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