Book flows from a river of memories
ShiftingCurrents is an engaging, historical novel based on a true story. All stories have a trigger. The trigger for ShiftingCurrents was a chance remark made to Joanna Orwin while she was researching a previous novel. Friend Neville mentioned his great-grandmother used to row one of the Kaipara chiefs up the Wairoa River as a child. Intrigued by what seemed an unusually intimate connection between Maori and Pakeha for the 1850s, Joanna gained Neville’s permission to use his family story as the basis for her next novel.
We asked Joanna some questions about her book:
Does basing fiction on real-life people create any difficulties?
It takes several drafts before I manage to let go of the real people and their lives. Only when I’ve created a fictional voice for each main character and a satisfying shape for the story I want to tell, do I find the courage to winnow out material not essential to that story. For ShiftingCurrents, I built my novel around the imagined relationship between my informant’s great-grandmother’s mother and mother-in-law. The triggering anecdote about the child rowing Tirarau did not survive the multiple drafts of the novel.
Tirarau was a real historical personage. How important was he?
I discovered that Te Tirarau was one of the most significant chiefs in the Kaipara, before and during colonial settlement. The relationship between the Kaipara chiefs and the colonial government during the intensification of Pa¯keha¯ settlement (1840s-1870s) took a different direction from elsewhere in New Zealand. The Kaipara chiefs remained loyal to the Crown, developed excellent relationships with successive Governors and officials, and willingly negotiated the sale of blocks of land — both during the 1845 Northern War with Hone Heke, Kawiti, and Tamati Nene (Tirarau refused them permission to cross his land so they could attack Auckland) and during the later wars in Taranaki and Waikato. For that reason, I decided to portray Tirarau as accurately as I could. That was possible because of the wealth of information available — his biography in Te Ara Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, Nancy Pickmore’s The changingtimes ofTeTirarauandthepeopleoftheriver , articles from Papers Past, extracts from the notebooks of Sir Donald McLean (Native Secretary and chief land purchase commissioner for the government), and family anecdotes.
What was the relationship between Tirarau and your main character?
Those anecdotes revealed genuine friendship between Tirarau and my informant’s greatgrandmother when she was a child, and with her mother, and that was a friendship that persisted into his old age. The chief’s dealings with the settlers on the Wairoa would have been one of benign patronage, at least initially, and he certainly considered himself on equal terms with colonial Governors and superior to their officials.
How did you do your research for the book?
I spent five days in the Auckland War Museum Library. I used on-line resources like Papers Past for events and personalities and National Library Tapuhi for pictorial images of the period .
You’ve said the need for stories that reflect our rich past is probably greater now than ever before. Why do you think this?
We are entering a stage in our history where we are prepared to take a more honest look at the colonial past — a past that inevitably ended up marginalising Ma¯ori, which is something that has only recently being acknowledged in our “official” histories. I think fiction can be a palatable and accessible way of confronting that past.