This is going to hurt
“The New Zealand Wars have left a huge legacy. Once you know these histories, you’ve opened the box of memories and you can’t ever unknow them.” — Professor Joanna Kidman.
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Author: Joanna Kidman
‘I follow the trail of blood’
“In these fields, the tūpuna lie where they fell in the swamps or in unmarked graves hastily dug by survivors, with the dead piled up around them. I swear I can sometimes hear their voices.” — Joanna Kidman.
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‘I’m still a mum, aren’t I?’
“We were the last mothers of that generation. The last to go through before the cradle-to-grave welfare state came crashing down around us. After that, single mothers were further stigmatised — and life got much harder.”
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Princesses — and the sanitising of British history
“For many Māori girls who grew up in Rotorua during the 1960s, the guides were our heroes. Our superwomen. Our warrior princesses.”
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The Great Silence — the heartbreak of losing te reo
In the opening sequence of the cult classic The Great Silence, the cowboy — a lone figure on a...
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Joanna Kidman: Reaping our own strange and bitter harvest
Last week, I was at home finishing off a paper for a conference when I heard a hacking smoker’s...
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Joanna Kidman: Should we destroy the monuments of our colonial past?
Not long ago, a group of graduate students had an impassioned discussion about an obelisk. It was...
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