Max Oettli
Hine Toa: A story of bravery by Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku (HarperCollins Publishers, 2024), 320pp, $40
Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku’s fascinating book is, above all, a self-portrait of a Māori (Te Arawa, Tūhoe and Waikato) woman, growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, who progresses from troubled girlhood to strong and determined wahine, ultimately becoming an academic embarking on a distinguished scholarly career. What makes the story interesting on so many levels is the complexity of the lattice of cultural and social interactions in which we meet her, as both storyteller and participant. The structure is essentially Māori, lashed together with strong cords of militant awareness, weaving strands of affirmation for adopted children, for women’s rights, for gay liberation, for Māori cultural rights. We see Ngāhuia as convent school girl, as poi girl, as thermal springs guide, as high-achieving college student, as pioneering university law student, as radical political protestor. This tell-all account of her formative years is artfully constructed; it’s novelistic, dramatic, confrontational. She is indeed Hine Toa, a woman warrior fighting her corner.
She is also a darned good writer. Ngāhuia, setting scenes, creates quicksilvery sketches of people in a stylish English that does not strain for effect. First thing for her, and this is a leitmotif throughout the 300-plus pages, is always whānau: acknowledging the incredible density of family connections that Māori have, while her birth story makes clear how complex these can be. The book opens with her beloved kuia telling her the stories of their iwi. The power, the mana, her grandmother expresses here is truly amazing. We are in Rotorua in the Bay of Plenty region, Ohinemutu to be precise, and Ngāhuia’s love and admiration for her kuia—a noted harakeke weaver of the district living in a modest whare—feels boundless; her grief at her death and the tangi that follows are movingly and convincingly rendered.
Ngāhuia’s take on Rotorua as a tourist centre, where she is given a job as an 11-year-old welcoming international visitors, is initially warm and positive, because the smiling bodice-and-piupiu-skirt-clad Māori maidens who surround her are mostly cousins and aunts—and because she turns out to be good as an articulate guide. In her teens, Ngāhuia is appointed a ‘Rotorua meter maid’, putting threepenny bits in parking meters and providing information, and she even has a spell as an exchange meter maid at Surfers Paradise on Australia’s Gold Coast, where being rather short and flat-chested she refuses to wear the regulation bikini-and-sash and wanders about instead in her Māori costume.
An intelligent 16-year-old, she causes a tense silence at a Gold Coast civic reception when she expresses the desire to meet some indigenous Australians. The Aboriginals are not like us, her boss later explains, adding: it’s not polite to ask awkward questions. But, in late twentieth-century New Zealand, she will ask many awkward questions and then come up with her own answers, often provocative and confrontational, always of vital importance.
She suffers too from the sexist attitudes of the times and frequently runs away from home. After a particularly horrible experience in Hamilton at 13, she is taken back to Rotorua by the cops: ‘I came out of it wiser, angrier, trickier … It was one hell of a lesson but I survived.’
Moving to Auckland to attend university at the beginning of 1967, Ngāhuia discovers that she is the only Māori woman student at the O’Rorke Hall of Residence, though she quickly befriends the Māori women workers there. Her first reception at the law school very precisely defines her place as prescribed by both gender and ethnicity, making it clear what she is up against: ‘Men in suits thronged the lobby, men of all ages and sizes. They all turned and looked at me, their eyes glittered, tongues licked wet lips. I shuddered.’ And when a ‘flurry of young ladies arrive’ at ‘haughty’ O’Rorke, she must adapt to their social codes, although she is: ‘Not a lady, not fine like them.’ Her roommate, a gutsy fine-arts student and, like her, rebellious, sums it up: ‘What a load of old bollocks.’
At the university’s Māori Club reception, too, she seems to be a misfit among the awfully respectable young Māori people from private schools, dressed in their suits and twin sets. However, at the function, she meets Hana and Syd Jackson and Pat Hohepa, who will, in time, revolutionise the study and practice of Māoritanga. The Māori Club people are ‘a bit too stuck up and square for me’, she later confesses to Alamein, a Māori cleaner at O’Rorke. Alamein responds by giving her directions on how to find like-minded people downtown: ‘The young kamp girls meet up at the Casa d’Oro coffee lounge.’
Soon, too, she is introduced into the company of people in the art world by her uncle Bramley, who is visiting from Rotorua. She describes a memorable lunch with mostly Māori in attendance where the conversation ranges far and wide:
Amazing for a girl from Ohinemutu; here they were talking about politics and art at the kind of Māori drinking party that happened at home … An aristocratic British voice serenely contributed ‘And down in the Gully [Grafton] they’re digging them [graves from the Victorian era] all up. Damn that motorway.’
She gets to meet Hone Tuwhare, who says nice things about a poem she wrote when she was still at school. Her portrait of him is a delight. Later, she wants to do an MA thesis on Hone’s poetry, but the ‘panel of wise white people’ decides he’s ‘evolving but not quite there yet’.
After her first year at Auckland University, she bails on the ‘hostile’ law school and enrols in an arts degree. She also moves to new accommodation at 56 Grafton Road; a rambling villa that backs onto Auckland Domain. It’s twinned with the villa next door at number 60. Both houses serve as well-known student communes, home to ‘a passing parade of personalities’. Ngāhuia, while still drawn to the downtown ‘kamp girl’ scene and in particular a girl known as Mandy, marries science student Keir Volkering and for a time becomes Mrs Ngāhuia Volkering. The 1960s are in full swing. It’s an era of committed artists, Vietnam War protests, the despoliation of Grafton Gully, student poetry readings, Jumping Sundays in Albert Park, and youthful liberation movements.
