Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku: On show

This week, Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku won the general non-fiction award at the 2025 Ockham Book Awards for her memoir Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery — described by one of the judges as a “rich, stunningly evocative memoir that defies easy categorisation”.

In this excerpt from the book, she writes about growing up at the pā in Ōhinemutu, Rotorua, where haka, poi, and performing for tourists were part of life.

 

Haka and poi, like weaving, were always part of my life, even with Aunty Nuki in Wellington. For years, I joined my kuia, my mother and the aunties at parties, at receptions and smaller events; I owned a piupiu and pari bodice, and a tāniko headband, all made to fit me. Standing up, smiling and simply performing for fun was what we all did.

During the summer tourist season, my kuia and Paparoa mother were on stage most nights. How I yearned to be part of the top haka group, but it didn’t happen. At the few practices I attended with my mother, we’d all be melodiously trilling along in three- or four-part harmony — then a girl, usually the youngest, would pull an ugly face.

Cued in, one of her sisters would hiss, “Who’s flat? Someone’s flat! Who’s flat? Hey, it’s her. Huia! Shuddup, Huia, don’t sing harmony cos you’re always flat!” And most times, it wasn’t me at all: they just didn’t want me. I couldn’t fit in with them, and I didn’t want to grovel.

St Faith’s Youth Club was different: it was welcoming and so random. An active and vibrant haka team, it was a mix of young people from communities around the western and northern Rotorua shores. Every Tuesday, the big red Commer van would arrive at Te Ao Mārama Church Hall, packed with teenagers from Awahou, Waiteti, Ngongotahā and Koutu. Those who lived in Ōhinemutu would walk to practice and afterwards cadge a ride home.

The driver was a bald, smartly uniformed Church Army officer. He’d laugh and say, “But you only live around the corner!”

”No! Mum wants me to see my aunty at Awahou! Can I come? Can I please?”

The mournful “please” usually worked, and no one from Ōhinemutu got off on the far side of the lake. We forgot about the aunties; instead we all enjoyed the ride, singing and poking each other and giggling and snatching smooches and flirting and spying on the older ones trying to do sneaky things, and sometimes they’d grope the wrong girl. Or boy.

One of the older kids might have a Songster, a pocket booklet of all the latest songs on the hit parade. They’d smugly shout out the words, and we’d roar them back, all in perfect tune and harmony. The groping and giggling would stop while we all enjoyed the song.

The best musician was Taaka, who used to sneak me hungry looks and ask me to choose something for him to play. That was exciting — all the girls liked him. Sometimes over 20 of us would squeeze in, sitting stacked over one another, trying not to break the guitar.

The church hall was originally the site of the Māori Arts and Crafts programme established by Apirana Ngata to revive and strengthen traditional arts, particularly carving. Te Ao Mārama had a classic carved front, reflecting its neighbour, the great house Tamatekapua, with extensive interior work, including a magnificent poutokomanawa centre pole as well as ornamented door and window frames. The floor was polished wood, perfect to dance on, and at the rear was a fully equipped kitchen run by the Ladies Fellowship. It was a warm, happy, welcoming space.

We did one tourist show every second week at a hotel restaurant, and the income went to the church. If our main tutor was away, I was the announcer with my snooty voice, which the tourists loved and remarked on.

“What a well-spoken young girl.”

“She’s very fair, that one. She must be a half-caste.”

“My dear, is one of your parents European? English, perhaps?”

“Thank you. Um. No. They are both Māori. Thank you very much.” I’d simper with pride; I always felt grateful for being noticed. I also enjoyed sharing our culture with visitors, as most of them came from overseas: the United States, Australia, Canada, even Britain. Very few came from New Zealand.

We travelled to admire and compete with other groups, and to learn about and compare tribal styles of haka. One outstanding group was from Tai Rāwhiti, the East Coast. As overall winners one year, they seized my imagination, and their principal composer and haka leader captured my pubescent heart. Offstage, she wore a man’s overcoat, dark grey trousers and a fedora, but onstage her dress was the pari, headband and piupiu. Her thick, wavy hair was cut short back and sides, like a man’s. Her legs were shapely and muscular, her shoulders bulky as a working shearer’s; her voice, rich with the lyrics she’d created, soared lucid and strong like her forceful, uncompromising, grounded stance. The power of the earth and the sea rose through her stamping feet, flashed from her quivering outstretched fingers.

