Vital acts

Patricia Grace's late-life story collection weaves together myth and contemporary tales.

- PAULA MORRIS

Patricia Grace’s first published book, Waiariki in 1975, was a collection of short stories, the first published by a Māori woman writer. Almost 50 years later, she is still writing stories. If the pieces in Bird Child are her valediction, they express what Grace holds most dear as a writer: stories of her childhood and youth in a loving Māori and Pākehā family, and the Māori stories, ancient and modern, encompassing forest and freezing works, the pātaka and the food court, factory floors and hypocritical ministries with their endless reports and ignored recommendations.

The first stories in the book are formed by, or in the style of, pūrākau (myths and legends), and the act of storytelling itself is visible. In Bird Child, a baby’s before- and after-life encompasses the songs and stories overheard and absorbed in the womb. “In all stories so far about Mahuika, Keeper of Fire,” the narrator of Mahuika et al tells us, “Tīrairaka doesn’t feature at all.” “In many accounts [of the legend of Rona],” we learn in The Unremembered, “this is where the story ends.” To share stories, and to return to them to seek out new possibilities of meaning, remain vital acts in Grace’s work. The Unremembered, for example, is a Rona-in-the-moon story, a pūrākau Grace explored almost 20 years ago in Moon Story, as well as in her first novel, Mutuwhenua (1978).