The Collection of Dame Judith Te Tomairangi o Te Aroha Binney and Sebastian Black

Judith Binney: Shaping History Bridget Williams Dame Judith Binney and I worked together over twenty years – on Encircled Lands, Redemption Songs, Stories Without End, new editions of Mihaia and Nga¯ Mo¯ rehu, and finally, Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History. And our conversations about these On the occasion of Encircled books would take place down in her study in Lands winning the New Zealand Post Book of the Year Award in the garden at Brentwood Avenue. The walls of 2010. the house above were covered with paintings: here in the study there were books, filing cards, boxes, a long desk with neat piles of typescript. Judith Binney’s research was extraordinary: she tramped the land she wrote about, she examined manuscripts carefully, she searched exhaustively in archives, and she looked always for what could be seen on the page or in the image, as well as what the words said.

The books themselves tell this story. Mihaia and Nga¯ Mo¯rehu were conceived as visual narratives, drawing together historical photographs from archives and family collections, along with Gillian Chaplin’s remarkable photographs of the people whose history is told. In an essay published in 1989, Judith Binney wrote of the journeys she took with Gillian Chaplin, taking photographs to the people: ‘When we first brought a photograph of Pinepine Te Rika, Rua’s first wife, to Materoa Roberts... Materoa lamented and sang directly to the photograph. She talked to Pinepine as though she was with us in the room.’ (Stories Without End, p.155.)

The two great works, Redemption Songs and Encircled Lands also brought together photographs, paintings, manuscripts, maps and other documents not only to illustrate but also to tell the historical story.

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