You Are Here, Whiti Hereaka and Peata Larkin
Massey University Press, 2025

The map of your mind can be redrawn; there is no need to keep to the narrows of an old-world view. You can be expansive. You can make new pathways; you can broaden the old ones you already have. You can delight in the kupu shaping your mouth, the physicality of language: tongue and teeth and breath and throat. You hope that one day you will connect it all: sight, sound, meaning.

 

Whiti Hereaka

Massey University Press’s kōrero project invites collaborations “between two different kinds of artistic intelligence to work away at a shared topic”. You Are Here , by author Whiti Hereaka and artist Peata Larkin, is the sixth volume in the terrific series.

In her endnote, Whiti talks abut their shared topic, the Fibonacci sequence – how the book adopts a spiral structure, and how she has been drawn to the spiral as a way of creating stories. She muses upon the influence of DNA and the double helix on Peata’s earlier work, and lingers over patterns in both tāniko and whakairo. She embraces te takarangi the double spiral’s shape, and the unfurling connections between knowledge and wairua.

And here we are as reader, here, at a resonant starting point, in this beautifully designed book, ready to enter a spiralness of reading, with a fecundity of movement, exposures, insight. I think of here as a pivot and then find myself likening it to home, to home as a fulcrum: a physical location, state of mind, an intellectual axis. Think of the way tendrils reach out from here, drawing upon past present future, feeding upon epiphany and challenge.

I am entering the infectious spiral of Whiti’s writing and it is to enter an opening of self, with room for anxiety, doubt, with fragility alongside recognition, navigation and strength. There is so much to draw close to in this unfurling spiral: the way the bone of telling is fleshed out with experience, contemplation, questioning. How we might depart from here, but how here may never leave us. And how an opening of self might be personal but it might also be political. How, for example, the children punished in an education system that privileged one language, one knowledge, one limiting set of customs, are speaking here. How you can be both a stranger and estranged with feet in your own soil, upon your own land.

What draws me deep into the heart, and yes this writing is heart fuelled, is a primacy of connections, recognitions, feelings, expansions, mappings. Begin with the bloodline connections between Whiti and Peata, the two cousins, the writer and the artist.

Breath. A recurring motif. We will breathe in. We will breathe out. We will pause and find multiple ways to absorb and travel through the book. Breath a fundamental ingredient as we read and write.

In her endnote, Peata reveals her media: ink pens, a transparent medium and pure pigments, a lightbox, embroidered silk, acrylic paint. Her artworks, as captivating as the text, offer drawing as a form of navigation, embroidery, cross stitch, kinetic pattern making with multiple textures. It’s like a visual viewfinder with shifting settings that send me freewheeling down the diagonal and retracing the diamond. Glorious. Addictive. I am moving from honeycomb to marshmallow pink, from smudgy cloud to abstract mountain.

Why do I love this collaboration so much? I love its prismatic openness (is that such a thing?), its myriad relations enhancing myriad things, its ability to question, return, reclaim, expand bridges between here and here, to strengthen self-nourishment. In her endnote, Whiti invites us to create our own unfurling spiral (“by forming your thoughts into a group of three words, then five, then eight . . . “), so I did exactly that as the morning light lifted upon a world on the knife-edge of catastrophe. This gorgeous book, unfolding. This fragility, this strength, this succulence, this openness.

Unfurling

the morning fog
onions pumpkin harissa ginger simmering
there’s a new notebook in my miracle lap
a pīwakawaka tūī bush soundtrack
the dawning light

Paula Green
21 June 2025

Whiti Hereaka (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa) is a playwright, novelist, screenwriter and a barrister and solicitor. Her fourth novel, Kurangaituku, won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Peata Larkin (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, and Ngāti Tuhourangi) graduated with a Master of Fine Art from RMIT, Melbourne, in 2009 and has a BFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland.

Massey University Press page