A Vocabulary was the result of several years of roaming among the memorials and gravestones of Aotearoa’s colonial wars, seeking out the texts on these testaments to folly – A vocabulary of colonisation. Remnants scattered across mostly Te Ika-a-Māui North Island, residual memory, misremembered, not remembered … 

I step mindfully onto the farmland to photograph a panorama of the battle site from both Māori and Pākehā points of view. After several footsteps, and with some bafflement, I stop dead in my tracks at a strange sensation deep inside my belly, which today I’m still unable clearly to throw light on. History was here, I grasp that, but this was out of that range. Does earth hold memory, and deliver that memory when the gravity is ripe? – Bruce Connew