Thank you Immi and the other East St residents who came and supported Dead Mileage two weeks ago, including John and his nephew Prabas who spontaneously made us cups of tea and brought us biscuits, Anna who came and said hello and Miriam and her young family who came to read the names outside their neighbours’ homes, as well as their own.
Jeremy Leatinu’u’s concentration on the task at hand, excellent sense of humour and exquisite handwriting not only highlighted the past residents and businesses who lived before at East St but brought together the contemporary community of East St to see who they were and ponder at this marvellous manual memorial.
Thank you to our marshals: Rochelle Thorne, Mose Eteuati, Jacob Thorne, Victoria Wynne-Jones, Daniel Strang, David Sun, Jamie Connor, Mike Holland, Rachel Rayner, Sophie Wilson, Cathy Livermore, John Radford and Kelvin Aris, who selflessly came and made sure Jeremy was okay throughout the performance, especially the wee hours of the morning.
A special thanks goes out to Sarah Wheeler, Tasha Roughton and David Daniela for their wonderful work from the Auckland Heritage Festival and Auckland Council, Edward Bennett who is the generous Cornucopia of Auckland history as well as being the K’rd historian, Leonn Lockhart of Knights Security for being awesome and sussing out security for us, Campbell Farquhar for helping us out, Marlaina Key and Simon Ashforth for being thoughtful souls, superb cookie bakers and a coincidental line of defence and Brent Harris for his love and support .
Throughout the twelve-hour performance, about seventy people came and engaged with the performance as well as chatting to the support crew of curator Louise Tu’u, Brent Harris and security guru and docent Mike Williams. This includes many people from the art world, including Bruce E. Phillips, curator at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts and Ron Brownson, Senior New Zealand and Pacific curator at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. Ron even wrote a post about the event, for which we are extremely grateful for. View photos of the event and the day after here.
We’ll leave the last words to Ron.
We Should Practice 