 Inga mana, inga reo, inga rauranga tēlamā, tēnā kauta, tēnā kauta, tēnā kauta katoa. Ko ea tearoa te fenua, ko rimutaka timāunga, ko rongarunga teawa, ko wong akso, wong gym, toko tuwhuna no hainai ea. Ko nati siip toko iwi, ko wong tun toko hapu, ko wong toko whānau, ko wong gokfi toko ingoa tuturu, ko Richard Foy aho, ko o te tumuaki, o te rua mahara, o te kāwanatanga. No rara, tēnā kauta, tēnā kauta, tēnā kauta katoa. Kia ora ndf. Good to see you. It's really nice to be back. I thought I'd be able to do some follow-up from last year. So as you recall last year at the keynote opening, I shared a little bit of a story about some displacement that I'd had one week on from the Kaikura earthquake. And in that displacement, I was separated from some precious personal taunga, a piece of digital media, the 2003 classic science fiction disaster movie The Core. And I just want to let you know that one year on from the Kaikura earthquake, after we were able to get back into the building, I recovered it. Fantastic. So we'll get rid of that for now. But I also made a plea to you all to ndf at that conference to show some love for The Core because it was rated only at 5.4 on IMDb. And I think it's rightful to look at what has happened in that year. So 2016 5.4 out of 10 watts it's sitting at. Drum roll, beat. 5.5. So I don't know. I mean, you know, as performance management goes, you guys done pretty good. I'm happy. I'm very happy. So thank you. Thank you. And ndf is, I don't know if that's implied, but it's meant nicely. OK, for the serious part of the talk. A declaration. A treaty. A petition. He Whakapotanga o Te Rangatiratanga o New Terenu of 1835, Te Teretia o Waitangi of 1840, and the Woman's Suffrage Petition of 1893. These three of our most significant constitutional documents of our nation's history make up He Tohu, the heart and soul of He Tohu. It's a permanent exhibition jointly conceived of, designed and created by Te Rua Mahara o Te Kawanatanga and Te Puna Mataranga o Aotearoa, the sister institutions of archives New Zealand and National Library of New Zealand. He Tohu literally symbolizes the thousands of people that left their marks, their signs, their signatures on these icons of New Zealand's history. They're also physical marks of people's hopes, of their aspirations, and of their commitment to forge our nation. But in a more prosaic sense, they're also public records of long-term archival value for New Zealand. And as such, they fall under the preservation care, under the stewardship, and the kaitiakitanga of the Chief Archivist and Archives New Zealand. All in accordance with the Public Records Act of 2005. It's fairly important to remember that. But the more than just sort of dusty documents about some banal transactions, even of historical notes or curiosity, they are contemporary documents. They are living documents with contemporary value. And probably more so now in a 21st century as New Zealand is trying to find and make its way on the world stage. And especially in a digitally disrupted area where we seem to be obsessed with self and the immediacy of the here and now. And we too often forget about the past, and then alone think about the future. Which is why those ideas of the architects and the signatories of these documents are at the very heart of the kaupapa for He Tohu. He Whakapapa Kureru, He Whinoa Kura, talking about our past to create a better future. So these documents, He Whakaputanga Te Teriti and the Women's Suffrage Petition, they are potent reminders to us of the promises made by our tupuna. They serve to hold us to account and honouring the commitments that were made. Sometimes to make rightful amends. But probably more importantly in a world we were looking at the past and talking about it to create the future. They inspire us to become our better selves as people and as a nation. But I'm not a constitutional lawyer. I'm not a professional historian. And I'm not an archival expert in these documents. Luckily we have some great people that are. And here are a couple of them. Stephanie Lash, who is the lead curator. Jared Davidson, who was co-creator. These two important people from Archives New Zealand, part of the whole team that we had, helped create some of the content and the substance behind this amazing exhibition about the documents. My eyesight not being what it is or what it was. I misread lead curator once and I said to Steph, you're the Lord Curator. That's fantastic. And she said, yeah, you can call me that, but I prefer an E on the end of it. So yeah, not being a historian or an archival expert, but as Kaitiaki of these documents. You can't help but fall in love just a little or maybe a lot about these three documents. And really because they're filled with stories, rich, deep, human stories. Stories about their creation, their signing, their journey to our care. But probably more importantly, stories about the signatories. Signatories that I've shown you photos of or pictures of already. Like Eruera Mahi Patuone, who is recorded to have had four wives, which is actually just a couple more than I've had. He lived to the ripe old age of 108. He was well known to be friendly to the European settlers. He believed in the rule of law by the Queen. And he was a real peacemaker, you know, when he wasn't being a warrior. Or Te Rangitopiora, who was a composer and singer of Waiata. She was a fierce, informatable female rangatera, one of 15 that are known to have signed totility. And when she was baptized in 1857, she wanted the name Kuini Victoria, or Te Kuini, the Queen, Queen of the