Rīpoinga

FEATURE | ISSUE THREE | WHENUA Written by Elise Sadlier (she/her) | @elise_sadlier | Contributing Writer Illustration by Skye Lunson-Storey (she/they/ia) | @uku_rangi

E tōku Whenua, 

Do you hold a place for me still? 

My ancestors are pressed into the soft moss of the Mangaoporo Valley

I circle home like the Kārearea always swooping, never landing

It is the east

and you are the sun. 

I spent a month of my summer this year at home, in Gisborne. While I was there, my friend, Te-Amo — a wanderer inconveniently without a vehicle of her own — had hitched a ride to Te Araroa with her sister. My father and I would drive up the coast to collect her. I had meant to go anyway. Going to Gisborne feels like a waste if you don’t venture up further. For me, it settles something. There is a displacement when you are without a single kainga. 

I am splintered; My body is in Tamaki

My heart is in Gisborne

My Wairua is in Te Tairāwhiti. 

We fuelled up and pressed on through Okitū and around the coast, where the lip of the road overhangs the sea. The sky was grey, as it so often is.

Past Tolaga Bay, where single lane bridges descend into the hills, and the road is swallowed up by farmland and bush, blackberries and gorse. Rugged horses chew at the bracken and ferns behind haphazard fences. 

State Highway 35 is the spine of the Coast, rivers branching like nerves in search of potholes. Cyclone Gabrielle has scarred the land, whole chunks of road, bridges and land swept out and reduced to slash.

We stop at Tokomaru Bay and steal the last remaining Pāua Pies. It burns my lips because I refuse to wait. The five peaks greet us as we continue — Hikurangi with her head in the clouds. 

Our first stop is my grandfather’s whenua, in the riu of the Mangaoporo, backing on to the river. 

While we’ve been gone, it’s grown wild. 

I never met my grandfather, but I know that this is his whenua. I see him in the buttery yellows and deep reds of the paint, I recognise him in the joints and the boards he laid. And I know that my green-thumbed grandmother has been here too, because all the plants have grown so fiercely — even the weeds.

 The bright blue bach is hidden now among the grasses.“Ah, your grandfather,” my father says. 

His voice wavers a little. Between his words I hear the wind, the rustling of the pines, and the distance we’ve grown apart - empty worlds suspended in the space we never bridged. We were never really rooted here to begin with.

E mokopuna 

It says 

There is work to be done. 

I squeeze my father’s hand and reassure him that we will come back with a weed eater when I’m home next. Stay a few days if we need to. 

Tinātoka Marae sits just across the road. We wander through, peering through the lapis and jewel-toned glass of the Church, then climb the hill to the Urupā. As a child, I thought Marae and Urupā - especially old ones - were haunted. 

The notion that someone’s spirit lingers in a place feels more comforting to me now. Why fear the ghosts of those who could only have ever loved you? Your tīpuna would never wish any harm upon you. I imagine them haunting me sweetly; blowing on a cup of tea, brushing an eyelash off my cheek. 

My father wants to show me St Mary’s in Tikitiki. We obsess over the carvings, the kōwhaiwhai and the stained glass. The steady interweaving of Toi Māori and Catholic Imagery. Two Māori Battalion Soldiers wrought in lead and glass kneel with their rifles propped. Ihu Karaiti is almost peaceful in his anguish; eyes closed at the moment he gave up the ghost. My father points out the names of my C Company Great-Uncles. 

Just outside of Tikitiki is the land where my Grandmother grew up. I haven’t been there yet. On the hill overlooking a brook are three brick chimneys. My father tells me that they are all that remain of the house that my grandmother grew up in.

“If you scratch the ground,”

 he says 

“You’ll probably find a bottle of top-shelf liquor.”

I sit on the fallen chimney, looking out over the land under the shade of a magnolia tree.  Presumably, peacocks roam these hills.  The trees sing with a choir of cicadas. I feel like I hold a cicada in my throat; chirping in my clenched jaw. I am overcome by the sheer volume of time. I think of lives lived and unlived, of the children who gathered by these fires, who waded in this stream. I wish that I could have heard my Grandmother’s stories about this place, which I had thought to ask when I was younger.

Nostalgia for a time that wasn’t mine, 

a time that could’ve been, 

a time that could be still.

It could be still, and I could be ahikā stoking the fires and I could build a house around these chimneys and I could toast apples at the hearth and I could cut through all the weeds at my grandfather’s bach, and maybe the orchard and the beehives will spring to life again after what has been a long and hard winter. My sentimentality hangs heavy as a pounamu. I want to hoard these things, to keep them close to my chest, but they are slipping through my fingers. 

I am too late I am too early I am right on time. 

We eat our lunch by the stream, skimming stones. Catharsis hits and I am content to sit in the soft light of the glade beside my father. 

We head back towards home, with Te-Amo in tow. My father tells her stories but mostly we look out the window as the greenery and the hills envelop us. We stop at St Mary’s again, pointing out each landmark we’ve visited.

“Wow, Elise,”

she says. 

“Your home is so beautiful.”

I look at it with new eyes. 

Yes, yes it is.