A constellation of Aotearoa Māori cartoons and comics

Speakers

Joan McCracken, Sam Orchard

Welcome and karakia

Joan McCracken: Nau mai, Haere mai.

Welcome to Connecting to Collections online from the Alexander Turnbull Library. Ko Joan McCracken aho. I'm with the Alexander Turnbull Library's outreach services team and I'm delighted you have joined us today to learn more about the library's, cartoons and comics collection with my colleague Sam Orchard.

To open our session today, Sam will share a karakia.

Sam Orchard:
Tuia i runga, tuia i raro.
Tuia te here tangata i a Nukuārangi.
Ki a Puanga Kai Rau, ki a Matariki Ahunga Nui.
Tō mata tini me pā ki roto, tō mata tini me pā ki waho.

Kia horahia te kura, he kura nui, he kura roa.
He kura takatū mai i a rongotaketake.
Ka ronga te pō, ka rongo te ao.
Ka rongo i te ahi kā roa i tūārangi te whakaeke nei.
Ka whakaeke te haukai kia tina.

Ka whakaeke te haukai kia toka.
Ka whakaeke te haukai kia uru ora.
Whiti, whano, tau mai te mouri.
Haumi e! Hui e! Tāiki e!

Joan McCracken: Kia ora, Sam. Thank you. And now it's my great pleasure to formally introduce my colleague, Sam Orchard, Assistant Curator Cartoons and Comics at the Alexander Turnbull Library.

As well as his position at the library, Sam is a comic artist and storyteller. His comics and resources around gender and sexuality have been used internationally. In 2018, he founded the We Are Beneficiaries Campaign, an online project in which a group of artists shared their experience of social welfare in New Zealand.

Due to the popularity of the project, it was extended to include submissions from the public. You can learn more about this extraordinary project, which is now archived on the Turnbull, on Sam's website. We'll put the link in chat for you. Now over to Sam. Kia ora, Sam. Do we have visuals?

Sam Orchard: Kia ora. I don't think we do. It's saying that the host has stopped ability to share my video.

Shall I just plough on? And you can hear my voice from the ethereal beyond.

So that karakia was written by Ben Naia for Wellington City. And if you go to the Wellington City Library's blog, there's a beautiful video that they've put together of the karakia.

Introduction

Tēnā koutou katoa.
Ko Elanora te maunga.Ko Narrabeen te awa.Ko Gai-maraigal te tangata whenua.
Ko Pākehā te iwi.
I tupu aka ahau I Sydney.
Kei Te Whanganui-a-Tara e noho ana.
Ko Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa toku roopu mahi.
Ko Sam toku ingoa.Tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatou katoa.

I am Sam Orchard. I am the Assistant Curator for Cartoons and Comics at the Alexander Turnbull Library. And I've put together this presentation today to talk about Māori contributions to cartoons and comics across history.

Part of what I'm wanting to do is centre this talk around matariki, which is a time for remembrance, it's a time for celebrating the present, and it's time for looking to the future. And I wanted to use this opportunity to take a journey into Māori, also cartoons and comics, through the lens of our own collecting practises here at the Alexander Turnbull Library.

And I wanted to start off by saying that I'm not wanting to centre myself as an expert on Waituhi whakakata me ngā Pukawaituhi Māori, Māori cartoons and comics. But I do want to use this time to acknowledge the wonderful constellation of stories that have found their ways into this collection and the histories that have been created and shared by Māori, and the incredible talent of Māori cartoonists and comics.

I also want to use this opportunity to talk about what we might have missed and frame this talk around our own collecting practises here and to think critically about how our collecting practises might have excluded Māori artists in the past or made it hard for them to be collected, how we not only need to make it easier, but we need to provide a welcoming and inclusive environment where Māori cartoonists and comic artists feel like they want to be a part of the collection.

We have, at times, misrepresented, underrepresented or excluded the voice of Māori artists from the cartoons and comics archives. And this has happened through the framing of the purpose of our collection, through our daily collection practises, and also about including a lot of collection of works that are about Māori but not by Māori.

