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So my name is Kerryn Pollock and among other things I work for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga which is the National Historic Heritage Agency and a really great project I have running is called the Rainbow List Project which really kicked off about 2021 and the main purpose of that was to improve the representation of Queer communities and histories in the New Zealand Heritage List, Rarangi Kōrero.[00:00:30] Today we are at Old St Paul's Church, which is an 1866, um, neo gothic, um, wonder of architecture. It's one of the properties that, um, Pohiria Taonga, uh, runs. We have custodianship over it, and, uh, it's the, The place where we are making our first sort of foray, I guess you could say, out of the heritage list and into our [00:01:00] heritage properties for RainbowList. Tell me more about that. Okay. So my idea with RainbowList is, as I said before, it's to make sure that queer histories and communities are represented in the heritage list. And so that's basically storytelling through, through the heritage list. All the narratives that go with the historic places that we have on that list. And so I guess the next step for the project is opening our [00:01:30] properties out to queer communities. So heritage is for everyone and I think it's very easy to think That, um, heritage is, um, not for everyone, that it's forbidding, that it's colonial, that it's, um, conservative, you know, all of those sorts of things, whereas heritage truly should be, anyway, in the ideal world, for everybody. So, um, For me, it's a really important next step for Rainbow List that we [00:02:00] essentially overtly throw our doors open to queer communities and almost allow for queer takeovers of our heritage spaces. That's been my dream. And so that's what the drag show that we've got coming up at Old St Paul's is all about. Yeah, so, I mean, have there been other opportunities? Are there any other drag shows in the past that have been here in this church? We're not aware of any drag shows as such. There was a burlesque show around 2008, I [00:02:30] think. That's well before my time with Heritage New Zealand. I mean, there are a lot of events in this church. place. It's still a consecrated church, but it's sort of not an operational church. And um, so while there are lots of weddings and funerals, um, in this place, there are also lots of music events, gigs, live music, exhibitions. There's all sorts of things, um, happen here. Um, so absolutely, it's already got, um, an amazing reputation [00:03:00] for a diversity of events. But as far as we are aware, there's never been a drag show here. And just getting back onto the, um, so with marriages, there's still being consecrated ground. I mean, do, do same sex marriages happen here? They do. Um, I know that, um, for instance, before the time of marriage, uh, when civil law, uh, civil unions came into effect, um, Grant Robertson, the ex, um, Minister of Finance, got civilized here, for want of a better word, [00:03:30] um, I know that there'll be a history of queer couples getting, um, civilised or, or married here and it's not something we've looked into, um, and it would be really interesting to do a bit more delving into that, um, but absolutely, I'm sure that if you delve back into the archives of this place, there will be clear evidence that queer people have used it, you know, for those fundamental rituals or everyday life purposes, um, worshipping when it was still an active church, um, Um, I know that, for instance, [00:04:00] Catherine Mansfield worshipped here and she obviously occupies her spot in our queer history. It is amazing to think that we are sitting in the same pews that Catherine Mansfield sat in a hundred plus years ago. Yeah, exactly. I think that's one of the amazing Um, I guess experiences that Heritage Places offer is that we can, um, you know, immerse ourselves in them and once we know the stories, we can connect with those stories and I think people really love, [00:04:30] love that and that's what, that's, I think that's the unique thing that Heritage Places can do. They provide a meeting place between past and present, um, and you know, with, with Heritage Places. Events like the drag show we're making new stories here and with an eye to the future So, how did the drag show come about and and is it a collaboration and and why drag? Ever since I started With Rainbow List, [00:05:00] I was really keen to do a drag show and At Old St Paul's, I mean, I had also thought about, I had this vision of drag queens on the veranda of Antrim House, which is the Edwardian building on Bilcott Street in Wellington. That's the headquarters of Heritage New Zealand. I could just see that happening. And I think, for me, that is such a fabulous, overt expression of queer culture and queer life. There's also a really strong drag [00:05:30] scene in Wellington, so it was almost, it was so obvious that that would be a great, um, great project, um, great creative