Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand
Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand
Synopsis
Excerpt
It was an invitation to speak about my ‘trilogy’ of books in July 1997 that first jolted my personal memories into an articulated form, for while the three works in question were born one from the other, they were neither planned nor constructed with such a purpose in mind. The ‘unanticipated trilogy’ grew from a series of personal dialogues over time, and from the discovery that family oral stories may provide crucial keys to unlock histories that have been previously unacknowledged in the public arena. The three books are very different in their formats, but they all arose from talking with Maori elders about their ‘recent’ past—fragments of their collective colonial experience.
The first book, Mihaia (Messiah), published in 1979, is a co/ authored study of the Tuhoe prophet leader, Rua Kenana. It was constructed around early photographs, whose existence had been previously unknown to most Tuhoe (and indeed to most people). The second book, also co-authored, is Ngā Mōrehu: The Survivors; published in 1986, it narrates the histories of eight Maori women . . .