Christine Rogers
Phd Candidate
RMIT University
Abstract
When Derrida exhorted us to learn to speak to ghosts, his rich notion of hauntology was taken up by post-colonial scholars (Cameron; Coddington) to discuss the hauntings in many colonial landscapes. New Zealand is arguably such a place. Some of my birth kin are Māori, a fact I learnt only in adulthood, as I am adopted. In 2017, I took a video camera to Riverton/Aparima, where my Ngāi Tahu ancestors lived and died. I went looking for ghosts, for a connection. I was seeking Hirsch’s postmemory. Postmemory is not living memory but an intensely imagined past. Adoption scholars (Brookfield, Brown and Reavey; Homans) also use postmemory. However, unlike Berry and her striking experience of Dresden, this land did not speak to me. Despite this, I filmed the properties that my great-great-grandfather John Arnett bequeathed to his children in 1895. Back in Australia, I was forced to intervene in the placid nature of these images to try to put the ghost in. In this article, I outline my working methodology of autoethnography, and discuss how hauntology and postmemory are powerful tools that have changed how I create.
Keywords: autoethnography, documentary, adoption, Ngāi Tahu, hauntology
Wind
Birdsong, incessant.
The light is a newly washed business shirt.
We are driving off the end of the world.
Small houses, painted bright
Gardens
Wide empty streets
Wide empty land
One sign, Leader Street, my ancestor’s name. My name.
Screeching in the wind, pointing to no place.
During Easter 2017, I travelled for the first time to a place where my tūpuna, my ancestors, had lived and died. Riverton/Aparima, once called Jacob’s River, in Southland, New Zealand, connected me to my lost heritage, to the Māori ancestry that I have, but never had, because I was adopted at birth into a Pākehā (European) family. My unknown ancestors have always haunted me, and now that I had the name of a place where they had lived, I took a camera and went looking for something. For some sense that I belonged. It was Easter. Did I seek a new birth? To rise again, refashioned Māori? To be made whole? This homecoming did not immediately fulfil its (impossible) promise. Yngesson reminds us that this story of return is a familiar one for the dispossessed. It assumes a past that is just waiting to be found and inhabited wholesale, like a discarded coat. She suggests that “seizing the past” is rather a piecing together, a “(re)inhabiting of events in order to lay claim to them” (Yngvesson, 2003, p. 13). Through my creative practice, including making the video John Arnett – Five Properties from the footage I shot during my first visit, I have been piecing together the past to create a more coherent present. To do so, I had to acknowledge the ghosts. I turned to academic literature and the theoretical concept of hauntology to find out how the ghost has been conceptualised, and how the idea of haunting could deepen and enrich my creative practice.
Lifton writes that adoptees are haunted by what she calls the Ghost Kingdom, a place where our birth kin live, there and not there, just beyond our ken (Lifton, 2009, 2009). The idea of haunting is certainly a fruitful way of describing both personal and cultural histories that contain “aspects which seethe”, which refuse to be settled. Haunting “collapses time, bringing the past into and thereby permanently altering the present” (Coddington, 2011, pp. 748, 752). Gordon describes ghosts as trouble that demands attention. Rather than some literal spectral presence, ghosts are “disturbed feelings [that] cannot be put away” (Gordon, 1997/2008, p. xvi). The notion of haunting, of trouble and disturbed feelings, has been taken up by colonial scholars to describe places and spaces that hold the spectres of past trauma, seething beneath what can appear to be a banal landscape ((Coddington, 2011) (Davis, 2005); (Gordon, 1997/2008); (Cameron, 2008); (Fitzpatrick, 2016); (Tuck & Ree, 2013). Evison makes it clear through his detailed scholarship of 19th century land settlements in the South Island that my Māori ancestors experienced a great deal of deprivation because land was sold for too little and government promises were broken.
