Online anthology explores Pukeahu/Mt Cook

A collaboration between staff and students from colleges across Massey University’s Wellington campus has led to the launch of an online anthology exploring its location in the suburb of Mt Cook.

Pukeahu is the name given by Ngāi Tara to the small hill in Wellington that rises between the Waitangi and Waimapihi streams. Since the mid 19th century it has also at various times been the location of a prison where men from Parihaka and later conscientious objectors during World War I were confined, an early police station, an army barracks, the Dominion Museum and National Art Gallery, the National War Memorial, Wellington High School, Wellington Polytechnic and after its merger, Massey University.

More recently it has become the site of the new Pukeahu National War Memorial Park, opened on the centennial Anzac Day 2015.

All of that history, the area’s topography and the inhabitants stories are part of Pukeahu: An Exploratory Anthology, which includes work from staff and students from the College of Creative Arts and College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Senior lecturer Dr Ingrid Horrocks who teaches a third year creative non-fiction paper, says the anthology also mines the work of some of New Zealand’s most renowned writers such as Katherine Mansfield, Robin Hyde and Witi Ihimaera.

“By assembling a collection of voices and stories we wanted to evoke a sense of one particular place as mobile and living, and of the unsettled imaginaries of those who have moved through it.”

This objective was realised by a Pukeahu project research team who were not just content to include extracts to form the anthology but brought the collection alive by traversing Mt Cook’s steep streets and exploring its colourful history themselves.

Two creative non-fiction students, Lena Fransham and Thomas Aitken and design student Rosie Percival, collaborated with Dr Horrocks and writer Lynn Davidson, (then completing a creative writing PhD), to develop the final work.

The wider project, which includes an archaeological report on the site, is led by Associate Professor Robin Peace from the School of People, Environment and Planning, who was also instrumental in making connections to the area’s evolution and history as well as contributing a poem to the anthology.

The online publication is divided into sections that reflect different experiences undergone in the Pukeahu/Mt Cook environment. These include titles such as Embodied Archaeologies, Contesting Histories, Confinement and Inhabiting Pukeahu.

“We anticipate that Pukeahu: An Exploratory Anthology will evolve and grow as new students and new readers and writers get to explore Pukeahu/Mt Cook and find other stories, poems, art and articles to add to this opening conversation,” Ms Davidson says.

ENDS

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