MARCH 2007
ISSUE 9 - ISSN 1448 - 6326
“The Land is Power Pulling our souls in under hills..”[1]
Ann Gilroy RSJ
Abstract
Taking as a starting point that the context in which we live contributes to the shaping and colouring of our experience of the Divine and hence embeds our spirituality, this article analyses the works of New Zealand women Pakeha poets to make explicit their attitudes towards the land and landscapes of Aotearoa. Though the poets did not intentionally write about their spiritual connections to the land, they nevertheless convey their understanding of and relationship to the land as in some way revealing the presence of the Spirit. Some acknowledge the indigenous influence on their growing relationship to the Earth as an ecosystemic home. For many Pakeha women, their developing spirituality of land finds expression in the belief that the Divine Spirit is present in and through the land, and consequently opens them to the fertile possibility of mutual forgiveness, transformation and communion as revelations of Divine presence and efficacy.
Two volumes, anthologies of New Zealand spiritual verse, hit the bookshops recently in New Zealand and sold unexpectedly well.[2] The collected poems were not religious in the way of hymns but they articulated some of the implicit spirituality of this country in such a way that people could identify with it. Pakeha[3] are not a particularly religious people and so their reference to spirituality is not about being churched, as much as finding new ways of speaking about the experience of living their lives purposefully and ‘in the round’, in a way that recognises their network of relationships, beliefs, values and practices that has grown out of the experience of living in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand.[4]
At the heart of spirituality lies the experience of divine presence and over the last few decades Maori, the tangata whenua,[5] rather than Pakeha, have provided visible and public ways for acknowledging the Divine and the spiritual dimensions of life through rituals such as powhiri and karakia on public occasions.[6] As they emerge from the effects of colonisation,[7] Maori have lifted their new-found voices, upsetting the dominant Pakeha discourse, to assert their own language, identity, tikanga,[8] spirituality, history and possession of land. The new reality of Maori agency and the articulation of Maori spiritual relationship to land, has contributed to Pakeha re-evaluating their own attitude and practices towards the land as well as the values and beliefs that undergird them. This paper while exploring a Pakeha spirituality of land, focuses on the work of women artists, particularly poets, and engages with their portrayals of living in Aotearoa as experience and as spirituality. While my chosen authors have not self-consciously written about spirituality, I will engage with their texts and subtexts to produce through my own interpretative lens, a further text in a different register to fit alongside their major work. My work will bring Pakeha women’s spirituality of land to the foreground.
I have claimed that there has been a shift in Pakeha cultural awareness of
their spiritual identity with the land. A recent television commercial
for fax machines that print in colour
illustrates my point. The commercial
featured a young Pakeha girl bundled in winter clothing sitting in a dismal
basement flat in London. When her fax machine began spewing out coloured pages
she came to life pasting them onto her wall until she had a huge mural of a New
Zealand summer shoreline. In the photo the
water glistened, a pohutakawa flowered crimson in the foreground and the
sunlight intensified to a jewel-like brilliance the colours of the earth.
Everything in the picture was the antithesis of her London context and evoked
her connection to the place she had left for her ‘OE’. What she saw in the picture reminded her of
her identity, her cultural values, her hopes for her future, of those ‘at home’,
and of why she was in that other place. As
Pakeha, though she was ‘abroad’ she was connected to Aotearoa, as well as to
the other land of her genealogical history, represented by her ‘OE’ in London.[9]
An analysis of the picture suggests that the advertisers were drawing from the Maori custom of introducing themselves to each other – identifying the mountain, the river or body of water, and the land of their home – to tap into the Pakeha psyche where a similar connection has developed in their process of becoming, what Michael King has described as, ‘the second indigenous people’ of this country.[10] Thus while the Maori are the tangata whenua, the descendants of setters have become Pakeha, people of the land in a different but significant way. I suggest that Pakeha identified more with the subtle message of their emotional and spiritual connection to the land, than with the product the commercial was meant to sell.
