Pure brightness

Featured in

  • Published 20140204
  • ISBN: 9781922182241
  • Extent: 300 pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

EACH April at Pure Brightness Festival (Ching Ming) Chinese families sweep the graves and perform traditional rites to honour their ancestors. On 4–5 April 2013, a hundred people gathered in the remote far north of New Zealand to commemorate those lost when the SS Ventnor sank off the coast of the Hokianga on 28 October 1902.

The Ventnor was carrying the exhumed bones of 499 Chinese for reburial in their villages in China as well as impoverished elderly Chinese men whose fares home had been paid by fellow Chinese New Zealanders. Some crew and most of the Chinese and bones were lost at sea. Some bones washed up along the coast and were recovered and cared for by Te Roroa and Te Rarawa.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

About the author

Alison Wong

Alison Wong's novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (Pan Macmillan, 2009), won the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted...

More from this edition

Fitting into the Pacific

MemoirI MET HER mother first. Emi was head of the typing pool in a government department where I worked and, in those days, before...

Waiheke Island

FictionTHEY WERE WORRIED about the boy so they sent him to me. I needed a job done. You'd think he was eighteen from the...

Postcard from Beijing

MemoirI'M LIVING AT Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, in an extraordinary brick building designed by the artist Ai Weiwei, who lives down the road....

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.