She concludes that it wasn’t a catastrophe for her to give up painting whereas, one might assume she means that may have been the case for Pat. Photography wasn’t seen as art then, and she jokingly adds that it was useful to be able to photograph Pat’s work. Even nowadays when this comes up she’ll giggle and say she might have actually been better at painting than Pat. It’s hard not to wonder what the joke conceals. In an earlier interview, for the documentary Pacific Ikon, there’s a section where she describes Pat as being negative about women artists, saying he didn't really take them seriously. I struggle to reconcile this with my adored grandad, and how much I know, in other ways, he loved and respected women. But it tells of a possible tension in their relationship. Perhaps there’s more to be said about that era, and how, even though my grandma might seem unconventional compared to others, structures in society still greatly impacted the trajectory of her life. Or how, in Gil-like fashion, she chose, with great autonomy, to de-centre herself in what could be seen as a sacrifice but was really, in her graceful strength, a decision to simply get on with her life. She’s on record as saying that she is not sad about it.  

Not long after art school, Pat and Gil left for London as many of their friends had already done. It was the late 50s. Pat worked in a theatre, and Gil made sets for films. They then left for Spain, where they travelled together on a Lambretta scooter and once spotted Salvador Dali in a cafe. (I suspect this would have been exciting for Pat especially, but they left him alone.)  

They returned to London and married, before having their first child, my uncle Ben, in 1959. Ben was a baby when Pat and Gil took him on his first march, the London leg of the Aldermaston Marches, against the use of nuclear weapons. Pat then got a grant to paint in Italy. Throughout their time in Europe, they both picked up various jobs to stay afloat. Pat would paint when he could, and Gil was trying out photography – though not in any serious way. But even her photographs from this time have a composition that only an artist could achieve. In 1962 they found out they were pregnant again with my mum Tamsin and chose to come home. This time, they decided to try Tāmaki Makaurau.  

Tamsin was born the same day they moved into a house on Windmill Rd, Mt Eden. A place with a view of Maungawhau, a view which Pat would then paint over and over again. Pat had a shed out the back as a studio and would spend time painting as well as making kites and go-karts for the kids. Gil began to plant things – vegetables and the beginnings of another of her life’s creative works, the garden. The beginnings too, of what became the inspiration for Pat’s Garden Series – yet again, enabling the other artist in the family.  

My grandma is Pākehā. She grew up on a farm near Bulls, and no disrespect to Bulls, but it was unlikely she grew up understanding the history of colonisation in this country. And yet, through the 80s, as Māori resistance to Crown subjugation was erupting in new forms, Gil was there. The Springbok Tour had forced many people to consider racism in their own backyard. It cracked open divisions in the country that had not yet been explicit for many middle-class Pākehā. Joe Hawke, Eva Rickard, Titewhai Harawira, names synonymous with land reclamation and the Māori rights movement, all knew Gil, and at times had requested her presence as a photographer. The next generation too – Hone Harawira, Mereana Pitman, Annette Sykes – they all ask after Gil when I see them.  

Gil is often revered for being a woman photographer, but she doesn’t talk this up much. Perhaps, rather than being the assumed obstacle, her gender was sometimes beneficial, allowing her into spaces without attracting notice. I don’t have any memories of her explicitly calling herself a feminist. Gil didn’t really get into the women’s movement until my mum was out of high school and getting involved herself, and even then, Gil was taking the photos rather than marching in the streets. My mum was also proactive in the anti-nuclear movement, walking along the East Cape to raise awareness. It was then that my mum had her eyes opened to Māori issues, and chose to learn te reo. Later, she would have two Māori sons (my brothers), and five Māori grandchildren.

For a large part of her life, Gil was reconciling the relationship between Māori and Pākehā in this country. Later when I was at high school, she and I were at a pōwhiri at Ōrākei Marae, and she joked to others about how I would translate the proceedings for her. I was a little whakamā, but I knew she was just proud that her granddaughter could speak Māori, given she couldn’t.  

There is a unique intersection here though, and Titewhai Harawira and Hana Jackson represent this for me. Gil has taken personal portraits of both of them, requested by them and their families. For Hana, it was at a time that she was unwell. The intimacy required for this speaks volumes of the trust and respect Gil had from and for these women. It wasn’t easy, Gil talks of some tension with Titewhai, but later in life Titewhai would always tell me to pass on her love to Gil. Another example of this intersection perhaps is when Gil was commissioned to take photos for Diggeress Te Kanawa’s book, Weaving a Kakahu. She went into the bush with Diggeress, collected plants, watched how she made the dye and how the flax was threaded. There is a stack of meticulously captioned prints in the studio identifying this whole process. 

When I started to film Gil, during that period of obsession while I was at University, I would always ask her how this all came about. How did you learn to grow things? Why did you take so many photos? Interviewing Gil can be frustrating, because she really doesn’t like the attention. We will be sitting in her magnificent garden, looking through one of her boxes of prints, let’s say it is labelled Parihaka – she’d driven there with Dick Scott – and I’ll ask her “How did you get invited? Why did you photograph these issues?” Most of her answers begin with, “I don’t know, I just…These things were just happening."

