Feel the history

Interview: Jacqui Gibson Imagery: Mike Heydon

For author and historian Helen Beaglehole, learning from the past is key to caring for the future of special places like the Marlborough Sounds kaitiakitanga: guardianship and protection pou whenua: post markers of ownership shop.heritage.org.nz

A fond memory I have of the Marlborough Sounds is swimming at Meretoto Ship Cove. I recall drifting near a heron standing in the shallows, its delicate grey feathers and chest markings almost within reach. A few nights later, while boating, I saw dolphins swimming, their bodies outlined by phosphorescence.

I first went to the Sounds in 1977 on a stormy sailing trip from Wellington with my husband Tim and our three children. The kids and I were seasick, but the sun finally came out when we reached the sheltered waters of Tory Channel. That trip began what was a 40-year exploration of the Sounds as a couple and with family and friends.

The natural beauty and charm of the Sounds immediately drew us in. We loved its bays, its walking and cycling tracks and landmarks like the Perano Whaling Station and, in more recent times, the carved pou whenua by Reg Thompsett (Tainui, Ngāti Maniapoto) depicting Kupe at Meretoto Ship Cove.

Over the nine years of writing my latest book, the details of its history drew me in too. Life in the Sounds has played out in complex ways. You have the interplay and tensions of Māori and Pākehā, of land and sea, and of the boom and bust of industries such as farming, fishing, aquaculture, mining, milling and, most recently, forestry.

In researching my book, I found the Marlborough Sounds to be a place that’s been overdeveloped and environmentally exploited over time, particularly as European settlement got underway. I hope we can learn from what’s happened in the past and turn our minds to the future, and to caring for this special place. How to do that? I think we have to go beyond contemporary environmental concerns and engage with the area’s Māori history, heritage and custodial relationship with the land expressed through concepts like kaitiakitanga. In the Sounds, these things have been invisible for too long. New Zealanders, to me, need to know about and understand them so that, as historian and author Dr Rachel Buchanan says, we can all “feel the history of the places [we] call home”.

An historian and former children’s book author, Helen Beaglehole has written histories of New Zealand’s coastal lighthouse system and rural firefighting in New Zealand. Her latest book, One Hundred Havens: The Settlement of the Marlborough Sounds looks at the history of settlement in the Sounds. It was published by Massey University Press last year.