So in the spirit of Matariki celebrations, I focused on the three elements of the Matariki celebration — remembering the past, celebrating the present, and looking to the future as a way into these conversations.

I've got a tech expert here who's gonna help me with the video. One second.

Eh, here we are. Magic. Thank you so much.

So I wanted to start to kind of talk about the history of the cartoon archive because it's a little bit different to some of the other collections that we have here at Alexander Turnbull. So the cartoon archive started as a community centred collection and became, in 1992, was formally established in a partnership, The Cartoon Archive Trust, with the Alexander Turnbull Library. And it's explicit purpose was collecting editorial cartoons from newspapers.

So over the years, the Cartoon Archive Trust worked alongside ATL to do that. In 2005, the Cartoon Archive Trust became fully absorbed into ATL, Alexander Turnbull, and the Trust was replaced with a guardians committee to kind of oversee that the kaupapa was still being adhered to.

In 2019, the guardians committee decided to step down, and the conversations began around the scope of the archive itself. Lots have had changed in terms of newspapers, which also affected editorial cartoons being printed in newspapers. So there was a wider conversation around, maybe it's time to expand the scope to include comics, graphic novels, mini comics, zines, those that exist outside of the political newspapers that you find in— political cartoons that you find in newspapers.

So over the last couple of years, the Alexander Turnbull Library has put together the Cartoons and Comics Advisory Group. The scope has been officially expanded, so we are now the cartoons and comics archive. And my job was created. So the Assistant Curator for Cartoons and Comics, which I was lucky enough to get that role, has occurred and the last few years has been me working out where we've been, where we're at now and where we're going to. And I think that the voices of Māori cartoonists and comics is really central to that thinking.

Getting comics and cartoon into the Archive

So there's a couple of different ways that you can get your cartoons and comics through the front door, if you will, of the of the archive. So these usually happen through cartoonists or comic artists or the holders of the art gifting us or us purchasing the material, so that comes through physical items of the original artwork, what was actually drawn on the physical paper, or their notebooks or sketchbooks.

The other side is that, because technology changes, that there's a lot of cartoonists who are working exclusively digital, so we will have an accrual agreement with those artists who will send us the image files via e-mail or cloud software, and we download them, or they pop them up on their website and we download from there.

But there's also a little bit of collecting through multi-format collections because cartoonists and comic artists are usually people who do a lot of other things as well, because cartoonists and comic artists gonna eat and there's not a lot of roles where you can sustain yourself just by doing cartoon and comic art. So they also come through multi-format collection. So it's really important for the Assistant Curator of Cartoons and Comics to work alongside other collections.

The other ways that cartoons and comics can get into the collections is through legal deposit. So that's any publication that was made in New Zealand, by law, comes through the National Library under legal deposit. So that's newspapers and magazines, where a lot of cartoons and comics are published, but also comic books and graphic novels that are printed here.

I've also got a small little box there that talks about zines and mini-comics, because technically they fall under legal deposit. And it becomes something that a lot of zinesters and mini-comic makers maybe don't know about. And also it's really hard for us to follow up each individual self-published publication to say, "Hey, actually we'd love a copy of your things." Especially the fact that a lot of people who are making zines and mini-comics and self-publishing are only intending that for a really small audience, so there becomes some ethical questions around how we collect things and make them available for a national audience when they're only intended for a small thing. So I've got that in a kind of small bit because it's a tricky kind of thing.

We also under legal deposit, collect websites that are based in New Zealand. And you can have a look on the website, if you search for legal deposit and website harvesting on National Library website, you can have a look to see what this covers. So if you've got a website that has a .co.nz, then we will collect that and make it available. And if you go to the New Zealand Web Archive, you can have a look through some of the websites that have been collected, and you can also nominate websites as well.

So the other way that cartoons and comics come through is through our New Zealand and the Pacific collection, where cartoons and comics haven't been published in New Zealand because a lot of artists go over to other countries or it's cheaper to— or get publishers from international publishing houses. But if they are done by New Zealanders, or have a lot of New Zealand content, then we will proactively go out and collect those things as well.

