From Myths and Legends of the Ancient Pākehā and Three Women - expected 2024 

It seems important to me that Pākehā should sing to Māori. They are waiting to meet our ghosts. We have too often brought them our here and now, our worlds of business and bottom lines, our getting on with it, and not our gaps. Māori have taught me that to show no doubt about what one thinks is a great ignorance, and songs are a way of shaking. If we do not sing them we remain less sure.

It was by looking at the Māori oral poem more closely that I came to ask what it is that a Pākehā oral poem might sound like. And whether it is capable of holding the same power that Māori oral poetry seems to. Might a sea-shanty meet the energy of a haka? Can a hymn stand up to a mōteatea? To find out I went back to the ways that sung English poetry first arrived in New Zealand: via sea-shanty and hymn, lullaby and nursery rhyme, work song, clapping song and skipping song. I also went back to what has often been the concern of oral poems, our histories.

It seemed to me at times growing up that Pākehā stories were somehow less powerful or soulful than those of other cultures, but working on these poems has made me realise that this was largely my failure to appreciate what was always waiting to be seen. At the end of singing my heart out I am left with the realisation that there are many volumes of Pākehātanga left unsung. A lifetime of singing would do little more than scratch their surface.

I should say also that I have very purposely written about our shortcomings and failures as Pākehā. We are as much in our defeats as in our victories. It seems to me the ultimate mark of respect for a society is to mark what we have got wrong and what we do not wish to repeat. These memorials should dot our wayside and warn that we are capable of forgetting and a lack of generosity. I sing of them because the broken and incomplete often seems more beautiful to me than that which is bright and shining.