Her mana resonated across the marae and throughout the concert hall, and the women in her company, her haka group, took her lead. They were aggressive, unstoppable, majestic; they were commanding, almost masculine, yet female. Although I was a small Arawa girl from a family of postcard beautiful women, I wanted to be like them.

Then our uncle Manu transferred to another parish, and a timid parson from the far south moved into the vicarage. He was vapid, meek and colourless, and not a relation. The youth club was disbanded. No more practices, no more van rides. No more fortnightly concerts at Brent’s Hotel.

No one knew why, but gossip swirled around the village, around the parish, implicating senior Pākehā members of the vestry committee. They were rumoured to have done unmentionable things to some of the younger boys — and often, with them.

The youths were never named, but they were our relations and our schoolmates on the bus, and we heard stuff. This wasn’t like Donald the taxi driver at Maketū, but somehow, to me, it was like that. It seemed to be the same kind of thing; but everyone condemned it as evil, unnatural, wrong. Corrupt. The men were charged in court and taken away. They never came back to Rotorua. And what was much worse, for us: the club never got going again.

Aware that I had to be kept busy at weekends when she was at work, my mother decided I needed to do a sport, even though I’d never caught a ball in my life. She had a talk with her cousins who worked at the hospital laundry; the ones who were there when I came into the world.

They carried the proud tradition of our tribal hockey team, the venerable Ōruawhata, a laughing pack of mothers, aunties, grandmothers, breathlessly overweight, roaring around the field ready to beat up and destroy any rivals. These enemies came from villages across the lake, and we ran them over.

Only one local team was unafraid of us, the Ngāpuna gang, all rapacious and scrawny and toothless and fast. Injuries happened: usually bruises and cracked bones. I was in the B team, never made it to the A; my asthma didn’t help, but my eyes were the real problem. I could run, though, and make a mean attack, despite hardly ever seeing the ball — or proudly slamming it off in the wrong direction.

Our captain was an inspiration. Auntie Bonnie was chunky and sawn-off, with only one working eye, a massive appetite for life, and a lethal swing with her stick. She hovered in the goal, her substantial legs stuffed into lumpy recycled cricket pads donated by a hospital doctor. Her cobalt-blue pleated skirt was rolled over large navy bloomers. She was our goalie; she was our coach.

Auntie Bonnie occupied space and controlled wherever she stood. Seeing me staggering about half blind across the soggy paddock, she’d bellow, voice loaded with gravel, “Huia! Never give up! Keep going, my girl! Never give up!” Though I only played two seasons on those soggy paddocks, that advice stayed with me forever.

Our A team made it to one national tournament. What I remember most is the beer crates, progressively emptied, down the middle aisle of the bus. The only male on board was the driver, a sober father of seven, younger brother to one of the players. As I was the youngest and the lightest on board, my job was to make sure everyone had full bottles and to stack the empties along the back seat. There I sat, lost in the magic of their lusty singing, and wheezing through the thickening haze of nicotine.

After our Saturday games, we’d head for the clubhouse. Its two and a half linked rooms were balanced on a bank by the stream, squeezed behind a big warehouse used sometimes by the traditional carvers for their larger, longer jobs. Reached by a narrow track fringed with blackberry bushes, ferns and willow saplings, it rang with boisterous female voices singing about their victory on the field or mourning a rare defeat.

A couple of times, off-key, the rasp of a not-quite-male voice would push through the corrugated-tin roof. It was Regina, up from Wellington, dressed to the nines in an Astrakhan coat and moulded felt hat, her large-knuckled hands daintily enfolding a scoured fish-paste jar brimming with Jim Beam, her bulky Adam’s apple sometimes bobbing slightly above her artfully folded chiffon scarf. The aunties enjoyed her company, and she made everyone laugh, full of stories about all the ones she’d loved and lost. But still, she couldn’t sing.

Next to the clubhouse was a bubbling pool surrounded by a spiky thicket of bamboo. With a cold hose from the tap, this could be used as a bath. Sometimes the water was soft and oily, even soothing on the skin, but people hardly ever used it, as it belonged to the owners of the empty house next door. A sagging colonial villa with a creaky verandah and mossy broken steps, it was said to be haunted.