So that's part of our role is to work across teams to be on top of what's coming in through legal deposit, what we might be missing, and engage with artists themselves to say, "Hey, we'd really like to include you."

What kinds of comics are we collecting?

So. What kind of comics are we collecting? I wanted to— before I go into the three sections around remembering the past, looking at our present and looking to the future, I want to note here that the people I talk about here are by no means an exhausted list of Māori cartoonists and comic artists. I would be here all day if we were to do that.

I've endeavoured to contact each artist or their family to seek permission to talk about them, and I've excluded people who've simply said it's not a safe place for us, as the National Library, so a colonial institution, to include them in this talk. And I think that's really important that the work we do acknowledges the harms that perhaps we've done in the past or are continuing to do, and to work in a relational and consensual way.

And I also want to stress that I'm Pākehā and I'm not seeking to create works that are important to Māori, but rather this talk is about giving you a starting place to further explore and deepen your knowledge about the role that Māori have in contributing to cartoons and comics histories.

I think a lot of the narrative around cartoons and comics is that it's a white boys' club. And I really want to undermine that and to show, actually, there's a whole lot of diversity in cartoons and comics, and today we're talking about Māori contributions. So that's my little preface to talking about this.

Remembering the past

Savaged to Suit

So the first section is remembering the past. And we'll start with Paul Diamond's 'Savaged to Suit', which is a book that he did for the Cartoon Archive, which was published by the Cartoon Archive, that came out in 2018.

And Paul is the Curator Māori at the Alexander Turnbull. And this work is a really important piece of research, exploring how Māori and Māori culture and life have been seen by editorial cartoonists in a succession of stereotypes over time.

The book mostly focuses on depictions of Māori, rather than by Māori, but Paul provides some important analysis of Māori artists in Chapter 9. And it's here that he talks about the scope of his research, which also mirrored the Cartoon Archive's scope at the time, which has since changed.

But he talks about it as a fact of how Māori cartoonists and comic artists have perhaps been left out of conversations. So if the scope was broadened to include artists and cartoonists whose work has been published not only in newspapers, to comics and magazines, then additional names contribute to a list. But still in its single figures, only seven Māori cartoonists can be identified as having published in the 1930s. But if we expand in that scope again to include illustrators, if we expanded that to include publications that are activist publications or self-published publications, then that list will grow further and further.

So we know that people like Helen Courtney, who did a whole lot of cartoons and comics for Broadsheet, for example, was a Māori woman and has largely been left out of some of these histories. But I would argue that her function, in terms of the cartoons that she was doing, were political editorial cartoons. They just weren't printed in newspapers.

So one of the comics that I'd like to talk about that Paul talks about in his book is this one here, which is a, maybe the earliest post-colonial political cartoon that we've discovered. And it's a caricature of Governor Grey, and here he is. This was found in a sketch book in 1867 and is attributed to a person called Aporo. This depicts Governor Grey as the devil, and he's carrying a sack. And inside the sack are some people.

So the sketchbook that this was drawn in was stolen by Gilbert Mair, who was a commander of the Arawa Troops in the Tauranga Bush Campaign. And the text that you can read here says, "Governor Grey has come here to deceive Māori people. He is carrying them off in his sack." And this sketch was kind of lost for a while and republished into into Te Ao Hou in the 1960s. But really shows that Māori were contributing to their own political analysis and creating their own cartoons and comics for a long time.

In the book, Paul also talks about other cartoonists and comic artists, like Oriwa Hannon, Mark Tapsell, Anthony Ellison, James Waerea. But I also want to focus today on Harry Dansey, who was a journalist, as well as a comic artist and an illustrator. So most of his cartoons were published when he worked for the Taranaki Daily News in the 50s and 60s. He works as a journalist, and in the 60s worked for the Auckland Star as a feature writer, specialising in Māori issues. He also has written an article about Matariki, which you can look up, which is in Te Ao Hou, which is in the December issue of 1967, available on Papers Past, and it's on page 15 and 16.

So Dansey was one of the few Māori artists to be employed as an editorial cartoonist. And Paul talks about, says that his background and depth of knowledge meant he was able to reference Māori culture from a more informed standpoint, and at a time when Māori were still on the margins, Dansey was able to make quietly subversive points about their place in New Zealand.

