Suchergebnisse

A letter to Robin Kearns - Gregory O'BrienListening to the Samoan-born writer Albert Wendt at a recent literary festival in Wanaka, my thoughts drifted northwards in the direction of the Pacific. When asked—in keeping with Maori protocol—to name his ancestral mountain, Albert insisted on citing three: a hill behind Apia, then a sacred burial mound on the Samoan coast, and finally Mt Taranaki, beneath which he had spent some formative years at New Plymouth Boys' High. This set me thinking about our visit, last year, to the Niuean village of Liku. Our painter-friend John Pule had recently built a house there, leaving Auckland to settle on the plot of family land where he had been born in 1962.

1. Introduction -- 2. Researching the psychiatric asylum -- 3. The survival of the idea of asylum -- 4. On-site survival : the contemporary practice of mental health care on former asylum sites -- 5. From asylum to college campus : memory and remembrance in transinstitutionalisation -- 6. Re-imagining psychiatric asylum spaces through residential redevelopment -- 7. Imagined geographies and virtual remembrance at the derelict psychiatric asylum -- 8. The future place of past asylums.

This paper explores the links between housing and other welfare policies, low income, and culture among Pacific peoples within Auckland, New Zealand. These migrant peoples occupy an ambiguous social space within Auckland: they represent the visible face of the world's largest Polynesian city, yet are occupants of some of the city's poorest and least health-promoting housing. Through considering the balance between choice and constraint, we examine how housing costs, poverty, and cultural practices converge to influence household expenditure decisions. Specifically, we are interested in the ways health-promoting behaviours (for example, obtaining fresh food) and utilising health care services are 'discounted' (that is, postponed or substituted with cheaper alternatives) because of costs associated with structural changes in housing and the broader policy context. We draw on narratives gathered from in-depth interviews conducted with seventeen Samoan and Cook Island families undertaken in the South Auckland suburb of Otara in mid-2000. Our findings illustrate a lack of 'fit' between state housing stock and its occupants. We conclude that, although a recent return to a policy of income-related rents may alleviate these conditions, further longitudinal and community-supported research is required to monitor whether health inequalities are in fact lessened through income-related interventions alone.