Questions of Identity
Book Review
This Pākehā Life: an unsettled memoir
by Alison Jones (Bridget Williams Books, 2020) $39.99
Reviewed by Lindsay Shelton
I have been recommending this book to everyone. And those who have accepted my recommendation are now recommending it to others. Its story may at first seem to be a modestly low-key one, but it quickly proves to have a powerful impact, with resonances that will be personal for every reader.
As Alison Jones writes: “Most Pākehā people seemed to know nothing about Māori history, and they did not know what they did not even know. In my experience, Pākehā people like my father who denigrated Māori things knew nothing about Māori. On the other hand, I too knew next to nothing about Māori though my ignorance was tempered by curiosity and attraction rather than rejection and fear.”
The author, a professor in Te Puna Wānanga at the School of Māori and Indigenous Education at the University of Auckland, tells a moving personal story that begins with her birth in Cornwall Park Hospital in 1953 — “with no relatives here, my parents and I were alone in New Zealand.” Her parents were immigrants from England, who had arrived the previous year.
From her hospital bed, her mother looked out at One Tree Hill, without knowing that the “volcanic cone, rising high amongst all the other remnant volcanoes in the Auckland area, has another name, another history, and another identity.”
And now, “it officially has a doubled name, joined by a slash. It is Maungakiekie/One Tree Hill. The slash marks an ongoing tension: the mountain’s identity remains unsettled.” And she tells us: “The stories of Maungakiekie and One Tree Hill, the histories that call those places into being, are quite different.”