TĪKAPA MOANA | 2020

I listened to the radio announcement on my way to the ferry terminal. I was expecting this: friends on Turtle Island left me with no illusions about the pandemic circulating. Still, the Prime Minister’s voice detailing the nationwide lockdown we were about to enter felt like a wartime address. I am fortunate not to have lived through war so I only know these from the movies, but I expect to hear more such addresses as the climate collapses around us and extreme weather events intensify. This was not my first apocalyptic ferry ride of 2020: in January I sat on the top deck, in winds drawing smoke from the Australian bushfires to our shores, watching Tāmaki Makaurau turn a sickly yellow. This time, late March, I was making a hurried journey to retrieve my dog from Waiheke before we entered Level Four lockdown. I felt on the edge of a world about to shift, held in an interlude by a boat suspended above the faultline.

SĀMOA TO TĀMAKI MAKAURAU | 1876-1914

Twenty-year old Gustav emigrated to Sāmoa in 1876, having acquired a position with a German trading firm. It was there, in Āpia, that he met Louisa Silveira. Gustav was born to a Jewish family in the Prussian town of Thorn, while Louisa was the daughter of a sailor and former Catholic priest from the Portuguese island of Faial. On her mother’s side, she was the granddaughter of High Chief Fiamē of Lotofaga. Their mismatched religions led them to elope: Gustav and Louisa were married by a Wesleyan Minister in Vava’u, Tonga. Seven years and five children later, the family moved from Vava’u to Tāmaki Makaurau in 1890, where they went on to have another five children. Gustav established himself as a general merchant, shipping food and other goods between Europe, New Zealand, and the South Pacific Islands, amassing enough wealth within twelve years to build ‘Oli Ula’ and his warehouse.

TE MOTU-A-IHENGA | 1914-1918

At the beginning of World War One, New Zealand invaded Sāmoa to capture it from the Germans (and remained there for another forty-eight years). Back home, the government was holding Prisoners of War on Te Motu-a-Ihenga. Gustav was one of them. Along with several other German businessmen, he was classed as an ‘enemy alien’ and interned on the island, despite having been a naturalised British subject for over twenty years. Records held by my family include: the telegram from a postal censor to his superior, flagging Gustav’s trading ship in the North Sea as suspicious; transcripts of his interrogations by military authorities; letters from the family to the government, begging to be recognised as British subjects to dispel the shame and suspicion cast upon them; a newspaper clipping detailing the death of Gustav and Louisa’s youngest child, Tui; and the list of prisoners to be released unconditionally, where the letters KRONFELD, G. are printed.

Gustav was not transporting soldiers and supplies to the German military, as accused, but the toll of his internment was great. He was allowed one night at home to attend Tui’s funeral, with guards outside his bedroom door. His son, my great-grandfather Samuel, was sent to the islands in his place, but returned with Gustav’s brown leather collecting bag empty. Envelopes holding white feathers and cruel letters were sent to the family even years after the war. Gustav faced anti-German sentiment in Auckland, as well as anti-Jewish sentiment among his fellow German prisoners. A year before his release, and as the war was drawing to a close, the influenza pandemic was tearing through New Zealand. Ships with sickness onboard began to quarantine at Te Motu-a-Ihenga. The internment camp was relocated to Narrow Neck, an influenza quarantine station was established on the island, and the two graves in the cemetery were joined by five more. In the midst of the pandemic, a ship was allowed to leave the port of Auckland for the South Pacific Islands.

Kronfeld

SĀMOA | 1918-1920

The SS Talune docked in Āpia on the 7th of November 1918, where sick passengers disembarked. Influenza spread around Sāmoa like wildfire, killing a quarter of the population. The New Zealand Administrator described the Sāmoan grief and anger as “temporary and, like children, they will get over it provided they are handled with care... They will later on remember all that has been done forthem in the previous four years…”³

Instead, resentment of the New Zealand Administration grew into a revolutionary movement that regained Sāmoan independence.

My great-grandfather Samuel visited Sāmoa in 1920, after the pandemic. Fiamē⁴, Tuimaleali’ifano, and two hundred men gathered in Lotofaga, requesting Samuel ask Gustav’s permission for Louisa to return to Āpia and hold court: her sister and others who held the memorised lineages of titles had died of influenza. In a 1975 tape recording, Samuel recalls Louisa and King George of Tonga “going through the ritual of pedigree until the early hours of the morning… [covering] the intermarriage of folk from Sāmoa, Niue, and Tonga.” Gustav refused, reasoning it wasn’t fair to either the people or Louisa given she had spent so many years away from Sāmoa. This request came only months after Gustav’s release from internment — he was to share four more years with Louisa before his death in 1924. Louisa died 15 years later: three days before Germany invaded Poland, not far from Gustav’s home town, beginning the Second World War.

