Grief shatters time, dates are subsumed before and after, events fall out of sequence. Memories spiral me in and out of pain.
I avert my eyes and look out the window of the express at the rushing landscape. On the left the plain rolls away toward the sea. Far in the distance, a fisherman puts out white-winged floats to take his fishing hooks beyond the breakers. A farm passes by, followed by a small ribbon of houses along the main highway with a small railway siding, Bartlett’s township.
The Wharerātā Ranges crowd the sky. The rugged peaks were the southern extent of our family’s world in those days when we were contract workers, pretty much. The northern boundary was the Waioeka Gorge, to the west were the lands of Ngāi Tūhoe that were accessible via horse track from Waituhi, and eastward was Ngāti Porou. Practically speaking, that’s as much as our truck could manage anyway. As long as we stayed on the plains, there was no danger of the motor boiling over. Best to stay close to Waituhi, anyway, because, tribally, we could count on amicable kinship ties with the lowland iwi, more or less. Farther afield the relationship with other tribes was more complex.
Even so, being on the road as much as we were, mihimihi, establishing who we were, were constant daily encounters:
Ko wai koe? Mum and Dad would be asked. Who are you?
Nō hea koe, where are you and your family from?
Those wandering years will always seem a long time in my memory. Mum and Dad would wake early each morning, and somewhere in my and Rīpeka’s drifting dreams we’d hear the soft stamping of their feet and the rustle and clink of familiar sounds: our parents whispering to each other and then the rustle of Mum’s thick warm dressing gown as she moved round preparing kai. A match would flare, casting a sudden light in the morning darkness. Dad would have lit the outside kitchen fire by then so that Mum could hang the billies of water on wire hooks above the burning wood. Smoke billowed from the wind gusting down the sheet-iron chimney.
Rīpeka and I would make our entrance.
Kua tae mai ērā, aku kaimahi, Dad might greet us. The other workers are here, Dear.
Over breakfast, we would discuss the day’s work ahead. Whether Dad would go on alone and start the job, whatever it was: scrub-cutting or fencing maybe. Perhaps the plan might be that Mum would join him later. Or Mum would go with Dad there and then and leave me and Rīpeka to look after Mere and Wiki the whole day.
Sometimes, I was the one, not Mum, who went with Dad in the mornings, while our women stayed in the workers’ hut. Maybe it was because Mum or my sisters were not feeling well. Whatever the case, I would sit behind Dad on the horse given him by the boss.
Off we would go! Ka haere māua ki te mahi. Either looking for sheep stranded somewhere on some perilous spur of land, or repairing a fence that had come down in a slip and was dangling over some gully. Workers like my father got the dangerous jobs nobody else wanted.
I’d help him as much as I could. There was always a gate to open and close. Scrub to be piled up for burning. Battens to be dragged down to the fence-line Dad was working on. When our dogs weren’t up to the job of shepherding, I became the top kurī, woof growl grrr. Or if somebody was needed to stand in the way of a sheep that wanted to go back down the cliff face where Dad had just rescued it from, that was me.
Why do sheep always do that!
I was the one who took him his cordial from the saddle pack when he wanted a drink. He had no better helper to dig a few spadesful of dirt when he was taking a break. And sometimes I acted on my own initiative: going back to a stream we had crossed because I had seen some watercress there. Or foraging in dark places for the mushrooms Dad loved to eat.
I became my father’s finder. If Mum, my sisters and I were at the whare waiting for Dad to come home for tea, Mum would say to me: That father of yours! He never knows when to come back to us. He might have fallen into a river, for all we know. You better go and get him.
I should have come home for the lambing, Dad. If I had been there and gone out to look for you, I may have been able to bring you back safe and well.
The express breaks across the highway between the clanging bells of a railway crossing, and steams slowly through the Wharerātās. At the traverse, an old truck waits for the train to pass. There, on the back, two children stand and wave. I lift my hand and wave back to them.