Most Māori teenagers would be warned off, but I was drawn in — I wanted to see. I’d wander through, peering at the stained Regency wallpaper, gazing up at the ornate moulding, touching the faded wainscoting. In the largest room, I’d consider the lofty ceiling where an elaborate medallion encircled a rusty light fitting, a yellow spider of tarnished metal. The door handles were discoloured bronze. There was a broken porcelain toilet with a chain hanging from a copper box high above it. Two streaked bay windows, one in each large room off a long corridor, peered onto a sorry huddle of dying and depleted hydrangeas. Mangled willows pressed against the patchy slated roof.

The place was empty, yet not. Embracing the north side, the abandoned kitchen — with its yawning brick hearth and huge cracked sink snug in a scored wooden bench — recalled conversation and business, wholesome food and hot toddies, laughter, grief, arguments and triumphs, people and decisions, memories.

Whose memories? The house ached with loneliness. I wondered; I asked. In the clubhouse, the haurangi hockey players just smiled at me, had another beer and said what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. My kuia told me never to go back there again. Never.

Years later, it burned down, and the rubble was bulldozed over. And I found out the house had belonged to my birth mother Erana’s parents. Who had simply moved away, leaving it unoccupied, unloved. One more mystery.

The summer tourists would wander around our village, needing a clever guide “in case they fell into a fumarole”. With my cousins and sometimes my uncle, I’d walk over and talk to them. They were interesting; they were from far away, large-boned white people who asked a lot of questions. Some liked it when we asked questions of them. Like,

“Do you have two cars at home in a double garage with a dog kennel?”

“Of course we do — everyone in America has two cars.”

“Oh. What about the dog? Who’s looking after the dog?”

One of the older ones showed how smart they were. “It’s in the kennel, stupid.”

“He stays at a place like a holiday camp for dogs. A little dog ranch.”

Everyone shouted at this. “A dog ranch! For dogs!” That was worth thinking about, skiting about on the school bus. A dog ranch!

Someone changed the subject. “Do you have a TV in your house?”

“Yes, dear, everyone in America has a TV. Some of us have at least two . . .”

“Is it coloured? Do you see the colours like in the movies?”

“Oh yes!” she lied. We knew it was a fib because the eyes quickly shifted sideways. And she jiggled the little charms on their thick gold chain. One fat dog! Statue of Liberty. Palm tree. Mexican hat. Sunflower. Koala bear. Eiffel Tower. Japanese pagoda. Baseball bat. Kiwi bird. Dinky gold miniatures that told us where she’d been, when we asked about that, too. Around the world, all her journeys tinkling on her plump wrist. We were amazed.

Her husband, florid and patient, gave my cousin a quarter. The other kids got nickels, and I received a silver dollar for being the main guide, for talking the most and spinning colourful tales about the village, the lake, the hot springs, the church and the carved houses, lacing them with a few glittery threads of truth.

Most of the stories came from the women in my whānau, but a few were the gift of my koroua uncle, Tani te Kowhai. He was a tall, ponderous, heavy-set figure who moved slow and gentle like our river, Utuhina. His dark-grey trousers dropped beneath his hand-knotted dark-brown cardigan fixed by chunky leather buttons.

Aunty Joan, his wispy, pallid wife, had knitted it for him; she was from far away, not from our pā and possibly not even from our country, but she wasn’t a tourist. She hardly ever talked, and when she did, no one could understand her, but she loved our koroua, and she looked after him. They lived on the marae closest to our homestead, in the tiny carved perfection that was the whare tupuna, Te Roro o te Rangi.

I’d meet Uncle on Saturday or Sunday mornings, and we’d stroll past people’s homes, wave at different relations, sniff the aromas from ngāwhā boxes cooking lunch, and I would yell out that I was going to the main marae with Uncle to guide the tourists — just in case anyone wanted to join us. Most times, no one did.

As we came upon the wide plaza of Te Papaiouru, I smiled at Mokoia, our green island floating on the lake. We passed a raupō-fringed lagoon of warm simmering water, known as the Ruāpeka. Early in the morning, no one was diving for the little golden morihana carp that darted around the edges and made a bony feed. The cosy rock shelves and recesses lining the pumice banks were waiting for tourists, who liked to take pictures of the nut-brown native kids swimming there with no clothes on and showing off in the sun.

