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In an interview with Athol McCredie, recorded in 2012, Glenn Jowitt recalls photographing Lucy Parkinson:
"I shot this while I was doing the ‘Polynesia Here and There’ [series] material. Lucy Parkinson was a very good friend of mine, and at this time in our lives I was going up to Ocean Beach and staying with them. When we swam at the sea we didn’t wear anything. There was about half a dozen, a dozen of us at one time, and it was just the way we were.
Lucy was wandering around the beach with Hinekoia on her hip and this little white cloud popped up. I thought, ‘God!’ It was the only cloud in the sky. And I said, ‘Lucy, we’ve got to use this.’ She has her family’s pounamu, and she’s pregnant to her second child.
Lucy’s a very staunch woman, you know, really knows where she stands with her culture and with the world. This just represented her strength, and her family’s strength. It was just one of those moments where I took it, didn’t really think about it, because I didn’t see the nudity as anything different than normal life at the beach with a kind of hippie attitude.
It wasn’t until later that I realised that the cloud and the pounamu and Hinekoia and the hot sea and the hot wave made for this picture that just expressed, for me, the strength of the kuia, the Māori woman, in our culture, and how incredible it is that they’ve carried the culture through the terrible times of colonialism. When alcohol was the way, and their whole culture was busted up – it was the Māori women in New Zealand, I believe, and in the Pacific particularly, where they preserved their culture through their cultural practice".
Listen to photographer Glenn Jowitt describe taking the photograph Lucy Parkinson on Ocean Beach, Whangarei; 1981