endeavor, I suppose, to have at Old St. Paul's as a way of really activating Rainbow List. Um, so basically, I just got in touch with Willie Smackintosh, um, the drag king. Um, I've been to lots of their performances before, and I said, oh, hey, we've got, you know, this thing called Rainbow List. [00:06:00] Uh, we also have this fabulous venue. Uh, we would really love it if you would meet with us and think about whether you'd like to do a show here. So, um, Willie or Hannah Gordon and, and her wife Em visited us here and it was really fabulous seeing the looks on their faces when they both walked in. I don't think they'd been here before. This is a space that's pretty unassuming and plain from the outside. [00:06:30] And so when you walk in, if you don't know what you're about to see, it's quite visually mind blowing. And I could see when they first walked in, they were just like, Oh my gosh, wow. And I could already see that they could, they were starting to visualize what they could do here. And so for us at Heritage New Zealand, we basically said, we will provide our space for you. Um, this will be like a collaboration, but, um, tell us.[00:07:00] What do you want to do in this space, really? So, the actual show is completely, um, Willy and Co's show. Um, it was really important that we didn't dictate or control what they did. Um, obviously because this is a heritage place we have to be extremely mindful of caring for the heritage fabric. Um, but really, we're not here to tell the drag because, um, crew what to do. They are the experts in [00:07:30] drag. And so they've come up with a show that really interprets this space, which is why it's called Wedlock, a drag show. I just can't wait to see what they've come up with. Over the last year or so, there has been quite a bit of controversy in some parts of society around, not necessarily about drag shows, but around drag story times. Have you had any pushback in terms of putting a drag event on here? Um, [00:08:00] I'm not aware of any to date, and I'm sure that I would know about it. That's definitely something that we did think about. Obviously, this is a church. And for some sectors of society, that might be problematic. But Heritage New Zealand is an organisation. All of our properties are signed up to an initiative called the Safe Space Alliance. So we are absolutely out and proud that our heritage places are safe places for queer people. I would like to think that [00:08:30] will be respected by those that don't share our views. Uh, Basically, um, I'm not expecting anything to happen, but you never know. Um, if, if that was to come to pass, we would be very clear that that kind of bigotry is not welcome in our heritage places. And it must be quite hard, I'm guessing, for the performers over the last year or so, because, I mean, particularly with those, um, drag story time incidents. Yeah, I mean, Willie Willie himself [00:09:00] has been the target of, um, attacks by, you know, the likes of Destiny Church a few months ago, um, for a drag story time. So, um, this was already well underway when that occurred. Um, so, you know, we are, we are well aware of that, but it really just galvanized me and my organization, um, to, you know, there's no way we're not going to do this. Let's put it that way. Obviously, um, it's, you know, a, a potential risk that we're aware [00:09:30] of. And whenever you do an event at a place like this, you, you have to, um, you know, be aware of all manner of risks. This is just another one of them. Um, but I really hope that this, and I know it will be an uplifting and heartwarming experience for Willie and the crew and also the audience, I don't know whether it's too far to say it's a political act, but it's definitely an overt show of support for performers like Willie and the rest of them.[00:10:00] Looking back at the rainbow list, and when you first started that, was that looking at properties that were already on the heritage list, and then looking at it from a kind of, with a queer lens? Uh, yeah, pretty much. So, It really started when one of my colleagues went on one of your walks, actually, and, um, and it might, I think it was for an Architecture Week festival quite a few years ago before COVID, and [00:10:30] she realised that we had a lot of places on our heritage list that you talk about, but we didn't tell those stories, and obviously, um, you know, you could, you know, speculate that that's an overt omission, but I think mostly it's just because there just wasn't that awareness and there wasn't that lens, like you say, that queer lens over it. So we really just thought we have to do this. We absolutely have to do it. And so Carmen's Curios, the shop on Cuba Street, was the, [00:11:00] um, I guess the pilot project for it. Um, so that's the first one we did. Um, and that was really great, very successful. It's really. It's quite easy for us to, um, work with properties that are already on the list because they don't need to go through an onerous listing process, um, which can be stalled