TE WHANGANUI-A-TARA | 1939

Several months before her death, Louisa donated the Kronfeld Collection to the Dominion Museum. The Collection was packed into crates and taken into the Museum’s basement, at which point “things began to go a little astray”.⁵ World War Two had broken out. The building was repurposed as headquarters of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, artefacts on display were shifted into the basement, stacked in front of crates holding the Kronfeld Collection. The measina and taonga remained there, forgotten, until the 1970s.

‘The Friends of the National Museum’ spent a decade working their way through the crates, eventually revealing the Kronfeld Collection. By this time, the Collection held fewer than the 304 artefacts (including taonga Māori) listed in an inventory made by Sam in 1917. As many of the artefacts were gifted to Gustav by chiefs, and in acknowledgement of their cultural significance, Sam had returned some of the taonga Māori to the Māori Queen at Ngāruawāhia. Measina also came into the Collection through Louisa’s relationships, including a tanoa fai’ava (kava bowl) believed to have been Matā’afa Iosefo’s, a Paramount Chief and Louisa’s relative; and a kie (fine mat) from Queen Sālote, signifying her close relationship with the Kronfeld family and the connection between Moana aristocracies. It was knowledge of Louisa’s relationships that I was seeking when I travelled to Sāmoa last year.

SĀMOA | 2019

Today, the Sisters live next door to the old stone building. They emerged at the sound of the dogs attempting to chase me off the empty grounds — school was closed due to the measles. After I stumbled through an explanation of my connection to the place, Sister Vitolia welcomed me in: “you’re in your own house, fix your own coffee.” We talked at length about the Portuguese descendants of Louisa’s father (the former Catholic priest, Augustino Silveira) around town, climate change, being a united Pacific. She tells me that Sāmoans love to dig at the roots, and that trees have less roots than the Sāmoan people. As I left, she kissed my cheek and waved goodbye saying, “go to Portugal and find that man who ran away from his priesthood!” I won’t be going anywhere for a while, but I am lucky I could return to Sāmoa before COVID-19 brought the world to a standstill. I am only just beginning to understand the depth and complexity of this glorious root system and my place in it, but slowly, I am learning how to tend to these roots.

KINGSLAND | 2020

53 years passed between Louisa’s lifetime and mine, but Tama-Nui-Te-Rā continues to go down here every day, as he did before her and as he will after me, a rhythmic anchor mooring us across time and space. This new synchronicity is reassurance I am on the right path in bringing these stories back to the surface. We sustain our ancestral stories through gathering and intertwining them with our own, strengthening our collective story and memory. As I draw them from the deep, I am reminded of our interconnectedness across Te Moananui-a-Kiwa. These stories, for me, are a kind of raft, linking islands, wartimes, pandemics, ports, homes, and lifetimes. Together, we are held by the surface tension, moving with the currents, ready for more stories to fasten on. We continue traversing the ancient routes in our ocean and bloodlines while we generate new ones — mobile as we are, and always have been.

REFERENCES

¹ The title of this article is drawn from Lana Lopesi's forthcoming doctoral research.

² Margaret Hixon, "The Kronfelds," in Sālote, Queen of Paradise (Dunedin, N.Z.: University of Otago Press, 2000), 64.

³ "Influenza in Samoa," Ministry for Culture and Heritage, last modified 22 April 2020, accessed 21 August, 2020. https:// nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/1918-influenza-pandemic/samoa.

⁴ I believe this to be Matā'afa Fiamē Faumuinā Mulinū'u I.

⁵ Tony Kronfeld, Gustav and Louisa Kronfeld: Some Notes Prepared by Their Grandson (1992), 3.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Influenza in Samoa." Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Last modified 22 April 2020, Accessed 21 August, 2020.

Hixon, Margaret. "The Kronfelds." In Sālote, Queen of Paradise. Dunedin, N.Z.: University of Otago Press, 2000.

Kronfeld, Tony. Gustav and Louisa Kronfeld: Some Notes Prepared by Their Grandson. 1992.

Tecun, Arcia. "Wai? Indigenous Words and Ideas." Moana Cosmopolitan with Lana Lopesi, 2020, accessed 16 August 2020.

Emily Parr (Ngāi Te Rangi, Moana, Pākehā) is an artist living in Tāmaki Makaurau. Weaving stories with moving-image, her practice explores relationships between people, political frameworks, whenua and moana. Her current research on settler-indigenous relationships of Te Moananui a Kiwa traverses oceans and centuries, seeking stories in archives and waters on haerenga to ancestral homelands.

This article was made possible by a Copyright Licensing New Zealand COVID-19 Contestable Fund Grant