There are then two hauntings to speak of here – that of the colonial landscape, and those of an adoptee. Can either of them be laid to rest and, if so, how? Derrida, the father of hauntology, doesn’t think so. For him, ghosts are never settled. They sit between life and death, presence and absence, making “established certainties vacillate” (Davis, 2005, p. 376). Derrida believes it is our job to learn “how to let them speak or how to give them back speech …” (Derrida, 1993/2012, p. 221). John Arnett – Five Properties is part of my creative research practice through which I investigate these hauntings. In this essay I will explore the question: Can I evoke the feelings associated with adoption and the ghosts of my fragmentary past through my filmmaking practice? How can I go about “representing the unrepresentable” (Holloway & Kneale, 2008, p. 297); my peculiar attachment to the mundane landscape of Riverton/Aparima and surrounds because it the landscape of my birth kin?
Adoption: a child out of place and out of time
I was one of 3088 children adopted out at birth in New Zealand in 1965 (Else, 1991, p. xii), from a total of just over 60,000 live births.[1] It was a closed stranger adoption, which meant that there was a clean break between my new family and my birth kin where I was issued with a new birth certificate as a baby and considered to be tabula rasa, a clean slate. This is a practice founded on secrets and secret-keeping (Haenga-Collins & Gibbs, 2015). Anne Else writes that “adoption is one of those apparently contradictory, confusing phenomena which are the social equivalent of earthquakes” (Else, 1991, pp. xi, xiii). This was certainly the case for me. The knowledge that I am adopted has always been at the core of me, unsettling, uneasy, dark. At the age of 21 I searched for my birth mother, however this was unsuccessful at the time. Later, around the age of 30, I was given official assistance to find my birth father, Brian. It was then that I found out he and I have Ngāi Tahu (Māori) ancestors. This was incredible news to me. My memories of school Māori history featured the Treaty of Waitangi and North Island colonial wars. I knew little about Ngāi Tahu, the southern tribe. But now that their history was mine, I began to gather information, seeking to fulfill what Stein calls a adoptee’s desire for “origin narratives possessing some certainty and coherence” to combat my sense of “incompleteness” (Stein, 2009, p. 298). My past could finally move from fantasy to fact, and what had previously been brutal but somewhat impersonal knowledge about colonial injustices became personal, and so much more dreadful.
Raymond Williams, a cultural theorist, used fiction to explore the difficult history of his ancestors: “this history is a record of … defeat, invasion, victimization, oppression. When one sees what was done to the people who are physically my ancestors, one feels it to be almost incredible … It’s the infinite resilience, even deviousness, with which people have managed to persist …” (Harvey & Williams, 1995, p. 79). This resilience becomes obvious when I search the archives and find a number of newspaper articles referring to the entrepreneurial activities of my great-great-grandfather John Arnett. This resilience has become a strong thread through the final work.
Ngāi Tahu, a Southern People
Ngāi Tahu are the dominant iwi (tribe) in the South Island of New Zealand. Our ancestors migrated from the North Island during the 17th century (King, 2003), intermarrying with the Waitaha and Ngati Mamoe iwi, and by the time the Europeans arrived there was “… an entangled web of kinship that tightened with each generation” (A. Anderson, 1998, p. 59). This strong web of kinship was one of the many things broken by the widespread intermarriage of Māori/Pākehā that followed.
The Aparima hapu (sub-tribe) in the very far south, my ancestors, were hunter-gatherers, moving with the seasons. So the cultural shift was immense when Europeans began to arrive in numbers from around 1804, seeking their fortunes in the resource-rich southern Pacific Ocean. First sealers came, then whalers, and by the mid-1830s the majority of southern Ngāi Tahu were in permanent settlements and economic relationships with Pākehā (A. Anderson, 1998). When formal land settlements began in the 1850s, the loss of prized mahinga kai (food-gathering places) was legislated, which increased Māori reliance on Pākehā culture and capitalism (O’Regan, Palmer, & Langton, 2006). With these close relationships, it’s not surprising Southland Ngāi Tahu became the largest mixed-race population in New Zealand, and these marriages are in my whanau (family) as well.
