The journey to 99 Albany Street begins at Broad Bay, on the Otago Peninsula near the city of Dunedin. A huddle of houses sits beside a wide sweep of coastline, a broad scoop indeed of a peaceful sea. Its name, in the time of first settlement by Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe and Waitaha, was Whakaohorahi, a place where food, including kaimoana and tī kōuka or cabbage tree, was gathered. Many hapū lived near the harbour and its estuaries, enjoying a hunting and gathering lifestyle. The peninsula’s early name, and of the surrounding area, was Muaūpoko, and the main village was Ōtākou. In the 1830s, whalers and sealers from Australia arrived on its shores and, it is said, began referring to the area as Otago. This name was adopted by European farmers when they arrived in the 1850s. Meanwhile, historic Ōtākou Marae, near the harbour mouth, was one of the places where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840. Those who signed were descended from ancestors of all three tribes.
The main settlers had come from Scotland, buying into Wakefield’s New Zealand Company scheme. The name of Dunedin is from the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh: Dùn Èideann. The bay became a shipping destination too. William Larnach used it to land materials required for building his famous castle further along the peninsula.
And for a while, in the Edwardian era, Broad Bay became known as a seaside resort. Seasonal regattas were held, newly wealthy town dwellers built pretty villas on the hill above, more informal cottages called ‘cribs’ were set up as holiday homes.
I stayed in a seaside cottage in the spring of 2021. It’s called the Caselberg Cottage, after the previous owners, John and Anna, a writer and artist. They had wanted their home to become a retreat for artists like themselves, and it was acquired by a group of people who wanted to turn that dream into a reality. Before the Caselbergs, it had been owned by Charles Brasch, the founding editor of the literary periodical Landfall. I am one of a long line of writers who have inhabited this space, surely among the quietest places on earth. The garden overlooks a shaft of the sea, revealed between sentinel trees. I figure the trees have been there a long time. One of the oak trees has epiphytes growing on its branches, air plants sustained by its host, like Tāne Mahuta, the giant kauri tree in the north. Below lies the beach, steps cut in the bank to the rocky shore. In the evenings, I sat at a small table in the garden, drank a glass of wine, watched the bird life on the water, listened to the sound of my own breathing, counted the rhythms of my heart.
Each morning, I climbed a hill, and set off for the bus stop by the boatsheds. I passed other cottages transformed into chic houses, surrounded by vegetable-rich gardens; a place that looked like a latter-day hippie commune; a courtyard furnished by a table circled by eight large empty black chairs, as if a meeting were about to take place; the turn-off to a cemetery on a headland of bare earth dried by sun and sea winds, graveyard to Scots and Irish settlers. I boarded a bus that wound around the long coastline until I came to the city and made my way to a small redbrick building at 99 Albany Street.
99 Albany Street is home to the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies (CISS) at Otago University. Earlier in the year, I was invited by Professor Sonja Tiernan and the department to be the inaugural Irish Studies Writing Fellow, and my tenure was to have lasted some months. In this season of Covid-19, and now of its rapidly moving Delta mutation, this was a truncated attempt to capture what might have been.
The room that I occupied was number 103, up two flights of stairs. The interior of the building is very blue – dark-blue carpet on the treads of the stairwell, doors painted ink-blue with black frames – though the door handles are brass. Some rooms are tucked into hidden spaces, with tongue-and-groove match lining. My room is one of the larger ones, my name on a plaque beneath that of the crime writer Professor Val McDermid, who was the Scottish Writing Fellow earlier on. The plan is to alternate the fellowships year by year. With me, you have two for the price of one, I joked, drawing on my dual heritage: the Sottish mother, the Irish father.
In order to be offered the fellowship one must have some Irish connection. True, I had written a novel about Albert Black, the Irish boy in This Mortal Boy, but that’s not enough to cut it. It’s because of my father that I arrived in this room. That mysterious figure I keep circling back to. If anyone has followed these narratives, they will have seen his uneasy presence throughout them.