From Immigrant Settler…
The colonists emigrating to New Zealand took several generations to grow into Pakeha. Contemporary Fiona Kidman (1940 -) in Speaking with my Grandmothers dialogues with her ancestral grandmothers about their attitude to New Zealand. She contrasts her own Pakeha relationship to the hills of Wellington with that of her colonist grandmothers who first settled in the same place:
I know you through
These hills, this horizon, tonight’s
Wild dark, our summer
Days[11]
Kidman’s Scottish great-grandmother left for New Zealand reluctantly – auctioned off as it were - already a wife and mother and an integral ingredient in the fulfilment of her husband’s dream:
See how he seizes the child from her arms and turns back to the boat.
She follows; she takes her place. Going, going
Gone to New Zealand.
The reality of the conflicting emotions women colonists endured in uprooting from home and re-rooting in a strange land is taken up in Jane Campion’s film, The Piano.[12] Campion portrays Ada McGrath, a settler wife, as an almost allegorical character isolated by more than self-imposed muteness in the utterly alien wilderness of bush, weather and relationships of 19th century New Zealand. Campion’s Ada provides a visual dimension of Kidman’s great grandmother caught between choices of staying or leaving, with neither choice being freely her own. Whereas Ada withdraws indoors into a secret, forbidden world of desire, the prescience of the Kidman generation is apparent in Ada’s young daughter, Flora, dressed in fancy-dress angel wings and playing in the puddles and bush, already at ease in the bush but not yet quite at home. However her voice, motivated by loneliness and raised in betrayal of her mother, unwittingly destroys the cobwebly delicate bonding she has with her place. In the end the place lets both women go.
The railing voice of the character in Rosemary Menzies’ poem, Are you the God, also evokes a woman’s alienation in New Zealand. Although she experiences the land as vast, unbounded and unlimited, these qualities constrict her rather than bring her freedom. She is caged, raging and impotent:
Are you the god
Who dropped me
In this land
This vast interior
Where no fences
No clear boundaries
Safety pin my eyes to limitations
Or the vast steppes of slow progressions.
But I walk here
In this vast unbounded cage
Seeking the god to fight
Who dropped m
e in this land.[13]
One feels that Menzies’ frustrated character will wear down into apathy in the face of the distant, unconcerned Divine. She cannot see, let alone read, the features of the land and what they may reveal to her of God. In fixedly categorising the places that God inhabits she is preventing herself from discovering the Divine presence in other forms and places. She exists on a vast barren plain, an outward reflection of her own interior desolation and impotence.
One can understand how such experiences of dislocation and loss can develop into a theology of an ‘other-world God’, a deity dwelling in heaven remote from human affairs, as a King is distant from his subjects. One can sympathise with a colonist experiencing God in this way separated by distance, resources, season, hemisphere and night sky, from her mother and homeland. The irony is that in Aotearoa where divinity was tangible in so many forms for Maori, Menzies’ character’s cultural and theological lens allowed her to see only emptiness. Even as she lamented the loss of her personal God she resorted to importing ‘her God’ into the new land and, as did the Christian churches, she continued her devotions disregarding the a-synchronicity of the northern hemisphere liturgical calendar with the southern seasons.
Kidman’s grandmothers, and Campion’s and Menzies’ characters provide glimpses of part of the story. Two women writing at an earlier time than Kidman and Menzies intentionally addressed the mismatch of season and Christian festival and began to experiment with images which acculturated Christian traditions within the New Zealand landscape. They tell another story of a generation born in the land of Aotearoa and establishing a respectful relationship with the land. Eileen Duggan, (1894–1972), of Irish Catholic parents grew up in a rural area near Picton, Marlborough. Much of her poetry reflects her experience as a first generation New Zealander. For example, she inserts local symbols and characters into the Christmas story:
Had my Lord been born here in the time of rata,
Three dark-eyed chieftains would have knelt to Him,
with greenstone and mats and the proud huia feather,
And the eyes of Mary, seeing, would grow dim,![14]
In contrast to Menzies’ character, Duggan’s Divine is purposefully engaged with the land. The land makes its own response, a response, she hints, which is not always valued by humans who have fixed ideas about land use. In Swamp-Land Duggan layers paradoxical images succinctly contrasting a God/land purpose with that expected by a colonist New Zealander. She leaves no doubt that God’s option is for the land.
