A story from Central Otago

Once upon a time, soon after World War Two, the good people of the New Zealand Broadcasting Service took their huge truck around parts of New Zealand, recording interviews with people they met. This was hot new technology, developed during the war. One of their trips was through Central Otago, an intensely beautiful and also harsh landscape. Although it's now famous for wine and skiing, it used to be famous for gold. So the people interviewed in the 1950s were mostly as old as possible, sons and daughters of the earliest white settlers.

These physically enormous tapes (made of acetate) are of great value to linguists who are interested in researching the origins of the New Zealand accent. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time when the very wonderful Elizabeth Gordon of the University of Canterbury was looking for a history researcher to find out more about the interviewees from these tapes and to interview and record their descendants. Which is how I got to spend ages in libraries in Otago and Wellington and to drive round Central Otago looking up tiny museums and interviewing descendants of the interviewees. Along the way I fell in love.

With this:
So I went on to do my MA on women in the liquor industry on the nineteenth century goldfields of Central Otago. Which meant I got to go back there. New Zealand women won the right to vote in general elections in 1893 on the back of the temperance movement which argued that the woman's vote was a vote for temperance. Throughout the same period, parliamentary debate on liquor licensing often focused on the question: did a woman behind the bar raise the tone of a drinking establishment, or were hotels so corrupting that women had to be protected (read: prohibited) from running them? What I found on the goldfields was a much wider range of experiences. Wonderful, fabulous women running very astute hotel businesses. Degenerate lushes causing a stir with their drunkenness on a regular basis. Inventive women running sly grog shanties which turned into peppermint tea houses when the police came to call - at 3am.

Here on the West Coast I'm back in old goldfields country again, which I quite like.

So what has this got to do with anything? I just can't separate my life story from this idea of growing an activist. Growing an activist has just been me growing. I wasn't born difficult I'm told, (it started when I was about six according to my Dad). I've been fortunate, extremely fortunate, to have had many opportunities to get inside the heads of other inspiring people. And I love the stories of all people. And so I thought I'd share this little box of my history.

I will go back to history again some day. I may yet do more work recording the stories of our living taonga, the elderly men and women of our community. I won't do it for money from the elderly though. That's not giving dignity to the silent in our community. And giving the silent, the quiet, the underheard, a voice, a la Paulo Friere, is something I think is really worthwhile.