I came to my father late, but then many women do. That is, I came to the point where I wanted to understand him better. It’s strange the way fathers become kinder people with the long lens of hindsight. Mine was the one who dreamed seemingly impossible dreams, or, if he achieved them, let them go, like mercury in a bottle. Like the long-dreamed-of farm that he abandoned so quickly once it had been acquired. He had roamed the world for a long time before I was born. In San Francisco, he had sung in light opera and been engaged to a girl called Sybella; in Vancouver, he had jumped ship, and been saved from prison by his Irish uncles, who had emigrated to Canada and become Mounties; in Perth, he had waited on the railway station for my mother to cross the Nullarbor Plain and marry him. He had worn a Donegal tweed jacket and a tie, in spite of the heat, my mother told me. He would wash up with her in New Zealand, a country he never particularly liked, and never left after my birth. By the time that we lived permanently under the same roof, nearly six years and a world war later, he had become the delicate, sad person I never really understood, nor I believe did he me.
I have wondered from time to time what his original accent really sounded like. Although he had been born in Middlesbrough, and spent much of his childhood in Bandon, County Cork, he spoke what I recognised later as BBC received English, a cultivated voice with taut vowels. It was his wish that I learned to speak with his accent, to know ‘the King’s English’. To speak ‘properly’. He sent up the way children I went to school with spoke, imitating them with exaggerated nasal noises. His mission was to transform my voice into that of a well-educated British schoolgirl and, when I spoke, he would often stop me in order to correct my pronunciation. Sometimes I would say, But did you hear what I said, not how I said it? Or did I say this under my breath? Or perhaps in my head, for I can’t remember ever getting a response to this question.
He did other things, too. Like deciding to go off and wash his jerseys when my mother’s brothers and sisters paid a Sunday afternoon visit.
Or refusing to have a car, even though we lived miles from anywhere.
Or, when I was a teenager, not allowing us to have a telephone in the house.
Most of all, not to have a Kiwi accent within earshot at the dinner table.
But, without him, I wouldn’t have made it to Room 103.
Without his Irish DNA.
What did I do in Room 103? People asked me what my project was. Well, nobody ever asked me to have a project when I became the Irish Studies Fellow, and for this I give great thanks. Writers, and artists of most callings, have to account for themselves these days before they get any support at all. Tell us what you will write, the people holding the purse strings say. Allow us to decide how worthwhile this project of yours will be, let us monitor you, measure your creativity, and then we will think about whether you get these funds that we will proceed to audit with care. Never mind the desperation that has driven one to write an application based on any wild scheme that may be impossible to fulfil, once faced with computer and the blank space beyond. No. The Irish Studies people said just come along, and be a little with us. I love them for it. Which is not to say that I had nothing in mind.
I had had earlier close encounters with the department. The Scottish co-chair and professor, Liam McIlvanney, is a crime writer, and his brain-child was the Celtic Noir Festival, to which he had invited me two years earlier. It was there I’d first met Val McDermid, and Liz Nugent from Dublin, and Vanda Symon, the Dunedin crime writer. I’d been ushered into the dark halls of crime writing via This Mortal Boy after it won a prize for being the best crime novel of the year it came out. That still surprises me. I hadn’t thought much about the crime when I wrote it, more about a young man’s bad timing and misfortune. The book was never a whodunnit. It tells you what the crime is alleged to be from the first page, and what is going to happen to the perpetrator is writ loud. Yet, secretly, I was proud, because lurking in my short stories there is quite a lot of crime and problems to be solved. People have a habit of disappearing in mysterious circumstances, often near rivers. Crimes are hidden for generations in my stories and, in the end, nobody gets called to account, which I think is often how life is.
Anyway, I’d also met the writer Emer Lyons, who works in the department, and our first encounter had its own surprises. She is quintessential Irish, wide green eyes, red-blonde hair, a manner as lively as a dancer. Where is your home town? I asked her, to which she replied Bandon, County Cork.
And when I said, well, that is where my granny came from too, she asked the next question of me. Where in Bandon?
St Patrick’s Quay.
That is where I grew up, she told me then.
So, there was already a feeling of homecoming when I arrived at Room 103, some innate sense of belonging. In association with the Embassy of Ireland, Sonja had conducted a survey the year before, mapping the Irish community and people of Irish heritage in Aotearoa New Zealand. There is an estimate, based on this research, that suggests some six-hundred-thousand people fit this description. I had never been alone, I just hadn’t seen it. Nor, I guess, had my dad, but then this Irishness was not borne with distinction when he came here. Neither had it been a badge of honour when Albert Black arrived. There has been a steady influx of skilled Irish workers arriving in the country since 2000. The face of the diaspora has changed.