South. And she made her husband take on the name Albert. And then of course Kate Shepherd, who was the founder for the women's suffrage movement in New Zealand. Who worked tirelessly to get those petition sheets mailed out to all parts of New Zealand. When they were returned to her, she painstakingly used animal glue to paste them all together into 274 metres of a monster of a petition that weighs in around 7 kilograms. So we wanted to do something really special around these documents and Hitohu. And one of the things we wanted to focus on was preservation of these taonga, because they've seen hard lives. We need to protect them from the agents of deterioration. I'm not making this up. This is real in the archival community. Things like physical forces, like earthquakes, tsunami, these vandals, displaces of artefacts, fire, water, pestilence, pollutants, light, light exposures, a terrible agent of deterioration, incorrect temperature and relative humidity, probably the most harmful, that of custodial neglect. Because, ladies and gentlemen, you don't get a document, a record looking like this if you haven't valued it and looked after it. And it's our job to make sure this never happens again on our watch. But of course we also have some experts in this space too. Fantastic conservators like Anna Whitehead from Archives and her husband Peter Whitehead, who's a collection care leader at the National Library, Alexander Turnbull Library. This is date night for them. They're working on the suffrage petition, that little doodad that Anna's got. It's a spectrophotometer and archival geek speak, but it's a tricorder. And this is the team, Vicky Ann, Dave in the middle, and Peter and Anna, so just spending a little bit of time with the documents there. But we also care about access. So not just preserving these wonderful tanga for future generations, but ensuring that they are going to be accessible and more accessible than they have been in the past for at least the next 25 years, if not the next 500 years. Here's a little picture I took. Just yesterday I found this down in Archives. It's a little board that we used to have on the outside to invite people to come into Archives to look at the Treaty. We can't use it anymore because the license has expired. But they would come into the Constitution Room and look how cramped and jammed together the documents are. There's not a lot of space for people to move around and to really get good access to these. So we wanted to improve access. We also want to improve the ability of everyone to learn about these wonderful documents, to learn about their deep history and about the stories that they tell. And this is what it looked like in the past at Archives at Mulgrave Street. Just kind of a few boards up there. So we wanted to have a much more immersive experience for people in the future. So we knew, though, that we needed to create a fantastic new exhibition. And we needed to take it out of Archives at Mulgrave from the Constitution Room, which has had its life for 27 years. This is the former chief archivist, Marilyn Rule here, standing guard, as you do, in front of a vault, protecting precious things. We needed to create a new home, a new whare tonga for these incredible documents. So we worked with Studio Pacific Architecture. I think Fletcher Construction helped design and build a wonderful new place, a new home. And to work with artists and artisans and crafts people in New Zealand to help shape the new home for these documents. And we needed to find a house for this home. And that house was going to be at the National Library on Mollsworth Street. I like to refer to it, though, as Castle Black, which is a Game of Thrones reference. It makes work a lot more interesting. For those of you not from Wellington, you might not know where Mollsworth Street where the National Library is relative to Archives, so here's just a little bit of an overhead perspective. We had an enormous task ahead of us. We needed to move the documents from... I'm calling it East Watch by the Sea, Archives New Zealand on Moll Grave, over to Castle Black, National Library New Zealand. By the way, Shadow Towers, just where Parliament is. We needed to move it from this X to that X. Plan A, using our sharpest logistical planners, figured out that we could just go from point A to point B. Cos, you know, most school kids know that a straight line is the fastest way in two points in euclidean three-dimensional space. And we could probably use kind of a device like this that would make it really, really easy to get it instantly there. But apparently these don't actually exist yet, so we're just waiting for that. So we had to do this the hard way. So we scrapped Plan A and we thought of Plan B, and this is when our people really got clever. And so we worked out that we would need to move it very, very carefully in a very planned and controlled way from Moll Grave to Mollsworth in a slightly circuitous path. And that's what we did on Saturday, April 22 on the moving of the documents. And a really special, you know, ceremony with appropriate and respectful taonga for the entire event, for the documents and for iwi. But also, you know, using some state-of-the-art containment systems, these wooden crates that were specially designed to nestle in the documents, stop vibration, keep them weathertight. And in the early hours before dawn in the dark, it was a very cold morning that day, archives, archives people carefully took the documents in a very somba, a very respectful, very beautiful ceremony from Moll Grave Street a couple of