God made this place for sallow twisted roots
And winds that limp the high-roads of the air,
For songless birds and broken–hearted fruits
And men who never learned a prayer.[15]
Ursula Bethell, (1874–1945), like Duggan, used her religious beliefs as a lens to shape and be shaped by her relationship with the New Zealand landscape. In Pause, she evokes the land’s agency and wonders how important ‘self-important’ humans really are to the land:
In a little while, it may be,
When our impulsive limbs and our superior skulls
Have to the soil restored several ounces of fertiliser,
The Mother of all will take charge again,
And soon wipe away with her elements
Our small fond human enclosures.[16]
Whereas Duggan imagines that the land responds to God’s purpose, Bethell speaks of ‘the Mother of all’ finally wresting control of the land from New Zealanders. Although she addresses earth’s agency as ‘Mother’, Bethell leaves the actual identity of ‘mother’ open. Does she want us to understand her speaking of Mother Earth, or of Mother God, or yet again of the Maori Earth Mother, Papatuanuku? As well as clouding the identity of Mother, Bethel also focuses the mother role not on giving birth to a baby but on giving life to the land after human death, suggesting that the ecosystems of the land are not dependent on human facilitation. There is a richness in seeing each of the three ‘Mothers’ revealed more fully in the other, and together forming a trinitarian lens on the cycles of life and death in the land’s ecosystems. Bethel’s work dismisses the use of a purely romantic lens for understanding the land-settler relationship.
……to Pakeha
Up to this point, I have concentrated on two aspects of the story, the settlers’ perspective of the land as strange and even inhospitable towards them, and that of first generation New Zealanders’ tentative identifying with the land. I return to Kidman’s engagement with her grandmothers for a further story, her own. She acknowledges that the settlers’ motivation was unworthy of the land and of the tangata whenua. She highlights not only the clash between Maori and colonists’ understandings of their relationship to the land, but the settlers’ plan to dispossess Maori of their land. Continuing her conversation with her grandmothers, she confesses her ancestors’ implication in unscrupulous land grabbing from the Maori, which benefited her family but passed a burden of guilt from shoulder to generational shoulder. Kidman acknowledges:
I wear this hair shirt of guilt
The settlers’ shame.
*
And I found only of late like a child
Discovering illegitimacy in a certificate
Hidden in the bottom of a knickers drawer,
The contrivances of that rush for the great land
Grab before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed;[17]
*
Kidman’s confession is symbolic of the new awareness of Pakeha of her
generation who have begun to retell the story of colonisation in a way that acknowledges
their wrong in dispossessing Maori from their land, the source of their
economic, generational and spiritual sustenance.[18] She confesses the colonists’ sin which lies
in the Pakeha psyche, like a Jungian shadow seeping poison into relationships
with tangata, whenua and the Divine. The long process of confession, apology, restitution
and restoration of land and relationships is the new journey Pakeha need to
undertake. Acknowledging their part in the breakdown of relationship with Maori
has introduced Paheka to the experience of a new value, that of humility,
grounded in the humus of this place and the hope for restored relationships
arising from it. The workings of the Treaty of Waitangi Tribunal, the official
acknowledgement of Maori customary rights of the land and the restoration of
significant lands back to the care of the Maori tribes provide a pathway
towards on-going reconciliation of Maori and Pakeha. Within that journey in which Pakeha with
humility will re-evaluate their identity and their relationships with the other
people and the land, we can also expect to discover the Divine presence in the ‘long,
white cloud’.[19]
Kidman whispers back through her genealogy, the difference between her love and dependence on the land and theirs:
And I whisper to you. I tell you you must not mind this foreign soil. You must not mind for me. I am the robber's bride as my mother was before me. I have found my own way. I am the ordinary face of strangeness. You would not know me if you saw me. We have bitten the white throats of roses and ridden wild horses bare backed. I live here. There is no turning back. Do not call me now. Stay just where you are. Tonight I want to sit quietly by this window. There is so little silence, so many voices.[20]
The contrast between the grandmothers’ perception of ‘foreign soil’ and Kidman’s cry of ‘I live here’ differentiates generational attitudes and marks the transformation of the women from colonists to Pakeha of Aotearoa. The sins of the journey – ‘biting white throats of roses’ – as well as and the boundary breaking experiences – ‘ridden wild horses bare backed’ – have transformed them. Although sitting in the darkness Pakeha Kidman experiences a closer communion with the land than do the women of her genealogy. Nevertheless, her grandmothers complete her identity. She has come from them and will return to them just as she is of the land and will willingly return to the land.