The Embassy of Ireland was established in Wellington in 2017 by Ambassador Peter Ryan. One of the things that I have noticed at gatherings he and his wife Theresa host is the diverse range of people they ask along: people from every walk of life, there is little sense of a formal diplomatic function. And the ambassador associates closely with Māori culture. In his company, New Zealanders are acknowledged as a mixture of people, and the embassy provides a natural meeting ground.
I thought about this a great deal during my time in Dunedin. It was never my project, but what I spent a fair bit of time doing in Room 103 was re-reading a play by the Irish playwright Brian Friel, called Translations. Peter Ryan had given me a copy of it. I wondered at first why he had given it to me, but as soon as I began to read I was struck by parallels between the colonisation of Ireland by the British and of Aotearoa, the way language had robbed the land, in each case, of its true meaning and identity. At almost exactly the same time as the sealers and whalers were arriving on the Ōtākou peninsula, in Ireland, the British were replacing Irish law and language.
I knew my Synge and Behan and Beckett and some other of the twentieth century Irish playwrights. But, somehow, I was not aware of Friel, who has been described — I’ve heard since — as the ‘Irish Chekhov’. Translations is simply one of the best plays I’ve come across in a long time. I need to explain here why that is: the play is set in 1833 in County Donegal in a hedge school, one of the small illegal schools set up to teach children from faiths that didn’t conform with the governing Anglicans (in other words, Catholics or Presbyterians). A young teacher is coaxing a girl with speech difficulties to speak; straight away we recognise the constraints of language, the necessity to have a voice if we are to survive in the world. Manus, the teacher, is the son of Hugh, the master (Hugh, by the way, was my father’s name). The audience is given to understand that the language spoken is Irish Gaelic, though the play is primarily written in English. Few of those assembled speak English, although Greek and Latin are taught and some of the cast are fluent speakers of these languages, too.
Manus is poor, like everyone there, but he dreams of marrying Máire. Close by, a detachment of the Royal Engineers has camped. Their job in Ireland is to make an Ordnance Survey, in other words to map the country for the benefit of the English government. In order to do this, they need the Gaelic place names to be recorded in an English version. Their surprise translator is Hugh’s older son and Manus’s brother, Owen, who has been absent a fair while and is now fluent in both languages. He comes upon the gathering of students and masters.
Manus asks his brother if he has enlisted, to which Owen replies: ‘Me a soldier? I’m employed as a part time, underpaid, civilian interpreter. My job is to translate the quaint archaic tongue you people persist in speaking into the King’s good English.’
And you can see how things will go downhill from there. The man in charge of the military detachment is starchy and self-opinionated Captain Lancey. He arrives accompanied by a lieutenant called Yolland. Yolland’s job will be to enter the new names of every hill, stream, rock, every piece of ground in a Name Book. Owen’s function is to pronounce each name in Irish and then provide the English translation. Lancey sets out to explain what is going to happen – a ‘general triangulation which will embrace detailed hydrographic and topographic information which will be executed on a scale of six inches to the English mile’. He looks to Owen to interpret.
Owen says easily, ‘A new map is being made of the whole country.’
Later, Manus will say to his brother, but you didn’t translate everything.
So the days roll on, and Croc Ban, which means Fair Hill, becomes Knockban, and Bun na hAbhann, which literally means the mouth of the river, somehow becomes Burnfoot, and a ridge called Druim Dubh becomes mixed up with the name of the place they named the day before.
But even as the landscape takes on new meanings, Yolland is being drawn in and tempted by an Ireland that appears more appealing than his life in England. His eyes have turned with yearning towards Máire, and he wants to learn Irish. He says longingly, ‘Even if I did speak Irish I’d always be an outsider here, wouldn’t I. I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won’t it? The private core will always be … hermetic, won’t it?’
It’s Hugh, the father, who tells the lieutenant that Irish is a rich language, full of mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception — a syntax opulent with tomorrows.
