One image holds the trilogy together. In 1863 a woman carries a cannabis plant into Aotearoa during the New Zealand Wars. In 2020 her descendants roll it in a crumbling Linden mansion and a room full of people goes quiet. In 2140 it is blended with a southern strain and passed around a table at the edge of a world ending. One plant, many bloodlines, one whenua, a story weaved together over 300 years. 

Book One — Kākāriki and the 7 Pandas (Rolling Thunder)

2020 · Te Whanganui-a-Tara · 85,000 words · Complete

The year of the cannabis referendum. Eight competitors gather in a crumbling Linden mansion for a joint rolling competition, security is run by a bilingual talking dog, and a bitter ex-cop is driving toward them in a Nissan Leaf that keeps running out of charge. Beneath the comedy runs a real grief. A crime comedy in the tradition of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, filtered through the warmth of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, about who was criminalised, whose knowledge counted, and whose grief was allowed ceremony.

Book Two — Kākāriki and the 20,000 Pandas

2140 · Kawatiri Westport · Approx. 40,000 words drafted of an 86 chapter structure

 A hundred and twenty years later, after a second New Zealand war and a risen sea. The 101st Rolling Thunder is being organised in a pub on the cliffs at Cape Foulwind, and almost nobody knows it is happening. People travel the length of a nearly empty country to be in the same room. The book is about presence and looking away. Fascism builds because people stop paying attention. The competition matters because it is the one moment everyone who chose presence is together, and that is exactly when the world that forgot how to feel arrives to end it.

Book Three — Kākāriki and a Nun

1863 · Aotearoa and France · In research and development

 The origin book, written last. 1863 is the year of the invasion of the Waikato and the New Zealand Settlements Act, the legal machinery of the confiscations. At its centre is a woman who arrives from a village in the Loire, learns the reo, learns rongoā from the people whose land is being taken while she learns it, and carries a plant that will still be growing in this story three hundred years later. The other two books are about what was lost and what survived. This one is about the moment before either was decided.