In Anna Jackson’s poetry (1967 -), one finds an even closer communion with the land than that of Kidman’s. Jackson’s experience of the earth as nurturing, speaks of a mutuality of earth/human relationship, a relationship that Duggan might have sought after. In Tahitian Pohutakawa she interplays the meanings of whenua[21] paralleling her baby daughter’s life with that of a seedling:
Up it clambers from the muddy
Lawn and from the hole
We dug
For Elvira’s placenta. Feed baby
Tree, I can’t wait to see you
Flower.[22]
Jackson expects both her daughter and the seedling to bloom because both have fed from the same source. Her daughter’s placenta, produced in Jackson’s own body, and returned to the earth has in turn fertilised a new form of life. Jackson’s hope and anticipation are confirmed by the cycles of the earth, the giving and returning of life. Thus the earth of Aotearoa reveals the Source of life and is honoured and respected for its divine gifts.
From communion with land
Other contemporary women poets resonate polyphonically with Kidman and Jackson’s sense of communion with the land. What is of special interest is the question of how God’s presence is understood in this relational communion of earth and Pakeha. In order to answer this question I will need to go beyond the poets’ voices and to offer another voice in the polyphony, that which articulates the relationship to God.
Belinda Diepenheim is quite explicit in identifying herself and the land as being of the same physical reality, grounded and rooted. She writes:
I walk outside and touch the sweaty land
grounded by the knowing we’re of the same clay.[23]
The substrata to her words, could be the Genesis 2 account of the Divine moulding the earth creature, adam, from the red earth, the adama, thus establishing the original relationship of earth and humanity, even before God differentiated humans sexually thus extending the possibilities of their relationships.[24] There is something cautionary for humans in this story, something also recognised by Menzies, Bethel and Kidman, that we are far more reliant on our relationship with the land than the Earth is on humans. Like human/divine or child/mother relationships, communion is in the giving, not in holding or withholding of power. Emily Dobson recognises this when she invites her lover to dance with her on the beach in Poem II:
Come laugh in the sand, and feel
the divinity of skin
lit by flame.[25]
She hints at the Divine appearance as breath and flame, energy and sound enhancing the communing love of earth and lovers:
We are born of the earth,
We shall know its breath as our own,
Feel its throbs as the beat of our heart,
See the course of our blood as an echo
Of something eternal. [26]
Ruth Arnison in After the Rains experiences the Spirit of companionship, joy and laughter after days of being cooped indoors with her young son:
After the ten day rains we ease our way out of
the house where we have become to ourselves
and each other, unbearableHe points out the lettuce tree like the one at kindy
I correct with 'cabbage.' As long as there's no
brussel sprout trees he's not botheredHe whispers, see the wind breezing the beautiful
flowers, and the daffodils nod in delight
at this recognitionOur stale and snappy winter words have been
released and spring's warmth is seeping
into our conversationI've got little hummings bubbling inside me and
I haven't swallowed a bee. I catch his sideways
look and we burst out laughing.[27]
By attending to the earth from her young child’s perspective, Arnison and son are both released from the effects of separation from the outdoors, and both participate and share in the freshness of land and of Spirit. While the earth mediates the Divine presence for them, it is in the nexus of land, sand, wind, daffodils, rain and sun, human attending, longing and loving, that the Spirit is released in a little everyday Pentecostal excitement.
In a more reflective vein,
The land is power
Pulling our souls
In under hills
Deep into caves of no light
And glimmers of light like glow worms.
The land is mother
Holding our grief
In tears of rivers
And our cries
In open arms of bays.
