Journey Summary

The story’s narrator, an unnamed 71-year-old Māori man, leaves home to go into the city to meet with officials about the future of the land his family has owned for generations. As he waits for a taxi to pick him up, he feels annoyed by his family’s nagging: he thinks they treat him like an old man. Still, he is in a good mood, happy to be out on his own and expecting to have success in the city. Traveling to the train station in the taxi, he watches the town pass by, noticing which parts of the landscape have changed and which have stayed the same.

He enters the train station and boards the train, continuing to observe the view out the window. He notes how much development has occurred in the area since he was young: construction projects have radically changed the landscape, filling ocean with land in some areas, causing erosion, and turning farmland into housing developments. While he bitterly resents the ways that the Pakeha disrespect the land, he reminds himself that the development provides people with basic needs, such as housing, food, and transportation. When he gets off the train in the city, he remembers how, during an economic crisis in his youth, many starving people lived in the train station, but his family survived because they were able to garden on the family’s land. Outside the station, he sees a spot where the city bulldozed a graveyard to build a highway, and the narrator reflects again on the disrespectful behavior of the Pakeha. He then walks confidently to his meeting.

After the meeting, the narrator waits in the station for his train home, reflecting on the conversation with the city planner. In the meeting, the narrator explained that he wanted to subdivide his family’s lot so that each of his nieces and nephews could live on it, but the city planner responded condescendingly, telling him that the land was slated to become a parking lot in a future housing development. The narrator urged the official to reconsider, explaining that the family’s relationship to the land goes back generations, so they could not simply sell it to the city. The meeting escalated into an argument, in which the planner revealed the underlying racial discrimination of the city’s decision: having a Māori family living together on the land would decrease the land’s value. At this, the narrator became very angry and kicked the planner’s desk, damaging it, and the planner forced him to leave the office.

The narrator returns home to his family in defeat. Instead of telling them how the meeting went, he shouts at them, demanding that when he dies, they cremate him instead of burying him in the ground, as he is afraid the development project will unearth his remains. He then retires to his room alone and sits on the edge of his bed for a long time, looking at his hands.