The man in the hat

In 1983 six of us women walked with six prams and two children all the way round the Tai Rawhiti from Whakatane to Gisborne.  We had all worked with passion and urgency on the nuclear free and independent Pacific cause – I remember one of us, the writer/ composer writing a letter to David Lange quoting Shakespeare – “The oldest have borne most – we that are young shall never see so much nor live so long.”  He wrote her back a short note – “I will remember what you have said.”  It was she who named us Pramazons; we loved the bravery, humour and paradox of the name but the kids who would come out of houses and schools, pointed and laughed,  calling out “Tenko Tenko” naming us as refugees, tattered, down and outs.  Which we also were.

'Tenko' series two

We wanted to connect with the ‘independent Pacific’ in our own back yard.  Also I think we wanted to have a break from our ordinary lives, and to have an adventure. Each of us would have her own story of what we needed to go towards and get away from:  me, I had taken a year off my high school teaching job to go and finally learn Te Reo Māori.  I was 34 and the oldest of our group, two of whom were 19.  I had studied the miracle plays done by bands of strolling players  in my English degree.  I had looked at the long finger of the Cape all my life yet never been to where it was pointing.  I had lost one lover and was unsure about another.  Walking away from it all seemed like a good option.

In planning the year, I had asked my friend Hine who taught at the same school as I did “Where shall I go to learn Te Reo?”  She said, “Wellington Polytech.”  A devotee of universities, having grown up with the University Grants Committee coming to dinner at our place as my sisters and I witnessed Waikato University come  into being around us, I replied plaintively “Oh...not university?”  “No, Wellington Poly.”  Hine’s voice was clear and strong.

Thank goodness for guidance!  The experience of learning Te Reo for 44 hours per week was astonishing.   A group of educators including Martin Winiata had set up that wonderful Kuratini programme of intensive courses.  We went 9 – 5 Monday to Friday and 9 – 1 on Saturdays for six weeks at a time, being charmed, challenged, dazzled, puzzled and fed by  Roimata Kirikiri, Te Ariki Mei, Lee Smith and Huirangi Waikerepuru.

Te Ariki Mei on the right -  on one of our haerenga in 1983

 Two hours a day in the language lab and Manuhiri Day every Wednesday.  A noho in our classroom to learn the work involved and then a haerenga to some district and  Noho Marae there.   By August I could understand a lot of what was said in Wellington, far less when we went to country areas...but I could at least begin to reply when called on.  I had also learned to respond to the pained anger which was expressed to me a couple of times: “Why should YOU be taught when my own children can’t even speak?”  I replied that I knew I had no right to what I was learning but so great was my love for this language which had been speaking to me all my life (Ohope...Manukau...Pukekohe... Opotiki...Otahuhu...Papakura...) that if anyone made it possible in any way for me to learn I would be there, taking up the offer.  Us Pākehā on the course didn’t deserve what we were getting but oh how lucky we knew we were.

So when we left in the beginning of October to go on our long walk around the East Cape, I was excited to be going into places where Te Reo is primary. 

The story of that journey is one we are just starting to feel like we can and must put together now, 30 years later, as it has worked within each of our lives like a magic yeast, leavening and informing the shapes of our worlds.  

Pramazons in the rain - when I was away with my kids for a week

The aspect of the journey sparkling with me tonight concerns the man with the hat.  Right out at the edge of the Cape, where colonisation is weakest,  we had been invited to stay in four wharenui.  A kuia with thick white plaits and a red track suit, standing in the garden outside her tiny cottage,  was the first to invite us.  “Of course you should sleep there, that’s why we put up those houses, for people who were walking round,  just like you!”   Potaka, after hearing the kokako, where our graceful friend Sandie  taught us to clean properly when we left and leave the place better than we found it.  Then Te Araroa where Mereana whose 10 year old daughter was one of the children walking with us,  told a story which we played back for her inside beloved Hinerupe.  Then we stayed at Awatere too – I don’t know how this came about, maybe through Mereana.

The road on from Awatere was windy and full of hills.  We all had differing reactions to those hills, accepting them some days and finding them torture others.  Our writer/composer played the cornet and this day she charged, swearing,  up the hill to the top and played the cornet triumphantly as the rest of us toiled up.  My technique was to lean slantingly on the pram and gaze at my feet, saying to myself the mantra that had arrived to support me all the way through the journey “All I ever asked of you was to take one step at a time.”

The man in the hat, 30 years on

Anyway, we were somehow a bit strung out that day.  And then it happened out of nowhere, magic.  A car drove past us, then turned and stopped and out climbed a man in a hat.  “Hine told me you would be coming.  Walk on into Tikitiki and turn in to the marae opposite the church, you can stay there.  There’ll be a meal for you there.”  I think we erupted in six different ways, we were quite excitable at the best of times.  He looked at us, quizzically, and raised his eyebrows.   

