When I think of my memories of living in Ōtepoti, I think of this lump of uku. When I try to speak to this place, I stumble.
The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.
Illustrations by Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho.
This essay mentions topics that might be tu meke for some readers right now, including sexual violence, drug use, eating disorders, death and suicide. Please take care.
All through the city there are endless roadworks. The streets peddling out from an octagon at Dunedin’s centre have people in orange high vis and wrap-around sunglasses digging up the guts of the city. One day while walking I see the colours of the whenua beneath and see a golden streak of clay (uku), so I ask a man in high vis for a lump.
He asks a colleague to pass him a shovel and to remove a container of his smoko from a New World bag, and he digs up a gooey ball. He hands me a heavy lump in the bag. The gooey ball contains sediment, wood and mud, but also enough uku to be workable. I have worked with this uku for weeks and tried to build a vessel to carry this place with me, but every time I try to fire it, it cracks.
When I think of my memories of living in this place, I think of this lump of uku. It can be shaped, remoulded, crumbled but never turned into something new. It carries dredges of the past that are fragmentary grog of the many lives that have shaped it. The Taranaki writer Rachel Buchanan relays the past as a loop or a coil, a koru, because it seeps, unfurls and radiates. The whenua remembers, which is likely why my lump of uku refuses to be fired.
When I try to speak to this place, I stumble. In my mind exists a blurry set of photos that I could scour Facebook and even Myspace to find. I have some prints, but most of them are on old phones and social media profiles. I try to give context around these images found online and crumbled in boxes and in my memory, but I would ask that when I am describing these images you think of the click of the camera shutter and imagine your own eye looking into the camera viewer. I know that photographs are unreliable witnesses, and cannot be thought of as a primary resource, but my memory is like a photo slideshow anyway.
When you fly above Ōtepoti, you get some sense of how much has been “reclaimed”, like many other cities and towns in Aotearoa. This whenua is covered in those beautiful maunga, which were lovingly painted by artists like Rita Angus and Colin McCahon. In this sense I can understand how the Scottish Presbyterian settlers saw the Scottish highlands, and copied the English who had copied the Romans and decided to bring their cities with them. The name Dunedin is the Gaelic form of Edinburgh, “Dùn Eideann”.
I remember first flying here after a week of sneaky drinking in the sleepout of my best friend’s house in Tauwharekākaho (Rolleston). My parents picked me up from the airport which was so far away from the city that it made me feel like I’d flown to the edge of the world. We drove past the drained lakes of Kāwaewae o te raki (near the airport) and Waipōtaka (near Mosgiel), past the resting taniwha Matamata (Saddle hill) and went to Whakaherekau (St Clair beach) and had pizza. I felt sick watching people surf while a literal iceberg sat in the water, which confirmed my suspicion that we had indeed moved to the edge of the known world.
It was in Whakaherekau that I would go to secondary school; the area shaped who I would become. In terms of demographics it’s a strange place because it sits between the working class packed together on the flat and the exuberantly wealthy on the surrounding hills. Much of it is sinking and prone to flooding. A lot of Ōtepoti is hilly and built out from an extinct volcano. This area was mostly swampy, but on the back of the gold rush in central Otago in the 19th century, these flat swampy marshes were turned into houses.
It’s still one the most densely populated areas in the country. My school, Queens, sits right beside a boys school, Kings. We would head to the tetahi to smoke durries and go to the Esplanade for chips or to Forget Me Nots on the strip for a mouse trap and a cheese roll in winter. Ōtepoti is like Ōtautahi: if you say you are from here, the first patai is, “what school did you go to?”
I remember a photo taken sometime in 2007, which became my profile photo on Myspace. The side of my face is squished and I am pouting like a duck; another rounder face is beside mine, pulling the same face. She has brilliant blue eyes, straightened blonde hair and pale skin. My fringe is cut badly and swept to one side. I was growing my eyebrows out from overplucking them but they are still thin, with the tadpole shape. My face is orange from fake tan and heavily made-up, the telltale line around my jaw from the Maybelline Dream Matte mousse foundation.
Garnier Ambre Solaire Natural Bronzer was my go-to, as I preferred to go gradual and spent hours trying to make my skin tan, but as “naturally” tan as possible. (Ōtepoti really brought out my Scottish whakapapa.) I had never not considered myself Māori until I moved to Ōtepoti. Here I learnt Pākehā and Māori both had ideas about what that meant. I didn’t fit that mould so I think being tan was my way of being the Home and Away type Mozzie that people saw me as.
