Uni: I did a guest lecture, Mum & I had our nails done (!), and tea with M&N
Wed - an 'at home' day
Thurs - Mum and I hit Sydney (and the rain hits us!)
Fri - off to the Warringah Mall - for Auntie Nanie's first Kebab! then to the Avalon RSL yum :)
Sat - last day: pack up, have lunch, drive Mum to the airport, head to Michelle and Ness's.

Of course, this kind of list can't account for the things I'll remember:
waking up at 8am every morning and having coffee and a gossip and some knitting time with Mum;
cracking up laughing over drinks or food or while we were sitting in Auntie Nanie's kitchen;
filling the car with gas on the way home from Katoomba, when the cashier commented 'cool- you've got three generations in your car' and I realised it was true;
sitting on the porch overlooking the water with a drink and showing a CD of Amy's wedding photos on my laptop while the sun gently set;
giving a lecture to a class of Indigenous Australian students with representatives of two generations (the oldest two Te Pungas in the world now!) listening intently from a desk in the back row;
hearing my elderly aunt say to me (after I asked about someone else) 'you know, I really do believe that the reason people don't end up with someone is because the right person just didn't come along' and feeling a huge sense of relief that there is an explanation that doesn't ultimately say 'you're too this or not that enough and that's why;'
running through puddles and rain with Mum in Sydney, recounting the story to each other of the table in the Apple store on George St;
watching political programmes on TV, realising that yelling out loud at despicable people may be a family trait after all;
before going to the RSL on the last nite, spending time in the kitchen looking through photos of our trip to the Blue Mountains, along with some of the photos of Hamuera that I found in the archives and that neither Auntie Nanie nor Mum had seen;
learning things about uncles and aunties and grandparents and greatgrandparents (and myself) I would never have otherwise known...
and of course there are so many more where these memories come from.

I guess this is how it is with archives: some things are recorded and other things aren't. Chronologies and itineraries will show so much of a life, but no more. I had to google the name of the mall at Mona Vale while I was blogging this post because I'd already forgotten it, but I suspect I'll remember Auntie Nanie proclaiming my apple crumble "a triumph" for quite a while. Perhaps the words 'memory' and 'archive' are like two partly-overlapping circles, a Venn diagram of sorts, in which the nature of the relationship between the two is better understood when the dimensions of the bits that don't overlap are considered.

Like a miniature sabbatical, I suppose, the past week has been all the richer because I knew that I should make the most of it before life returned to its usual routines. I've had a txt from Mum to say she's landed safely at home in Aotearoa. It's nice to be back online, and I'm ready to get back into email and facebook and all the rest. Really ready: not burdened by the list of things to do, but keen to get back into them and with lots of things to recall, remember and think about while I do so. Te tau okioki indeed.

'real' archives

Well my dear blog readers (I apparently have 5 'followers' plus my mate Michelle who is a ghost follower, perhaps in the theme of my book project 'Ghost Writers') - I'm off to spend a few days with my Mum and my Auntie Nanie. Auntie Nanie is Grandad's youngest sister and the last sibling left. She lives here in Sydney and while I'll be in the right zone to listen to her talk (a real living archive really), I'll be out of zone for internet access.

Will post again once I'm back in the 21st century ;)

processing...

Today in Adelaide I did things that normal people do, and for which I was really looking fwd to my sabbatical year: I finished a novel, I met someone for coffee, I had lunch, I met two other mates for coffee (and one of them brought fab kids along for the ride - awesome)... so nice to not be under pressure and feeling like I'm running a million miles late behind where I 'should' be... 

Now I'm home in Sydney at Michelle and Ness's place, about to hop into bed. Mum will be jumping on a plane in Wellington very soon and I'm picking her up here in the morning. She's here for ten days, and we hope she'll get to spend lots of that time with Auntie Nanie although she and I will also do some other fun stuff too.

It is going to take me a while to process the amazing things I saw in Adelaide - the new ideas and new information and new details and new connections... and I also need to think carefully about the conversation I had with my mate Nat, who talked about her own work in the archives which bear the marks of a slightly different colonial project and range of contexts. Whereas I find myself hunting for shreds of documentation, Nat's Aboriginal family has been under surveillance by the Australian state to the extent that she has the opposite, lopsided, problem: the files on her family are heavy, full, swollen, detailed, intrusive, intimate. What a predicament: we as Indigenous people find ourselves needing to connect with our own relatives through such extremes (absence and presence - it's all extremes) in official paper memory.