by owner opposition and all sorts of other things. It's quite difficult to get things on a heritage list. In a way, that's rightly [00:11:30] so. It shouldn't be easy, but we often don't list things. It's not because they shouldn't be on there. It's because of external factors that stymie our work. Whereas we have the ability to update the narratives, or even a lot of our older listings don't have any historical narratives to go with them. So it's really easy for us to do the research and then retrospectively write up those narratives. So, at the moment, there are 35 list entries under the Rainbow List [00:12:00] theme, all but two of them were existing list entries, and the more that we find out about places having a queer story or history, the more, sort of, what we call upgrades we can do. I would love to do more new listings where the queer story is the reason, or one of the reasons, why it meets the threshold for a heritage place. The first one we did was Dygans [00:12:30] Building in Whanganui, so that's the Charles Mackie building where the shooting occurred when he was being blackmailed for being homosexual. That is the fundamental reason why that is on our heritage list. It's an otherwise pretty unremarkable Edwardian building with a pretty ordinary history. The Charles Mackie story elevates it and it's actually a category one listing which means that's outstanding. That's a hugely important story in our queer history, as you know.[00:13:00] So I would love to be able to do more of those, and we definitely have had nominations for more, but we've run into difficulties with owners who don't want their buildings to be recognised as heritage. It's very frustrating. The other recent one we've got is a building called Home Crafts on Molesworth Street. That's a Chapman Taylor. Walter Chapman Taylor was an arts and craft architect. That was his showroom. It's now a pub called Chapman [00:13:30] Taylor's. Um, and I discovered when we were doing the list entry for that, that, um, a creative called Theodore Trezise owned that for a time and he possibly lived there with his mother. So that's a more sort of, um, that's just a sort of moment in time for that building. His, his occupancy and ownership of it, um, is not sort of, you know, what makes it a heritage place. It's, but it's part of the story. And so that's what we do with Rainbow List is that it's all about storytelling. [00:14:00] So even if, you know, the queer story is not super significant or highly important or long standing, we're We can still make sure it's in the story, or the narrative we tell about a place. Um, It's really important to me that we don't rule out queer stories that seem small or passing. They, they have their place. And I, I, I'm just thinking back to the media coverage around the Charles Mackie building, and, um, Just how significant that [00:14:30] was for rainbow communities to see that, um, queer spaces were being added to this really significant list. Absolutely. So, one of the, um, criteria that, um, means a building can be deemed heritage is social significance. And that is, um, the extent to which a place is significant to present day communities for its sort of historical significance. Um, story or, or [00:15:00] values. Um, it's not that it was socially significant in the past. It needs to be significant now. Um, what I knew when I was doing the Charles Mackey building was that it was undoubtedly historically significant. That's another criteria. But what I wasn't sure about was whether the story of Charles Mackey was connected to that building for queer communities or just communities out there. Did they value this building? today in 2023 when it was listed 24 [00:15:30] because of that Charles Mackie story. It's really hard to get evidence of that kind of social significance because it means it needs to be recorded and that kind of, that kind of connection is often, it's really meaningful for people who hold it in groups but they might not record it for people like me to use as evidence. But what we can do with any heritage listing is that we, we, we publicly notify the listing and that gives anyone an opportunity to have [00:16:00] their say about the listing, whether they think it's correct, um, what it means to them, so on and so forth. And we got so many submissions from queer people saying this is so amazing, this means so much to me. It's so important that queer stories are represented in things like a heritage list because it shows that we have a past and a history. So that, that process of gathering submissions in itself was more than enough for me to say this meets the test for [00:16:30] being socially significant to queer communities today. And that was, that was actually quite beautiful. I really, really, that, that was probably my favourite thing to get out of it. Usually when we get submissions, sometimes they're just a simple yes or no, or, you know, they'll give us useful information, but there was so much rich content, if you like, in those submissions, so much beautiful