Tommy Wilson: Mentor leaves legacy of learning

Kaumatua Monty Ohia speaks at Te Whetu o te Rangi Marae. Photo / File

The people of Pukenga have always been part of our family growing up in the Mount and now in Te Puna.

My mum and dad were very much working class and all roads from the hinterlands of Welcome Bay led to the wharf in those days.

My mum worked in the wharf canteen with my favourite aunty Mona from Kairua Rd who was always kind to us kids when we would show up for a free feed in the days when you could walk on to the wharf without being given the once over by Sergeant Shultz and Colonel Klink - as we called the guards on the gate.

Aunty Mona and her son Hone Farrell and I were good mates at school and stayed that way all the way through college. We left at the same time, got our first jobs together down Hull Rd and when I had made enough money to make tracks for the beaches of Bali and beyond, I sold my motorbike to Hone and said goodbye to the greenhouse days of the Mount Main Beach and the laid-back life of living in the '70s - a decade of decadence that, for me, was the best and most blessed of the six I have lived thus far.

Having seven sisters helped. Especially when they were blessed with good looks and great voices as mine were and many of the boys from Kairua Rd who went to Mount College knew that I was their baby brother. So I got a green card when it came to being bullied or crash tackled or stiff-armed on the footy field.

And almost by osmosis I inherited a flock of friends who could see the shortcut to not just my sisters but to a fight-free zone in the playground where there were clear demarcation lines drawn between my Kairua Rd cousins and those who were born with more Persil than pango in the colour of their skin.

Those schoolyard days came flooding back in a To Sir With Love kind of way at the tangihanga of esteemed elder of Ngati Pukenga and koro of many of my Kairua cuzzies from college, Monty Te Rereamomo Ohia, who was farewelled last Friday out at his Ngati Pukenga and Nga Potiki marae Te Whetu o te Rangi and Taahuwhakatiki.

I can clearly remember Monty from my days of being a paper boy at the Oceanside pub.

He would flick me a shiny sixpence and tuck his Bay of Plenty Times under his arm and tell me, "Keep your nose in the paper and out of places like this boy" - the public bar of the whare waipiro - pub he was about to walk into.

"Do as I say not as I do" comes to mind almost 50 years down the track.

And I did and still do, not having ever been drunk on beer in my life thus far - but in saying that I gave everything else on the menu of mayhem way too much attention.

Monty Ohia was more than a mentor to me. His sister-in-law Hinemanu was the inspiration behind Kapai the Kiwi and he was the one who passed me a pen at Huria Marae in a symbolic gesture from the wise scribe to the apprentice columnist almost 15 years and 500-plus columns ago, and said: "It's your turn now boy. Put your opinions in the paper, no matter what they are and fight for what you believe in as the pen is mightier than the sword."

In a symbolic passing of the pen gesture I gave it back to Monty last Thursday before we sent him home to the great library of learning in the sky.

Without any whaikorero or waiata (even though I had To Sir With Love ready to bust out in a heartbeat) I passed the pen to his widow Tirikawa Ohia sitting loyally at Monty's side, who quietly slid it in next to him so he could write back to us. Monty, in his mischievous way, always said he never knew if where we went to after dying was real because "no bugger ever wrote back!".

Tirikawa knew exactly what this gesture was about as we had shared the cheeky boy intellect of her Monty on many occasions when reading his straight-shooting letters to the editor of this paper.

As one of the old kuia said to me who picked up on the pen passing gesture "we won't get just a letter back from him we will get a blingin diary a day now he has all the time in the world to write it!"

For me Monty Ohia was to Tauranga what Sir Apirana Ngata was to the East Coast people of Ngati Porou. They lived, breathed and preached the gospel according to the taiaha of knowledge and if education is the answer as many of us believe it is then may the legacy of learning that Monty leaves behind be picked up and preached in all homes and every whare of Aotearoa.

Aurevoir mon ami, Monty. I look forward to your letters, Bro.

• Tommy Wilson is a best-selling author and local Tauranga writer.

-broblack@xtra.co.nz