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Emma Philips

Fieldnote


My home is below sea level. There’s a sign as you drive in that reads metres above sea level = 0, then another sign with a happy man holding kūmara. Our small town pride extends to these two things, root vegetables and our ancestors’ swamp draining.

And you drive home and spill greenhouse gases that warm the air and melt the ice caps. Do you eat kūmara at your home? Do you drink milk? And when the sea level rises over our stop banks and once-in-a-lifetime rainfalls come every winter will my home be safe? Will you miss kūmara wedges and milkshakes?

I know I’ll miss the way the land lay flat so far that you could see every fence and tree, every doe-eyed dairy cow till dark blue hills rose up and kissed the sky. I’ll miss driving home for Christmas. And if home is where the heart is then my heart will be long drowned and feeding the fishes.

And maybe my house will break free and float away into the ocean, and the driftwood you find on your morning walks will be the bones of my home. You’ll think it’s one town, just a couple hundred people displaced. Not the end of the world. But what if my world is only as big as the kūmara patches?

Or maybe I’ll live in a floating town and grow fat on the silvery fish that swim on the doorstep. Like a strange kind of rural Venice. But cows can’t live on fish and kūmara doesn’t grow in the ocean.


Emma Philips is 17 years old and lives in Ararua, which is frequently forgotten on maps of New Zealand. Previously, her work has been shortlisted in the National Flash Fiction Day Youth Competition, won the 2022 Turnbull Library Smart Alex Competition and been published in fingers comma toes. Currently, she is trying to choose between pursuing physics or journalism.