The Ani Waaka Room is my first poetry collection, published in 2022 by Te Tākupu at Te Wānanga o Raukawa. It is both a tribute and a response — to the survival of my ancestors from Taranaki who were displaced by war and found refuge at Te Aro Pā.

This book brings together poems that span generations and geographies, tracing lines between Taranaki and Te Whanganui-a-Tara, whānau stories and state violence, memory and whenua. It’s a space to speak back — to concrete and colonisation, to absence, to forgetting — and to affirm that mana whenua are still here.

Through poetry, I lay down a challenge and offer a narrative grounded in whakapapa, in whenua, and in the stories that live in inboxes, kitchens, and streams buried beneath streets.

“If you want to know what resistance looks like, start here, with Debbie Broughton, whose stunning debut collection reconstructs the world that was taken from our tūpuna, and so creates a pathway back for all the tamariki mokopuna of Te Aro Pā and beyond.” Dr Rachel Buchanan (Taranaki, Te Ātiawa) author of The Parihaka Album

“What I love about this book is that it contains all the knowledge, all the history, all the indignation that the best of us carry - and yet it chooses not to take itself, or the coloniser too seriously. It’s the elevated art of the piss-take, humour layered on irony layered on collage, the coloniser’s own words presented back to them on the sharpened tip of a knife.” Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore) author of The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke and Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings