My idea, I think has come to me in bits and pieces over time. You know, my identity, the area that I grew up in, which is in on Gadigal Country, Eora Nation, specifically Marrickville. You know, how this area has shaped me, all the people that I've grown up with and who I've grown up around.
I was thinking about two individuals who I met in the '90s. They were also of Tongan heritage like myself. One of them was a student and he had quite an unusual name, I thought, for a Tongan – Winston Cook. And it really made me think back then, and I still ponder about it, where's this name from?
You know, It's very English. I hadn't known of any other Tongans with the last name Cook. You know, then I also met another person, Elizabeth Cook, who worked in our local shopping centre. And so I've been thinking about them for a long time. And then, you know, obviously over the last couple of years with a lot of the things going on around the explorer and navigator, Captain James Cook, and I also come from a navigation clan; I started to think about the Cooks again, these two people who I believe are cousins, but I also believe they may be descendants of Captain Cook because Captain Cook did go to Tonga.
It led me to also think about this cultural context of Captain Cook referring to the Kingdom of Tonga as the friendly islands, and Tongan people love this identity. You know, these kind of ideas came together for me and started making me think more about the complexity around the different kinds of national identity. As an Australian, a first generation Australian, I was thinking also about my own identity being a person from this area, from Marrickville.
So this started making me think a little bit more about, you know, the ideas of being friendly, the ideas of hospitality, the ideas of belonging.
