Aaron Smale has been writing about Māori children in state care since 2016, winning multiple journalism awards along the way. In this kōrero, he tells Dale about his own experience of being adopted and raised outside his natural whānau, and how his need to know about his birth family and identity has influenced his journalism.

 

Tēnā koe, Aaron. I’ve been looking forward to having a kōrero with you. I don’t get to talk to too many Māori journalists, because they’re a bit thin on the ground. I’d love to see more, but it’s not an area that draws too many of our people.

I know you’ve got some Ngāti Porou connections. Would you tell us about the Smale clan, your names, and how you came to carry them?

I was adopted at birth and brought up by Pākehā parents. That’s where the name Smale comes from. My birth mother was Pākehā. My birth father was Māori, and on his mother’s side, the name there is Tawhara. There’s also whakapapa to the Huriwai whānau which is in Te Araroa.

I guess part of my journey as a journalist has been trying to recover information about myself and where I fit into the whole picture — and that’s an ongoing project.

I didn’t meet my birth parents until I was in my late teens. My grandmother was one of nine, and my birth father is one of 11, so there are quite a few cousins floating around that I keep running into, and they keep running into me. It’s been a bit of a journey to try and understand where I fit in that scheme of things.

Did you know you were adopted? And did that lead to some resentment through the early part of your life? I don’t want to be disrespectful to your adopted parents, who showed the ultimate kindness to whāngai someone, but how did life pan out for you? And where did you grow up?

Resentment wouldn’t be the right word. It was just this longing to know, because you grow up not being like other people around you. You don’t look like the people around you. You don’t think or act like the people around you. And so you always feel a bit out of place. The adoptive parents I had did a good job. They tried to give me everything that a parent tries to give you, but they pretty quickly realised they couldn’t give me my identity.

And part of that recognition was their choice to send me to St Stephen’s. But that just amplified the sense that I didn’t know who I was, because a lot of the guys that I was there with were tūturu Māori. There were guys there from Tūhoe and the coast, and they had a very strong sense of who they were.

Some of them were fluent in te reo. I certainly wasn’t, although I grew up in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, an area with a high Māori population. It was just one of those things that I had to deal with, and still deal with. It’s not something that ever ends.

Were your adoptive parents comfortable that you wanted to know more about that side of you? Were they helpful?

They were very supportive of me, and they helped me track down my birth parents. Particularly my late grandmother. She was a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, trying to track down the names and whereabouts of my birth parents and grandparents.

My mum always said that it wasn’t their choice that there was no information because in those days adoptions were closed. They would’ve loved to have known and understood more about who I was.

It was a very short, almost one-generation experiment, those closed adoptions. There was no legal reason for it. They just thought: “Well, we’ll make it all a secret, and everybody can move on.” But that’s not what happened.

I think many adoptive parents were caught in this experiment of trying to raise children that they knew nothing about.

Was the reconnecting what you hoped it might be?

You get answers to some questions, but that raises more questions, and on it goes. You think there’s some closure to things, and then it jumps back out at you. About 15 years ago, I found a sister I didn’t know about. She was also adopted. We’re siblings by our father.

All those kinds of things can disrupt what you think you know, and then you have to start over again and rewrite the script. Sometimes it’s been difficult, but facing difficult things can make you a better person. It hasn’t been easy, but life isn’t easy, so you just deal with it.

It was an interesting decision by your parents to send you to Tipene (St Stephen’s School, in Bombay, Auckland). Obviously, they wanted you to understand a side that they must have assumed that you had. What was behind their decision to send you there?

I was born in 1971. All my parents had was this piece of paper that described eye colour, height, occupation — you know, the information you’d get off a passport, except it didn’t have a name. When it was describing my birth father, it said he was Māori, and that was all we knew. My parents were very conscious of that when I was growing up.

