Survivor Stories

Short Film (Full Length) – 1998

The city was about to blow up, literally.
– Napier local Audrey McKelvie (née Hurst) on the fires that followed the Napier earthquake

We couldn't get them in the bail, they refused to go in the cowshed to be milked, and that's when the lady turned around and looked up at the sky and said "there is going to be a huge earthquake".
– Farm worker Jim Clayton discussing cows sensing the earthquake

Our elders, when they came back that night, they had a kōrero on the marae for everybody to come. Come out of your homes and come and stay on the marae, which they did. The starting bringing their beds and their blankets and things.
– Napier local Hana Cotter

Having grown up in Napier, I was told earthquake stories from the time I was 10. The place was awash with them. They centred around well-trod terrible tales that, as many do after a tragic event such as that, cloud the real terrible, terrible thing.
– Gaylene Preston during a lecture for the Friends of the Turnbull Library, 28 July 2021

... she had been sitting in the bath and the bath floated out of the bathroom, out of the house, and down the street. And we all knew about this person, and we knew that it was somebody's grandmother. We were just glad it wasn't our grandmother!
– Napier local and poet Lauris Edmond

Hana's account plays every hour in the exhibition, which has run for years. The audience cries with her.
– Director Gaylene Preston on quake survivor Hana Cotter, in her 2022 autobiography Gaylene's Take - Her Life in New Zealand Film, page 95

I am listening intently. She slips in and out of the past and present tense ... The hair on the back of my neck is standing up...
– Gaylene Preston recalls kaumātua Hana Cotter describing an experience "like the end of the world", in Preston's 2022 autobiography Gaylene's Take - Her Life in New Zealand Film, page 94

Collecting oral histories has grown from a childhood curiosity into a lifelong habit.
– Director Gaylene Preston, in her 2022 autobiography Gaylene's Take - Her Life in New Zealand Film, page 98