An Intimate History, a Unique Population
Both of my great-great-great-grandmothers were Māori women who married Pākehā men, and their children were ‘hawhe kaihe’, literally ‘half-caste’. (The term half-caste and three–quarter cast were extensively used in official documents of the time; however, I use the term mixed-race as this has less negative blood-rule connotations). Stevens uses the term “gathering places” to write about the rich places where “mixed descent families encountered each other and the state, as well as ideas about class, religion and respectability” (Stevens, 2008, p. 7). A rich place this may have been, but there’s no doubt that it was not always an easy place to be. Many scholars have written on the racism and myriad difficulties faced by early mixed-race New Zealanders ((Wanhalla, 2007),(Wanhalla, 2015); (Binney, 2006); (Haines, 2009); (Stevens, 2008); (A. Anderson & Niven, 1991) (Meredith, 2000) (Paterson, 2010) (Smith, 2013) (Brown, 2016). Land shortages increased pressure on those seen as not belonging and a number of separate and specific land allocations were made by government to mixed-race families because of extreme hardship (Brown, 2016). There is poignancy here for me; my ancestors were outsiders too and did not fully belong in either Māori or Pākehā culture.
John Arnett Speaks for Justice
Among those who sought justice and recompense for these deprivations was my great-great-grandfather John Arnett. Arnett’s mother, Haerenoa Te Anu, was Ngāi Tahu/Ngati Mamoe and his father Pākehā. In 1880, he spoke on behalf “of local people who were not chiefs” (Evison, 2006, p. 157) at the Royal Commission on Middle Island Native Land Purchases. He reminded his audience that promises made by Walter Mantell, Commissioner for Extinguishing Native Land Claims when the Mirihiku (Southland) land was purchased in 1853, remained unfulfilled. He told the Commission how this had affected him: “If Mantell had fulfilled his promise, I might have been a good scholar. I am no scholar at all. I have never been out of Riverton/Aparima, and have had no chance of education” (Evison, 2006, p. 158).
Arnett may not have been a scholar but he was, at various times, a farmer, boat-builder and tin miner, and when he died in 1895 he left five properties for his wife and eight children. This hard work and good fortune does not make nonsense of his testimony nor nullify what it might have been like to have been mixed-race. His in-betweenness is something I wanted to represent in John Arnett – Five Properties through an act of imagination, with my own experience of being in-between as the core from which I (always) work. To this end, I used the joint methodologies of practice-based research and autoethnography.
Methodology – the Tools of My Study
Batty and Berry emphasise that at the heart of creative practice research is the doing. They encourage us to learn to move fluidly between thinking and making, to begin “drawing connections to make constellations” (Batty & Berry, 2015, p. 186). This process oscillates between reading and thinking, methodology and making, and is necessarily full of “chaos and complexity” (Haseman & Mafe, 2009, p. 219). To make new knowledge and new work, I must be both inside and outside the work, and undertake conscious experimentation through a process of action and reaction (Gibson, 2010). For me, impulses for the work can be as much unconscious as conscious; it is what I am ‘drawn to’, and autoethnography helps me uncover and nurture this attraction. It also helps me to frame my practice and situate it within broader social contexts.
Autoethnography is part autobiography, part ethnography. An autoethnographer writes consciously from the inside of culture, producing story and theory together (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). Theory helps the reader to stand back and gain a broader view, and helps break through what Harris and Gandolfo call the “isolation of individual experiences of refugeity and unbelonging” (A. Harris & Gandolfo, 2014, p. 568). I am working with Anderson and Glass-Coffin’s list of the five key features of autoethnographic practice: visibility of self, strong reflexivity, engagement, vulnerability and rejection of closure and finality (L. Anderson & Glass-Coffin, 2013). This is my story – I am central and self-reflexive and vulnerable in the work I make and write. I am engaged with the Ngāi Tahu community. And a rejection of closure and finality, of neat Aristotelian beginning–middle–end narratives, is an important element of the creative practice component of my research.
