Seasonal Living

Prior to European settlement, iwi would live and move with the seasons. As Hori Parata told, “In pre-European time(s) we didn’t live in a stationary position like this. We did have a stationary place, which was the pā site. As soon as we knew the tribe had been threatened, then everybody heads to the pā but, in general, we lived with our environment and the food that came at all times of the year.”

On average, Māori lived four months in the bush, four near the sea, and four near the river. When they weren’t in the bush, they cultivated the land. Meanwhile, marama, the moon, played a key role in the seasonal calendar, much like it plays a role in the circulation of Wai. Maramataka is the traditional Māori lunar calendar. It’s used to guide planting, harvesting, fishing and hunting. “Maramataka is really important about kaitiakitanga,” said Hori, referencing in the latter the guardianship and protection that his people practice in their management of the environment and general wellbeing of their land. “Maramataka and matariki. Matariki is the beginning of the new Māori year in June. You look at the new moon to gather clues about what the new year is going to be like,” he explained.

I thought of what Kelly Kahukiwa told me of Wai, and how it followed the cycles of marama, when Hori added, “Christianity puts us six months out of tune with reality and with each other. Their world starts with Christmas but that’s only six months into the Māori year,” he said, referring to Pākehā in government and alluding to the larger inconsistencies that result from colliding worldviews between Māori and Pākehā. At face value, it is a simple disagreement over which calendar to live by. However, within the context of their fraught history, it reveals yet another instance of resentment that Māori have for Pakeha over their disregard for Māori customs and practices.

My knowledge of early Māori life, fixed in the stories that follow, comes mainly from anecdotes people shared with me about their childhoods, and their parents and grandparents who lived their lives at least partly as bushmen.

On October 27th, 2019, Hugh and I met a woman named Erina Adams for coffee in Kaitaia, a town about 30km north of the Warawara ngahere (fig. 15). Erina was the Land Research Manager for the land claims around Warawara and is an informal member of the Kaitiaki Komiti (an advisory body formed to act as a collective representation of the mana whenua hapū of Te Rarawa for the stewardship of the Warawara ngahere). She informed us that her brother was an acting member of the Komiti Kaitiaki for a time.

Erina’s grandfather and his 11 siblings came to New Zealand from Scotland. He grew up moving with the seasons and would travel to the gum fields of Ahipara to get Pākehā supplies for their family. As an adult who was raised on stories from her father’s time, Erina warned of how detached modern communities are from the forest and the information it holds.

Having lived through the shift from the old ways of postcolonial New Zealand to the new ways of contemporary life, Māori of Erina’s generation have one foot in and one foot out of tradition. All of her brothers were bushmen, one brother and an uncle were even ‘runners’ for their tribe’s tohunga. To be a runner meant that they were sent into the bush in search of a particular plant that the tohunga needed for healing. Spending time in the bush was normal in her family. No longer the sole source of food, the bush was a space for exercise and where the familial urupā (burial grounds) was. She explained that in the old days, people who died were brought into the bush and left in the puriri trees until nothing but bone remained. Today, the urupā tradition she referred to lives on, though instead of being brought way up into the bush to rest, the remains of the dead are buried at their marae to complete the cycle of reconnection to Earth.

On October 21st, 2019, Hugh and I woke up in Ahipara, a small surf community in Northland. We drove 10km northeast to Kaitaia for a 9 a.m. meeting with Doug Te Wake, a Community Ranger at the DOC Kaitaia office. We ate lunch and then drove southwest back through Ahipara and on to Herekino. We followed the road southeast toward Panguru until we reached the Panguru Tavern, a pub owned by Charlie Dunn (fig. 16). After waving hello to the two men chatting by their trucks in the 4-spot parking lot, I entered the building and waited for Charlie’s daughter, who had helped us arrange the meeting the day prior, to come around.

To my surprise, an older woman walked out of the back room to greet us. I said hello, explained my situation and asked if she could direct me to Charlie’s home. Skeptical, she rang Charlie’s daughter and handed me the landline. I received the directions (drive toward Mitimiti past the marae and over the bridge toward the beach until you reach the end of the road, then wait there for him), thanked her, drove myself and Hugh to the end of the road in Mitimiti and turned off my engine.

We idled for five minutes on a patch of grass in front of a locked gate that advised: Private Property: do not enter, and were independently scrolling on our phones when a large man rapped on my window, rolled his eyes at our youthful activity, and chuckled. He motioned for us to follow behind his truck and then opened up the gate with ease. Charlie returned to his truck and drove through the opening onto a dirt road. I looked at Hugh and then at the pile of metal and plastic that was our van, and followed. The road turned from dirt to sand before it disappeared altogether. I trailed close behind Charlie as he continued over the uneven ground, cut across a creek, and rattled up the rocky hill onto the other side. Eventually we pulled up a path that turned out to be his driveway. Shortly, we came upon a home.

There seemed to be generations of life sprinkled around the property. There were old cars that could just as easily have been abandoned in totality as left mid-project, and landscaping nick knacks and ceramic works scattered about. The most striking thing about the property was the sheer abundance of native plants. It was so lush up by the house I forgot for a moment that we were standing on a sandy cliff overlooking the ocean. In the front yard was a vast expanse of the Tasman Sea and in the back, a farm stretched right to the edge of the Warawara, the bright green grass eventually blending into the grayish shrubland that marked the start of the bush. The structure was bookended by sea and forest.