And it was quite a fixation for me, even as a kid: wanting to know, wanting to know, wanting to know. Maybe that’s why I’m a journalist, because I was always asking questions, and my parents never had answers — or couldn’t give me answers. Sending me to St Stephen’s was one of the things they did in trying to address my need to know.

It was towards the end of my time at St Stephen’s that I met my birth parents. We were on a rugby trip in Australia when I first met my birth mother, and then later that year I met my birth father. It was a massive revelation to my adoptive parents to meet my birth parents because it explained my temperament, looks, who I was.

St Stephen’s was an interesting place, because at the time bullying wasn’t uncommon, and there was some pretty serious violence at times. It wasn’t that much fun. But there were other things that I have good memories of, like some of the mischief we got up to. I reflect on that with a bit of fondness.

So you bumped into your mum in Australia? Can you tell us about that?

It’s a fairly intense thing when you walk into a room and there’s this person looking at you, and you can tell straight away that you’ve inherited some of those looks. Especially so with my birth father — it was obvious.

And then you meet all these cousins, and you can hear your voice, you can hear your laughter, you can see yourself in all these people around you. That wasn’t my experience growing up. I think for most people, it’s pretty normal. But it’s quite a shock to your system when you haven’t had it.

It took me a while to adjust. I was only 16 at the time. I suppose it wasn’t until my adulthood that I started to build the relationship with my extended family. And that overlaps with my journey as a journalist. There were a lot of events and stories that I covered where I was crossing paths with people who I was related to.

Were you a state ward before you were adopted?

The situation with adoption under the Adoption Act at the time is that your birth parent, usually the birth mother, signs away their parental rights, and then Social Welfare manages the process and transfers those parental rights to the adoptive parents, who they’ve interviewed and chosen.

Technically, there’s probably a moment where briefly you’re a ward of the state, but it’s pretty quickly transferred, so your adoptive parents become legally your parents.

There’s a bit of a tricky thing in there because the Adoption Act doesn’t recognise traditional Māori adoptions. It says that quite explicitly. So in my case, that took the whāngai option off the table.

I’ve got a lot of aunties, and many of them have said they would’ve taken me in, and the same with my sister. But that option wasn’t there. Social Welfare didn’t bother to explore that option. So there were many mixed-race kids like myself being placed with Pākehā. The implications of that weren’t thought about.

Another thing that was also going on is that most of the couples who were applying to adopt were obviously Pākehā, and they would express their — I don’t even know how to say it — their wish list, or their preferences, and many of them just weren’t interested in taking Māori children. And when I found that out, that annoyed me. It made me quite angry. And that raised a whole lot of questions for me personally, but also professionally. It’s like: “So this is what Pākehā society thought of Māori kids?”

And that led me to cover the whole issue around state abuse. It hit me hard. Who’s at the bottom of all the social statistics? It’s Māori. Māori boys particularly, and Māori men. And the bigger problem, I felt, when I started to look at that, was that New Zealand’s okay with that. It’s a status quo that we’re quite comfortable with as a country.

I wasn’t comfortable with it, and I wasn’t willing to accept it. That’s when I started asking a whole lot of questions around things like the high number of Māori in prison, trying to understand why and how that’s come about. And that’s when I started hearing stories about the welfare institutions. The rest is now a very long history.

How do you get on with your adopted parents now? Are they still living?

My mum passed away in 2019. She had cancer. It was before her time because she’d only just turned 70. But, I mean, they were my parents. They did the hard work of raising a kid, and it was probably a bit harder when you don’t know much about the child. This goes for a lot of couples who adopted children. They weren’t given any support. It’s like: “Here you go, see you later.”

In fact, when my parents went to pick me up at the hospital, they drove from the Bay of Plenty down to Wellington, and the nurse dropped me in Mum’s lap in the waiting room and then walked off. And she came back, 5 or 10 minutes later, and said: “Well, do you want him or not?”

