Tina Makereti

TŌTARANUI /QUEEN CHARLOTTE SOUND

We lived all over the North Island, and we moved around a lot. I spent many hours atop a mattress in the back of a station wagon, or lying on the backseat of a Hillman Hunter, breathing second-hand smoke, the windows down. Outside, I saw treeless hills, sheep and cattle and fence posts. What trees I saw were lined up along fencelines, macrocarpa or pine or some English relative of these. In my memories, the landscape of my childhood is a physical wasteland, as well as a cultural one. I don’t know how much of this is true; I only know that this is what I remember. I had no heart for it.

Sometimes we lived on farms and I walked the hills looking for adventure. The ground seemed parched, denuded of trees. It was all stubby grass until torrential rain turned everything to mud. I don’t remember ever seeing a pūkeko or a kererū. Even tūī were rare. We had a black-and-white cat.

I was 17 the first time I went to the South Island. Coming into the Sounds on the ferry, I was astonished. This is where they’d been keeping the trees! All of them, it seemed. I understood something, then, about our country and what we’d done to it. It wasn’t until that moment that I realised what exactly had been missing. It would be many years before I learnt how significant my ancestors had been in this area, and how this was the home of my bones long before I understood it to be mine. But Tōtaranui sang to me, on that first trip, and it still holds me in awe each time I am there. The cultural wasteland is long since gone now that I know how to go home.