Many of Gil’s photos tell of how close she was to the action. She has a close-up of Don Brash with mud on his face at Waitangi. During the Springbok Tour, she’d been at the rugby game in Hamilton that was cancelled, where the protestors ended up on the field. It was scary, she says. (And yet, she still kicks herself for having missed a potentially brilliant photo when, instructed by police to move off the field, she walked past the pathway leading to the stalled rugby players assembled under a grandstand and failed to photograph them). She was at Bastion Point. She was even at the opening of the Kōhanga Reo at Hoani Waititi. Miles away from her NZ European farming roots. 

When my mum was in her late teens, her half-sister, my aunty Amber, was born. Amber is Pat’s child from an affair with another woman. This was possibly the most difficult thing to happen in Gil’s life. But she never blamed Amber, and Amber became part of the family, eventually living with Pat and Gil. Gil doesn’t talk about this much, but she stayed married to Pat. I suspect though that this changed their relationship in a fundamental way, forever.  

Gil has an album dedicated to the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. She’s printed certain shots and collected them in an A4 sized book, along with captions, many of which have since fallen off. She made two versions of the book, and gave one to Greenpeace. Pat was a member of the Peace Squadron, and Gil had done some work with Greenpeace. She had been on the ship the night before it was bombed, a night with invited guests such as Helen Clark, Matiu Rata, Trevor Mallard, Jo Hawke, Hone and Hilda Harawira, and David Robie.

Gil was in her darkroom developing photos when she heard the news and immediately grabbed her camera to head down to Marsden Wharf. She saw some of the crew huddling in blankets but chose not to photograph them because she could see how traumatised they were – she told me once that she wasn’t being a professional photographer at that moment, and that says a lot about her.  

Another photographer died that night, Fernando Pereira, because he’d gone back to retrieve his camera. Gil told RNZ once that she would probably have done the same. She’s got a knack for close calls, I learnt recently she’d been on the train that would later crash at Tangiwai - but she’d gotten off at Marton. She tells less of her stories these days, repeating the same ones over and over. Because of Gil though, we still have the physical evidence. And the physical evidence tells of an insatiable need to photograph, to record, to document, and to share. 

Gil has an almost feverish passion when working which anyone who has seen her at a protest will have witnessed. I managed to capture it when I was making a documentary about the TPPA (now CPTPP, The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership). Gil’s standing with her camera overlooking the group of protestors and sees me in the crowd. She pauses and gives me a big, kind smile, the one reserved for when we find ourselves mirroring each other in that kind of context, or when we sit silently next to each other in the garden as dusk settles. Not two seconds later though she spots something she thinks should be photographed, up comes the camera, and click – her attention is gone.  

In 2015 Gil donated a large part of her collection to the Auckland Museum, with the condition that her work would be accessible to those who wanted it or needed it. Gil was the only one who archived her work, the only one who understood the inventory, the only one who had begun to attempt to digitise it. It’s quite a lot of work for one person. They took the entirety of her 110,000 black and white negatives, which covered the late 1950s to the early 2000s. There were 3800 proof sheets relating to those. There were also 3000 gardening images in colour, and 16,000 other colour images.   

They held an award ceremony to honour her. When she got up to do an acceptance speech, it lasted about one minute.  

“Thank you very much to the Auckland Museum, I’m not a speaker so I’m not going to speak very much. I’m a documenter. I’ve always just recorded what was happening everywhere. Hopefully, it’s available to anyone who wants to access what was going on over the last 30,40, 50 years... Ok! Thank you.” 

I can see a clear demarcation of the point in which Gil’s grasp of her memory really began to loosen. It was when Covid-19 hit and my stubbornly independent grandma, like many people, spent long periods alone. It was also during this time that Gil was deemed not able to drive anymore. This meant she could no longer take her camera and go – just go to all the things that were just happening. In 2020, I also chose to move to Wellington, and my visits became much less frequent.  

These days when I visit I don’t try to document her so much as just be with her. Usually I’ll bring her a flat white, or we will have tea and gingernuts at the outside table. Occasionally it will be wine. She will ask me about Wellington, and I’ll say it’s brilliant and windy. She’ll laugh. Then she’ll lament about what’s happening in the world, as seen via Al Jazeera, it’s the only thing she watches now, if she decides to turn the TV on at all. She hates ads. I try to ask her about how much the world has changed, but she doesn’t seem to think her experiences and lessons of 90 years are necessarily ones to be known or adhered to. She will tell me how she is reading A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough. She reads a lot. Her dining table, where we would enjoy crowded family dinners of broccoli soup, or rich stewed goat, is now stacked with newspapers, the latest Listeners, and new books sent to her because her photos have been used. So we sit for a while as she reads a newspaper from 2023. I tell her she can probably get rid of that one, but there are some good articles in it, she says. And then she asks me again how Wellington is, and my puku drops a little at the repeated question, but I smile and tell her again that it’s brilliant, and windy. She smiles that smile at me, and I know she’s happy if I’m happy.