writing, um, that it's something that's really stayed with me. So is it just limited [00:17:00] to buildings on the list or can it be places? And do those places or buildings still have to exist? Yeah, that's such an interesting question. So no, I mean, the short answer is no, it doesn't just have to be buildings. We have all sorts of, it's basically place based history. So we've got a lot of landscapes, um, we've got monuments, um, structures, you know, we've even got the likes of dog kennels on our list. Um, as well as really vast, impressive landscapes. [00:17:30] Um, so no, it doesn't have to, and if you look at, um, we have special categories for Māori heritage, um, wāhī tapu, which are sort of sacred places, and wāhī tupuna, which are places of ancestral significance. And oftentimes, um, it's the land and the whenua that is where the meaning is held, and there might not be anything obvious to the outsider. But for the people, the iwi, hapū and hapōri, those places are so important, [00:18:00] those landscapes, because they do hold those stories. And that's sort of what you can call intangible history, really. So, so it can be a landscape, absolutely. I think for something like queer history, Having a defined landscape or structure to really hang the story on is very helpful in a way. Um, so, you know, it's, it's immensely [00:18:30] frustrating that so many of Carmen's, um, buildings are no longer with us. Um, the coffee house would have been absolutely perfect for this project. Same with the Evergreen Coffee Lounge. Um, I think it would be a hard ask for us to list the land on which those places stood. There are now new buildings there. That would be a real, real challenge. Um, but [00:19:00] it's also an interesting conundrum because so many of these places have been demolished, you know, and so does that mean that we therefore can't tell the stories of our queer communities because all the spaces they're in are gone? I mean, that's, that's not a good, not a good situation at all. So I think we need to think really carefully and laterally about what constitutes place. And, um, to what extent we can tell stories through a heritage listing of buildings or uses of [00:19:30] buildings that are no longer there. Um, one place that we have had nominated for, uh, Rainbow List, or out of the Rainbow List project is, um, Putangahere Vinegar Hill. Um, in the Manawatu, and that's obviously, you know, a recreation reserve, um, the site of New Zealand's oldest running queer summer camp. That also has a profoundly important place to Ngati Hauiti, the iwi there, and so we are working with them to make sure [00:20:00] that we tell that story, um, alongside the queer story and any other stories that are, um, attached to that place. Um, And when you've got a place like that, that has so many layers, and is so important to um, mana whenua, you don't rush. That, that process. So we're still sort of in the midst of working that out. Um, places I'm interested in are the likes of Vivian Street, Marion Street. So actual streets, because [00:20:30] streets are where life happens. Where so many of these queer stories are. So a question I like to think about is, would the corner of Cuba Vivian or Marion Street itself be, uh, a worthy or valid heritage place. We have old colonial roads on our heritage list. Why can't we have, um, a central city street? Um, Karangahape Road's another example of that. Of course, that's got all the built heritage [00:21:00] there already. So that would be an example of, I guess, more intangible heritage. We are sure you can't necessarily point to this, that, the other building, but it's the street itself where that life happened and still probably happens to some extent. Um, so I think that's absolutely worth exploring. So how can queer communities get involved in what you're doing, which is amazing work? Yeah, so, [00:21:30] I mean, it's up to us to, uh, at Heritage New Zealand to create a project, um, that queer communities feel comfortable sharing their stories with, um, and I hope that we have done that. But basically, if, if anyone out there knows of a place, um, or a community, um, and there's some kind of, um, place based history, queer history, let us know. Like, we absolutely love finding out about new places, and you know, [00:22:00] I've done a lot of research myself in secondary literature. And I've come up with a whole lot of places, but the best thing for me is when I find out about something, they had no clue that it had a queer, queer history. And that's often through people finding out about this project and, and telling me. So, you know, you just need to go to our website, Google Rainbow List, and you can get in touch with us. Um, we are really keen to hear people's stories. And if somebody is wanting to do [00:22:30] a, say, a queer performance or something queer within a heritage space, we just come to you? Yeah, absolutely. So Heritage New Zealand has, we have a whole lot of properties all throughout the country. Um, and they're on our