When she told that story, Mum was always quite annoyed about the callous way that it was asked. And I do think it had something to do with me being mixed-race, because at that time they were having trouble finding couples to take Māori children. I think they just wanted to get another one off the books.

Some of those things stick in your head, and when you get situations now with children fostered or taken from their parents or whatever, you view it in a different way from most people because of that experience.

You’re noted for the work you’ve been doing as a writer and investigator of different aspects of New Zealand society. How did that come to be?

Throughout my growing up, I was always good with language, and I suppose that was something that was encouraged by my teachers. I think the first inkling I had about journalism was during the Springbok Tour and all the chaos that caused the country.

I was only about 10 at the time, but I think the following year I was in a bookshop and saw an autobiography by a guy named Donald Woods, a South African journalist who was confronting the apartheid regime through the 1960s and ‘70s. I look back and think: What made me pick up that book?

The thing about it that spun my wheels was that he was confronting and challenging people in power, and getting some pretty serious flak, too.

That was a little seed, and it took a while for me to pursue that, because I had, and still have, an ambivalent attitude towards the media which is predominantly staffed by Pākehā and telling stories for a Pākehā audience. That can distort the way stories are told when it comes to talking about Māori.

I don’t tend to follow the media pack, because I don’t want to be writing the same stories as everybody else.

Like a lot of journalists, I started in newspapers and then moved into magazines. I did a lot of work for Mana magazine, and that was an important stage in my career, because I had moved out of a newspaper around the time the whole foreshore and seabed thing blew up. That was quite a difficult time, because the media coverage of it was straight-out racist, and I didn’t feel like I had a place there.

I was freelancing, and then I got a semi-regular gig with Mana, and it gave me a place to not have to justify the stories I was telling. And that gave me a bit more confidence in the position I was taking on stories. And when I say position, it’s the angle that I was approaching stories, and who I was talking to, and what the story was about.

Eventually, I went back into the mainstream media at Radio New Zealand. The first story I did there blew open the state abuse scandal. It had been covered in previous years, but it never got any public traction. If you compare it to Australia, they had the Stolen Generation, and that blew up over there in the 1990s. We’re 30 years behind Australia, in having an inquiry into what happened here — and in some respects, what happened here is worse.

There are times when I feel like I’ve been going outside the square and outside what’s expected from editors — and sometimes that’s been a bit challenging because editors don’t like to be told that maybe they’re missing something, or they haven’t quite got their heads around something that they should.

I’ve got to a point now where I’m more confident in my judgment. Sometimes I’m okay with the fact that nobody else is seeing it, and I will pursue a story that others aren’t interested in.

But the state abuse one has been a major part of my career in the last little while. I could see this massive impact when I started to look at the numbers, and then I started to make connections. I live in Levin, and three of the worst institutions were here. Hōkio Beach School, Kohitere and Kimberley. And the Royal Commission’s report on those three institutions is horrendous.

But then you start to see the connections between what happened to children in those places and where those children ended up, like in jail, in gangs, in mental health institutions. The numbers are massive, and I don’t think we’ve got to grips with the damage that’s been done. Yes, we’ve had a Royal Commission report come out. But I don’t think, as a country, we’ve grasped the scale of the damage. We still tend to look down on the victims or judge them for some of the problems they’re having, without understanding the trauma they’ve been through.

That’s been a major part of my work. I have done other things, like Cyclone Gabrielle and the forestry slash. I’ve done a bit of stuff around Māori education and inequality, because all these things fit together. You can’t just have one issue over here and think it’s not connected to another issue over there.

I think perhaps one of the things I am good at is joining the dots. A lot of news coverage is about one angle on a story, leaving out all the other factors that contribute to that issue. That’s why I gravitated towards longer-form writing in magazines, because you can get to explore some of those wider issues a bit better than you can in a daily turnaround environment.

How much satisfaction do you take from the fact that you were part of being able to bring state abuse from out of the darkness and into the light?