As researchers do in these newfangled times, I took my digital camera with me into the archive to get copies of all the photos and documents I could find. As I framed things up over my two days in the archive, I started to see the documents in a whole lot of ways... I took photos not only of the whole documents but also of Hamuera's own signature - there it was, signed with flourish and confidence, over and over again - with or without a middle name and in one case running together the two words of our family last name into one: 'Tepunga." One of the last things I saw was the Maori language Bible which belong to Pastor Blaess, the German Lutheran missionary with whom Hamuera had a close connection and to whom Hamuera wrote in English and Maori. I realised this was probably the (literal, actual, material, real) Bible from which Hamuera would have read back in the Taranaki days leading up to his 1906 baptism and departure for the States to train at seminary.

The other main insight I had not expected from the Lutheran archives in Adelaide was the centrality of language: Maori, English, German. As we ate our lunch yesterday, those of us at the archive talked about the  social control of communities through imposition of attitudes about language in the cases of Maori and German... in particular, choices that German-speaking families in Australia and NZ made to not teach their children German in order to protect them from violence during WWI & II. I hadn't realised Lutheran schools were all shut down by the state during WWI. I hadn't realised Lutheran services stopped in many places in order to avoid violence and internment. Churches were burned down. Church land was confiscated by the state. How ironic that the Lutheran church in Christchurch had their land taken from them by the NZ Govt and it was Hamuera, with his transferable skills from fighting for Maori land for years, who won it back. Hamuera, who became Lutheran because Pastor Blaess asked him to help translate Lutheran doctrinal documents into Maori. Hamuera, who wrote a letter in Maori from Illinois about how he was going to have to learn German as part of his studies at the seminary. Hamuera, who a year later wrote a letter in English about failing German and Latin and needing to take the classes again over summer. Hamuera, who preached in German as well as English to a crowd of 1500 white Lutherans in Tabor, Victoria, 1926.

I'm reminded of  few lines from Vernice Wineera's poem:
This island is the tip
of an underwater volcano
so large, it is disorienting
imagining all the world beneath

haere atu ra e taku reta aroha

So began the letter written by Hamuera which I found in the archive today. It's a common poetic way of opening a letter written in Maori, but it made me tear up a little because as I looked at the letter - handwritten on stationery bearing the logo of the Springfield, Illinois Lutheran seminary where he wrote it in 1906 - I realised this was the first full piece of writing I've seen by a Te Punga in the Maori language. Two glorious pages of te reo Maori, the language in which my nephew Matiu will be the next to write...

What an amazing day. Letters about and by Hamuera, photos of him and other relatives, descriptions of how he was percived and understood and respected, deeply respected. A black and white photo of a small man preaching in an outdoor pulpit in the midst of a mass of tall trees and with the many hats of listeners - the listening flock - along the bottom of the frame; read around a bit and it turns out this is Hamuera preachng to 1500 people in Tabor at the general Convention of Synod in 1926, the first "coloured man" (as the notes add) to preach to white Lutherans in this part of the world.  Tightly sloping handwriting that details the educational achievements of his children over and over again in letters, on the backs of photos, in Christmas cards.  

I'm exhausted, exhilirated, full of questions... I'm finding that I am connecting to my Maori inheritance but also my Lutheran inheritance in ways I'd not expected. This morning I wrote about opening cans of worms and this, gentle reader, is what I have done.

two blogs for the price of one!

Am writing at ten to 9 on a rainy but warm (according to me - not according to the locals!) Adelaide morning. I didn't blog yesterday - I was hanging with Michelle and Ness (fab $10 sunnies at a crazy little fleamarket! i still don't know if I'm more excited about the cheapness of the fab sunnies or the fact that it was sunny enough for me to need some!) then flew to Adelaide (in the same manner that I flew to Sydney two days ago: sleeping from tarmac to tarmac) then caught up with my uncle's family who I'm staying with here (Glenice and Jeff - so lovely!). All of this meant I wasn't sure about how to get online, and so today I'm writing a blog to cover yesterday to.

Actually, what's *really* happening today is that I'm going to the fun and exciting Lutheran Church of Australia archives - they will have some things about my great gradfather Hamuera because he was a Lutheran pastor - and I'm really hoping for some photos as well as being excited about the letters they apparently have in their little file with his name on it. Letters! YUM!

