NGA TUPUNA/ ANCESTORS

This publication is a graphic chronicle of two families. On each page it depicts a moment in the lives of 39 generations of each family over a period of a thousand years.

One family is Polynesian, their story is taken up in Samoa and follows them to Aotearoa in about 1150AD. The other family is European, we first visit them in an Anglo Saxon village somewhere in England, and follow their fortunes there and in Scotland before coming to New Zealand in 1858.

Both stories run concurrent, on facing pages, which may be a little confusing at first , but this way we hope to contrast what life was like for each family throughout the years.

As there is a gap of many years between the generations visited here, each page is more or less self contained. The pages are linked only by the unbroken thread of family that goes back well before our window of a thousand years and hopefully well beyond it.

Zak Waipara has used his own whakapapa for this project and has done considerable research to get the Polynesian side as accurate as possible, using material that was derived from oral history.

The European side is based on my son's whakapapa, through his mothers side. it is based on actual records back to 1800, prior to that it is largely fictional. Some of the 'ancestors' prior to 1800 are based on records of actual people, such as Ralf the Red and his son and Monday the Plague orphan.

As a graphic narrative, the depiction of the ancestors are not intended as a realistic portrayal of the real ancestors, but as an abstraction of life in a past era as seen though the eyes of 21st century cartoonists.

The artists involved in this project were each given an ancestors name, some reference material and a brief story line. They were free to illustrate it as they chose, however they were asked to be respectful to their subjects. On the Polynesian side there was stricter editorial control than on the European side.

Some of the artists have illustrated the story lines exactly as the writers intended, some took them a few stages further, and in the European side some went off on a completely different tangent all together. That is why each page, like each life, is so different from the next.

We hoped that in doing the artwork for these pages the artists would think about their own ancestors that lived during these thousand years and we hope that the reader will too. Tony Scanlan