This methodology breaks traditional boundaries purposively; “[autoethnography] as a mode of inquiry, was designed to be unruly, dangerous, vulnerable, rebellious and creative …” (Ellis & Bochner, 2006, p. 433). This appeals to my innate sense of rebellion, a trait linked to the outsider status of an adoptee. I am working with evocative autoethnography, which privileges the journey rather than the destination, story, and the messiness of lived experience (Ellis & Bochner, 2006). Concerning the theory element of autoethnography, I am working with adoption scholarship, and notions of hauntology and postmemory.
Theoretical Frameworks
Adoption scholarship helps to describe why adoptees find the world different to other people. Harris writes that adoptees are ever-hungry for stories and have a rich fantasy life that “… [is] a hidden treasure, a mystery, a possibility of specialness, and a nostalgia for something imagined” (A. Harris & Gandolfo, 2014, p. 573). Story-making is now seen as vital for adoptees. Modern adoptees, together with their adopted family, construct a ‘life story’ document, creating in material form a living history to make sure that the future “is sufficiently grounded in a coherent and narratable past” (Brookfield, Brown, & Reavey, 2008, p. 477). I have stories now, fragments from Brian my birth father, a reluctant storyteller, casual about a past that I can never be casual about. These are flimsy pieces of information and memory, more gap than substance. My video work is also a gathering, of fragments of place. With these images I want to make substance, but also to have the absences, the hauntings, show through.
This desire for, and obsessive attachment to, objects and places from a family’s past is what Hirsch calls postmemory. Postmemory is different to living memory because there is generational distance, and it’s not history because of a deep personal connection; postmemory is a particular kind of memory “precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch, 1997, p. 22). Memory work can be done physically, as Berry notes in her travels to Dresden, where walking the streets and making creative work made Dresden become real for Berry (Berry, 2016). However, her striking experience of Dresden turned out to be very different from my experience of Riverton/Aparima.
I’m also following the path of Byrne et al. in The Stony Rises Project. This team wrote and made creative work that sought to bring the ghosts back into the landscapes of the Western District (Victoria), a place with a dark history of colonial aboriginal injustice and murder, now invisible under Europeanised land (Byrne, Edquist, & Vaughan, 2010). Here they found stone eel traps; physical traces of other, earlier, occupiers. This was what I was hoping for. Yes, I had looked at a map and at Google Earth and I had seen the quintessential green patchwork of paddocks that dominates the South Island. But I had also seen place and street names on the map: Howells Point, Gummies Bush – names that relate to my ancestors. Was it this that led me to believe that the story of my tūpuna would be somehow writ on the landscape?
The Visit and the Shoot
The tripod wobbles
The wind blows loud in my earphones, distorted, ugly
The frame sags sideways, despairing.
A lonely car on a distant road, distant mountains
Greengrassblueseablueskyriver
I don’t know what to look at
I don’t know what the fuck to film
I don’t know.
First, some on-the-ground research. I visit Helen Brown at Ngāi Tahu headquarters in Christchurch. Helen is involved in a complex project mapping Māori reserves and pieces of land granted to claimants over the many years of the Te Kereka (the Ngāi Tahu claim). She finds 10 hectares given to John Arnett in the 1880s as part of a ‘half-caste claim’. We look at it on Google maps and then Google Earth. It’s pasture, inland from the coast, indistinct from the blocks either side of it. But now there is one place to which I can anchor my visit. Then, browsing in the Arnett/Leader folder in the whakapapa (genealogy) unit, I find that someone has left a copy of a court document from 1895, and it’s here that I discover Arnett left five pieces of land to his family. Excited, I give these addresses to Helen, and over the next day or two she sends through the modern addresses, along with other old survey maps that relate to the pieces of land (see fig. 1). Now I had five places to visit; five places where I could literally ‘follow in his footsteps’. The maps themselves also contained poignant reminders of the outsider status of Arnett and his kin; one has written on it ‘half-caste claim’.