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about letters a lot because at the Welly departures lounge I picked up a copy of a book recommended by my mate Sophie a couple of years ago: 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society' - it's fab and a great read and is all int eh form of letters. It's been lovely to enjoy as a book, but also good to remind me again of the place of letters in the first part of the twentieth century, including Maori letters - I'm going to end up with letters from three different writers: Hamuera, Uncle Paul (whose letter is in a restricted file of Ta Apriana Ngata's) and Grandad... but then I started to think (partly as I was coming in and out of consciousness on the plane yesterday) that there are other kinds of writers in my family too: scientific writers. Uncle Fatty and Uncle Martin were both scientists whose writing was published in journals etc and whose writing really made a difference (apparently Uncle Fatty and his research and leadership almost singlehandedly saved NZ from sheep TB or something at some could-have-been-ghastly moment a few decades ago, and Uncle Martin's theory of some kind of geological something is still seen as cutting edge and exciting, fifty years after its publication)...

It seems I've opened a can of worms... worms of writing, worms of letters, alphabetic worms writhing through my history. Not a very comforting image, maybe, but active and wriggling and alive! Yay. Let's see what worms are in the archive today.

poihakena

After being farewelled by Mum and Dad at the airport, I was asleep before the plane left the runway in Wellington, and woke up as we were landing in Sydney. Nevermind a year of writing: at the moment I feel like I need a year of sleep! :)

Have spent a lovely lazy catching-up day with Michelle and Ness here in Sydney, including a long fun dinner at an amazing Greek place for Ness's birthday... tomorrow we'll get me an Aussie sim card for my phone so I can do local calls for cheap while I'm here, and check out a farmers/ art market, before I fly to Adelaide to spend some more time with family ghosts, family writers, family.

But in the meantime, it's late and I've got a very full puku and am very very sleepy and while I sit here in my PJs about to turn off the light I find myself reflecting on all of the Maori people in the early nineteenth century who also started larger trips away around the world (usually, but not always, to London) by spending time here in Sydney. Here in Poihakena.

I'm  thinking about people I write about in my research, like Mowhee, Tooi, Teeterree... but there are so many more too who have walked and slept in Sydney while acclimatising to the big wide world after time in such close proximity to the people and places that make them who they are. 

Without realising it before now, I've done something incredibly familiar and deeply usual: spending a month in Sydney before spending a year in Canada uncannily fits the story of Maori mobility over the past 200 years. This isn't new ground I'm crossing, this isn't a new journey, heaps and heaps of Maori people have done this before me.

There's something kind of comforting about being a cliche some days. 
 

she's leeeeavin' on a jet plane!

theoretically one sleep to go, but anyone who has helped me move before knows that i always leave things too late and so yep this will be a case of a half sleep instead! ah well.

bags are packed and zipped up and standing at attention, and i have said my goodbyes to matiu and megan... today i have also handed over my office and packed away teaching notes etc which now won't be opened until july 2012!

an inventory of my sabbatical so far...
keys to office/ car/ house handed over: 5
key to toronto house: 1

yep, that ratio of keys about sums it all up... te tau okioki is all about relaxing the commitments i have here in wellington so i can recharge my batteries and catch up with things...

next blog will be from sydney... wish me luck!

two more sleeps...

I should be stressed about leaving for Sydney on Saturday morning, but this evening the whanau had a surprise farewell party for me and it reminded me to stop - or at least, to slow down a bit.

Three hours in the archive today with whanau both ways: old letters written by my great-grandparents and cousin Katrina beside me. I've found a reference to a letter Uncle Paul wrote to Ta Apirana Ngata which is n a restrcted access file and as the woman behind the desk patiently explains that I need to write directly to the Ngata faimly in order to seek permission to read the file, I realise I haven't seen Uncle Paul's writing before. More family ghosts.

More family ghosts.
More
family ghosts.
More family
ghosts.

A family of writers. I come from a family of writers. Writers, writers everywhere and not a word to read. Or perhaps (having spent three hours pouring through Lutheran records,  I find myself recalling things I'd thought had been quietly subsiding from my memory) indeed there is nothing new under the sun. Or even, a mighty fortress is our writing!  

(personal) archives

Sabbatical. I'm still in the preparation phase... tying up loose ends and letting things go. Today I entered the last of my marks for teaching, so my more immediate ties to Aotearoa are lessening each day.

Now, tonite, I'm packing. Selecting things to keep, throwing things away, deciding the fates of so many material possessions... am creating my own archive at the moment, packing up my whare and getting things back into boxes again. I used to do this all the time back when I was a student in Auckland, and then some more when I moved to Ithaca (NY, USA) then to Hawaii then back to Ithaca and finally home to Wellington... I did it again when I spent three months in Sydney a couple of years ago and everything went into storage.

