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| Photo: Pam Ingram |
"Writing the Land". This is an idea I dreamed up back in 2004 – 2005 when I was working on a book going the distance: Women outdoors in New Zealand with photographer Becky Nunes.
As Becky and I journeyed into the outdoors in a conscious way to write and photograph what we encountered, I discovered that there were different and often intersecting readings of the journey we were on. Scraping back those readings like scraping back layers of paint, became a fascination.
I started listening more closely to what the land had to say - trawling for its songlines and collecting its stories. There was the history of the land we were travelling through; the journey others had made before us; our journey and who we were doing it with; references from artists, writers, poets and local Māori.
I’d only just begun to learn to listen to the land when the book came to an end. A couple of years later I followed William Colenso across the Ruahine Range in Hawke’s Bay. See Following Colenso
Now I am out walking and writing again but I’m tied to a job in Auckland City so I’m putting the journeys up as I can. Most will be day or overnight walks accessible from Auckland. I’ll see how the tapestry of each one unfolds, what it reveals ... the stories there are to tell. Tess Redgrave