And here's a couple of his cartoons that were featured. So I think that what Paul's done in his book is outlined the ways in which cartoons by Māori had an insider point of view, which kind of softened some of the Pākēha rhetoric around Māori issues and talked about it from an insider's perspective. And sometimes that was laughing from an insider group and sometimes that was being critical of Pākēha ways and life. But you should check out that. It's an important contribution to cartoons and comics history in New Zealand.

Pikitia Press

The next thing I wanted to talk to you is about Pikitia Press, which is a blog that Matt Emery has done. So Matt Emery is Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Maniapoto, and has been at the forefront of research in New Zealand and Australian comics histories for over a decade. His blogs are archived by our web harvesters, by our digital archivists, and you can check them out by exploring the catalogue. So he started doing it on Blogspot, which is now defunct, so we've got an archived copy of that, and he currently is at pikitiapress.com.

So Matt actually, he started researching cartoons and comics, and is probably one of the most knowledgeable about cartoons and comics histories in New Zealand. And he has done an interview with Coco Solid in Mana Magazine in 2015, which you can come over to the General Reading room, it's sitting on our shelves, and read around the history of Māori Comics in New Zealand.

And it has also explored people like Noel Cook. So Noel Cook was a New Zealand artist and illustrator, and a pioneer of sci-fi comics. So he worked in New Zealand, Australia, England. He was born in Foxton. He's the great grandson of Te Rauparaha, and worked for the New Zealand Herald and the Observer, as you can see, doing political comics, that's how he kind of started out.

But he also, when he moved to Australia, he created a comic called Peter, which is one of the first sci-fi comic strips. It was about the adventures of a young space explorer who travelled across the solar system, and was an instant hit, and was syndicated across in America and across the world. And he also went on to do other sci-fi hits like Planet of Fear, Adrift in Space, Cosmic Calamity, as well as humour strips like Kokey Koala and His Magic Button. So he was quite a prolific artist, but also had quite an expansive scope.

Also, there's an interesting— I really enjoy comic and cartoon mystery, so I have to include one anytime I talk about cartoons and comics. And Matt pointed out this quite interesting mystery that there's a cartoon that came out, it was part of a 20 part series in England, I think in the 1930s or 40s. And it's called the Heiress to Tangurau. And it was drawn by Leslie Otway and it tells the story of an orphaned Tina Rogers, who inherits a sheep farm in New Zealand. And so she goes back there and engages with New Zealand folklore and history, that's how they described it.

And Matt says, although that it kind of flirts with these stereotypical depictions, it's actually very accurate in its depictions of New Zealand of the time, and featured a lot of knowledge around Māori culture. So he suspects that it was probably Noel who helped write the script for this and helped inform the process. But, as yet, we haven't been able to solve that mystery.

Kia Mataara

So, the third thing about Remembering the Past is actually the inspiration that I had behind this talk. So Kia Mataara was done by the Kia Mōhio Kia Mārama Trust, which—

Sorry, I just want to make sure that I hate all my notes.

So the trust was started in 1985, and the trustees were Rob Cooper, Rua Rakena, Doctor Jane Kelsey, Barbara Menzies, Donna Gardiner, Moana Maniapoto, and they came together after the 4th Labour government was elected, when there were simultaneously like a move to neoliberalism, as well as a move to more actively honour Te Tiriti. So the trust, which had its roots in the Māori Council of Churches, had a focus on pedagogy and education, using mediums that work for all Māori.

So the Kia Mōhio Kia Mārama Trust was a strongly Te Tiriti based bicultural group, committed to structural change, and Kia Mataara was among a number of resources that sought to educate and inform Māori about contemporary developments through critical analysis.

They began by creating question and answer sheets and little cartoon policy guides, things that analyse fisheries and privatisation and treasury from a Māori kaupapa point of view. And these would be photocopied and sent out in envelopes across the country to like 450 strategically placed people. And those resources, which were then photocopied and used, and sent far and wide. So it was kind of before e-mail and websites, where people were doing that really grassroots activism, and resources were photocopies upon photocopies upon photocopies.

