It's like, how do we be who we are and live our culture in a place that is changing? What do you think about that?

I think that sense in which we've always been both controlled by the state and also managed to escape it sometimes in big and small ways and having pushed back against it a bit.

I think one of the things about that early Pākehā culture, the rural cultures, there were a lot of opportunities for people to forge and form relationships with one another that sometimes came under the oversight of the state and at other times didn't.

Certainly by the Early 20th century, we see the emergence of kind of what we might start to think of in terms of gay or lesbian identities.

And certainly some of the stories are really interesting.

Two women who married in Australia and moved to New Zealand and then got divorced.

They got married by one of them presenting themselves as a man to the vicar in Australia, came over here, ended up where it was discovered that, in fact, one of them had married another woman at St Matthew's in the city in Auckland, again, by pulling the same kind of trick.

Thinking about that, about the past and the present and how we draw, what do you think are some of the continuities between the past and the present?