The land is grandparent
Rocking our childhood
In hollows of hiding
And hillsides for sliding
And plains as open as pikelets.[28]
Powell images the land, not the people, as the subject, as power, mother
and grandparent and as such offering humans further revelation and
relationship. In the interplay of light
of darkness of the first stanza, one hears a resonance of the soul’s journey to
union with God in John of the Cross’ poem,
The
Dark Night of the Soul.[29] Powell has identified the darkness, geographically and spirituality, as connected
to knowing the land. It is in and through
the presence and power of the hills that the journey to revelation and communion
unfolds and the presence of the Spirit is known. In the second stanza Powell
moves to a further aspect of the trinitarian relationship of earth, human and
Divine. She portrays the contours and edges,
or meeting places, of land, sea and humans as generously expansive and open
rather than as bordered or fenced to create limitations or elitism. The
encounter in these places will surprise, delight or comfort as much as it will
disclose the Divine, at once ‘known all our lives’-familiar and at the same
time, original and fresh.
Whereas Powell identifies the land’s agency in revealing the Divine presence, Cilla McQueen in Low Tide, Aramoana captures an almost imperceptible moment, encapsulating the interconnection of Earth with the moon and the wider cosmos. She observes the change of tide:
Low.
And
There’s a sudden
Wait
.
for the moment
of precise
solstice: the whole sea
hills and sky
wait
.
and everything
stops.
High gulls hang seaweed is arrested the water’s skin
Tightens we all stand still, even the wind evaporates
Leaving a scent of salt[30]
McQueen’s attention to the precise moment of change when the waters in a particular part of Aotearoa respond to the moon’s gravity, outlines a liturgical, even mystic, moment of creation. She notes that all of creation – sea, hills, sky, birds, wind and plants – wait in expectation of the change as if in a universal holding and then expelling of breath. The moment is momentous, yet humanity scarcely notices it, taking it for granted as we tend to do the rest of the earth’s systems. McQueen though hints at the out of step-ness with the rest of creation of those who have lost an appreciation, even awe, at the wonder of the systems of Earth and the universe. Low Tide, Aramoana potrays an attitude of prayer of the heightened attention, the waiting and responding to the life around us, and so to the Source of life.
Rhian Gallagher in Burial speaks of the final communion with the earth with the return of the person to the earth after death:
The shovels stood in a sticky underbelly of earth
as we stepped from the sidelines for him,
peeling our jackets, the boys loosening their ties.
Soon there was clay on our church-going gear
and his voice coming out of our childhood
coaching us to put our backs into it.
Flowers and fine words had never touched the man
like work, grunts behind a shovel’s bite,
the clean sound of clods as we heaved them in. Digging,
we bowed in memory of his stooped solid shape.
The dark damp weight of earth,
a provision, a very last word.[31]
Gallagher portrays the family’s unpretentious devotion in filling the grave over their father’s coffin spurred on by the remembrance of his attitudes and earthiness as they do so. The daughters and sons bury him as a wholehearted act of love for a man who approved of work well done and who took pride in his work. In burying him themselves rather than allow strangers and machines to do this work out of their sight, they acknowledge humanity’s final, inescapable communion with the Earth after death. As the body becomes one with the earth so too does the mystery of the end of life as we know it converge with the mystery of the Divine presence in the Earth.
…..To Divine Presence
What can we draw from these women’s voices in order to articulate a Pakeha women’s response to and spirituality of the land? While Kidman and the other authors each offer an individual’s perspective, at the same time their experiences resonate with others, although undoubtedly not all, of their culture. From their polyphony I will offer a sketch of a spirituality seemingly inspiring and animating their relationships to the land of Aotearoa. There seem to be several identifiable themes.
First, they speak of a ‘growing into,’ a recognition of the Divine presence revealed in the diverse sources of life within the Earth. While they do not use conventional or predictable images of God, their portrayals, true to the experience of the land, are a God of unsettling presence, authentic kinship and fierce attraction. The focus for the Divine presence is not in churches and cathedrals but in the mountains, the home garden, the estuary and the stream. The Divine Spirit is present in and through the land.
Second, the writers speak of ‘giving’ themselves to the earth and of
being almost captured by the land, as if held outside ordinary time, held in earth
time or liminality. While the experience
can be personal and individual, the response of shared laughter, joy, pain or
work suggests that the experience of the Divine is shared and precious. In such
shared responses, as an eruption of joyous laughter or the rhythm of shovelling
soil, the Divine presence is recognised with surprise. The Divine is felt in the strengthening of
relationships and the deepening of bonds with other humans, with all of life,
with the land and with the Divine.