And one of the most ambitious projects that they did was this series, called Kia Mataara, which is 13 chapters and an introduction. And each chapter is about 40 pages, so it's a huge piece of work. That got some funding to tell the history of Aotearoa from a Māori perspective, using comics. And it's absolutely beautiful, and I encourage you all to go and have a look at it and read it and—

So Moana Maniapoto was paid for her comic work, which she did these beautiful drawings, and Barbara Menzies did a lot of the research alongside the other trust members. And this resource was produced and distributed across the country for free. And it's been sitting in our library for a really long time. And I had no idea about it until I came across it because one of our advisory group members sent me a post that Leonie Pihama had done where she had contacted the trust and digitised these beautiful materials and made them available so that people can go and look at it.

And I got to thinking, like, what is it that someone else has found this comic, recognised its importance, made it available, and done all of that work, and we haven't even acknowledged it as part of our collection, and seen it for the important resource that it is. And so this is what's kind of got me thinking around, what do we have in our collections at the moment that are getting lost and not seen for the value that they are when they've come through legal deposit or they've come through some of those side entries. And so part of me wants to say, "Hey, here's something that's in our library. Let's shine a light on that."

But also, a question for me and a question for all our curators, I think, is, "If this is in our library, what have we missed that hasn't gotten into our library?" Because this easily could have gone and become another cartoon mystery.

Celebrating the present

Editorial cartooning

So my next section— I'm just going to check the time. Ah, yes.

—is celebrating the present. So looking at where we're at with editorial cartooning now, who are our contemporary comic artists, and who are the people who are making space for indigenous stories and storytelling.

So Sharon Murdoch was the first woman to regularly produce political editorial cartoons in the New Zealand mainstream media. And she's won New Zealand cartoonist of the year three times. She's come up doing graphic design, particularly with the activist design group, Wellington Media collective. And began producing political cartoons in her 50s. Dylan Horrocks describes her as the most exciting voice to emerge in New Zealand political cartooning for a long time.

And I just love her work. She brings a really beautiful artistic element to her to her work, as well as using a lot of levity and word play and likeness, as well as being able to sucker punch you in the gut sometimes with her perspective, which is just delightful.

There's a really beautiful interview with her on the Spinoff, part of the Two Sketches series where she talks with Toby Morris, which I think you should all go and watch. But she talks about her approach to cartoons and comics and the work that she's doing. So when we look at the current cohort of New Zealand Māori comic artists, and again, I want to stress this is not everyone.

We have people like James Davidson who's done the Moa series which got— He's been producing comics since the early 2000s, starting with the Groundsman. And this Moa series was recently republished by Earths End Press. And is beautiful and fun and kind of adventure story that reimagines a New Zealand that never was, where it's got possums von Tempsky and Kiwi Pukupuku as they journey across the land, riding giant Moas, and you should just go read it. It's fun.

We also have Lauren Mariott, who also goes by Ralphie, who also does the doodle cat picture books. A lot of these comic artists, illustrators as well, do a lot of illustrations through picture books. And I have a whole nother talk up my sleeve about why picture books are also comics and should be collected in the comic archives. But that's a story for another day.

I really love Lauren's work. She's been on a break from doing comics in the last little while, but she's heading back into it soon. So you should keep an eye out for her.

I've just lost my place in the notes. One second.

Ah yes. So Munro Te Whata is also a comic artist, animator, designer, music, does photography. He's done heaps of work for Kiwa Digital, which we'll come back to in the last session. But he's doing incredible work. He's the sort of person that once you see his name, you'll start seeing it over and over and over again, and is doing really interesting things with combining technology with comics and storytelling, which I'll come back to soon.

There's also Zak Waipara, who's on our advisory group, who again, he does a lot of illustration for children's books, but he's also a lecturer and has just finished his PhD, reimagining traditional mythology to address modern issues and using cartoons and comics and a multidisciplinary approach to that.

So Zak is a digital media lecturer at AUT, and he's worked as a designer for Miharo. He's illustrated comics, he's won awards for his illustrations, and he's done animated music videos. If I can say one thing about cartoonists and comic artists, it's that they're a multi talented bunch.