“Well, see you later.”

The next bit was downhill all the way.

The marae was astonishing, Rongomaianiwaniwa the impressive embracing wharenui and a carved dining hall.  A cousin of Hine’s, Kui had come and cooked chicken curry for us, opening a bottle of her black pickled mushrooms.  There was hot water.  In the church over the road soldiers knelt in the stained glass windows, dressed like my father’s uncle Paul who had left Opotiki at the age of 16 and never come back.  They seemed to agree silently with our message about the insanity of war.

We rested, we gloried in our good fortune, we ate, we went to the pub, we did our puppet show in the primary school and got ready for the antinuclear show and discussion we would do at Ngata College down the road.  In the pub Api (for it was he) told me how when he first came home from the city, any time he made suggestions the home people would act as if no one had said anything, they would completely ignore his remarks.  “They did this for two years,” he said, “Testing me.”

In the intervening years, we saw him on TV, becoming a more and more senior spokesperson for the district, the iwi, Maoridom.  Each time I saw him, he looked much the same, he wore his hat, he spoke with gruff eloquence in English for the TV cameras, sometimes with that same quizzical angle we had seen in him.  

When I heard he had died, aged 80, it was hard to believe because it had felt like he would always be there, guarding whatever it was –  mana, detail,  depth, truth.  I was astonished to find at home in Wellington that after the news I could not settle to anything, I felt full of pins and needles;  and then it became clear that maybe one of us had to go, to represent us Pramazons, at his tangi.  I tried to talk to the others, heard back in texts and emails that they thought it would be good if I went.  I could go, I had free time and a car full of petrol.   I heard my mother’s voice in my head, “These times only come once.”

When I told my beloved friend, neighbour and co-worker in Wellington that I was thinking of going, and told her of what he had done, all those years ago,  for us, a ramshackle strange group of headstrong Pākehā women with the two ten year olds tagging along, she saw it in an instant.  “It’s such a model of being an elder and caring for younger people,” she said, “Really attending to the detail and reality of things, unconditional.  We have to honour it because now we have to try and play that role ourselves, in our own lives.”  Her understanding helped me to frame it, accept it, plan, pack for the journey.

Over the course of the next day and a half, driving myself from Wellington into the rain shroud where Api lay, feeling his magnetic pull,  I thought of Hine and how it was, all along, her mana that had come in to shelter us.  The way Api and Kui believed in her and trusted in her was what had given us that magic time.  I had been trying to find her, now I am back in Poneke but hadn’t been able to.   

Wonderful Hine when she led us on a haerenga ki Parihaka

 

Maybe I would find her on this journey?

Beloved friend and mentor Hine on the left

All the way I felt the depth of the purpose of this journey – to honour care.  Hine’s care, Api’s care, Kui’s care.  Hawks flew above my car, again and again, heading north. Near Ruatoria, I put on the radio and started to hear the whaikorero – I thought it was replays of the afternoon before but soon realised that it was happening RIGHT NOW.  Humour, poetry, performance, responses of groans, laughs, murmuring.  As always, lots I couldn’t catch but enough that I could to laugh out loud or have tears in my eyes.

Tagging on to a small group going on, still Tenko with my sandals and backpack among impeccable black overcoats,  I found myself moving with the group to sit on the side of the home people.  I thought, well I have slept here...sitting there I was able to look across at the manuhiri as well as to the porch where the family gathered.  The group of home people around me was nearly as big as that of the guests, a testament to how Api’s care that we strangers had experienced all those years ago had worked in the lives of those closer to him.  Across from us were distinguished guests.  Someone beside me said “One good thing, no Māori are going to prison today, all the judges are here!” 

At last I spied Hine sitting at the side of the porch, part of the family.  I kept checking back across that thronged marae, with the wonderful Radio Ngati microphones picking up and relaying the words out for all to hear, to see her beloved beautiful face.  When I could I made my way across to her; we held each other and wept and I told her how I had known I must come and at the same time I knew it was her mana that we had been blessed by all those years ago.  “Haere mai come with me” she said and took me right to the coffin, where there was suddenly an empty mattress beside Api.  “Tell him.” So I did, with tears and so much wonder for the powers of love and relatedness and being connected right through. I knelt beside a mountain that never moved, (a man who refused a knighthood four times.)  I bowed my head and cried. I looked for his hat.  It was sitting at his feet. 

Meteor February 2015 in New Zealand

Later that night a meteor was seen by hundreds, going northwards from the East Cape, shooting through the darkness with a flash, a sonic boom and a shower of bright sparks.  Like many others,  I thought it was him.