And here we go again - getting things into piles and ready for boxes and plastic containers, some of which still have labels from the last time they stored my life and kept it watertight.

Getting ready for another journey, with my usual three categories of things to take with me: clothes/ shoes/ jewelery/ toiletries, school things/ research things/ things that need chargers, and 'things that remind me who I am.' In that last small pile, I've got photos, a few pictures and cards, my raukura, a kowhaiwhai-design hanging Nana stitched for me years ago, an 'I love Wellington' teatowel,  some fabric, and room for a few more things. The last thing to be added (early Saturday morning when I get up to go to the airport) will be Aunty Martha's wreath, the white one Mum made while she and I sat with Auntie Martha during some of her last days back when I was sixteen.

Tying up the loose ends. Preparation. Archives. Keeping it all watertight. Getting ready to go.

All about the whanau

I'm in my favourite kebab shop in Petone (Kilim), finishing off some teaching work and a mixed doner kebab at the same time - mmm multitasking :)

This morning I distracted cousin Terese at Maori Studies for a while before going to dive into the Alexander Turnbull archive with cousin Katrina Te Punga where we found two fab photos of my great grandfather we hadn't seen before and ordered a whole lot more material we're going to check out on Thursday, possibly with cousin Tamati (right Tama?)... now I'm in Petone, or Pito-one, the place from whichmy relatives watched the first Europeans sail into the harbour. In an hour I'll be picking up Matiu from school. This afternoon I'm 100% Matiu's Auntie Lala and nothing else; I am going to teach him how to do his own hair (I won't be here to make sure it curls right!) and he has put in a special request for nachos which we will make together.

So much family, all the time. Can I do it again? Can I be away from all of this - all of them - for so long all over again?

Te tau okioki is going to be about proximity and distance. I'll be closer to my writing self (the girl I've often known as 'my PhD student self') but further from my whanau. Well, further from Katrina and Matiu and all the gang, but closer in some ways to Hamuera... the major project of the next year will be my book that I'm calling 'Ghost Writers: The Maori Books You've Never Read' and one of the chapters is called 'Family ghosts' and in that chapter I'm looking at Hamuera (and Grandad) as writers. When I'm talking informally about some of the other writers in my project, especially the early ones like Mowhee, Kooley and Te Rangihiroa, I'll often say I'm 'stalking' them... but with the family ghosts it's not exactly stalking; it's just spending more time with people I already know. 

So much family, all the time.

Independence Day

It's the 4th of July; day four of te tau okioki. This is sabbatical #1 (as my mate Chris Andersen calls it, 'Baby's first sabbatical') and I'm going to blog about my experiences partly as a diary for myself and partly so I can avoid excruciatingly self-involved and lengthy fb status updates as a misguided attempt to keep everyone enthralled with my whereabouts.

Actually, I started my sabbatical on Canada Day, 1 July, but this first blog post has had to wait until US Independence Day - I'm not entirely sure what to make of this accident - but certainly, while the last of my ties to Aotearoa are being loosened (have had final poetry reading, final marking almost complete, bedroom a haze of suitcases and piles) I am feeling more and more independent by the minute. Yum!

Not that independence is the number one for me all the time - I love being part of a network (a nice cosy squashy network) of connections and relationships, and will definitely return home after a year away because, as I found myself telling someone last nite "this is where I make sense." But I'm a bit depleted, a bit drained, a bit running-out-of-steam, so I'm ready to be a big girl and head back overseas and get all charged up again and refocussed and then I'll be ready to come home in June 2012 to be, well, all charged up again and refocussed. Te tau okioki. Or, to misquote a poem of my own, 'te tau okioki both ways' :)

So here I am, writing my blog rather than marking an essay. Have finalised my plan to meet with cousin Katrina tomorrow to go thru some archives that might fit my book project. Have got a sleeping Matiu in my bed, knocked out as only a 6 year old can be, and knowing that Auntie Lala will come and hop in and be there in the morning when he wakes up. Am getting ready to leave on Saturday for Sydney, and Adelaide, where I'll have a chance to write and check out some more archives and reconnect with some very cool people.

I have decided that every week this sabbatical, I am going to spend one day at home to write. or at least, one day at home. I'm  not sure I'll manage that this week but I'm okay with that - but I'm going to pick one day a week to write for the rest of my year...

Hmm, now that's a Declaration I'm happy (and privileged and humbled and excited) to be able to make.