Huia Press

I really hope that it's okay to talk about Huia Press. I emailed them a number of times. But to me they— and they haven't got back to me. But they are really incredibly important to Māori cartoons and comics. They are an independent Māori-owned publisher that was established in 1991, and they're producing a range of award-winning titles, short stories, books, but also comics and graphic novels. And they're really, really important for language acquisition and revitalization, but also telling Māori stories and using Māori artists to tell those stories.

They've kind of approached a number of upcoming artists to do that commercial work, and I think they're really leading the way in terms of shepherding the next generation of comic artists and illustrators into being able to be paid, which is very important. And they've been around for a really long time, and I think that their contribution to Māori cartoons and comics cannot be understated.

Looking to the future

So we've got these comics from the past that we might have missed. We've got comics that are being pushed through day by day, in a regular way now, and coming through our legal deposit and through, you know, the work that I'm trying to do where I'm approaching current artists. But also part of the work that we're trying to do is to look to the future. What are things that are changing?

So one of the things that I've kind of talked about in the past is that, the world of editorial cartooning has changed quite a lot with the change of newspapers and the print media. And what we're finding now is that there's this next generation of editorial cartoonists. People like Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho, who's a takatapui artist who works also as a designer and illustrator. But they've put a number of their political cartoons and comics on Instagram and Twitter as just a thing of like, I have a lot of feelings and this is really important to me and I'm just gonna put it out there.

And there's also people like Daniel Vernon, who does the Yeehaw the Boys comics, who is creating these very contemporaneous cartoons about issues of the day, political issues of the day, that are functioning in much the same way that an editorial printed cartoon would be, but he's doing it through Instagram and Twitter and Facebook, and he's also providing extra detail, and his thought process through Subtack, which you can subscribe to.

And it's kind of making me think, well, how do we collect some of these cartoonists and comic artists when they're A: not getting paid to do this work and B: trying to find ways that people will support them to do that work when it's outside of a mainstream media funded situation. Not to mention the fact that sites like Instagram and Facebook are really, really hard to harvest for digital archivists. So some of this work is at risk of getting lost unless we build up those relationships with those artists to say, hey, your voice is important and you're fulfilling a role that has really changed, and if we stuck with that same scope that said editorial cartoonists that are printed in newspapers, we would be missing out on some of this next generation of editorial cartooning as it shifts and changes.

We also have comic artists like Taupuruariki Brightwell, who does a range of things. She's also a multi-talented person who does music, who does mural installations, and does sculptures, and usually tells stories using her sculpture and mural practices. So how do you collect that?

Which brings me to Xoe Hall which, if you live in New Zealand and have ever driven past the Massey Campus, you might have seen this amazing mural which is— I think it's a comic. It's telling stories and using narrative, using pictures to form a narrative that is telling Māori mythology. And it's plastered in these beautiful, bright colours across walls. And "How do we collect walls?", I ask myself often.

Which is things that as curators, we have to think bigger and more deeply around, how do we collect things as the medium itself changes and as things develop? So cartoons and comics aren't always written on paper.

I mean, this list was very hard to cut short for myself, so I've just like squeezed as many people as I can in here. There's people like Izzy Joy who is also doing a lot of cartoons and comics. Her cartoons have been in the school journal, as well as, she's printed and published her own eBooks and zines, and you'll see her illustrations online as well as on Instagram and social media and things.

And there's also people like Story Hemi-Morehouse, who is working out of Brisbane and lives in Australia, and has for a long time, who is doing a lot of cartoons and comics work and publishing online and getting noticed by people like Huia Press, who make sure to employ here, which is great.

But, you know, it's something that as as assistant curator you're wanting to look not only of what's happening in New Zealand, but of the people who are not living in New Zealand and are doing things worldwide.

I also want to do a shout out to Kiwa Digital and Maui Studios, who are using technology to expand the scope and reach of comics. So Kiwa Digital has done a series of cartoon-based stories that are telling narratives and employing people like Munro and Ariki Brightwell to do this.

