Scars in the Ground: Kauri Gum Stories

Maori and Croats met on the Far North gumfields of New Zealand, where they worked as gumdiggers at the end of the 19^th century and developed relationships marked by significant number of intermarriages. When the gum-industry collapsed during the 1960s, the gumfield communities become ghost towns.  Drawing upon extensive oral history interviews with both groups for this presentation, I will explore the relationships between Croats and Maori individuals and communities and how these relationships shape identities and memories.  In particular, I will focus on the politics of representation of the kauri gum industry and gum workers in three different museums, all located in the places where gumfields once were. Placing displays at three museums within the context of narrator memories, I will show how the “no longer” is also present, and even futural: the beautiful metaphor used by one of my informants, about “scars in the ground,” shows also how gumdigging practices that brought Croats and Maori to the gumfields have shaped the land itself.  I will investigate this linking of land, memory, and identity to demonstrate how the stories of places and stories of individuals and communities cannot be separated; also how colonial pasts shape memory – collective and individual, dominant and dominated - in the present but in ways that are not linear.  I will also consider the fluidity and contested nature of the gumfields  even though they are represented in all three museums as a specific place with its own materiality and history.