She was the first real friend I made at Queens (besides a French exchange student that chain smoked, cut herself and was obsessed with Camus’ The Stranger). This friend was very caring, but always had to have everything I had. I’d work for two days at the terrible tea rooms in Palmerston to buy one fluro T-shirt from Slick Willys, then she’d get her mother to buy one. I decided to take Classics, so she took Classics. The kapa haka teacher wanted my sister and I to join the kapa haka group, so she suddenly had Māori whakapapa. She lived in Taieri near Mosgiel, and I felt like that was a rural backwards place where wealthy old white people go to die. This coloured how I felt about her competitiveness.
My warmest memory of her is, when I tried to kill myself in my first year of varsity while my parents were away, she let me stay in her sunroom and I had sex with the boy who I tried to kill myself over on that floor, but halfway through his penis started to bleed and it went all over the floor and she didn’t get angry with me. He was someone whom I desperately wanted to love and she felt sorry for me and told me repeatedly that he was an idiot with a terrible haircut. She made me vegan mac and cheese, because I was vegan even though I wore leather and smoked cigarettes. We aren’t friends now and I’m not friends with anyone from high school, which I think of as a really healthy thing, but I hope she’s well.
When I moved back to Ōtepoti after many years, I was very haunted, and not just because the city was empty due to Covid. I moved into my parent’s place, which didn’t help. Their old house in Waikouaiti is haunted and I hadn’t lived with them since they kicked me out in seventh form. (Now, for the most part, we get along great.) Living in the so-called “birthplace of Otago” in what locals call “whack-a-white” was eerie and made me reflect on living there at 16-17. I once saw a goat that looked like Satan suck its own penis in Waikouaiti, and although it has one of the most beautiful beaches in the country, it’s still a scary place.
None of my memories are very coherent and feel shaped or rather trapped by traumatic events and nostalgia. Around this time I started collecting lumps of oneone and uku so I could feel more grounded. In 2020, I thought about the deep depression that still feels like a dark cloud over all my memories of my late teens and early childhood. These memories are punctuated by alcohol, drugs, bad relationships and friendships that evaporated pretty quickly when it mattered. It also makes me think of people who have passed and how that could have been me if I had given in to it, but I never did.
While cleaning out some boxes I found a pixelated photo printed out on crumpled paper from winter 2007. My parents had kicked me out and I was living in a damp flat in North East Valley. I was 17, had pierced my lip and was hiding my face in a black scarf. I had long, bushy, reddy-brown hair. In this photo, I’m wearing my uniform from that time: my mother’s green anorak and well-worn, dark blue docs. I’m smiling but self-conscious and avoiding the camera. Standing next to me is a skinny young man in black skinny jeans, a Misfits singlet, leather jacket and black docs. He’s clearly shouting something. His hair is scruffy and I recall he always smelled like incense and mitchum.
I’m probably really sick. I had been trying to keep up with his drinking, drug-taking and antics, which always seemed really stupid but were part of why we were friends. We met at Arc cafe a year earlier at an all-ages gig that the band TFF was playing. He had been sitting outside at 11pm, drinking a long black and chain smoking marlboro reds. A few weeks after this photo was taken, he pressured me into smashing up letterboxes and taking oxy, snorting nutmeg, drinking an entire bottle of cough syrup and taking Mexican tripping weed. The latter gave me a concussion after I ran at a wall screaming.
It never occurred to me that he had feelings for me, but even the “nice” girl in our group of friends accused me of leading him on. This was after I was assaulted at a dingy flat beside Sammys by a much older painter. We didn’t have a language to articulate what these things meant at the time. It took me years to realise that some of my experiences as a young person in the art and music communities in Ōtepoti were not okay. I realised that sometimes it’s hard to be friends with straight men, because they always seemed to want something more, beyond making me sick on booze and drugs. I saw him at a tangi for a mutual friend not long after we fell out and he was still so angry he wouldn’t look at me. Even the suicide of a friend we loved couldn’t fix our friendship. After thinking about this for a long time, I scrunched up the photo and threw it in the fire.
During lockdown I found some photos from 2009(ish), including a black-and-white pinhole photo of myself and a blurry figure. I am wearing a fur coat that belonged to my great Aunt and my hair is still long. I am standing beside him. He was a sort of mentor who in many ways was abusive and it feels strange to reflect on our relationship. He was decades older than me and, together with my on-off girlfriend-turned-friend, we formed an experimental theatre company. He was Australian and smelled really bad so this should’ve been a red flag. He was very controlling and, although I learnt so much from him, I mostly feel anger for how much he belittled me and the violating way he choreographed my body in some plays we worked on.