But they're not telling comics in the traditional way, where they just put up a panel and then you read the story, but it's actually creating an online platform where you can have the comic read to you in Māori and then read back to you in English. And you can change the way it appears on the screen, you can colour in your own panels, you can interact in a way that just goes beyond what the traditional comic book would be if you read it.

And you know, I ask myself, how do we collect apps? Because apps become a really different thing when you're talking about collection and access and how we're gonna make them usable for future researchers as the technology shifts and changes.

Questions and answers

So these are all the things that I think about. That the work that I have to do is to bring some of our materials that we have in the library out of the shadows and shine light on them, to encourage future researchers to do the research that needs to be done, to fill in the gaps where our collecting has let things fall through, and to look to the future, to anticipate changes in technology, or the way cartoons and comics are being used, or being made.

But I think most of all, the work that we need to be doing is to create inclusive, welcoming and safe places where we invite people in actively and help them feel cared for and sane so that they do feel like they belong as part of our collections.

So yes, I think we have enough time for questions. Hopefully I've timed that alright. I want to stress again, this is not an exhaustive list of Māori cartoonists and comics. There's so many more people than I could talk about. But I wanted to kind of do a peppering and encourage you to go and look up your own and share, maybe in the Q&A's, people who I've missed or haven't talked about. But also, if you have any questions, let me know.

Joan McCracken: [Inaudible] Yes, if you could just stop for a moment. That was such a fascinating exploration of the collections and thank you for sharing with us your version of the collection's future.

We have received some questions and there is time for more. So please do add your pātai to Q&A.

Q1: Where should someone who is new to Māori cartoons and comics start?

So the first question we have is from Julie, who asks— or who says, "That was a wonderful presentation and a great introduction to a range of Māori artists. For those of us who are new to this area, where should we start? Is there an artist's work which you would recommend as an introduction to this genre?"

Sam Orchard: Thank you. That's a very interesting question.

I think what I love about cartoons and comics is that they're quite expansive over genre and styles, and pretty much any type of comic that you wanna read, choose something that you want to read and you will find a Māori artist who is doing it amazingly, whether that's superhero comics like Munro Te Whata, or personal comics like Huriana, or [?? Kiamatano 43:09], which I'm currently obsessed with, which is an educational resource, and doing some of that educational communication that needs to happen.

So yeah, my #1 would be go to Leonie's blog and have a look at the amazing work that the trust did in the late 80s, cause it's just so relevant now. And there's beautiful pictures, and the way they've done the storytelling, I just love.

Q2: About the Contemporary Voices team

Joan McCracken: Thanks, Sam. Another question came around. "Your called the Assistant Curator Comics and Cartoons. Can you explain a little bit about the group with whom you work?"

Sam Orchard: So I work— Oh yes, that was actually, I had that in my notes and I skipped over it.

So I'm part of the Contemporary Voices team, which is particularly interested in where the gaps are within our collections, but also being future thinking so that we are looking to how technology changes things and how we can make sure that we're not missing things because we're not up to speed. So I work with our wonderful team in the Contemporary Voices team, and that's because of the change in technology for cartoons and comics, but also because of the history of how we've done the collecting in the past, that it fits quite well within the kaupapa of Contemporary Voices.

Q3: Māori myths and legends in cartoons and comics

Joan McCracken: Thank you. Another question. "Kia ora, Sam. Loved your talk and the revitalization of many myths and modern cartoons, comics and illustrations. Do you see many Māori myths and legends depicted in early cartoons and comics by Māori artists?"

Sam Orchard: Yes. I think that's a way that people keep coming back to their own storytelling and identity and discovering themselves. And it's not limited to Māori, but I think there's a lot of really visual elements to Māori storytelling, and— I don't want to call it myths and legends per se. But in terms of some of those stories, they have that really beautiful visual element, which I think people find their ways into that, and find meaning through cartoons and comics because of that. I know that for myself, when I think about my own identity, I've found cartoons and comics a way that I can process that in a really different way than just writing will do, or in a really different way that just pictures will do. So I think— I imagine that's something that is true in terms of indigenous storytelling as well.

