Back on the waka

A day at Te Matatini gets writer Emma Hislop back on the waka.

 

I’m stuck on the motorway on Monday morning, coming back into Ngāmotu. Te Matatini doesn’t start until tomorrow, but the traffic is already heaving. I’ve just dropped an electric saw back to Tool World, and it needed to be back before 9am to get our bond back.

“Good weather for Matatini,” I say to the guy at the counter, noticing his tā moko.

“I’ll say. Should be mean.”

He points at the electric saw. “How did you get on with this?”

“Sweet. We wanted to keep it, to be honest.” He laughs.

I always resist cutting a tree, but we had it on good advice that you can hard prune a mature avocado tree, and we’ve got all the sun back on the lawn now. The avos are plentiful now that we’re trapping the possums, but the tree had almost doubled in size in the six years we’ve been in Taranaki. Seven possums so far. They were stripping all the baby avocados.

It’s our first Matatini. Everyone is talking about it. Every marae, campground, motel and Airbnb is booked out between Taranaki and Whanganui. Some churches even take out the pews to make space for mattresses. We hear that story more than once.

It’s back-to-back cars on the motorway. They’re talking about Matatini on the radio.

“I’ve no idea what to expect,” says a cafe owner in town. “Will they be coming into cafes to buy food, or will they take their own food into the event with them?”

It’s like she thinks aliens are coming to town.

Americarna, the American car festival, was in Ngāmotu last weekend, and I spotted more than one MAGA hat. A friend was coming back from a hui at Parihaka and got stuck in the middle of the lineup of vintage American cars, going 10km per hour. School kids and locals lined the streets to wave. It cracked me up, thinking of that.

Other mates who work as cleaners at a hotel were asked to work the weekend as the Americarna people left and the Matatini peeps arrived. I try to imagine the Americarna and Matatini people at a party together, and can’t. Give me the tino rangatirataka flag over the American one any day.

Later that day, after work, I go to the pool to swim lengths. It’s still hot-as. The pool is full of out-of-town visitors, mostly tangata whenua, and there’s even more manus happening than usual. Everywhere there is conversation.

“Where you from, bro?”

“Where youse staying? Parihaka?”

I visit my parents and Matatini is on the TV, with the sound down. That’ll be Mum — Dad’s deaf in one ear so he always has the volume up. We tried to get Dad to come to Matatini with us and offered to shout him a ticket, but he said he’d sort himself out, and then didn’t.

Probably best to stay out of the sun with that leg anyway, I think, looking at the bandage on his shin. He’s spent his life in the surf, wears shorts all year round, and never wears a pōtae or sunblock. My nagging paid off, and he finally saw the doctor. He’s getting it seen at the skin clinic tomorrow.

At our place, Muzz, Lenni and I have been watching the Road to Te Matatini and learning lots about the different elements to each performance. The waiata tira, the whakaeke, mōteatea, waiata-ā-ringa. The poi! We all love the poi. The haka, and finally, the whakawātea.

Friday morning arrives, and I argue with Muzz about taking camping chairs. It says No Camping Chairs on the website. Lenni points out the dozens of people sitting on chairs in the live footage. “We’ll be on a slope,” I say, remembering going to UB40 at the Bowl of Brooklands as a teenager, and Fleetwood Mac a few years back, in the pouring rain.

I’m keen to get there. Lenni’s been off school for two days with a virus but seems well today. We stop at school because it’s the last day to drop off police vetting forms for the upcoming senior school noho at Owae Marae.

“Off to Matatini?” Tracey in the office says. “Lucky.”

My cousin is the principal, and I can see him in his office with Te Matatini on his laptop beside his work computer. “Jealous,” he calls out, as I leave.

A colleague of Muzz’s has said we can park at his place near the Bowl, and Lenni is impressed that we have a special pass. The entrance to the Bowl is humming, and we’re excited. We have our day pass wristbands on.

The woman on the gate stares at our wristbands. “Wrong day,” she says. “You’re coming tomorrow.”

“Nah,” I say. “You booked Friday, eh Muzz?” I feel irritation creep in. It’s never far away these days, contributing factors being menopause and the current government.

“Pretty sure I did,” he says.

She asks to see tickets, and he pulls out his phone. She passes his phone to someone inside the booth, and that person makes a call. It seems to take ages, but finally she comes back.

“Okay. Kei te pai. I’ll cut those wristbands off. Give you new ones.”