But when I look at this photo, I mostly think about the photographer, my friend Larry Matthews. Even though he was so much older than me, he always listened and took me seriously. He was the first person to encourage me to make art and taught me about so many artists I still love. His gallery, {Lagniappe} Lanyop, was beautiful and only open at sundown and you could only view it via candlelight, while Larry played piano and offered you a cup of tea. {Lagniappe} is a French-Cajun word meaning “a little something extra for nothing” and that described Larry perfectly. When Larry killed himself I never got over it or felt the same way about the world again. I was numb at his tangi. I couldn’t believe such a wonderful person could leave us.
Not unlike Māori, the Scottish Presbyterian settlers of this place took their rivers with them. Moving like a snake across the land is the awa Ōwheo, which the settlers renamed “The water of Leith,” just like Edinburgh. I often think about how, in the Leith Valley, there is a waterfall in Ōwheo where healing ceremonies were performed to help heal injury or illness; Unu-unu-a-kapua-i-te-raki (Nicol’s Falls). The water carried away the sickness, which flowed down Ōwheo, into the sea. Any water downstream was placed under rahui, a protection that extended to the fish, birds and even firewood along the river.
Ōwheo has been rerouted many times and is prone to flooding. It once flowed into an inlet called Pelichet Bay, which frequently silted up, especially after a causeway was built for the South Island Main Trunk Railway between Ōtepoti and Kōpūtai (Port Chalmers). Pelichet Bay was drained or “reclaimed,” and turned into a park; the site of the 1925 New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition. One of the last times I walked past here it was raining, so I put my hand in the mud and scooped up a bit of Pelichet Bay.
On Facebook I came across a photo from 2012, taken at a party I organised. My hair was cut into a bowl and dyed white-blonde with strips of mawhero. I was wearing a black velvet dress with Victorian ruffles that I’d bought from a friend at Glue gallery. I had set up a bubble machine and a performance area and I was excited because this was a zine launch I’d spent a long while planning. A bunch of friends from Auckland have come down to play and the band TFF have reunited. We are at None gallery on Stafford street and I was tired but really happy.
At this time, Ōtepoti had this feeling like you could do anything you wanted for very little money. I miss Glue gallery and None gallery and the many other artist-run initiatives that existed at the time. Back then, I was making performance art, styling photoshoots, writing about fashion and curating art exhibitions. There was such a sense of community in Ōtepoti; everyone would help and we could pool resources together. I’ve never been part of a hapori in the same way since.
For a few years I lived in Tāmaki Makaurau and Te Whanganui-a-tara. My mental health issues followed me even though I thought leaving Ōtepoti would cure me, because blaming a city for your problems is easier than addressing them. I was in love and engaged for the second time, but I couldn’t keep it together and figure out what I wanted to do or even who I was. In hindsight, being surrounded by so many non-Māori made me feel alienated and depressed.
When I was burnt out beyond belief and living in Seatoun, I begged my parents to buy me a one-way ticket home. I did long-distance with my then-partner, which sucked, but within a week of moving back I found a flat on Arthur street and a sunny studio on George street, so I was very productive. A good friend and I formed a gallery out of our shared interest in critiquing imperial culture and questioning the marketability of the artist. We were obsessed with making tote bags with perfume samples sewed in and tried to sell them as Chanel. We referred to ourselves as CEOs rather than gallery directors.
On an Instagram post from 2014, we are standing together in front of a huge painting by the artist Cobi Taylor. I am wearing a salmon-pink leather jacket, a black and white lace negligee, and kitten heels with socks. He is wearing a grey jacket and trousers. In this photo I am the most intellectually-engaged and invigorated I had been in years, and although this collaboration would crash, burn and eventually repair, it was one of the best times in my life.
I lived a big chunk of my life in Ōtepoti, but it’s very much like Hinepūkohurangi, mist. I lived here as a manuhiri, a guest, and tried like our tīpuna to make kin with the rakau, moana, awa, manu, mokomoko and many other creatures as best I could. I’ve tried to learn the names of places and honour what is sacred. When I returned in 2020 it felt like going backwards, but in many ways it was the time I really got my shit together. I fell in love with a man from Te Teko that my Dad actually likes (and not just because he’s Māori), and we started our own whaanau.
In a photo taken in 2021 I am seven months into my haputanga and standing beneath a magnolia tree in full bloom. My hair is long and curly and I’m wearing a silk Emerald dress of my mother’s. I have black sneakers on and I am so happy. I had started to waddle and get tired, but I was determined to see the gardens as it’s spring, the most beautiful time to be in Ōtepoti.
I had my daughter Miriama Jean in Ōtepoti, so it will always be this thread that ties our whaanau to this place. I think of it like a sailboat moored to a jetty. It nearly gets carried away by the ocean’s tides, but keeps coming back.