PrideNZ Records 1,000th Slice Of Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow+ History

In a significant milestone for New Zealand's Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow+ communities, the non-profit PrideNZ.com has captured its one-thousandth audio recording, marking a pivotal moment in the preservation of queer history in Aotearoa.

Since its establishment in 2009, PrideNZ has grown into the largest online audio repository documenting the voices and opinions of New Zealand's Takatāpui LGBTI Rainbow+ communities. Founder Gareth Watkins reflects, “2024 has become an incredibly special year. Not only is PrideNZ celebrating its 15th birthday, but we achieved the 1,000th recording when we documented the nationally significant pōwhiri to welcome Georgina Beyer’s taonga into the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.”

Internationally recognised, Beyer is well represented in the collection, appearing in at least 20 recordings, including six hours documenting her life history. Other notable voices in the collection include former Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson, the first openly out intersex person in New Zealand, Mani Mitchell, and activist and co-founder of Tīwhanawhana, Dr. Elizabeth Kerekere. Watkins proudly states, “One of the very special things about the collection is that we’ve been able to document the growth of cultural groups like Tīwhanawhana and the youth support agency InsideOUT Kōaro. These types of organisations are the pou that support and bring our communities together.”

Diversity is a key feature of the PrideNZ collection, which contains 1,263 individually identified voices across 600 hours of audio recordings. “While society seems to be moving towards a more polarised, binary state, the PrideNZ collection celebrates the complexity and sometimes messiness of being human,” says Watkins.

With that in mind, PrideNZ prioritised developing a relationship with an apolitical, well-resourced “forever” archive to preserve the recordings into the future. Watkins explains, “In 2021, we began the journey to deposit the PrideNZ material with the Alexander Turnbull Library. The Library has the most robust infrastructure in the country to care for digital heritage collections and takes a really ethical and sensitive approach in dealing with diverse content.”

As part of the deposit process, a rich set of metadata spreadsheets was created to describe each recording and its content. These datasets are now freely available under a Creative Commons license from the PrideNZ.com website. “Excitingly,” says Watkins, “the creation of metadata a couple of years ago has now allowed us to harness the power of Generative AI to create detailed summaries and audio tagging - making the collection far more discoverable.”

Watkins reflects, “The future of PrideNZ is incredibly bright, thanks to the hundreds of community members who have contributed to the website over the last 15 years. As Dr. Elizabeth Kerekere reminds us, ‘What do we get up for in the morning if not to change the world!’ A sentiment that continues to inspire us, as PrideNZ looks forward to its next 15 years.”

© Scoop Media