Physical Places

The next three chapters are all about place. Start by taking a look at the Pukeahu website: it's a wonderful ‘place-based anthology of waiata, poems, essays and fiction about Pukeahu/Mt Cook’, in Wellington. The book makes reference to Christchurch and the changing relationship with the city that many Cantabrians experienced post-earthquake. Quake Stories is a government-sponsored website that serves as a repository for people's experiences of that time.

Music often conveys an appreciation of place. Try listening to Front Lawn's Tomorrow Night, which is very much about place: the Hutt Valley, Wellington, ‘on the Underground she'd ride, talking loud in a Kiwi accent’ and the connection to home, irrespective of where you might be living at any given time.

There are plenty of advertisements that evoke a sense of place and connection to Aotearoa New Zealand. The series of Speights ads do a particularly good job of this.

On the subject of ads, and their evocation of places and spaces, watch this most famous of Bank of New Zealand commercials which manages to shamelessly tap into feelings of New Zealand identity, even though most of us don't own a family bach! On the same page there's an interview with Len Potts, the advertising executive behind those BNZ ads, on what being a New Zealander means to him.