Ngā Ripo Wai | Swirling Waters: A Kerikeri Anthology

Kororipo Pā faces Stone Store

across an inlet fringed with northern trees

history looks different here …

This multi-genre anthology in te reo Māori and English explores the uneven terrain of Kerikeri and its history, from the pā to the store, from the warrior to the gardener, from the chainmail coat to the black singlet to the Māori Battalion tie-pin, from the orchards to the river banks, from the airport to the Old Packhouse Market and the galleries. Here is a beautiful, undulating landscape of poems, ultra-short stories, interviews and histories from writers with a Kerikeri connection, including Glenn Colquhoun, Fiona Kidman, Piet Nieuwland, Vivienne Plumb, Vaughan Rapatahana, Briar Wood and others. Here are fascinating strata of love and loss, community and tensions, nature and settlement. Here are the floods, the mountains, the dusty roads, the turbulent waters of the basin, the views from near and far. Here is Kerikeri, New Zealand’s longest continually occupied joint Māori–European settlement.

ko te ārautanga

o tōku herenga

he ātarangi

tomorrow’s sunshine

is my reward

for yesterday’s shadows

“Ngā Ripo Wai | Swirling Waters: a Kerikeri Anthology is a word painting of this place as it was and as it is now. Is Kerikeri a settled place? Yes and no. That tension is what makes this anthology so much fun to read and so worthwhile to think about.” 

—Lynn Jenner

This commendable anthology … attempts to do justice to the many facets of Kerikeri, and in general achieves that aim. It digs much deeper than the tourist-friendly establishments … As Lynne Hill’s untitled poem says: “history looks different here”.…One of the most attractive features of the anthology is the wide variety of contributors.… Dallon August’s beautiful cover artwork of a landscape with pou, shrouded in a mist that evokes the living presence of history and the need to make things clear sets the tone perfectly.

—North & South magazine