website, so all you need to do is, um, is get in touch with the property itself and say, Hiya. I'd love to do this thing, what do you think? Our properties are there to gather revenue in some cases. So a lot of [00:23:00] the gigs we have here, you know, the performers will pay to use the space. And so that's just something to bear in mind. But I think that so many of our other properties are ripe for queer takeovers. Performers should not be shy in coming forward and seeing if we can make something work. So the Queer Takeover is happening on Saturday the 28th of September 2024 in the Old St Paul's. Are you able to give me a little sneak preview of what we might expect? Yes, so [00:23:30] the show is called Wedlock, a drag wedding, and the MC is Willy Smackintush, the drag king, um, but there are another of other a number of other drag performers in the show So basically it's a drag wedding That's a really Obvious, you know response to this and I just can't wait to see what they do But it's a it's It's an hour or so long performance, um, there'll be a [00:24:00] lot of dancing. I know there's some opera singing. One of the drag performers is also an opera singer. It's very much riffing off the gothic architecture, so it's a bit of a, um, I would say it's a gothic wedding. Um. Um. Attendees are encouraged, if they like dressing up, to dress up. So, you know, wear your best wedding attire. Um, I think it's just going to be an amazing use of the space. I know that it won't [00:24:30] be just, um, confined to a stage at the front. They will be using the whole space here. It will be amazing. Looking back at your time with Rainbow List, what have you, what so far have been your most kind of memorable moments? Uh, I think I, I mentioned earlier, the, um, all the beautiful responses we got to the Diagens building Charles Mackey, um, listing. That was a real highlight. Um, [00:25:00] probably for me, it's those stories that I, just didn't know about through research, um, the new stories that, um, have come to our attention through Rainbow List. Um, so we got, uh, a message from an architect in the South Island who told us about, um, a modernist house in Rangiora called the Archer Tan House, um, that was owned and built by Courtney Archer and his partner, um, [00:25:30] gay men. Um, Courtney Archer was a pacifist. He worked a lot with Rewi Alley. Um, so he's got a very interesting story in and of himself. And I think his partner was Singaporean. So the, the house and also the garden are really important. So that would be such an interesting, um, exploration of to what extent their status as a, as a, um, quietly open but [00:26:00] you know, gay couple, um, at a time when, um, it was criminalized. You know, how we would tell that story and the place is really interesting because the garden is massive and it's all around the house and so if you think about a queer lens on that story, it's a very private place. Um, and I, I think it would be just so fascinating for us to explore the extent to which, um, you could see that House and the Garden as responding to [00:26:30] the circumstances, um, the queer lives of these two men, and what you could make of that, whether that's informed, um, The architecture and, and the garden design, um, we have the home or the batch of Frank Sargison on our list, um, and before we started Rainbow List, that was the only list entry that mentioned anything about being gay or queer. It mentioned that he was a gay man. And he had a little porch added on to that batch that would allow his lover, um, to [00:27:00] I think his name was Frank. Anyway, to come, come in privately and to give them some private privacy and to kind of not be, be seen so much because they had to be careful. And so that's a really good example of the circumstances of queer lives informing the built heritage of a place. So that was an exciting new thing for me to find out. Um, I was also doing some research the other day and discussed, uh, uh, found that the last, um, owner of Plymouth [00:27:30] House, which is now Balcott Street Bistro, um, Ella Plymouth, was understood by her family to probably be what we would now describe as a, as a lesbian. She died in 1958. Um, and of course, we need to be very careful with these stories and to not, um, ascribe identities. That don't fit these people. Um, but definitely I'm excited about exploring her life a bit more. And how that might inform the narrative that we have for that particular building. Because that's a category [00:28:00] one historic place at the moment. Um, but I'm really excited about the prospect of adding Ella's story, um, to that place. So it's, it's really the new stories that come up, you know, you think, there's been such amazing research done in our queer history and you do it yourself, but there's always new, new things to find out, and that's a really cool thing about Rainbow List is that it provides, I think, an opportunity for these stories to sort of get a bit more publicity.
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