I’ve been covering it for eight years, and there are times you think, why aren’t people taking this more seriously? It’s been frustrating, to be honest. I have colleagues and friends in the media who congratulate me on the work, but I’m like: “Yeah, that’s nice, but why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you guys follow it up?”

It was quite a moment for me when the report from the Royal Commission came out, and the media got it under embargo. I sat down in this hotel and flipped open this folder of PDFs. I was in a hurry. It was like: “What’s in here? What’s in here? I’ve been waiting five years for this.” I saw this part of the report that was about Kohitere and Hōkio, and opened that and, bang! There it was. The subtitle of that part was “The connection with gangs and crime.” And it was almost like I’d written it, because I’d done a story on that right back at the start, in 2017.

It wasn’t that I was particularly clever. It’s just that I sat down and spoke to people, gang members and others who had been through this — and I guess it was this little moment of vindication, not so much for myself, but for the victims. Everything they’d been saying and everything that I’d found out about what the Crown had been up to, was there. And because it’s a Royal Commission report, it’s official now, and it’s all recognised, and everybody else is jumping all over it. So I felt a sense of satisfaction: Yes, it’s out there now. But also: Why has it taken so long?

One of my heroes is a guy by the name of Oliver Sutherland. He was a Pākehā scientist, but he was knocking around with the likes of Syd Jackson and Ngā Tamatoa and some of those guys, and he was confronting this stuff back in the 1970s and exposing it. He exposed what was going on in the welfare homes, in Lake Alice.

To put it in perspective, I was born in ‘71, and most of the guys that I’ve got to know were about 10 years older than me. By the time I was born, they’d already spent half their lives in the system. By the time of my first birthday, they were heading for Lake Alice. By the time I started school, Oliver had exposed some of this stuff, including Lake Alice.

It’s taken my entire lifetime for this stuff to come out in a big public way. Why has it taken this long? The only answers I can come up with are, one, there have been people at very high levels that have been covering it up — and the Royal Commission confirmed that.

And two, you look at the identity of those victims. Eighty percent or thereabouts are Māori. If you weren’t Māori, you were poor, or you were disadvantaged in some other way. It seems to me that, for decades, literally decades, we’ve had people in power who just swept this aside. Because, you know, these people were expendable in their eyes. They weren’t a political problem, and the media didn’t care about them.

So, to answer your question, yes, I feel pleased about the job I did. But it shouldn’t have taken me to come along and do that. It should have been dealt with back when Oliver Sutherland exposed it — and there have been many opportunities over the years. There was litigation filed in the 1990s about Lake Alice. That was covered up. There was no serious police investigation. The UN found that New Zealand had breached the convention against torture because they hadn’t investigated.

The police didn’t do their jobs. That’s an understatement. And then there were numerous people at every level of government that tried to protect the government from legal liability.

Many of the Lake Alice victims have already died, but many of them are not in great health and only now are they being taken seriously by government ministers. I’m pleased about that, but I’m also annoyed that it’s taken this long.

It’s bigger than me. It’s not about me being this hero journalist who came along and exposed it. It’s been exposed before, and it was never dealt with at the time. So I feel a bit ambivalent about it, to be honest.

Tairāwhiti and forestry. You’ve delved into it in your new book Tairāwhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone, for Bridget Williams Books. Talk to us about what you wanted readers to understand more clearly. What’s the driver behind putting this book together?

Often, when I write something, it’s just me trying to understand things, and I guess this is how I see my job — trying to understand something and then explaining it to the audience.

I had been an agribusiness reporter earlier in my career, so I’ve covered floods and other disasters. I covered the Christchurch earthquake. And what I’ve seen is that there’s often saturation coverage for the first week or so, and then it tapers off. But, for the victims, that’s often when the hard part kicks in.

I was up in Tairāwhiti in 2018 or thereabouts. There was a storm that had hit Tolaga Bay hard, and there was a whole lot of slash that came down the rivers.