Once inside, we sat at a long wooden kitchen table, Charlie across from me and Hugh to my left. Atop the table, one jar of brown sugar cubes, another of granulated white sugar and a hefty screw top container of honey sat like a little barricade of fixings in between us. I pulled out the ginger nut biscuits I kept in my backpack for these conversations – which typically involved tea and snacks, and then we moved to the kitchen to prepare our drinks, quietly shuffling around the space that was new to us and home to Charlie. It was nearly silent, apart from the low hum of the ocean churning against the coastline just outside the door. I opened up the cabinet and chose a cup eerily similar to one that a friend of mine owns. Holding the steamy teacup calmed my nerves, which I hadn’t realized needed calming, and as I made the short journey back to the table I rested my eyes on Charlie, whose booming voice would promptly banish the quiet for the rest of the night.

As the episode with Gina revealed, Charlie Dunn is quite a large man. The most noticeable point of largeness on him is absolutely his hands, which he kept on the table or gesticulated with for most of our visit, giving me ample opportunity to notice them. I wonder if he noted my gaze because the first thing he talked about was his time as a heavyweight boxer. To my surprise, the story he told had a lot less to do with his own boxing gravitas than with an old friend and the fundamentals of Māori goodwill and hospitality.

It was 1972, and Charlie was a New Zealand Heavyweight boxing champ. He was scheduled to spar with the great Muhammad Ali but another chap, a stranger, jumped into the ring in his place. 27 years later, while Charlie was in Kaitaia for a fishing tournament, he stopped in at a pub. He started talking to some guy at the bar and, as it turned out, that guy was the chap who jumped his spot. They became fast mates and Charlie came to describe him as a minister who loved drinking beer to the point of “putting on a piss” and then waking up to go to church in the morning. When Ali died in 2016, Charlie and his friends raised enough money to send the guy and his wife to Louisville, Kentucky to attend the funeral. He lived in Kaitaia and Charlie suspected he had never been anywhere past Auckland, let alone overseas. But, when his mates gave him the chance he took it, and he and his wife flew to the United States. “On the way over,” Charlie reckoned, “the wife covered her eyes the whole plane ride.” Whereas his mate said the motorway was worse than the plane. Finally, his mate arrived, though for reasons Charlie did not elaborate on, he was 12 hours late and missed the funeral. In an unfamiliar city, in a country half-way across the world, he went to Ali’s boyhood home to find that people were still there. According to Charlie, “He did as Māori do, went inside, told them who he was and Ali’s family embraced him. He and his wife stayed there with the family for three days. He went to the Harley museum and everything.”

The story floored Hugh, who is from Louisville, Kentucky, and may have felt that this experience revealed an unspoken connection between him and Charlie. I concurred, for it was pretty wild that on a remote farm on the coast of New Zealand he made a connection with a stranger within 10 minutes of meeting because of his hometown. Hugh commiserated with Charlie about navigating from the Louisville airport, contextualized the fandom around Ali by describing a holographic billboard of his face on the city’s Muhammad Ali Center, and even described a path that he and his two sisters walk in the cemetery where Ali is buried. Both of them seemed settled after that story. It was their teacup moment.

Over the remainder of the afternoon, Charlie told stories of the land and the bush just outside the back door of the house where his mother grew up. The property we sat on belonged to Charlie’s maternal grandmother and it was where his mom was raised until she moved away as an adult. As I mentioned, Charlie grew up near Panguru on a Māori Affairs Farm, also called a ‘rehabilitation farm.’ Māori workers liberated from fighting World War II ended up on Māori Affairs Farms and Charlie’s father, Manuel, fought in the war. I learned later that Manuel was also a boxer. He was a Māori Battalion boxing champion who, while kept as a POW in World War II, sparred with a world heavyweight champion who was a paratrooper in the Luftwaffe.

As a child, along with play-sparring, Charlie often visited his grandmother’s home in Mitimiti to go hunting with his uncle and spend time with his whānau before leaving home for school in 1961. As for his education, “We all got sent to college, all the boys and girls from here. The only way to travel in those days was by train. We had no buses, there weren’t buses. We had to go from here on a horse and go further into Panguru and catch the cream truck – the guy who used to take our cream and go to the dairy factory – and then had to get on a ferry to Kaikohe and from Kaikohe we had to catch a train to Auckland. From Auckland railway station we had to take a bus to Northgate, to the college. It was bloody scary! For young kids from the country. But that’s what we had to do, that’s what we did.”

After finishing school, Charlie left home once more to pursue his boxing career. He returned north at 34 years old as a New Zealand heavyweight boxing champion and accepted an offer to manage a pub in Whangārei. He moved there with Jan, whom he married in 1969. Then one year, out of the blue, Charlie received a rights bill in the mail for around NZ$3,000. He learned that his grandmother, who had died 12 years prior, gifted the land to him. Charlie said that she never told him she’d left him land. “It had been 12 years after she died until I got the rights bill”, he stated again, either for clarity’s sake or in reference to the struggle Māori face to maintain ownership of their land to this day.

Charlie and Jan were still living in Whangārei when they received the rights bill. Jan is from England and came to New Zealand with her parents as a child. She and Charlie met in Auckland, got married, bought a house and had lived in Whangārei for almost 15 years before he learned of the land in Mitimiti. They put their place on the market, thinking that they’d likely sell it in a year and then move out. To their surprise, “in three weeks we bloody sold it. I was staying in my own house paying rent to that guy before we moved out,” Charlie said. I wondered aloud if he would have returned to the area had he never received the rights bill. “I would have moved back, probably not as quick, but I would have moved back,” he responded. “We found out that she had gifted me the land, 39 acres here, and we made up our mind the same day that we were going to move. And we did.”