CONNECTING HOMELANDS Telling the stories of Post-war Cretan Migrant Women in Aotearoa New Zealand An oral history and digital storytelling project

This digital archive contains the material of an oral history project that recorded the personal stories of elderly Cretan Greek women who came to New Zealand in the early 60s on a scheme to provide domestic staff for hotels and hospitals. It explores a gender perspective with emphasis on how women experience migration and the impact migration has had on them from a women’s perspective.
One of the limitations of research of this nature is that it fails to truly capture the impact such experiences as migration have upon the emotional landscape of the individuals caused by the rupture of parting. The visual element of the research project in the form of the audio-visual recordings gives voice to this and is more adept at presenting the ambivalence and complexity of such experiences as it communicates to more senses than the written word. Thus, the project’s second component involved developing a series of audiovisual outputs and a digital storytelling platform that would contain the curated material collected from the entire project in a creative, inclusive, and accessible way. The project was funded by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Unitec-Te Pukenga and Auckland Council Creative Communities NZ.