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.