Transcript
ROB HACK: Well I lived for six years as a boy on Niue Island but I haven't actually spent a lot of time in Rarotonga recently. I've been there three times in the last ten years and back to Niue twice but I intend, well I hope, to go back again next year but not a lot of time. I've really done a lot of going back to find out and really just trace my roots I guess.
DOMINIC GODFREY: So where are your roots? What islands are you from? You make reference a lot to the Cooks and to Niue.
RH: My mother was from Rarotonga and I reference her parents. Mum's mother was from Manihiki which is in the Northern Cooks and her father was from Mauke which is in the Southern Cooks. I went there last year actually, in the middle of last year. Haven't been to Manihiki yet.
DG: Very few people get up to the northern islands really.
RH: It's incredibly expensive and I've got other places to visit as well even around this place. The last remaining Niuean contacts and Raro people as well, they are slowly slipping away. I started writing this because of the fact that mum's memory was going. In the year 2000 I moved in for four years with her, which was a pretty big step at the age of 48 and I'm so glad I did because I started to realise I've got to ask her about her early days on Raro because there was no records, nothing anywhere. This is basically how I started to record her early stories.
Music under poetry...
"Work hard, go to church, save your money
an' you can sen' some to here... if you wan'?
Fine a Cook Islands man, tall, who works the
factory too, remember listen to him, he know.
Then you can be the happy girl ay?
Are you listen to me?"
DG: You reference other islands in the Cooks in your book, beyond Manihiki and Mauke that your [grand] parents are from.
RH: Yep.
DG: Where does this knowledge and memories come from?
RH: The one I'm thinking of at the moment is Mangaia which is the...
DG: The oldest island in the Pacific.
RH: Yeah, I've said it's 18-million years old but I read somewhere it was 22-million years old. That was just a story from a friend of mine who lived there when she was young.
DG: What took your parents to Niue?
RH: My father was a radio station superintendent and he'd been on Pitcairn, the Kermadecs and Raro. They came to live in Invercargill where I was born and my younger next brother was born. Three years later we were on Niue Island.
DG: And going back in...
RH: 2008 was the first time and I went back 2013 for the Arts Festival, read some poems on our old front lawn which is now the market place...
Music under poetry...
"Low cliffs, sand tracks, empty beaches
where tides wash in over the coral shelf
leaving coke cans, plastic bottles, a red jandal."
Rob Hack is a graduate of the Whitireia Creative Writing Programme and completed his Masters at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University.
'Everything is Here' is published by Escalator Press.