The author’s name-dropping at this point becomes a bit erratic and sometimes puzzling. Is the person named ‘Taura’, Taura Eruera, the Māori student radical and founding member of Ngā Tamatoa? Is ‘Janet’, the helpful arts student residing at 60 Grafton Road, the poet Jan Kemp? Is that Georgina Kirby, of the Māori Women’s Welfare League, standing unnamed next to Tini Whetū Marama Tirikātene-Sullivan, the MP, in a photograph? And was that the artist Bob Ellis playing guitar at a party? ‘Pākehā, smallish with thick blond waves reaching his ears and clever paint-stained fingers spinning impossible cords (chords) of Iberian melody.’ Possibly, from this distance in time, some of Ngāhuia’s memories of a period she describes as fuelled by alcohol and drugs are a bit hazy.
There is one poet she catches more or less with his trousers down, James. K. Baxter ‘still creeping in and out of 56 and 60 [Grafton Road] young girls in tow, and commiserating with Keir about the difficulties of having a Māori wife … Many times when Mandy and I were having noisy sex … we’d hear snuffling and groaning from the foliage near the bare bedroom window. Finishing with a raddled cough, he’d trudge wheezing up the stairs.’ But he gives her a cigar box of superb poems, ‘flawlessly balanced, compelling’, before saying goodbye and disappearing for good. ‘Someone stole it a few months later.’
The ‘Mrs Volkering’ phase (Ngāhuia went by at least three different surnames, possibly four) is probably when I knew her best. I was one of the ‘all male’ occupants, along with brother-in-law Michael Volkering and Joris de Bres, of the gracious old bungalow in City Road where the Ngāhuia-Keir ‘memorable’ wedding party was held.
The narrative is crowded with incident, and for those who weren’t around at the time, some of it may seem very long ago: rough-trade shapes lurking in the midnight shadows by the wharves near the Ferry Building; articles in the student magazine Craccum on sexual liberation; anti-Springbok Tour demonstrations; surreal street-theatre skits; coffee bar discussion groups on consciousness-raising. ‘We’d all talk about how hard it was being kamp and Māori in the Big Smoke, and how you sometimes had to choose which fight to take on.’ She usually had several fights going on at once, did Ngāhuia. She missed out on a Student Leadership Grant to go to the United States, apparently for being a ‘known sexual deviant’.
But she was becoming famous! To the point that, in 1972, she was granted a private interview for Craccum with Germaine Greer, who was in New Zealand to promote her polemical best-seller The Female Eunuch. In the book, Greer argued that the sexual repression of women cuts them off from the creative energy they need to be independent and self-fulfilled. Ngāhuia’s description of this occasion, which took place in Greer’s hotel suite, is priceless: ‘I had to keep reminding myself I was a university graduate with a brain. It was still hard; she exuded so much. The woman was bloated with power … Her size, her physicality; her face, her neck, her hands, her breasts, her legs, her nipples, her hips.’ Ngāhuia more or less choked on her room-service filet mignon and spilled her wine and ended up wrapped in Germaine’s spare bathrobe. The resulting published interview, liberally scattered with four-letter swear words and slang terms for sexual acts, is very difficult to obtain. And anyway the printers and typesetters at Wilson and Horton redacted most of it: ‘That issue of Craccum remains the most heavily censored in the paper’s history. But we tried!’
Ngāhuia took part in some spectacular political actions in the 1970s, including protesting against inaction on the Treaty of Waitangi at Waitangi, and a gay invasion of a SPUC pro-decency and anti-abortion committee meeting chaired by Patricia Bartlett.
It seems there will always be violence, racism, backlash. In 1975 she and her cousin were attacked at night on the streets of her home-town, Ohinemutu. While she was sitting in a car, a drunken, angry, middle-aged Pākehā male fired a shot at her. She only narrowly escaped with her life. ‘The shooter was charged with a minor firearms offence … I was subjected to hours of intense questioning on the witness stand … He was fined and walked free. That same week Māori all over the country were sent to jail for theft, car conversion, unpaid fines, burglary and petty crimes against property.’
Heeding the warning that she was a high-profile target, Ngāhuia left for the East-West Research Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, on a scholarship in 1975, and she stayed away for the next six years. Hine Toa: A story of bravery closes with a statement that we should keep very much in mind as we see the world taking a nasty lurch to the right; repression, violence and war are ever with us. ‘We must take nothing for granted. Reality can shift, just like that, and turn itself around with enough pressure and intensity of purpose from the other side. The haters and homophobes, the racists and the self-righteous, the passionate champions of patriarchy, are pushing hard. We can’t let them in. We mustn’t let them win.’
Most books end with a few paragraphs of thanks; Ngāhuia gives us three pages in her inimitable style; even a progression of cats is acknowledged. A treasure! Ngā mihi nui, Ngāhuia!
MAX OETTLI was raised and educated in New Zealand and is a photographer, teacher and writer. He formerly taught and lectured in photography at the Dunedin School of Art. He currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland.
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