But the warning is not enough. Yolland will pay for his fantasies with his life, and in return Lancey will see that the village pays with their homes and their livelihoods.
And so, I see that some histories are universal. Wars happen, people are pulled apart from one another, land is lost because of words and the way they can be misinterpreted. I see how a people can be colonised by language. Inevitably, I look to the way that Aotearoa New Zealand’s history was rewritten from the time that settlers renamed it. I may be from settler stock on one frontier, but I see what language does to strip people of their identity; it’s similar to the way people of different cultures change their names in order to blend with what they perceive as the common voice, usually through anglicisation. I live in a village suburb known as Hataitai in the city of Wellington. But once I might have said that I lived in Whātaitai, named after one of the taniwha that is said to have created the harbour of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, otherwise The Great Harbour of Tara, and all of these old words are beautiful to say. The W has been dropped from Hataitai, and even if it were still spelled in its original version, the area referred to then is situated some kilometres away from here. As for Wellington, named by the New Zealand Company, it reflects the Duke of Wellington, the victor at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. This seems utterly irrelevant in terms of our harbour.
As for the stretch of water that I overlook, it’s called Cook Strait, after the English explorer Captain Cook, but Māori know it as Te Moana-o-Raukawa. Many places were named by Captain Cook; perhaps you can’t blame him for this, he didn’t know what to call places he saw for the first time and, like the Royal Engineers who couldn’t get their tongues around the Gaelic words, te reo Māori might have been just too difficult. Some of Cook’s names have a sting — he called Te Kauwae-a-Māui Cape Kidnappers, following an altercation with a local tribe member. Who knows what part language may have had to play?
For that matter, my father hero-worshipped Cook and, stripped away of its romanticism, his own cloudy past reveals some uncomfortable truths, including his family’s association with the Royal Irish Constabulary, set up to police hedge schools. His accent and insistence on the King’s English mark him out as descending from a position of authority, although that was not apparent in the life that he led in this country. It was not until I read Friel’s play that I made this connection between the RIC and hedge schools. But perhaps I should acknowledge that in the English that I speak, I may have inadvertently inherited some of that long-ago privilege.
What we need when we learn a language are also the words that heal. We cannot undo the past, but in confronting it we have the opportunity to do better; in particular, to listen with respect to the languages that others speak. If learning correct English was painful for me as a child, I better understand how difficult it must be for those new to Aotearoa, speaking a different language, who must start from the beginning.
I do not speak te reo, although its vocabulary cross-references into my everyday conversations. But I have listened to the language for almost as long as I can remember, its rhythms and cadences familiar. Ian, my husband, spoke it as a young child when he lived with his grandparents in the King Country, but then lost it when he started school, where Māori was not allowed to be spoken. He felt this loss, and yet it was never really gone, lying dormant in hidden parts of his memory, suddenly appearing when neither he nor his listeners expected it. I remember his shy startled look when it crept up on him like that. While I lay no claim to the language, I believe that restoring it to its rightful place is essential to our collective understanding of who we are. In Translations, Hugh the father says, towards the end of the play, that ‘it is not the literal past, the “facts” of history that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language … We must never cease renewing those images, because once we do, we fossilise.’
Which brings me back with sorrow and some regret to Hugh, my own father. I wish we had understood each other better. I wanted his physical presence and his affection in a way that was hard for him to show, and I think now I may have hardened towards him. He had lost the power of speech on his deathbed. It was a late move, but I told him I loved him and gave him the little notebook and pencil he was using to communicate. He wrote in shadowy lettering ‘Nothing to say’. Perhaps he could have added the word ‘more’— nothing more to say. If I thought at the time that language had failed us both, I think now that I was wrong. In some ways, my father had little, but what he had, he wanted to give me, his gift the power to speak with eloquence when it was demanded of me. To understand and articulate the language I was given. It has taken me further than either of us imagined. This was the best he could do and, in turning to look back over my shoulder, I see that he gave me a richness in my being.
But sometimes when I listen to Gaelic-speaking friends, I will hear a sudden familiar note, a timbre, and find myself wondering what else my father knew.
These are some of the things I thought about in Room 103. I didn’t do much else.
The door to Room 103 at 99 Albany Street, Dunedin, 2021.