Gina Cole
Slowing the Sun: Essays by Nadine Hura (Bridget Williams Books, 2025), 240pp, $39.99
Nadine Hura’s book Slowing the Sun: Essays is both lyrical and insightful. At a journalistic and research level this collection of essays offers focused, intelligent and thorough investigations into the causes, effects and science of climate change. It explores the ways in which colonisation and extractive capitalist practices have in both the past and the present adversely impacted on tangata whenua and fed into the climate crisis we now face. Hura examines scientific data from a Māori perspective and carefully demystifies the organisational and administrative alphabet soup of acronyms prevalent in the climate change silo—try IPCC, AR6, GHG, CCS, COP, UNFCC.
She makes the science comprehensible, memorable and entertaining using pūrakau, poetry, rap, interviews and memoir in a way that left me feeling changed, moved and hopeful. At the level of craft, the essays reveal a love of the written word, and an impressive poetic and creative sensibility. On all levels the book cements Hura’s place as an important public intellectual in the ongoing discussion about climate change in Aotearoa, providing a valuable Māori viewpoint. Hura outlines the methodology that characterises her book:
Māori creation stories, or pūrakau, have been providing frameworks to understand what Māori Marsden describes as the ‘Woven Universe’. Pūrakau—referring literally to the seed or genesis of a tree—have a different authority to climate models because they can be adapted for any context or time. Unlike data, which can quickly become meaningless to all but those with specialised technical expertise, the instructions and insight contained within pūrakau are not only accessible to anyone, they’re entertaining enough to be remembered, applied to many contexts, and passed on.
Hura doesn’t denigrate the science around climate change but places it in a wider context. As she puts it:
It’s not that climate models aren’t valuable and useful, it’s that, in order for everyone—even the most disengaged—to understand and act on the knowledge they contain, they need to take the shape of a story.
Indigenous scholarship based on decolonising methodologies, such as Hura’s use of pūrakau and her integrated multi-disciplinary, multi-modal approach, is what Māori sociologist and academic Jenny Lee-Morgan has defined as a bricoleur approach, with the researcher acting as Indigenous bricoleur:
To create a successful bricolage, the researcher needs an overarching knowledge of interpretive paradigms, and may cautiously move between them … such a multidisciplinary approach requires … a new level of research consciousness … where the researcher is not only familiar with multiple methods but is also cognisant of how the bricolage is influenced by his or her own perspective, social location and personal history … A bricolage recognises the complexities and realities of lived experience of not only the participants, but also the researcher themselves.
True to this form of Indigenous bricolage, Hura explores how the forces of colonisation and climate change have affected Māori by drawing on her personal experiences and those of her whānau. Hura emphasises the importance of whakapapa and applies this lens throughout the book. Stories that feature people and events from her own life overlay, interweave and link with her focus on climate change, its causes and its devastating effects on the whenua, on Māori and ultimately on all of Aotearoa.
The collection is bookended by her essays featuring Hank Dunn. In the first essay ‘How to Survive a Shipwreck’ we learn that Hank, a structural engineer and fisherman from Pawarenga, has survived five shipwrecks in his lifetime—an entertaining highlight of the book. The stories of Hank’s survival punctuate Hura’s recounting of the science and politics surrounding the climate change adaptation conference where they met. She notes, ‘there are people like Hank at every marae, custodians of matauranga as well as yarns, who are generous in sharing them’. This might be an apt description of Hura herself and what she is doing in this book as a science communicator using story to understand and explain complicated issues, a truly Māori way of communicating knowledge. Hura suggests that Hank’s advice on how to survive a shipwreck, ‘I didn’t panic … panic’s what kills you’, is good advice to apply to the sense of panic that goes with the urgency of the situation around climate mitigation and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Hank’s stories of survival, resourcefulness and self-reliance in the face of shipwreck disasters is reflected in his whakapapa, with a great-granduncle who also survived a shipwreck and a father who would swim his horse across the river to go to dances at Pawarenga.
The essay titled ‘A Titanic Climate Allegory’ is a hilarious and ingenious take on late 1990’s diplomacy surrounding the Kyoto Protocol. Hura’s expertise on this topic is underscored by the fact that in 1998 she was working at the New Zealand Embassy in Buenos Aires and ‘drowning in the fine print’ of the Kyoto Protocol. When trying to think of a pūrakau to make sense of the whakapapa of the international agreements leading up to the Kyoto Protocol she came up with a narrative based on the movie Titanic:
After a week at sea, the Titanic is in trouble. A steward in the lower decks is later seen running through the cabins telling people to go back to their rooms, that the ship has ‘probably just thrown a propeller blade’. In fact they have hit an iceberg and, in this environmental allegory, the destruction has been caused by extractivism.