Figure 1.Block XI Longwood District. Map courtesy of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu
I was initially reluctant to shoot footage on this, my first, visit but my supervisor, Dr Marsha Berry, recommended it. My filmmaking practice prior to this research had been mostly a mixture of scripted drama and educational work. I had directed a long-form documentary but that was about an architect and a major building project, so action was yet to be filmed. Shooting landscapes and everyday life was a different form of filmmaking. I was using video as method, exploring what Harris calls the “… poetry of video and its ability to make its creators think more critically about seeing, about making, and about the purpose of research itself” (A. M. Harris, 2016, p. 2). To add to this, I didn’t fully trust my ability to shoot and record anything of value, having mainly worked with professional cinematographers and sound recordists, which was to become evident. However, this filming did work as Harris suggested. Through the act of filming, I saw and created Riverton/Aparima differently. To extend Manning and Massumi’s analogy: “Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color” (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. vii). To shoot video and record audio; a thinking of space, place, and sound. In this way, through my practice, I connected to place.
Not Quite Inside, Always Outside
I travelled to Riverton/Aparima with my husband, Jonathan. We stay in Invercargill, half an hour away. I don’t know why I didn’t make a booking to stay in the place itself. Maybe I thought it would be too much? We leave Invercargill mid-morning and drive southwest. The first two properties are at the entrance to the town, alongside each other. We are looking for 1 Havelock Street, and the property immediately north of it. These are sections 77 and 79 on the Māori Reserve, both once owned by Arnett. But the graphic landscape of the maps looks nothing like this three-dimensional living landscape. We pull up beside a large recycling tip. On the right, a large empty property; unfenced, overgrown. Along the far edge of it, a stand of huge gnarled Macrocarpa trees. These European trees, my favourite trees, were usually planted as shelter for houses. To the left of us, the tip, and beyond, pasture. In front of us, a fenced-off sewage pond.
I start filming, not sure what I’m looking at, or even if we are in the right place. It’s very windy, the wind blowing straight onto the microphone. The sound in my headphones is terrible and I quickly discard them. The tripods, both borrowed, are useless. I’m grappling with the gear and feeling foolish and frustrated. I’m a fish out of water. When Smiljana Glisovic travelled to shoot footage of Serbia for her creative research practice, she too felt awkward and self-conscious in the place where she thought she might belong: “I’m haunting these places like an unwanted ghost” (Glisovic, 2014, p. 183).
A young man wanders out from the tip. I’m sure he’s going to tell us off – me, an unwanted ghost – but he asks amiably what we are up to. I’m still fighting one of the tripods. It’s Jon who explains. The man confirms that yes, we are in the right place, and tells us we must meet his friend, a garbologist who knows all about the properties and the town. This is how we met Mike, who is happy to be distracted from his work. Mike offers to show us the other Arnett properties and we gladly agree. He gets in the front seat of the car, and I’m in the back seat. Surely a metaphor! Mike is also Ngāi Tahu but he’s dismissive of his culture (as an insider might be). We drive around. It’s a pretty place, indistinct from other small New Zealand towns in the South Island. The river where James Leader drowned, the Pākehā father of Elizabeth (John’s wife), is wide and benevolent. The next property is part of a large rugby field, bordered by ancient Macrocarpa trees. I’m surprised, and pleased, to find Leader Street. Here is something material, permanent. The sign is on a lean and screeches, metal on metal, in the incessant wind.
