Representing the Waikato: Photography and colonisation

1I'm going to talk about home, a topic with tremendous potential for both sentimental banality and profound, paradoxical interest. For that reason, and to keep myself alert, Fm calling my talk ? litde bit prickly'.1 This tide I owe to Sarah Shieff, who responded to my tentative proposal about home by sending me the text of a letter written by Frank Sargeson in January 1949, a bit under three years after I was born and perhaps about the time I began to be able to store rudimentary memories of our home in Blenheim and its extension in Waikawa Bay near Picton. This is the passage from Frank's letter that caught my attention:10 February 1949Dear Marie Insley,[...] When you say 'lovely' seaside suburb I do feel a litde bit prickly. I suppose Takapuna is lovely from some points of view - at least I really do think it was 20 or 30 years ago. But what worries me is that you seem to imply that I live here from choice and like it. No. All along it has been simply because of the bit of family property that my father allowed me to live on in the bach. I've never really felt at home in Takapuna, and from time to time I'm conscious that the feeling goes pretty deep. [...]2 My own take on 'home' is also 'a little bit prickly'.Driven by my father's wanderlust and my mother's boredom, our family left Blenheim for what was then called East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1954 when my twin brother Dave and I were seven. After a four-year period of, for Dave and me, feral, Jungle Book anarchy, we all went to England. Dave and I went to school there, but our mother and father took off to a variety of far-away places - East Pakistan again, Korea, Egypt, several others - all too far away from us to be called 'home', if, as we'd thought until then, home was where you lived with your mother and father. Like many of their generation, my parents had done the Depression hard - my mother had to leave school early, and was bitter about that for the rest of her life. My father had no formal education until the war, when he began an accountancy degree. They couldn't afford a house of their own, and lived in my mother's mother's house once Dad returned from the war, and during our childhood. They ran from this situation and, when the opportunity arose, kept running for the rest of their lives. My brother and I saw our wandering mother and father every two or three years and had a variety of caretaker homes. We made our own homes after we left school. I felt 'prickly' about that situation for a short time, but it was a fairly futile rearguard action in defence of a concept of home that was soon replaced with admiration and envy for the kind of peripatetic adventure my parents made of their lives, and the variously diasporic homes they made along the way.I've had several 'homes' since my childhood ones in Blenheim, Bangladesh, and England. And I'm currently back living in Auckland, close to where I lived as a student getting on for fifty years ago. So there are a lot of cross-currents and issues of memory for me in this prickly matter of home - where is it, what is it, and why do I go on caring?My focus on the prickly issue could and perhaps should be simple. After all, what's so complicated about remembering those homes and how I felt about them? But, whether I like it or not, I find I'm distracted and often confused by a variety of paradoxical questions. Mosdy, these have to do with the relationships of time, memory, and home. Memory is always happening in the present, but is always about the past. Memory of home may be triggered by a synaesthetic effect such as smell encountered in the present but indexically connected to a past represented visually; we can 'visualise' the past, but we can't smell it: a cognitive folding. Memory may be triggered by objects - mnemonic, symbolic, fetishistic - that no longer exist materially in the present, but that powerfully recall the past; memories of memories: a folding of time. …