Online exclusive
In My Double Life, Kiwis – and some international guests - share the side hustles, hobbies or dual careers that keep them busy. Here, singer-songwriter Anna Coddington (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue), who already holds an MA in linguistics, talks about why she is studying law.
“Lots of people ask me why I decided to study law and truth is I’ve been kind of turning myself inside out for quite a few years thinking I want to do something other than music. I just didn’t know if music is my ‘forever job’.
It’s a tough industry, you know. It can be great and amazing, and I feel really privileged to have had the awesome career that I have. But when I tried to think ahead, I just couldn’t see myself doing it forever.
I’d been thinking along those lines for quite a few years and then Covid hit and there were the lockdowns. I think it was an apt time for a lot of people, in lots of situations, to reassess. A lot of us had the rug pulled out from underneath us.
I ended up working with a careers’ coach and, on Zoom, did six sessions with her. She took me through a process of evaluating strengths, skills, values and all that kind of stuff. At the end of it, I sat down and looked at a bunch of different things that I thought I might be interested in, made a pros and cons list and law came out on top of that process.
Although I didn’t feel sure about the choice, I felt sure that I’d done a really robust process to get there, so I took a leap of faith and did a one-year Certificate in Legal Studies at AUT. I figured if I didn’t like it, I could stop and at least I’d have a qualification, but I really enjoyed it and am now in my third year with one more to go.
The big question at the moment is whether I want a career in law or something law-adjacent because there’s lots of different paths that a law degree can lead you down. My mum, Ngaire, started her law degree when I started high school, graduated when she turned 40 and worked in public service.
The “annoying” thing is that I find all the different aspects of law interesting so I’m not sure where I’ll head, but I am drawn to Māori issues. The current government is doing a lot right now to change the law in various ways that affect Māori rights, so I’m interested in constitutional matters around Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Right now, the government wants to introduce new legislation that will overturn a Court of Appeal decision covering customary rights to the foreshore and seabed. To me, that’s taking away rights that were won through litigation.
In the past few years, since I had my children, I’ve made a more concerted effort to learn te reo Māori. I did little bits and pieces at Raglan Area School and at Hamilton Girls’ High School, a little bit at university but learning a language doesn’t work like that, so I’ve been studying at night school.
I say I’m a conversational speaker. I’m trying to support my boys [Coddington has two sons] who are in a full Māori immersion unit at school, but it can be hard when I’m still learning myself. I’ve always been interested in languages, though.
When I first went to university I was studying Japanese, but ended up doing one linguistics paper and really loved it. I had something else as my major – I can’t remember what – but ended up swapping my major to linguistics.
I find it interesting the way that people use language without really thinking about the underlying cultural associations we have, of different ways that we say and comprehend things. We think of language as just this mundane tool that we use. I remember being a kid and feeling like the way we talk in New Zealand is the normal way of talking and that people in America and England had weird accents. You know, they had the accents, and we didn’t, but they would have felt the same way about us.
Linguistics is different to learning languages, although they’re obviously closely related. I never had an “endgame” in mind about what to do with my degree because I’m not really an “endgame thinker”.
I started music when I was about 11 and my dad, Peter, brought home a drumkit so he could learn but I was like, “what is that? How do I use it?” I was really obsessed and starting learning to play. We lived in Raglan and we were quite rural at the time, so it wasn’t as if it was going to bother any neighbours!
I wrote my first songs when I was about 14 or 15 for my high school band, Handsome Geoffrey. There were three of us girls and we won the Smokefree Rockquest. It was crazy! It felt really unexpected. We thought we weren’t in with a chance at all, but looking back we practised really, really hard and put a lot of effort into it.
While I worked in my dad’s shop in Hamilton and did a lot of cafe work, music’s been my main career. Although I’ve just released my fifth album [Te Whakamiha, which is entirely in te reo Māori], I haven’t been doing as many gigs.
I’m hoping we might do some shows featuring the new album during summer, though.”
Anna Coddington’s album Te Whakamiha is available digitally and on vinyl. You can read a review here.