A third aspect is that of allowing ourselves to be drawn into the seasonal changes of the land to participate in the Earth’s relationship with the Divine. A part is to journey into the experience of the dark and to discover darkness anew. As the authors suggest, being drawn into darkness has a range of meanings, some of them dangerously life-giving. The journey may mean that we face our fears; or we may be drawn to face into the ‘dark night’ which descends on us; or again, we may be drawn into the darkness of creative challenge and discovery. Allowing ourselves to be drawn into the dark is not so we will find light in the darkness and so escape the dark, but to allow ourselves to enter into the mystery of darkness itself, and thus to be drawn into the revelatory Divine Presence and be changed ourselves.
A further aspect is found in inescapable ethical and respectful responses to the land. While the women articulated their relationship to the land, whether to particular places such as the hills of Wellington, a home backyard, or a beech forest, their responses were of care towards the place as to a subject. Care requires an engagement in ethical relationships with the earth. This may be in concrete responses from Pakeha such as revisiting the Treaty of Waitangi as a covenant of the land and two different peoples and/or for Pakeha to release their clutches on the land, or to engage in ecological research and participate in the outcoming activities; it could be to change behaviours for the sake of the land, or join in international projects to preserve our planet and to restore its health. The spirituality calls us to listen to the Earth’s voice as to a subject, taking as an example Maori, who have more wisdom and experience in this area than we have, so that we grow increasingly attuned to the Earth and the Divine.
Finally Pakeha women’s spirituality of land opens to the fertile possibility of mutual forgiveness, transformation and communion as further revelations of Divine presence and efficacy. As Pakeha become conscientised to a more earth-centred relationship towards the Earth, the effects of androcentric behaviour on the land and the atmosphere, will become apparent increasingly and provide opportunities for seeking forgiveness through commitment to the long haul of restorative action. The criteria for positive action, as well as resisting from action that will cause further damage, will become earth-centred rather than human centred in acknowledgement of the earth as our source of life, as home, as gift, as a face of Divinity and as implicated in the revelation of Divine mystery. A spirituality supporting such action relies on shared understanding, commitment and perseverance even within the diversity of cultures and faiths of our times. It calls Pakeha women, as Powell suggests, ‘in under hills’ that they may know, love and restore themselves and their diverse communities with the land, and engage with the Divine, the vital presence and source of all life.
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[1] Anne Powell, "Land Pictures," in Enough Clear Water (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2001).
[2] Paul Morris, Harry Ricketts, and Mike Grimshaw, eds., Spirit Abroad: a Second Selection of New Zealand Spiritual Verse (Auckland, N.Z.: Godwit, 2004), Paul Morris, Harry Ricketts, and Mike Grimshaw, eds., Spirit in a Strange Land: A Selection of New Zealand Spiritual Verse (Auckland: Godwit, 2002).
[3] Pakeha
refers to Caucausian New Zealanders most of whom are descendants of the 19th and early 20th century colonists from
[4] Kevin Ward, Is New Zealand's Future Churchless? (School of Ministry, 2004 [cited 2006); available from http://www.schoolofministry.ac.nz/kevinward/articles/inaugural%20lecture%20v2%202004.doc.
[5] Translated literally means, people of the land, and indicates the indigenous people of Aotearoa, the Maori.
[6] Powhiri is a ritual of welcome and hospitality. Karakia is praying.
[7] Tariana Turia articulated this publicly as ‘Post Colonial Traumatic Stress Disorder’ in a speech to New Zealand psychologists in which she challenged their training which did not develop their ability to nurture the psyche of Maori clients, to see the wounded spirit of colonised people, and appreciate Maori concepts of 'kai tiaki, makutu' and 'mate Maori'. Tariana Turia, Speech to NZ Psychological Society Conference (29 August 2000 [cited 23 May 2006]); available from http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/tspeech.htm.
[8] Tikanga is the customary way of ensuring right relationships.
[9] Morris, Ricketts, and Grimshaw, eds., Spirit Abroad: a Second Selection of New Zealand Spiritual Verse, 11.
[10] Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2003), 516.
