The following korero between Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, author of the newly published memoir Hine Toa, one of the year’s most important books, and Dale Husband from e-tangata, was first published in October. It traverses her involvement with the activist group Ngā Tamatoa at Auckland University in the early 1970s, her sexuality, and critique of her iwi: “Recently, I went to an event that was jam-packed with smarmy, Māori designer-wearing professionals, swishing about looking fabulous and nibbling on gourmet food. And I thought of what I’d be coming home to, in and around Ōhinemutu and Kuirau Park. People sitting outside the pie shop with their hands out. Babies in cars outside the pokie bars. I mean, what the hell are we doing?”
Dale Husband: You turn up at varsity in Auckland in 1966, where, I bet, there weren’t too many Māori students at that time.
Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku: There were 20 of us Māori first-year students across the entire university. I was in O’Rorke, a university hall of residence, and I was the only Māori girl there. And this kuia, Merimeri Penfold, came and got me. An amazing woman. Just sublime. Anyway, she took me to this orientation evening, where all the freshers were gathering with the senior students.
Almost all of them had been to Queen Vic, St Stephen’s, Hato Petera, Hato Pāora, Hukarere, Te Aute or Tūrakina. All private Māori schools. There was one who’d been to Diocesan as a boarder, and another who’d been to St Mary’s in Auckland. And here’s me from Western Heights High in Rotorua.
They were the elite. They really were. In the corner of the room was this Pākehā playing a guitar and singing an American folk song that she’d put Māori words to. I’d never seen anything like that. And here were all these snooty Māoris, none of them talking to me, and then we had this awkward period of introducing ourselves.
The one that welcomed us was Pat Hōhepa. He’s my relation through my mother, through the Tāwhai Mokaraka Hōhepa crew from Waimā, Hokianga. I was aware we were related. He was doing his PhD or master’s. And the other one was Peter Sharples. They were our welcoming committee. And I felt out of place. Had the wrong clothes on. Didn’t look right. Then they realised I was from Te Arawa, and one of the women said: “Oh, I suppose you can poi.” [Laughs] Of course I can poi! I was given a poi when I was two!
The whānau I grew up with here in Ngāti Whakaue were humble. My kuia and mum and aunties weren’t front-of-the-house people – they weren’t reo karanga, whai kōrero people. I don’t mean to demean my family, but we weren’t like the front row unless we were doing the haka.
And my mum and my kuia had this fierce sense of social justice, especially my mummy. She was a card-carrying member of the Labour Party from its beginning. Like from the 1930s. So I grew up with this strong commitment to social justice – and I got a lot of that from my mother.
And, also, from watching the more privileged and affluent Māori families around Rotorua and the Bay of Plenty. People don’t talk about that, but it’s something I’m still acutely aware of, with all the intergenerational poverty and depredation and precariousness for many in 2024.
Way back then, you had your wealthy, privileged, well-educated Māori and you had the ones who were working on the roads, or making beds at the hotel, or clearing tables in the public bar. There’s always the notion of social hierarchy that operates within te ao Māori, without any critical interrogation. People don’t ask why.
And I’m reminded of that orientation evening and all those snobby, snooty people. The only ones who I was attracted to, apart from my cousin Pat Hōhepa, were four people. There was Maxine Rewiti, who was Ngāi Te Rangi and an Elam art student. And the man she was eventually to marry, Hone Ngata, who was a shining, enormous presence. And then there were the two iconic people, who were trying to start a family at the time. The fabulous Hana Te Hemara and Syd Jackson. They were the four I noticed at the university Māori orientation.
I didn’t hang out with Māori students that much because I was doing English and art history and on a different track. And I just thought the club was snooty. I never went back. But I did see Hone and Maxine and Syd and Hana at protest rallies and demonstrations, and I’d hang around. I really admired them.
And during that orientation week, I very quickly got into the left-wing, socialist, anti-Vietnam-War, anti-apartheid struggle. Guerrilla theatre, bright noise, hippie action – that’s the energy I liked.
Dale Husband: This was at a time when gay rights were somewhat under the radar. Pleasingly, we’ve brought this kaupapa out into the open, as it should be. But in the 1970s, it would’ve been very different.
Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku: The impact of Christian values on the Māori world has been profound, revolutionary, destructive, and it’s had an appalling and pervasive effect. I’ve always felt that, within the Māori world – and I saw this growing up in the pā – there were never absolutes. I mean, yes, most people were heterosexual. That’s the most ubiquitous option and that’s how people are taught to behave.
But, in my community, there were also extraordinary, visionary, talented, astonishing human beings who defied convention or who hid behind a veneer of heteronormative behaviour with families and wives and straight jobs.
They had secret lives, though, and the reason they had secret lives is that for men, until 1986, you ran the risk of being criminalised, of losing your job and of losing your family. And of losing everything that had any meaning for you. Simply because your natural state of loving, and of being, and of erotic contact or gratification, wasn’t approved by either the Bible or by the state.
I had huge respect for the queens – and we had a few around the town when I was a teenager. One of the more fabulous, even though he was kind of in the closet, was a local radio personality who came from another iwi. He was flamboyant and fabulous, and he wrote a superb autobiography, In The Air, in which he describes his time here in Rotorua. I’m referring to Henare Te Ua.