In beautiful Colac Bay, the road to the next piece of land is broken up and slumping into the sea. Huge concrete blocks stop vehicular access. On the other side of the bay, green hills rise sharply. Mike tells us that when he was young there was once a huge storm, and Māori bones were exposed on the foreshore, washed out of sandbanks. He helped an old women gather the bones, placing them in woven baskets. They were put in a valley and he points out where, across the small bay. I feel a sharp pang of jealousy. Is it about the gentle gathering of the bones? Bones that I want to gather but cannot? I stare at the valley and imagine fossicking there but know that I won’t. The story is a reminder of what lies beneath this landscape, because nothing else here is speaking of ghosts. Mike complains about the museum, how there used to be a wall of muskets and other treasures, but they were all taken away to Te Papa, the national museum. I’m too late it seems, as everything good is gone. We buy Mike lunch, a meat pie. He tells us that we must meet Harry Bull, as he knows everything and everyone. We drive past the marae, but nobody is there. Harry Bull is nowhere to be seen.
Figure 2. The Arnett Property at Longwood – or is it? Photograph: Christine Rogers
We drop Mike home after Colac Bay, then travel to the last property, which is part of a large farm. The motorway seems to be in the wrong place. It doesn’t match the map. A decision is made, and I set up again and shoot (see fig. 2). Finally, we visit the cemetery on the way out of town. It’s growing dark. Although it is only autumn, the cool air reminds me of the short days and cold that winter will bring. It’s a fitting time to look for graves. The outlook here is stunning. Mountains circle us but the graves of my ancestors are not the romantic concrete angels or elaborate headstones that make this place so picturesque. Jon finds a newish plaque for Meri Wehikore, Elizabeth’s mother. Then a large concrete-covered plot and a black marble headstone for Arnett. The names of other Arnetts are listed here too – relatives I don’t know, and in all likelihood, will never meet.
Now, a year on, I read my research diary again. That evening we ate in an Indian restaurant in Invercargill, and after a glass of wine or two I became teary at the help Mike gave us. Was I expecting to be turned away, a repeat of my abandonment as a baby? I also wrote that I slept a very deep and dreamless sleep that night.
The Edit – Colonial Landscape ad infinitum
In the corner of the yellow dining room I hunch over a screen
A seagull makes a dash across a green field
Macrocarpa trees shake their solemn branches
An old Holden ute toots its dull horn
The river licks at the riverbank, bored.
I look
I look
I look
It’s there and not there
It’s not there.
In asking “How does a space become a place?”, I am assuming that place has personal meaning. It is somewhere we are attached to, a “meaningful location” (after Tim Creswell). In The Stony Rises Project, Byrne et al. seek to “move beyond the surface of the land” (Vaughan, 2010, p. 8), to take the land from an abstract landscape and through creative interventions, to transform it into a more specific ‘place’. I am helped by the medium I am working with – the moving image – because it already possesses some of the unheimlich, Freud’s “uncanny”, that I seek.
Derrida claims that every viewer that watches a film is in communication with “some work of the unconscious” that is like the “work of haunting”, and that film works on us in ways that replicate psychoanalytic practice: “hypnosis, fascination, identification” (de Baecque, Jousse, Derrida, & Kamuf, 2015, p. 26). Here I do not differentiate between film and video for their effect. Through this hypnosis many filmmakers have used video and film to record their struggles with how to represent memory, postmemory, and that which is missing. In the essay film History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige, Rea Tajiri represents the hidden history of Japanese American internment during World War II through a mixture of interviews, memorabilia, existing footage and fragments of fiction. In voiceover she says, “I remember having this feeling as I was growing up that I was haunted by something. That I was living within a family full of ghosts. There was this place that they knew about. I had never been there, yet I had a memory for it. I could remember a time of great sadness before I was born” (Tajiri, 1991, 12’58” – 13’24”). She is also haunted by postmemory and is trying to conjure ghosts. However, there was no ‘memory’ of Riverton/Aparima for me. I wanted there to be, but there just wasn’t.