[11] Fiona Kidman, Speaking with my Grandmothers (Victoria University Press, 2005 [cited 16 June 2006]); available from http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-RobWrit-_N70667.html.
[12] Jane Campion, "The Piano," (New Zealand, Australia, France: 1993).
[13] Rosemary Menzies, "Are You the God," in To Where the Bare Earth Waits (Auckland: Hudson/Cresent, 1988). Menzies is a contemporary poet (1939- ).
[14] Eileen Duggan, "A New Zealand Christmas," in Kowhai Gold (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930), 11.
[15] Eileen Duggan, "Swamp-Land " in Kowhai Gold (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930), 13.
[16] Ursula Bethell, "Pause," in Collected Poems (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1997).
[17] Kidman, Speaking with my Grandmothers.
[18] For example, see the work of historians: Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Allen & Unwin, Port Nicholson Press with assistance from Historical Publications Branch, Dept of Internal Affairs, 1987). Claudia Orange, The Story of a Treaty (Wellington: Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, 1989). Anne Salmond, Between Worlds: Early Exchanges Between Maori and Europeans, 1773-1815 (Auckland: Viking, 1997), Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans, 1642-1772 (Auckland: Viking, 1991). King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, Michael King, ed., Pakeha: The Quest for Identity in New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 1991). James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders From Polynesican Settlement to the end of the Nineteenth Century (London, Auckland: Allen Lane; Penguin Press, 1996), James Belich, Directed by Tainui Stephens, and Producer Colin McRae, The New Zealand Wars: Nga Pakanga Nunui o Aotearoa (Auckland: Television New Zealand. Distributed by Silver & Ballard NZ Ltd, 2004), Michael King, Being Pakeha Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native (Auckland: Penguin, 2004).
[19] According to the story of Maori discovery of the land around the
12th century, they called the land Aotearoa, meaning ‘land of the long white
cloud’ because their first sighting of the land was the snow covered backbone
of mountains along the length of the South Island appearing like a cloud on the
horizon of the sea. The name,
[20] Kidman, Speaking with my Grandmothers.
[21] Whenua is translated as land as well as the baby’s placenta. It is a custom for Maori to bury the placenta in their tribal land thus symbolising the kinship of the baby with the land and the people of the land.
[22] Anna Jackson, Tahitian Pohutakawa (2000 [cited 11 June 2006]); available from http://www.trout.auckland.ac.nz/journal/7/trout7.htm.
[23] Belinda Diepenheim, Two Worlds (2001 [cited 17 June 2006]); available from http://www.trout.auckland.ac.nz/journal/9/index.html.
[24] E J van Wolde, Stories of the Beginning: Genesis 1-11 and Other Creation Stories (London: SCM Press, 1996), 39-41.
[25] Emily Dobson, Poems I, and II (1999 [cited 3 May 2006]); available from http://www.book.co.nz/dobs2.htm.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ruth Arnison, After the Rains (2006 [cited 5 May 2006]); available from http://www.arts.org.nz/ann.htm.
[28] Anne Powell, Enough Clear Water (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2001), 12.
[29] John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez, revised ed. (Washington: ICS Publications, 1991). See also, Mary Horn, "The Dark Night of Creation," in Land and Place: He Whenua, He Wahi: Spiritualities of Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Helen Bergin & Susan Smith (Auckland, NZ: Accent Publications, 2004).
[30] Cilla McQueen, "Low Tide, Aramoana," in The Nature of Things: Poems from the New Zealand Landscape, ed. James Brown (Nelson: Craig Potton Publishing, 2005), 73.
[31] Rhian Gallagher, "Burial," in Salt Water Creek (London: Enitharmon Press, 2003), 32.
Dr Ann Gilroy RSJ is a lecturer in Theology at the School of Theology in the University of Auckland and the Catholic Institute of Theology in Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests include contextual theologies and spirituality. Ann’s other publications include: "Green Fingers." In Land and Place: He Whenua, He Wahi: Spiritualities from Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Helen Bergin & Susan Smith, 201-16. Auckland: Accent Publications, 2004.
Email: Ann Gilroy <a.gilroy@auckland.ac.nz>
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This article has been peer reviewed, and is deemed to meet the criteria for original research as set out by the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training.
