![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And, much as I love this country, it’s not exactly the Big Smoke.īut I wanted to think about indigeneity, and Australia as part of the Pacific, and how culture and storytelling and history run into each other, making things knotty and nuanced and real. I’ve got no family here (apart from some homeopathic-beekeeping second cousins up in Whanganui, who I’ve never met). It’s not like I couldn’t do an English Literature/History double major at a dozen unis across my country of citizenship. When people ask me why I chose to leave Australia and study in Wellington, I’m never quite sure how to answer. Te-Whanganui-a-Tara.” I leaned into the sound of the words, once foreign-seeming and fumbled, now familiar and a sign of my privilege and slowly blossoming belonging.Īnd she said, “Oh yeah. “I just think,” I said, cracking my knuckles, then my neck, then my shoulders, “I just think this is a really good place to run away to.” I was thinking about Albert Wendt and Darko Suvin the types of cognitive estrangement that were enacted in the novel Dark Rainbow, and how fascinating it was to be studying Wendt in Pacific Studies and English Lit at the same time. She was writing an essay about women in 20th Century Russia. We were sitting cross-legged on her green duvet, rain pattering through leaves outside, fairy lights twinkling through the gauze of her bed’s canopy. ReadingRoom Saved from a fate worse than Queensland ![]()
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