The Arnett footage and I
In Melbourne two weeks after the shoot, I sit down to edit. I’m struck first by the poor quality of the sound. Almost all of it is unusable – so much for my sound-recording prowess! In comparison, the cinematography is good; images well exposed and in focus. It’s the content of the shots that are the issue. There are no traces of otherness, of ghosts, or the longing I feel when I look. I cut the best shots together, and it’s a pretty enough sequence but it goes no further. I can see that I need to put more meaning into it, to pull it in one direction or another. But how? I could work with the images; pull them away from realism. Berry writes that the proliferation of faux-vintage filters on mobile phone photographs in social media reflects a desire to do just that; to “capture more than just an accurate depiction of what their eyes can see” (Berry, 2014, p. 58). These landscapes of mine are too ‘accurate’ by far.
I decide to concentrate exclusively on the five properties and superimpose the early maps (see fig. 3). I cull the other images that are not the actual properties. The flailing old-man Macrocarpas, my favourite shot, has to go. The maps are a beautiful chilling snapshot. Now there is a relationship between the land and the maps, but it’s tenuous. Who does this land belong to? What meaning does it hold for the video maker and therefore for the audience? I stare at the screen. It’s surprisingly empty of meaning, or as Laura Marks would write, thin. For her, this thinness is the result of trying to represent contested histories that are all but invisible – “The story suspends in order to contemplate this emptiness, which is narratively thin but emotionally full: it is the product of a process of mourning, a search for loved ones who have vanished and cannot be recalled with any of the means at the artist’s disposal” (Marks, 2000, p. 5). These landscapes of mine are not full emotionally. Not yet.
Figure 3. Havelock Street Property Number 77. Photograph: Christine Rogers. Map courtesy of Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu
I remember a lesson from my screenwriting days; specificity is key. I need to talk about Arnett. I am keeping in the back of my mind that this video could be silent, as it will be shown at some stage in a gallery space along with my other creative research works. But in the struggle to add meaning, the soundtrack is too important here to pass up. A colleague[2] used to tell students their production mistakes were serendipitous, and would thus encourage them to see failure as the opportunity for more creativity. This great advice certainly holds true here.
I turn to constructing a soundtrack. The need to add information, context, is foremost in my mind. As Marks notes, words are commonplace when visual meanings are complex and nonrepresentational: “Words suture the work together in the absence of a stable, informative image …” (Marks, 2000, p. xv). I write and record a voiceover on my phone. I speak about Arnett and his connection to me, trying to break from a fact-only documentary-style voiceover. But as soon as I lay it on the edit track, I hate it. It turns the work into history, a televisual fragment. The poetics are gone. There is both more and less. It’s a striking example of how powerfully sound changes how we view images. Each misstep takes me closer to knowing what I want and don’t want – Haseman and Mafe’s chaos in action! I do know that I want people to watch the piece and experience something of the longing I feel when I look at these images. I look at Bruce Nauman’s lithograph Pay Attention (1973) with the text “PAY ATTENTION MOTHER FUCKERS” writ large and backwards. It works to slow our easy almost-not-thinking assimilation of meaning. So how to insert more meaning without giving too much?
Jon suggests I record a song as the soundtrack. This idea immediately appeals to me. A song is a story but one more rich in emotion, poetical. It can potentially deliver information while evoking emotion. Writing and recording a song is also unlike anything I have done before in my film work. I research and find several pieces of music that are out of copyright, and of Victorian or late-Victorian era. My brother-in-law plays them for me and I record them to help me make a choice. I choose “Davy Lowston”, a melancholy ballad written about sealers abandoned in Open Bay, Southland, in 1810, and I write new lyrics. Lyrics are more poetry than information; I’m forced to distil what I want to say.[3] I practise repeatedly at home. Although I have had music lessons and sing in a choir, I am an amateur. I’m certainly vulnerable here, in true autoethnography fashion. I record the song in a professional studio with my brother-in-law accompanying me on the piano. We there decide together that speaking rather than singing the fourth verse works really well for breaking up the song. The experience is frightening and exhilarating.