But yeah, it is a thing that I feel like many artists come back to time and time again and find new ways into and new things to explore. And I think particularly, you know we live in a colonial landscape, and I think when those stories have been suppressed and fractured, then I think finding the way to bring them into the light, but also fill in those gaps through the work of your own hands, is really important.

Q4: About the advisory group

Joan McCracken: Thank you. You talked a little about the team with whom you work, but you also mentioned you have a trust, or a governance group? Could you talk a little bit more about how they interact with the collecting for the collections?

Sam Orchard: Yeah. So we have an advisory group which is made-up of cartoonists and comic artists and people who are interested in cartoons and comics, and who teach cartoons and comics. And that's a really important part of the work that I'm doing to make sure that I am connected to community and connected to the people on the ground, so that I'm not just sitting in my little office desk by myself thinking, "Ohh, what comics do I like?"

But to go back, to have those robust conversations with community members, and to say, "Hey, this is the directions that I'm thinking of going. These are my priority areas. What do you think about that?" And they go back to their communities and talk about that, and that becomes a really robust discussion, particularly because, you know, cartoons and comics histories haven't always had diversity and inclusion as one of its focuses, So that's something that we're really wanting to make sure that we do. That every decision that we make around collecting is thought through and is connected to the communities and people who it will affect.

Q5: ComicFest

Joan McCracken: And one of the ways that you're promoting the collections is through talks like this, Sam. But I was also thinking that ComicFest was a wonderful way of getting people to see artists and their work. Could you talk a little bit about ComicFest and what place it has in the ecosystem?

Sam Orchard: So ComicFest is a partnership between the National Library and Wellington City Libraries. And we work together every two years— Well, we work together across the two years. But every two years we put it on an event called ComicFest, in which we— It's a beautiful celebration for people who love comics, read comics, make comics, or are even just mildly interested in comics and are like, "What's going on here?"

And I just love the fact that it's all ages, so we have— We centre it around Free Comic Book Day. So that's— We give out free comics for people to read, but we also do a series of talks and workshops so that people can explore and delight in the amazing comic artists and cartoonists that we have here in New Zealand.

And so we were to put it on last year and, of course, last year was last year so we postponed it. And we held it this year online. And the great thing about holding it online is that you can go and listen to all the talks. So they've been put up on a a playlist. If you go to Wellington City Library's YouTube, you find the ComicFest 2022 playlist. You can go and listen to all the talks.

And it's a really wonderful collection of talks aimed at people who are just starting out in drawing, people who maybe are interested in taking their comics to the next level and producing a weekly web comic, or taking on commissions, or just want to know what an artist was thinking when they wrote a book.

So I think there's something for everyone in that playlist, and it's one of the great things that I get to do as part of my job. Because when you have such a massive change in scope, it's really important to get the word out there to say hey, what we were collecting and what we are collecting now has drastically changed and we want to let people know that. And that's part of the the work that we're doing with CometFest. As well as, you know, getting me to talk about comics all day, or listen to people talking about comics all day, is just wonderful. It's my dream.

Joan McCracken: Well we love that, Sam. And as someone who might be described as a mildly interested, or has been in the past, I love ComicFest, and I absolutely recommend it to everybody. And just do go along and join it from the list that is available. We should share that link as well.

Closing

There are no other questions at the moment, Sam. So I think it's time for me to say thank you to you again, and to our colleagues who've supported today's presentation, and to everyone who has joined us today.

If you'd like to hear about future events being held at the library on site or online, and you're not already on our What's On mailing list, please do sign up. You can subscribe on the events page on the National Library website. And we'll add the address to chat. Remember, you can save the chat, at least, I hope you can, and the links we've added by clicking on the ellipsis by the chat button. If that doesn't work for you and you would like what was quite a lot of links, I've added, please do let us know. We can supply those to you.

I have a whakatauki to finish, but first I'd like to say thank you again to Sam. That was such an interesting talk and what a wonderful collection. And I know it's going to even get better in the future.

Mā te kimi ka kite
Mā te kite ka mōhio
Mā te mōhio ka mārama

Happy Matariki, everybody.

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