Briefly, I regret not getting tickets to the finals. I refrain from asking if we can keep the finals day tickets, too. Matatini isn’t cheap to attend — more than $100 for two adults and a kid.

We tip our water out on the ground and walk through. There’s heaps of stalls and I wish I had the money for a mirimiri. Te Whānau-a-Apanui start just as we sit down on the grass slope. There’s a massive screen between us and the stage, with just a glimpse of the real stage visible to one side. The performers look tiny.

“That Te Whānau-a- Apanui group were pretty good,” Dad messages.

“Best I’ve ever seen!” I message back.

“This next lot is from Tai Tokerau — Pukenui country.” We used to live in the north. It’s like Dad is with us, and I wish he was, although better to keep his leg out of the sun.

We move, in search of shade, and to get closer to the stage, finding a space above the tar-sealed road that’s transporting kaumātua up and down on golf carts. Lenni’s hungry already. He’s bumped into some mates from school, and they disappear, then return with fry bread and dumplings.

Dad messages. “I’m looking forward to Waihirere this afternoon. I expect they could go close to winning the thing. The trouble is I have to be at Peggy Chen’s at 3pm so I may have to cut my watch short.” Peggy Chens is the skin clinic where he will get a biopsy.

My sister in Te Waipounamu messages our family group chat.

“Haha my friend Christall thought I was performing in Te Matatini. Ha, I wish!”

The resemblance is astounding. I stare at the wahine in the photo. She’s part of Te Taumata o Apanui rōpū.

“It’s Erena Koopu. We already follow her on socials,” Ana says.

Lenni points out the golf carts. “Nanny and Koko could have gone on those,” he says. I try to imagine Dad on one, and can’t.

He wants to know what the kapa stories are, but I can only pick up words and the occasional phrase. Amazingly, there’s a translation app available, but I don’t want to look at it. It feels reductive.

I tell myself I should be enjoying the day, but honestly, I’m battling feelings of not being up to scratch. I’ve done no reo over the summer despite promising my kaiako I’d keep on it. Whenever Muzz starts to kōrero, I get annoyed. He can’t win.

Everyone is speaking reo around us, seemingly effortlessly. I listen intently to the conversation beside us. One woman is packing her stuff up, to leave. “Kei whea tō pēke?” Her friend points. It’s a basic kōrero, but I understand. The noise in my head quietens.

After a delicious fruit ice cream and watching the kapa for a few more hours, Lenni is fading.

Walking back to the car, we admire a single crimson gerbera lining the shared driveway of Muzz’s colleague’s place. A neighbour is outside pulling weeds.

“Have you been to . . .?” she trails off. Pointing in the direction of the Bowl.

“Te Matatini,” Lenni says. “Yes.”

As we drive out, there’s a row of road cones blocking our entrance. Both me and a guy in a van jump out to move them, but we’re beaten to it by two people walking past.

“Oh, cheers,” I say. “Kā mihi.”

“All good,” the woman says. “Easy.”

Dad’s biopsy result is back. Aggressive type basal cell carcinoma 8mm in depth.

He posts in the group chat. ‘‘I’ll have to google what that means.”

It sounds sinister AF, but my sister is quick to research, and apparently, surgery has a high success rate.

We stop at the Four Square for bread and milk on the way home. One of the sheltered housing guys from across the street is ahead of us in the queue. He’s also buying milk, but his card is declined.

“I can get it,” I say. “No worries.”

“Nah, it’s all good, I get paid tonight.”

“You’ll need a cuppa, eh?”

But he’s putting it back in the fridge already. “I’ve got all this.” He points to the counter, where there are six loaves of bread. My mind struggles a bit with this. If that was me, I’d have put a couple of loaves back and got milk for a cuppa. But I don’t know how many they’re feeding.

That night is my first reo class for the year. My new kaiako was a kura kid and tells us classes will be 80 percent reo, 20 percent Pākehā. Don’t sweat the small stuff, we’re told.

I know having the reo doesn’t automatically make you legit, but I’m happy to be back on the waka.

 

Emma Hislop (Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha, Kāi Tahu) lives and works in Taranaki. Her first book, Ruin, was published in 2023 with Te Herenga Waka University Press and won the Hubert Church Best First Book of Fiction at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She was the recipient of a 2024 Arts Foundation Springboard Award and is working on a novel.

E-Tangata, 2025