Always Song in the Water — An Ode to Moana Oceania

Always song in the water is an imaginative exploration of Aotearoa's oceanic environment. This is the new, expanded edition of the now out-of-print 2019 book of the same title. The new exhibition and its accompanying book celebrates-in images, words and sound-our connectedness with the wider Pacific region, its peoples, flora, fauna and the expansive waters which both inspire and define us. It is 11 years since the New Zealand Maritime Museum held the ground-breaking exhibition 'Kermadec-Nine Artists in the South Pacific', curated and co-ordinated by Gregory O'Brien, with Bronwen Golder of the Pew Environment Group. The new exhibition and this book Always song in the water returns to the themes, ongoing concerns and unresolved issues of the earlier project. In essence, the 2011 Kermadec voyage never ended. O'Brien and the other artists who voyaged to Rangitahua Raoul Island on HMNZS Otago never really disembarked from the ship that took them north. They think of themselves as still out there, on the ocean, absorbing its energy, listening to its oceanic songs and confronting the environmental issues which have only increased in urgency over the ensuing decade.

An expanded edition of O’Brien’s superb 2019 rumination on experiences of art, cuture, and environment, considering the ocean that reaches around Aotearoa and stretches to the Kermadecs and beyond as the medium that bears our thoughts in suspension and washes them on both familiar and unfamiliar shores. The new edition includes a section of 40 extra pages of images and thoughtful text.

Every spring on Gregory O'Brien's front lawn, on a ridgetop in Hataitai, an upside-down dinghy blooms with flowering clematis. In this book, O'Brien takes his metaphorical dinghy to the edges of New Zealand - starting with a road trip through Northland and then voyaging out into the Pacific, to lead us into some under-explored territories of the South Pacific imagination.
With creative spirits such as Janet Frame, Ralph Hotere, Robin White, John Pule and Epeli Hau`ofa as touchstones, O'Brien suggests how we New Zealanders might be re-imagining ourselves as an oceanic people on a small island in a big piece of water.
Always Song in the Water is a book of encounters, sightings and unexpected epiphanies. It is a high-spirited, personal and inventive account of being alive at the outer extremities of Aotearoa New Zealand.
`This is my field notebook, my voyaging logbook,' Gregory O'Brien writes, `this is my Schubert played on a barrel organ, my whale survey, my songbook.' Among the many artists whose work is featured are John Pule, Robin White, Phil Dadson, Fiona Hall, Euan Macleod, Laurence Aberhart and the Sydney-based painter Noel McKenna, who produced numerous works specifically for this book.

‘Always Song in the Water is like a splendid tapa cloth left out to dry on the salt of Oceania. It admits all-comers into its wet and capacious tapestry – shoes, seabirds, icebergs, painters, whales, stranded pianos, poets, horses, ghostly containers, dinghies, oil spills, surfboards, reef knots and travelling saints – and so lays claim to a hospitality as vast and ancient as Oceania.’ – Sudesh Mishra, University of the South Pacific