They remind me that we weren’t the only families on the road looking for work. We came across other whāmere in surprising places. Camping beside a stream perhaps. Or thumbing a lift in the middle of the night. Or outside some remote marae in the mornings, setting off to town. Or they were following an old horse track the boss never knew about, coming across us as we worked.
When I grew older, Mum used to be surprised that I even remembered the people we had met: Āe, Mum, I remember Bulla. He was a rabbiter Dad came across when he was out fencing. Bulla had kai with us. We had some mussels, and there was a small crab in one. Bulla said: Mmm, ka pai tēnei pāpaka and he swallowed it whole! Yes, I recall the Heperi whānau too. Mr Heperi was a roadman and he and Mrs Heperi used to come and play cards when we worked at the Jobson farm. And Mum, you and Dad used to gamble, and don’t say I’m telling lies, because I saw you playing poker! Georgina? She was the girl we picked up in the middle of the night on the Waimana Valley road. She had no place to go, having been kicked out by her father because she was pregnant. She came shearing with us somewhere in the back of beyond. Arowhana, I think that’s where we were heading. I remember the baby coming one early morning and you, Mum, delivering it and Dad being as nervous as heck as if he was the father.
We never did get to know the people we met for long, though. The day would come when we had to move on. But I’ve always remembered them with a grin, like Widow Karaka and all her kids who walked for miles just to say goodbye. Our truck had been loaded with our belongings and we were ready to go. Then we heard Widow Karaka yelling out to us, Rongo! Huia! Tatari ake, wait up. She cropped land not far from where we had been breaking in horses and had just discovered money Dad left at her doorstep. There she was, wading across the river with her children Kōpua, Ani, George, Danny, Ron and Roimata. Kōpua, big and burly, was giving Ani a piggyback. Roimata was almost drowning because she was carrying a big sack above her head so it wouldn’t get wet. Their pig came too.
We rushed down to the river and helped them up the bank. We all had to help Widow Karaka because she was, well, not thin. Dad grabbed one hand, Mum grabbed the other, and Rīpeka and I pulled at her puku. Her kids pushed her up from the back.
One, two, three and heave! Dad yelled. The Widow Karaka burst out of the water like a big whale and sat gasping on the grass. Takes more than a river to keep me away, she laughed. Anyway, about time these kids had a bath. Get rid of all their kutu.
No kutu on us, her children replied, offended. It’s Dreamboat, he’s got all the kutus.
Their pig pricked up his ears and snuffled, offended.
The Widow Karaka’s voice became tender. You can’t go just like that, Rongo, she said to Dad. She had brought a big kete of Māori bread and scones, still warm from the oven. Eat first. And then a karakia, a prayer, before you leave?
There were so many mihimihi and karakia, hellos and goodbyes, in our lives. Our language was the reo, it was still our first tongue at the time, used intimately between us and as a way of hiding from Pākehā what our thoughts were. Oh, if only they knew what we really were singing about when we did the haka or sang a jazz-inflected action song:
Te mātauranga o te Pākehā, he mea whakatō hei tinanatanga
Mō wai rā, mō Hātana …
Don’t let the cleverness of the Pākehā
deceive you, he is after our land, be strong people,
for land provides comfort to our hearts …
There was another way of communicating, and it was through our belonging to the Ringatū faith.
I like to call the Hāhi Ringatū the greatest underground movement New Zealand ever knew, but I realise there were others. And its language was gestural as well as oral.
It was the language of the raised right hand:
Korōria ki Tō Ingoa Tapu. Glory be to Your Holy Name.
Dad expressed the language on those occasions when we were getting along well with people we had just met. He would push back the sleeve on his right arm, cough, and show his palm.
