Kia ora huihui mai nei tātou katoa. Me kii, ko Tukorehe me Ōtākou ōkū marae-a-hapū, marae-ā-iwi rānei, engari ko Te Herenga Waka tōku marae whakatipu kei te Whanga-nui-a-Tara, nō reira tēnā tātou, tēnā tātou, tēnā tātou katoa.

Thank you to Victoria University and to Te Kawa a Māui for asking me to be here and speak today – a privilege and a pleasure. It’s quite emotional to be back here in Te Tumu Herenga Waka, at Te Herenga Waka, the marae which raised me in many ways, and scores of others over the decades.

It has been nearly 20 years since I graduated right here with my BA in Māori and Women’s Studies (back when there was a Women’s Studies Department) and ten years since my Masters in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. First, I want to mihi to all of you Māori graduands whose day it is today. I mihi to you in the widest, warmest, truest, most deeply felt, most ‘I get what you’ve been through to be here’ kind of way. I want to congratulate you all on what you have achieved and what is being recognised today.

When I was sitting where you are, I felt a combination of things. Relief that the sheer workload was over; excitement; a kind of tired triumph. But I also felt grief – or a prescience of grief – anticipating what changes might come after this day, those connections that would inevitably unravel a little as the future arrived with its new opportunities and demands.

It might seem strange, at a time like this, to talk about sadness. But in the Māori world it’s a natural thing. Whenever we are welcomed in pōwhiri on any of the marae around the country we are invited to grieve, to bring on our dead and our sorrows alongside our celebration.

I believe the true beauty of occasions like this lies in this variegation. As scholars, as thinkers, as Māori and as human beings, it’s part of our duty to remind the world about the beautiful complexity of things.

When I was sitting where you are, it was the sadness of what I was leaving behind that affected me. And not just what I was leaving behind on this campus, but in my life and my life-path up until that point. It was this sadness, just as much as the excitement at what I was about to step into, that made this day in my own history so important and so memorable.

So in this spirit I’d like to share with you some words from a Bohemian-Austrian poet writing at the turn of last century. His name is Rainer Maria Rilke, and I have found his words nourishing at moments in my life of transformation, of deep and significant transition. He writes a lot about sadness and anxiety, but in this passage from ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, he also writes about knowledge, about the limits of knowledge. He writes about the future, and how we may embrace it, how it may embrace us when we least expect it:

If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys.

For those sadnesses are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing…

We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes.

We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way, in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.

In closing, what I’d really like to do is my best John Campbell impersonation. I feel like exclaiming ‘Remarkable! You are all quite simply remarkable! Marvellous!’ But in fact I’m not sure if that’s John Campbell or David Attenborough. In Māori, I would say: Koia kei a koutou, e – which I think could be loosely translated as bloody good on you all. May your futures step into you today.

Mauri ora

Hinemoana Baker is the 2014 Writing Fellow at Victoria University. Her latest collection of poems is waha | mouth (Victoria University Press).