hundred metres around into its new home at the National Library, where it would sit behind this hoarding. And what did it look like behind that hoarding? No, no. That's when it looked a bit... I actually don't have a photo of what it looked like on Saturday 22, so using this. But this is what it ended up looking like. It's absolutely stunning and beautiful room. We call it the document room. It's fashioned on a wakahuia, which is a treasure box. It's hewn from native Rimutimba that came from the Kaharangi National Park, or forest, which fell down in 2014 through Cyclone Ita. And it is just a magnificent building and a place to house our new documents. Inside is even more incredible. Just this stunning, stunning room that has an organic feel to it. It's beautifully lit. The lighting you'll see here actually is, you know, not as bright as it is when you go in there, for real, because light needs to be very, very well controlled. So we have Hefaka Putanga. Two sheets, four sides there. Tititi Awaitangi. We've got nine sheets. Two on animal parchment. One printed. And all but one in Te Reo Māori. And then, of course, the woman's suffrage petition. And a very special display cabinet because it's on a roll, like a broomstick that Kate Shepard used. And I joke to people. I say, you know, at Hitohu, in the document room, we have a WMD. That's right. That's a weapon of mass democracy. Only one in the world. Well, probably not. So in terms of preservation and access, we have created a wonderful new home for these documents to live in, to be safe in for future generations. And as you can see, plenty of space for people to come and see to look at the documents at all angles. And this is what it sounds like inside the document room. Pretty quiet. Someone told me that the document room has the elements of looking like a cave. Other people said it's like being inside the womb. I don't remember. So I'm not too sure. But I'll just take their word for it. But learning. Learning is the third goal. And we wanted to create an amazing experience to envelop the documents in that document room. So we have this incredible interpretive space which has, you know, vibrant content that's been created with the help of Story Inc. And it surrounds the document room. We have these incredible document tables which are fully interactive. They're able to be used by all age groups. And they're really massive iPads, fully integrated. And because we've scanned and digitised the three documents at incredible resolution and detail, in fact, Andy Fenton, he's over here somewhere, NZ MicroGraphics. They did He Whakaputanga in Tertility. We did the Suffrage Petition in-house. You're able to zoom in to each of these documents. You're able to get up close and personal at a level of detail you couldn't possibly do in real life. And we've even been able to do a little bit of digital enhancement. You'll notice that some of the records, when they weren't looked after, they've been eaten up by little rats or mice, by pests. We're able to reproduce what they did look like because we have the photolithographic facsimiles from 1877. And we also have data, lots of data, that sits behind these documents and sits behind the interactives, naming and providing the biographies and information that we have around signatories. So you can search through the documents and find people who have actually signed these documents, who could be tupino of yours. And then we have these incredible map tables, which are a real crowd, please. A real favourite. I've got a video of a little bit. I'll just show you a little part of it. This is an interactive video to show you how the suffrage petition was created and farmed out across New Zealand and recollected. All right, I'll stop there because I'm running out of time. But I will, a little bit of a spoiler. Women get the vote. Right. But this is a crowd-pleaser. You know, some pretty important people have come to see this. That's right, he's the Wilder Boy from a Taika Waiti film, Thor or something. I don't know. Yeah, he came, I think, on Opening Day. And we have hours and hours of video korero, interviews of luminaries and experts about the documents and constitutional law, which you can actually go watch on YouTube as well. But in the end, Hitohu is just an amazing place for people to come and visit to spend a bit of time, to learn, to watch, and to talk. And that's some of these girls here, chillaxing. Since May of 2017, we've had over 24,000 visitors. On a good year, we may have had 10,000 visitors in Wallgrave Street. And it's attracting sort of worldwide interest. Heads of State are coming to New Zealand and wanting to see Hitohu and our documents. We have a VVIP experience. This is the Croatian president. We've got the poufini for the Irish president just a few weeks ago. I just want to call out the National Librarian. He's Lord Commander at Castle Black. And this gentleman here, best boss in the world. Peter's just there. And I'm there too. I'm there. I'm there. Believe me, I'm there. See? I'm there. So in these ceremonial things I don't stand on the shoulders of giants. I stand behind the shoulder of a giant. A Scottish giant. So we have some amazing times there. So that's it. I just wanted to say, personally, I invite you to Hitohu if you haven't been. Bring your friends, bring your family, bring colleagues. I think it's something that every New Zealander should experience many times, multiple times over the next 25 years of this exhibition as we evolve it. Spend some time talking about the past so that we can create a better future. Thank you.