Issue 62 - editorial

The stuff of Mana

Tena ano tatou katoa

Nothing warms a Maori heart more than a good yarn from the olden days. Especially if it’s told with dry humour and understatement.

The pearls are usually the stories within the stories – the sidebars or asides – and most often they come to light when our elders are reminiscing. I realised this again recently while listening and laughing my way through some fabulous interviews. I twigged, too, that a neat and unique thing about Maori is that there’s seldom any real scorn for rambling recollections.

For us, the compelling and enthralling jobs aren’t the blockbuster interviews with principals and movers and shakers. It’s those once-in-a-lifetime encounters with the ordinary, little people. Sometimes they’re even the incidental or accidental meetings. I’m sure Mana radio listeners and Mana magazine readers appreciate this. And I’m sure it’s why the casual Mana Tangata show on National Radio just before three on week day afternoons, and He Maimai Aroha, the magazine’s obituary section, are two of our most popular productions. It’s the nitty-gritty stuff that does it. And there’s plenty of it within the 100 pages of this edition.

It’s probably poetic justice that I had to go all the way to the Chatham Islands this summer to hear my neighbour from Nuhaka, Val Mete, whom I’ve known most of my adult life, reveal memories of her Moriori childhood in the Chathams. For decades Val felt oppressed about being Moriori, and that is a serious matter. But what got my attention more was her account of life as a youngster there in the 1940s.

It was a free and easy life, she told me. There were only two boats a year, whereas now they have a plane every day and a boat every week. Val and her siblings would cry when they had to have paua or fish for tea two or three nights in a row, because they wanted sausages or saveloys. For the funny side of that story, you’ll have to go to page 95. The same magic touch of humour can be found between the lines of our reports from the tsunami disaster zone of Indonesia’s Aceh province where a number of Maori are among the Defence Force medical team.

New Zealand army nurse Captain Georgina Parata-Turvey, coping with dirt and death as her team restored Banda Aceh Hospital, remembered the lessons her mum and dad gave her in being resourceful and inventive. As a child she was often on the marae with her mother, and was expected to help look after large numbers of people. “For example, if there was no water to wash in, you got some from the toilet cistern – that sort of thing,” says Georgina, whose full story (“Captain of resourcefulness”) is on page 54.

The young equestrian rider Mura Love (see page 70), while not recounting his past to impress or edify anyone, personifies all that is wonderful about te ao Maori – past and present. Here’s a young hotshot of the 21st century with his sights set on a place in the New Zealand team at the next Olympics – a dressage rider who got started as a kid riding rough Nati nags bareback with a rope bridle on the beach at Whangara, not so many years ago. Now it’s top hat and tails for the young schoolteacher who one day watched dressage and thought, “Gee, that looks easy, and they’re useless, so I think I’ll give it a go.”

Such is the stuff of Mana. It’s our pleasure and, we hope, yours too.

Whaia te iti kahurangi, ki te tuohu to mahunga, ki te maunga taitai

Look for the highest level of achievement. If you bow your head let it be