Home HEI: University of Glasgow
Host Institution: Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington
Duration of Engagement Fund Research Project: Four Months
PhD Project Title: Echoes of the Past: Reimagining Conservation Strategies throughArchaeology, Creative Practice, and Sound
I am standing at the shores of Poverty Bay in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa/Gisborne, on the east coast of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. Three men with full moko (facial tattoos) pass me on horseback, offering a brief nod as they ride by. Behind them, thousands of pine logs are stacked neatly in long, ordered rows along the port, and men in high-vis jackets move between them with clipboards, their gestures procedural. The air carries a sharp, resinous smell. It clings to my skin, making it itch. I thought it was only the needles I reacted to. Gusts of wind move constantly across the port and onto me and, beneath them, I can still hear the low mechanical rhythm of the ship’s crane lifting logs onto its deck. Every few minutes, a logging truck passes behind me, its weight travelling through the ground. When the sound reaches my ears, it is a deep, rolling vibration that unsettles my body, and I find myself tensing until each passes.
Over the past few days, I have driven north toward Mātāwai and south toward Wairoa, through landscapes dominated by forestry. Stoats, possums, and cats dot the winding road as roadkill, while vast plantations of pine stretch across the hills, dwarfing pockets of native bush. Some areas are dense and dark with growth, while others are stripped bare, the earth exposed in wide, raw clearings. The logs stacked at the port feel unceremonious. Uniform, debarked, spray painted with fluorescent pink glyphs, detached from the places they once stood. I find myself wondering which hillsides they came from, how long they grew there, and what remains there now. I wonder what these logs will become.
Figure 1: Pine logs stacked at Eastland Port, Tūranganui-a-Kiwa/Gisborne (© Gala Georgette)
The logging ship is anchored at the same shore where James Cook first landed in Aotearoa in 1769, some 256 years ago. On his arrival, interactions with local Māori were tentative and initially amicable, but they quickly deteriorated. Violence broke out and several Māori were killed by members of Cook’s crew. While the crew gathered plants to treat scurvy, Cook expressed frustration at what he perceived as a lack of provisions. Cook had intended to call the area Endeavour Bay, as an ode to his ship, but after his time here, he decided to call the area Poverty Bay. This name sits uneasily here. Not only is the landscape beautiful, but the Māori name for the area, Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, ‘the great standing/waiting place of Kiwa’, recalls an earlier arrival, when the ancestor Kiwa arrived from Hawaiki aboard the Tākitimu. It is a place of great significance for Māori.
Here at Cook’s Landing Memorial site, the words of Joseph Banks, the botanist who was aboard the Endeavour on this voyage, encircle me:
Thus ended the most disagreeable day my life has yet seen. Black be the mark for it, and heaven send that such may never return to embitter future reflection.
On this shoreline, it has never felt more palpable that the past is inseparable from the present. Māori arrival, Cook’s landing, colonial settlement, industrial forestry, introduced mammalian species, and my own presence today all unfold into ever present and living histories that shape the Land, and the ways in which we perceive and connect with it.
Figure 2: Cook’s Landing Site. The words of Joseph Banks surround the monument (© Gala Georgette)
My time in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa/Gisborne formed part of a four-month SGSAH-funded Visiting Doctoral Researcher placement at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, where I was hosted by Dr Dave Wilson. Working with Dave fundamentally transformed how I think about sound, music, creativity, and place, encouraging me to embrace creative practice as a form of archaeological research. Over four months in Aotearoa, I travelled through landscapes as varied as Tūranganui-a-Kiwa/Gisborne, Central Otago, Tiritiri Matangi, and Devonport, listening to the ways history continues to resonate through them. Building on earlier fieldwork in Scotland, including journeys to Glencoe and the Isle of Skye, I have been exploring how our understandings of the past might be navigated through creative practice, embodied listening, and music as ways of attuning to the layered histories of landscapes shaped by colonialism. The placement not only facilitated extensive fieldwork across Aotearoa, but also fostered new relationships with researchers in Wellington, created opportunities for ongoing collaboration, and provided space to further explore the role of sound and creative practice within archaeological understandings of place.
In many ways, my thesis traces the archaeology of ideology. I explore how colonial ways of thinking become embedded within landscapes and continue to shape how we understand, connect with, value, and manage places today. Viewing land as property, as something to be ‘improved’, produced the environmental crises we now face, yet these same assumptions still influence contemporary conservation and heritage practices. Archaeology itself emerged within these intellectual traditions, often separating Culture (with a capital ‘C’) from Nature (with a capital ‘N’) and treating the past as something external to ourselves. My project reflects upon what archaeology could look like if we approached it, and our connection with the past, differently: through creative practice, embodied listening, field recording, music, and tuning into our emotions, as well as more conventional archaeological methods. Landscapes are active participants and imbued with living histories that resonate through sound, memory, relationships, and everyday encounters. My research asks: How might archaeology attend to these living histories?
Figure 3: Deep listening at Erisco Village on the Isle of Skye. Residents of this crofting township emigrated to Australia in the late 1800s (© Gala Georgette).
History is active and resonant. It exists within landscapes and, pertinent to my research, soundscapes – the various sounds that surround us. Just as Joseph Banks’ words enveloped me on that shoreline, so too did the resonances of the histories from which places continue to emerge. The birdsong of the endemic tūī, the introduced sparrows flitting past me, the pine logs stacked along the port, and my own presence here are all active histories. Colonialism remains active in these places. It persists in the structures, values, and assumptions that continue to shape how we relate to Land, heritage, and the more-than-human world. If we are to confront the climate crisis with the urgency it demands, we must first recognise and challenge the ideologies that produced it: the colonisation of our minds and how it corrupts our relationships with the world around us. Only then can we begin to imagine and create alternative futures, and my time in Aotearoa New Zealand was a part of this process.
Thank you so much to SGSAH for making it happen – I am so grateful!
CONNECT WITH Gala (she/her)
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Email: gala.morris@glasgow.ac.uk