Nearby, the ornamented house Tunohopu echoed with the voices of aunties cleaning and sweeping; one came out and flapped her mānuka broom at us with a bright smile. We waved back, continuing along the rubble path towards the old dining hall, Whakatūria, cream weatherboards slick in the morning light, on the corner facing St Faith’s. We nodded at Uncle Tuhaka in his carving shed and shop, where he lined up jewel boxes, finely wrought bowls and freestanding figures cut to a perfect scale. Everything was made by his gifted hands, and he was training his sons.

Then Uncle Tani and I looked with wonder at our tupuna koroua, the magnificence of our carved house, Tamatekapua, the pride of Ngāti Whakaue, our village people, and of Te Arawa whānui, our wider confederation. Simple architecture elevated to a massive political and aesthetic statement, Tamatekapua contained centuries of history in chiselled panels, painted rafters and woven wall sections. Its harmonious design, calibrated texture and mathematical accuracy had all been curated to make an impact on the visitor; on the locals; on all of us.

Uncle Tani knew most of the stories, the curl of a cut spiral, the woven spike of a lattice, the flow of a painted curve. He repeated them to me, pointing out the symbols and their meanings. Some were figurative and obvious, like two brothers facing each other on stilts, or a sturdy male grasping an elaborate flute. Others were more obtuse, like the thin slabs brought over from Mokoia in the early 1800s. Delicately wrought in shallow relief, they were a mass of coils and twists that seethed into the imagination, their humanoid and tangled forms warping memory and myth.

The house recorded the journey from Hawaiki of our ancestral voyaging canoe Te Arawa, captained by the charismatic philanderer Tamatekapua (the house himself) and navigated by the astronomer-sorcerer Ngātoroirangi, whose noble image anchored the base of the central support column: the pou tokomanawa, pillar of the heart. Ngātoroirangi openly challenged the dainty Tudoresque church across the marae; I sensed they were performing a particularly tricky and fatal dance . . . but fatal for whom?

The house was loaded with such images, ripe with provocation, endlessly taunting and defiant yet also tendering an ironic calm. Metaphors crafted in wood, shell, fibre and pigment prompted the descendants to reflect, to remember — and, most of all, to celebrate.

My uncle and I would sit in the sun and gaze across the potholed open ground where small pools broke through its pitted skin while the namesake pool, Ōuru, hissed and growled, spurting grey clouds into the matronly face of Queen Victoria. She reigned from an elaborate stand that depicted the Four Winds, safe in her gabled shelter. Her crowned and sashed and sceptred presence aroused the tourists’ keen curiosity. Most of them were wealthy middle-aged couples from overseas. Few New Zealanders came into our big house or talked with us; they believed they already knew everything and so what, unlike the Americans, who constantly probed and pestered, and the English, who exulted in their 19th-century empress on her Māori plinth by the little church surrounded by neat concrete burial vaults.

Queen Victoria’s story belonged to us. How she came to our village was a complicated skein of story lines and political lumps, half-truths and wriggling fancies, so we’d just smile an enigmatic native smile and talk about the Treaty of Waitangi. If the visitor kept probing, we’d show them its elaborate facsimile enshrined under glass inside the meeting house. To enter, they would pay 2/6 each, about 10 dollars in today’s currency.

Within Tamatekapua, the lighting was kept low, and the seasonal sun threw shards of dazzling red from stained-glass windows ornately patterned with whakairo. Earlier years had seen this place as a dance venue; cigarette burns, chipped shell inlay and some gouged initials recorded those times, the frenzy of American troops on R&R, the winter surge of intertribal and international rugby, and more recently a bopping big band, Tai Paul and his Pohutu Boys. All this happened before my teenage time, but rock’n’roll still hustled in the pā.

Close to the carved flagpole, a narrow lane dusty with decades of crushed mussel and pipi shells was lined with small dwellings. Many were old-style wharepuni. One day, Uncle and I were sauntering home when we came across one of my Koutu cousins sweeping the verandah of an older house. We yelled out to each other, she continued her job, and Uncle and I continued our walk. There was a funny look on his face as he asked me, “Do you know who that girl is?”

“That’s Raukura, Uncle! A cousin from Koutu. We catch the bus to school, and sometimes she came to youth club —“

“Āe, but do you know who she is, to you?” We’d reached the Ruāpeka, and he paused, looking across the silky stippled water.