There were others who gathered around him, a few of whom were my uncles. In the women’s context, there wasn’t the risk of going to jail. But there was the risk of losing your job or losing your children, if you realised, after a disastrous marriage that, actually, you were “like that”. And the words we used were “like that”. “She’s like that”, “he’s like that”, and “Oh, look, they must be like that.”
In the hockey club that I was in, we had fabulous butch women. They were all around the Bay of Plenty and around the motu. We’d go to tournaments. One of my most phenomenal early experiences was when I was about 10 or 11. We were at the Hui Topu in 1960, and we were watching the haka teams coming on to our marae, Te Papaiōuru on Ōhinemutu.
I went out to watch the pōwhiri when Te Hokowhitu-a-Tū was arriving. And I saw their leader, and the women around her. She was this majestic woman. She wore men’s clothing, and she even had a fedora hat. And later, I saw her haka group when they performed. On stage, there were all the Māori performers, with the females wearing the most unflattering awful, awful costumes. Well, the long piupiu were beautiful, but those ghastly pari bodices flattened everything and turned you into a stiff board.
Suddenly, there was this electrifying presence on stage leading the haka – the one who wore the fedora at the pōwhiri. Her name was Tuini Ngāwai and she was glorious. So were the women around her. And even though she wasn’t my mentor, and I never knew her or even met her, just seeing her on stage was, for me, electrifying. It truly was. And it was at that moment that I knew something about myself.
I was an Arawa, and a girl in a family of guides, haka people, and all that stuff. I’d been told to grow my hair long and smile for the Pākehā. “Oh, you’ve got such lovely fair skin. Oh, your hair’s so black. Oh, look, you’ve got such good eyebrows.” And you end up being kinda trapped in this notion of what being a real girl is – in contrast to the girl that you want to be. Which is someone like Tuini.
I had aunties — and I’ll just talk about one aunty. She and her beloved of over 40 years, these two women, had a lot to do with my upbringing and they raised about seven kids. She had a senior civil service job in town. And, after 5pm and on the weekends, she’d wear men’s trousers, men’s shirts, cravats, big jackets.
Butch-as. Utterly butch.
But she’d have a pleated skirt in her car. And when she’d get to work, she’d get changed. I can think of three aunties who did this. They had this ritual of getting changed before they went into the office. And they’d wear these ridiculous bloody skirts, because that’s what the government and what the social order of the day demanded of them.
And I also had uncles being persecuted and convicted of same-sex behaviour, to the great agony of their whānau.
That’s the kind of stuff that motivated me as a radical gay liberationist, although the political pathway was the anti-Vietnam, anti-apartheid protests. Then equal pay for equal work. And, in 1970, all these movements, like Ngā Tamatoa and women’s liberation, suddenly blossomed.
Ngā Tamatoa was an interesting group. There are people from that time with whom I still share a great deal of my life. Hone Ngata, of course, has passed away, but there’s still Maxine. Then there’s John Ohia (Ringo) and his wonderful wife, Orewa Barrett-Ohia. And I often see Rawiri Ruru from Ūawa. And I catch up with my fabulous painter friend Kura Te Waru Rewiri. Those and other relationships have been sustained, although we’ve all gone back home. We’re home.
For me, it’s been an interesting journey, moving from that radical activist world in the tertiary environment and in the cities, back to our haukāinga, back to our marae, because that’s pretty much where I’ve ended up. Even though I’m still doing political and literary and urban gigs, I’m absolutely committed to being here.
Dale Husband: Are we being bold enough in our demands for change?
Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku: Oh no. I’m reminded of what Parekura Horomia used to say: “No one should be left behind.” But I can’t help thinking of the continuing social inequity, the economic deprivation, the intergenerational poverty.
I live in Rotorua. We’ve still got motels loaded up with our whānau pōhara. Recently, I went to an event that was jam-packed with smarmy, Māori designer-wearing professionals, swishing about looking fabulous and nibbling on gourmet food. And I thought of what I’d be coming home to, in and around Ōhinemutu and Kuirau Park. People sleeping in the bushes, or in the empty foot pools. People sitting outside the pie shop with their hands out. People sitting outside the bread shop with their hands out. Babies in cars outside the pokie bars.
I mean, what the hell are we doing?
Somehow, as a people, we’ve lost our vision. We’ve been seduced by the corporate dollar. I’m disgusted at the investment of my own iwi in shopping malls and a luxury spa, when we don’t have kaumātua flats, when we have a housing crisis. When so many of us are missing out on some of the necessities. There’s such an aggrandisem*nt of the individual and the individual achiever.
And I acknowledge that I’m an individual achiever. I’ve done really well. That’s thanks to those who yelled at me and said: “Never give up.” I’m indebted to them, and so I pick up their mokopuna and I take them with me.
No, we’re not bold enough. Voices like mine aren’t being heard. And I think that it’s highly likely that we’ll see the kind of revolution that we had with Ngā Tamatoa. That type of energy will have to rise again. Because it will only get worse.
With thanks to Dale Husband for permission to reproduce this portion of his korero with Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku. The full, fascinating interview can be read at e-tangata.
ReadingRoom is devoting all week to the new memoir Hine Toa: A story of bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (HarperCollins, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide. Monday: in an extract from her memoir, she recalls two violent incidents (in 1967 and 1971) when being lesbian in Aotearoa put her life in danger. Tomorrow: an interview with Sue Kedgley, who remembers Germaine Greer’s attempted seduction of Ngāhuia
