Personal history: Dame Anne Salmond revisits stepping stones in a journey of connection
Dame Anne Salmond: "An amazing ability to communicate and get the best out of people." Photo / Jane Ussher
Wherever she looks, Dame Anne Salmond sees connections: between people, between academic disciplines, between Māori and Pākehā cultures, between the islands of the Pacific, between the past and the present. Sometimes she sets out to make the connections, sometimes she finds them, sometimes they find her. Most recently, she has been examining the existentially crucial connections between humans and the environment.
An important personal connection was sundered in January, when her husband, conservation architect Jeremy Salmond, died. “It’s been a horrible year,” she says. “Jem and I were very close – 54 years together and we were very happy.” She is speaking in the impressive Devonport, Auckland, villa on which her late husband practised his heritage restoration skills. “We’ve only ever lived in this house. And we bought it when [daughter] Amiria was just a baby. He learned his craft on this house.”
As well as the personal partnership, the two shared a professional one in which each complemented the other. When Anne was doing fieldwork on marae around the country, Jeremy accompanied her and “was always much more useful than me”, she says. “People assumed because I could speak a bit of Māori that I knew a lot more than I did. But they would explain it all to Jeremy and tell him everything.”
He is also a presence in her new book, Knowledge Is a Blessing on Your Mind,which collects academic and other writing from 40 years, some previously unpublished. Salmond describes it as “a scholar’s journey. It’s quite personal in one way, but the way I’ve been a scholar doesn’t really exclude everything else.”
She credits Jeremy with the idea for the book’s structure. When she was approached about the project by Auckland University Press, she thought it was “boring”.
“I wrote all that stuff a long time ago. But Jem said, ‘It’s really good, because these are papers that lots of people won’t have seen. And why don’t you write something about what was going on when you wrote each one?’ And when I started to do that, the whole thing came to life.”
Salmond was born in 1945 and grew up in Gisborne, which “was quite a divided community when I was young. [Māori and Pākehā] met at school, and on the sports field and the farms, but it was pretty separate a lot of the time.” She describes her mother, Joyce, as “a bridge” who “always engaged with Māori people” and had Māori friends.
When teenage Anne went to the United States as a field scholar, she had been taught some action songs to include when doing the obligatory talks to Kiwanis and Rotary clubs but “I just realised I was talking through a hole in my head”.
Curiosity aroused (which is perhaps her natural state), she began to learn te reo Māori and joined a kapa haka group. She describes herself as having felt at home in Māori culture right from the start, “like a part of me that was missing somehow”.
At university, she took up anthropology – the only department where you could learn te reo Māori.