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.
No comments:
Post a Comment