It is an apt device, the Titanic as environmental allegory, where the fated ship is the equivalent of thirty years of international diplomacy chugging along ‘with two parallel realities, one above deck and one below the waterline’.
One essay that had an incredible impact on me is ‘Tough Love (a Stitch in Time)’—a beautifully-told story focusing on Hura’s mother, an entrepreneurial spirit who provided for her family by sewing from her basement as a factory outworker. Hura writes of her realisation that one of her taonga tuku iho—treasures passed down—was the sewing and knitting knowledge her mother had given her. After purchasing a sewing machine and attempting to make a skirt she notes that ‘more confronting that anything was my arrogance. Mum had always made sewing look easy.’ As in all the essays, Hura overlays her personal insights and the value of whakapapa, this time in relation to the world of fashion:
Even if you’re only vaguely cognisant of the environmental cost of fast fashion in the form of toxic waste and water consumption, it’s hard not to feel sick walking around shopping malls stacked with cheap clothing … Sometimes I pick up a t-shirt in Kmart and run my fingers over the hem just to know that I have made contact with another woman whose sweat has put food in the bellies of her children.
It never occurred to me until I read this essay that every single item of clothing I wear has been hand-sewn by someone. Hura notes:
Most likely, that person works in a basement or factory in a village or town in a country you can’t even imagine the shape of. Because despite all the advances in technology, machines still can’t match the aptitude of a pair of hands in joining two pieces of fabric.
This revelation seems logical. Maybe I had just never thought about it. But it affected me so much that instead of throwing out two pairs of pants with holes in them, I sewed up the holes so the clothing would not end up in landfill where, as Hura points out, tonnes of perfectly good clothes end up every day.
Another stand-out essay is ‘One Life: A Song for My Brother’ a poignant story about Hura’s brother Darren who died by suicide. It is haunting, heartbreaking and beautiful writing. Hura’s brother appears in many pieces in the book. These stories always lead to some personal understanding. As Hura puts it ‘every pūrakau has the potential to reveal something new. That’s the point. The mind is an infinite sky of living knowledge.’
Inspired by Margaret Mahy’s book-essay Notes of a Bag Lady, Hura writes in ‘Rock Bottom’ a recounting of her battle with waipiro, alcohol, and her attempts to become sober. This leads to an examination of how alcohol was introduced to Aotearoa by the traders in the early 1800s, which in turn led to the situation in 1840, by which time:
The rangatira of northern nations had had a gutsful of booze and debauchery … Heated arguments prior to the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi specifically reference the queen’s responsibility to control her frequently wasted subjects.
When Hura’s brother Dion gave up alcohol she realised that the most motivating driver for her sobriety was sibling rivalry. Again whakapapa is the important factor: ‘whakapapa endures forever’.
In ‘Once Were Maunga’, Hura pays homage to her father who worked driving heavy machinery in quarries and on roads. It is a tragic reminder of all the maunga in Tāmaki Makaurau that have been quarried into non-existence:
Once were maunga, umu, papakainga and urupā. Now are footpaths, tarmacs, tunnels, bridges, seawalls and roads.
Hura’s exploration of the harmful extractive practices surrounding roads is insightful, the remedy lying in compliance with Te Tiriti:
The road to decongestion is surely paved with delusion… Construction is a highly intensive, carbon-emitting activity, and roads also literally pave the way for ongoing future emissions … Stopping extraction at the source and insisting that tangata whenua have full and equitable decision-making power is one of the most effective climate actions people can take.
Hura points out ‘it’s not just the stones’. The irony is that green technology sources are produced with non-renewable materials, thus recharging ‘the insatiable desire for land’.
The overarching focus of the book is climate change and climate justice from a Māori perspective. But the essays are interwoven and overlayed with Hura’s insights into whakapapa, te reo, whenua, mauri, matauranga, maramataka, art, writing, regret, addiction, grief, joy and so much more. Although Hura examines complex topics she presents them in a way that is entertaining, informative, heartbreaking and unforgettable. She brings a dry wit to her writing and is often self-deprecating. Her work is filled with courage, generosity and beauty.
GINA COLE is a writer and lawyer. She holds a PhD in creative writing from Massey University. Her short story collection Black Ice Matter received the award for best first book of fiction at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her novel Na Viro, a work of Pasifikafuturism, was published in 2022 by Huia Publishers.
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