Reflections on New Zealand as an archipelagic imaginary

I cannot quite recall the context, but one bleached summer’s day in 1972, my parents revealed that they, one of my sisters and I were moving from Saskatoon to New Zealand, leaving two newly adult siblings behind. Gannetlike in their migratory habits my parents had earlier departed the grey weight of post-war London in 1950 to traverse the Atlantic, Panama Canal and Pacific to take up the care of a country school in Mokauiti, 89 km from Hamilton in the Waikato region. However, in 1953, with my mother feeling increasingly marooned in that valley, they returned to England, from whence, after a time, in 1959 they made their way to the wheat-fielded back-blocks of Saskatchewan. Yet, they were ever-restless and this newly announced return-trip south was perhaps, then, inevitable.