Hannah Bulloch
I’m a social anthropologist and narrative nonfiction writer.
My family memoir, Overland to the Island: New Zealand to Skye with Six Kids in a Homemade House-Truck, traces the story of my grandparents, Alan and Joan MacLeod and their six children. In the early 1960s, the family built a house-truck, stocked it with home-tinned food, and travelled from Dunedin to Scotland, largely overland.
The book incorporates photos, maps and extracts from diaries to tell the tale of their lively, ramshackle often quirky adventure.
You can listen to me speaking about the book to Kathryn Ryan on RNZ’s From Nine to Noon: The MacLeods' Epic Overland Journey.
I’m also the author of an academic book In Pursuit of Progress: Narratives of Development on a Philippine Island. This ethnographic monograph explores meanings of ‘development’ and related concepts for residents on Siquijor Island in the Philippines.
I have a PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University, an MA in Creative Writing from Te Herenga Waka’s International Institute of Modern Letters, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Development Studies from Massey University. I’m a Senior Lecturer at the University of Otago, and have worked at the ANU, the Royal Society Te Apārangi, Massey University, the UK’s Institute for Development Studies, and been a visiting research fellow at Ateneo de Manila University, the University of Hawai‘i and the International Institute of Asian Studies in the Netherlands. I was the 2017 University Book Shop (Otago) and Robert Lord Trust Emerging Writer in Residence.
Email: H.Bulloch@outlook.com
Genre:
- Academic
- Autobiography / Memoir
- History
- Non-Fiction
Skills:
- Academic Writing
- Editing
- Public Speaking
- Research
- Workshops (adults)
Branch:
Otago/Southland
Location:
Publications:
Overland to the Island: New Zealand to Skye with Six Kids in a Homemade House-truck
In 1962, Dunedin farmer Alan MacLeod began constructing a house-truck from the chassis of a World War II scout car, the engine of a Fordson tractor, and the cab of a city bus. His wife Joan canned over 400 tins of fruit, vegetables and home-killed meat. The couple’s six children cut flowers, plucked geese, collected eggs, picked blackberries, bagged moss and raised livestock to sell. Having been told they would need to pay their own way on the upcoming journey, they handed hundreds of pounds to their father. The MacLeods stocked the caravan with the tinned produce and so much other food that they required an export license. In 1963, with their vehicle as cargo, the family boarded a ship to Singapore. They were intent on travelling from there to Scotland, overland.
In Overland to the Island, granddaughter Hannah Bulloch brings to light the MacLeod’s epic adventure story. Early chapters are set on the MacLeods’ Dunedin farm, with its tiny run-down stone cottage, where the children cooperated in a regimen of heavy and risky manual labour. The book then follows the family as they motor through exotic lands in their caravan named Holdfast (after the Clan MacLeod motto), experiencing culture shock, wonderment, mechanical failure, hostility, hospitality and, at one stage, near catastrophe.
For the MacLeods, it was a pilgrimage to their ancestral heartland on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, where they hoped to visit their clan chief – Dame Flora MacLeod of MacLeod. Alan also wanted to search out locals he had befriended while an artilleryman in Italy during World War II.
Braiding past and present, weaving material from interviews, diaries, letters, newspaper articles and more, Hannah summons five generations of MacLeod voices. She explores what drove her grandfather to take his family on such a risky journey; how her grandmother coped with a scheme that placed an enormous burden on her; and how Hannah’s mother, Marilyn, came to terms with a trip that left her badly scarred.
Overland to the Island is a story of tenacity, stoicism, unity and conflict; a search for something lost, and struggle to find one’s own path.
Published by Otago University Press, 2025.