Tea and biscuits and pieces of the past

When I was working in the early stages of my Master’s project, I took a collection of voice recordings from a guided conversation between my mum and her sister, about their remembered childhood at Waitai, on D’Urville Island. Something mum said changed the direction of my enquiry, from being specifically about inherited history, to something much more fluid. She said, in reference to the feud that broke the Moleta family into two, ‘Family folklore can warp and change with the telling’. It shook me, for its absolutely liberating truth.