The song and my voice are far from perfect but when laid down with the landscapes and maps, the piece works in a more rich and complex way. In its imperfection, the work has become more fully human. The song is less literal than the voiceover but retains context. More importantly, there is feeling. I can see in retrospect how powerfully the song can bridge fact and fiction – a fruitful place.
A colleague sees the work and emails me, “I have about a million questions about the land, the maps, composing your own period song (!!) and what that’s based on, and especially the tone and sense of loss that I perceived in the piece”.[4] Is this “sense of loss” enough of a ghosting? Perhaps. I know that I cannot say with any authority how my work will be received because as Goddard writes: “[T]the meanings produced by sounds and images can never be assured … they are in a process of constant oscillation between the audience and the screen” (Goddard, 2007, p. 119). I feel if there is some of the complexities of John Arnett’s story in my work, and his story’s deep connection to me, then I have achieved something.
Old endings, new beginnings
Through making and ultimately exhibiting John Arnett – Five Properties, I have brought out of obscurity a unique history and created “a form of cultural memory, providing a form through which personal memories are shared, historical narratives are questioned, and memory is claimed” (Sturken, 1996, p. 8). In telling Arnett’s story I have also inserted myself into his history and claimed my place. No matter the outcome of the work, this is a powerful thing for me. I have been speaking with ghosts. Holloway and Kneale remind me that the experience of attempting to conjure the spectre is powerful: “the ghost then, in its spatial multiplicity and indeterminacy, … make[s] us (and our apprehensions) more alive … Hesitancy and imponderability, excess and ineffability – going ghost hunting offers the potential and opportunity for newly charged lines of thought and enchanted modes of apprehension” (Holloway & Kneale, 2008, p. 309). By making the work with a conscious desire to insert the ghosts, I have deepened my understanding of what it means to have a creative research practice. I have also become more confident in my ability to shoot first and question/make meaning later and deepened my understanding of the complex relationships between image and sound.
Travelling to Riverton/Aparima was part of my roots journey. But lost belongings are not just found. Rather, the actions of searching and making are what constitute belonging – “seizing the past involves not so much finding a ground as piecing one together, a process that is more material than intellectual, an active (re)inhabiting of events in order to lay claim to them (and in this sense to ‘own’ them)” (Yngvesson, 2003, p. 13). The act of making work is reparative and can even replace memories (or absence of memories) of a place. As Chris Marker says of Sans Soliel, “I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images that I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory” (Chris Marker in Sturken, 1996, p. 1). Through the experience of filming in Riverton/Aparima, I have my own memory now. The space has become place. I have written it on and in myself.
The short documentary John Arnett – Five Properties can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/249753718.
[1] From Stats NZ available at archive.stats.govt.nz/infoshare/ViewTable.aspx?pxID=2bc5a6bd-4b91-41cf-871a-483d9d9cc20a accessed 6 April 2018.
[2] The wonderful teacher in Media and Communications at RMIT University, Paul Ritchard.
[3] My lyrics state that Arnett leaves five properties and seven children. This is because there were seven children listed on the Ngāi Tahu whakapapa I was given twenty years ago. After recording the song, I subsequently learnt about Frederick Arnett, the eighth child, who was missing from the official whakapapa. Frederick died the year after John, his father, and he was childless. This is perhaps the reason for his absence, which is now amended. A great example of the gaps in history!
[4] Nic Low, personal correspondence, received 2 March 2018.
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Biography
Christine Rogers is a writer and filmmaker. Her recent work includes writing and directing the feature film I am Evangeline starring Georgia Flood (screened MUFF, STUFF and FICSUR). She has multiple screen credits in short drama, educational film and digital stories, which have screened at local and international festivals. Her non-fiction writing has been published in the Herald Sun and a number of popular blogs. Christine also creates web content for Briarbird.com. She is currently undertaking a creative practice PhD at RMIT University, where she is the recipient of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.