I was vaguely aware of it, but I didn’t have a grasp of how it all fitted together. I’d covered things like emissions trading, and I’d covered floods, so I had bits of the story, but I knew that once Gabrielle blew through, I’d need to spend some time up there in the weeks and months afterwards, to try and understand why there was all this crap turning up on the beaches.

It was probably a little naive of me because there was so much to understand about how the forestry industry had become embedded there. Tairāwhiti is one of the most erosion-prone pieces of land not just in New Zealand, but in the world, and that’s a result of all the political and economic decisions that have been made over decades, right back to the 19th century.

So again, as somebody who hadn’t grown up there but had a connection, I felt an obligation to the whānau, the hapū, to do something. To honour and to give them this exposure to show what was going on there.

That was how it started, but there were so many layers to it. One area that wasn’t covered much by other journalists was the damage to the ocean. There were the very obvious images of slash on the beach, but I spent some time with a couple of fishermen up there, and it became very apparent that you not only had this massive erosion problem, and this massive problem of forestry, but there was also the damage being done to the ocean that was invisible to most people.

It started off as one story and then it snowballed and ended up being six stories in the end. Then you have the emissions trading scheme, which is this whole other thing, this driver behind it — and not in a good way, either, because it incentivises pine but ignores the impact that pine is having in this particular area.

So that’s how it kicked off. Newsroom ran the series of stories over about a week. It was pushing the boundaries of magazine journalism and getting into book territory. I was contacted by Bridget Williams, and they’ve packaged it up as a little book in their BWB text series.

Again, it was a way to tautoko the whānau up the coast there, and just let them know that this is important, and the public should know about it.

Let’s talk about photography, too, because you’re described as a journalist and a photographer. Do you have a preference?

Photography has been a major part of my career. There have been various times when I’ve done more writing than photography, and vice versa. They’re different practices. You’re using a different part of your brain. You can get out of the office more and meet people on the ground when you’re doing photography. You can be lazy and just use the phone when you’re writing.

I’ve got some reasonable experience with the camera, and I think it often informs my writing, because I try to write visually. I try to put readers in a scene or in front of a person that I’ve met.

What do you shoot with?

I have used Canon for most of my career. I used to use Nikon. I don’t think it makes much difference what gear you’ve got. Every camera brand has some amazing gear. I’ve still got rolls of film at the back of my fridge somewhere because I can’t bear to throw it away.

But digital is pretty much it now. And the levels of technology are just astonishing. But I still think it comes down to the fact that your greatest photographic tool is your eye. It’s being able to see an image. And the camera is just a tool to capture it. A camera can’t do composition for you, can’t do timing, or being able to engage with people before you take a photo, and put them at ease.

I always ask people what else they do outside of mahi. What do you do to stay fresh?

I read a lot, especially history. That obviously overlaps with writing, but I have a brain that needs to understand things, and so I hoover up history in my spare time. I’ve got way too many books that I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to read.

I’m not a very good guitarist, but I do have a couple of guitars that I want to sit down and learn to play properly. Even as a kid, I had an interest in that. And the funny thing is that when I met my whānau, I found that many of them are quite musical, including my sister.

And, finally, some books that have left their mark on you that you might recommend to readers of this piece?

There are way too many books that I could recommend. One I’m reading at the moment is by Naomi Klein, called The Shock Doctrine, which is an overview of how neoliberalism has affected different countries. I knew some of it, but she puts it together in a way I’ve never seen before. That’s not a recent book. That’s one she wrote quite a while ago.

A newer one of hers I’ve just read is Doppelganger, which is about conspiracy theories and unreliable information.

Weirdly, I’ve been reading a lot of books about economics and the history of economic history. That sounds pretty boring, but when you delve into it, a lot of the decisions people make — and this gets back to the whole slash thing — are economic decisions. I’ve been reading a lot about economics, trying to understand what drives our decision-making.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

E-Tangata, 2024