But we have to be cautious, Son, Dad would say to me. The people of Waituhi took after a rebel chief during the land wars: Te Kooti Ārikirangi. We followed him when he fought the British soldiers. And after the wars, despite the leadership of the great matriarch, Riripeti, and our turning to peaceful ways, there are some who still conduct a vendetta against us for our so-called atrocities. Not just Pākehā but also Māori who were pro-Government. Thus, we are not always welcome in our travels around the motu. Although we identify ourselves and say that we are from Waituhi and expect most people automatically to make the connection with Ringatū, some don’t. Our valley was a stronghold of the faithful, still is, and Rongopai is one of our great cathedrals. While we raise our right hand with respect to God, we also use the sign to identify to others who we are and that we stand by our history of resistance. So you show me the sign, eh?
Meeting other Ringatū always lifted Mum and Dad’s sense of safety in an unsafe world. They would find out where the next prayer meeting was, on the 11th of each month, or the next gathering where we could sit among the people and utter karakia and honour God. Those meetings wherever they occurred enabled us to centre ourselves within our history.
Never forget, Son, Dad would say, that we are of the Ringatū mōrehu, the survivors.
The train continues through the Wharerātā Ranges. As I look out the window, I recall a phrase Dad always used to say to me: Tōu manawa, tōku manawa.
He would point at his heart and then mine. I would place my small right palm upon his chest and then on my own. As long as I felt his heart beating beneath my palm, I was not afraid. Your heart is my heart.
And then he would begin again: Tōu manawa, ō tātou manawa.
He would describe a huge circle with his right hand to indicate not just humankind but everything, the world really. And not just the world now, but the world past and future.
He wove his many wisdoms well, ensuring a solid axis to my universe.
Thus, when the day came, when I was seven, when I would begin another kind of kōrero, I was prepared.
I noticed, as we were cropping kūmara, that some children were going past the property where we were working. I asked them, Kei whea koutou e haere? Where are you going?
Ki te kura, they said. To the school.
My father told me that I watched them going back and forth for a few days. And he and Mum watched me watching them, wondering what I would do. They both firmly believed in education and were bringing my sisters and I up in mātauranga Māori. Through daily expression to observe the values of manaakitanga, reciprocity; whanaungatanga, relating to others; aroha, sympathy for all living things.
They knew, however, that that was only one world.
There was another.
By that stage my parents had also gifted me mana. The opportunity to stand in my own sense of self.
I have always had the habit of independence.
Ko taku whakaaro, ā tōna wā, I told my parents, ka haere au ki te kura.
The next morning, I worked with Mum and Dad and my sisters until seven-thirty. Then Mum dressed me in a white shirt and short pants and gave me some bread and water.
Haere koe ki te kura, she said.
It was at that first native school that I learnt she and Dad were what were known as itinerant workers. Because when I arrived out of nowhere and stood outside the school, waiting to be welcomed in mihimihi, and wasn’t, the first thing that happened to me was to be registered:
Can you write? No? Speak English, boy, leave your language outside the gate. Who are you? Where are you from?
I gave my name and my address as the kūmara patch Mum and Dad were working at.
So, your parents don’t have regular jobs? They are not from the area? Are they of any fixed abode? No address? Your father works seasonally then. And your mother is unemployed.
I didn’t know that this was the condition for all landless Māori, I was too young and dumb to think of it that way. I accepted that Dad and my uncles and all his relatives would work seasonally and have spells of not working in between.
As to the rest of the questions, they were too probing for me. Are your parents married in the Pākehā way? Have you been baptised? Do you know if your father pays taxes?
I didn’t even know what some of the pātai meant. I began to learn caution.
But, after all, I had not expected it to be easy. I was just another tauhou at the gate. My class teacher was kind enough to give me a pencil and some paper and show me to a desk.
He also strapped me when I slipped up and spoke Māori.
I learnt how to write my name and I acquired a new mouth and a new way of talking.
And sometimes, on purpose, I invited punishment; I wanted to honour my own mātauranga. To make sure they knew who I really was, and to remind myself who I was, I spoke te reo.