“Um . . .” I wondered what he was getting at. Was this a whakapapa lesson? “No. Why?”

“She’s your niece, Huia. Her mother is your half-sister, Ku.”

“No!” I gasped, hands shooting to my face. “Really? How come?”

“Your real father, Tamahou, had two daughters before you. They were already married with their own families when you were born —”

“No!” I was hugely excited. “But I thought Raukura and her sisters were my cousins!”

Sometimes it made my head hurt. I knew about my mother’s family, and Monty and my half-siblings from that side. We’d all been together at our mother Erana’s tangi. But I had no knowing contact with my father’s people, the Loevli clan, even though they were living close by. He had died years ago, when I’d been too young to attend his farewell ritual.

The old man smiled wisely, and that was the end of that conversation — though my mind and heart were ready to blow up, seething like the nearby mud pools.

When I got home, I dashed in to see my kuia. Holding my hands in hers, she confirmed what the koroua had told me. Stuff like that was not uncommon in Ōhinemutu, so it didn’t feel too weird.

A few days after that revelation, I went home with Raukura. Ku, her mother, met me at the door. I’d seen her around the village. We had a deep, tearful, warm hug. She was much darker than me, with dainty freckles and a wide, gentle smile. She chuckled. “Kare, you really do look like your mother!” Then we laughed, and we had tea served by my giggly younger cousin/niece Cookie, while Raukura bossed her around. Ku promised to ring our older sister, Maea, for a get-together. She was married to a Pākehā, had six kids and was living on the far side of town.

We all met up at the little whare in the lane lined with shells. It was our father’s house. Maea had pale skin like me; her oldest daughter was living there, and Raukura stayed weekends. We cried and laughed and ate and played cards. I still saw my nieces as my cousins, and we all cracked up when their mums reminded us that I was their aunty. They were familiar; it felt normal. We were in the pā, and it was easy for our lives to fit together.

Since the 1890s, women in my extended family — the whānau, and the village that raised and nurtured me — had featured on cartes de visite, calendars, newspaper and magazine spreads, postcards and promotional materials. My beloved kuia Hera was acclaimed as the “Belle of the Kāinga”. Already an established guide mentored by the illustrious Maggie Papakura, she smiled demurely at the camera lens, usually alone, sometimes with her cousins, over a 40-year period. She was the lead in the first ever full-length feature film made in New Zealand, 1914’s Hinemoa; she enjoyed telling her spellbound mokopuna about sitting high up on the rock, jumping into the lake and doing a pretend swim to Mokoia Island. She was an Actress!

I grew up admiring the postcards and pictures of Guide Maggie Papakura, who remained in England and later enrolled at Oxford University, and my beautiful kuia. I grew up in awe of cousins and aunties who won prestigious beauty contests and travelled the world. Moana Manley in 1954 and Maureen Kingi in 1962 were crowned Miss New Zealand; others won regional titles. Extraordinary! But my own dream was to follow Maggie Papakura and Ngāpare Hopa to Oxford. And to always be a tūtamawahine, to never stop doing the haka.

Ironically, I looked a certain way — long dark hair, white teeth, light colouring and a slim build — which attracted commercial and Tourist Department photographers. I did my first modelling job at 15; it paid extremely well, just smiling toothsomely and wearing my pari bodice and piupiu flax kilt. There were usually two of us working together; some were younger guides at Whakarewarewa or members of tribal concert parties, like the charismatic Kingi sisters, the gorgeous Yates girls, and vivacious Linda Moewaka Morrison.

For me, it also felt like an act of continuity and affirmation. My grandmother, my great-aunties, my aunties, my older cousins — they all did it. So I did, too. An expression of our Arawa femininity, it was regarded with some favour and even envy; it was also good money.

 

Hine Toa: A story of bravery, a memoir by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, is published by HarperCollins Aotearoa New Zealand.  

Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (Te Arawa, Tūhoe, Ngāpuhi, Waikato) has degrees from the University of Auckland and University of Waikato. An emeritus professor, she has worked as a curator, lecturer, critic, researcher and governor in the heritage and university sectors. She is a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, a Companion of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and a Fellow of the Auckland War Memorial Museum. She has returned to the pā and serves on the Paepae Tapu o Ngāti Whakaue.