Linnae Pohatu makes her way at the Auckland War Memorial Museum

TAONGA: Former East Coast woman, now Auckland War Memorial Museum’s tumuaki director Maori, Linnae Pohatu stands next to the waka Te Toki a Tapiri. “It is special to me because parts of the waka were carved by Rongowhakaata carvers from the Manutuke School of carving and completed in the 1800s,” says Linnae. “The waka was eventually given to Ngapuhi in Northland, apparently along with one of my tipuna, Maewa, who I am named after.” Picture supplied

FROM sheep shearing on the East Coast to a role as tumuaki director Maori at Auckland War Memorial Museum, former Gisborne and East Coast woman Linnae Pohatu’s career trajectory was determined from her earliest days.

For the past three years, Linnae (Ngati Porou, Ngai Tahu, Rongowhakaata, Ngai Tamanuhiri and Te Aitanga a Mahaki) has been the tumuaki director Maori at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, Tamaki Paenga Hira.

The position was created to enhance the museum’s relationship with Maori and to help extend the range of services the museum offers to the public.

As part of the museum’s senior executive team, Linnae’s main role is to provide leadership for the museum’s bicultural aspirations; for how the museum interacts with Maori and how the institution integrates a Maori perspective.

Every day seems to bring something new to the role, she says.

“Auckland Museum gets almost a million visitors a year. That number is increasing with our digital strategy. We have put about one million collection items online. That took a big effort from our team. My role centres on determining the strategic Maori approach to this.”

Born in Te Puia Springs, Linnae is bemused by the fact she is required to say on her driver’s licence she was born in Ruatoria. The Ministry of Transport no longer lists Te Puia Springs as a place to be born in.

“I don’t mind,” says Linnae.

“Ruatoria is my hood too. That is home as well.”

Blessed with her upbringingEducated at Waikirikiri School, Ilminster Intermediate and Gisborne Girls’ High School, Linnae says she was blessed with a good upbringing.

“I have always managed to be surrounded by great people. I’ve had some great teachers. They opened the world for me. They saw things in me I didn’t see myself.”

Her parents exposed her to as wide a range of experiences as possible, she says.

In her teens she took up ballet and reached grade five.

“If I think about my upbringing, there were Maori kids doing ballet but not many. I had the best of both worlds. My parents made sure I was exposed to ballet and to learning to play the clarinet but I also spent a lot of time running around my marae on the coast and in Gisborne.”

During her school (and later, university) holidays, she worked as a rouseabout in a shearing gang.

“When you are a student, you try to make ends meet. My parents don’t like layabouts. My sister and I were encouraged to make our own way.

“Shearing and rousing is dirty work with long days. I wasn’t that good at rousing but I was reliable. The experience did teach me how to work hard.”

On leaving school, Linnae enrolled at Massey University and graduated in 1994 with a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Maori Studies.

“I was quite young. I got to the point where I was well into a Masters degree and felt aside from rousing I had little work experience. I was a bit anxious about that. I quit my Masters study and started looking for a job.”

She started her career as an assistant clerk in Parliament’s Select Committee Office and then as a policy analyst at the Office of Treaty Settlements. She then spent three years as a bicultural policy analyst at the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

A Ngati Porou start in lifeFrom 2004 till 2011 Linnae was general manager Maori at the government agency Career Services. She followed her instinct in what interested her and looked to organisations she thought she could contribute to.

“It helps being Ngati Porou,” she says.

“That comes with some naivety but no inferiority complex. I take the attitude, well I might not have done something like that before but I am going to give it a go.

“Coming from the Coast influenced my contribution to policy. I tried to get to places where I could contribute to decision-making,” she says.

“I couldn’t work in a job that didn’t contribute to making New Zealand a great place.”

Linnae’s family and extended family have always been involved in community and civil service, she says. Her father, Godfrey, has worked in the Maori Land Court in Gisborne all her life. Her mother Mere Pohatu is Ministry of Maori Development regional director while her sister Sarah Pohatu is a policy planner with the Gisborne District Council.

“In our kitchen in Kaiti in the 1980s, a poster appeared of a Pakeha woman with a teapot and broom and defiant expression that said ‘Make policy, not tea’.

“That was probably about the time our mother stopped making tea and started her career journey outside of the home and suggested we could all start making our own tea.”

The hard work kaupapa Linnae was brought up with carries over into her role with the Auckland War Memorial Museum. So what does she do for recreation and fitness?

Thirty years on from her childhood in Gisborne, she has unfinished business to take of, she says.

She has taken up ballet again.

“It is a personal challenge,” she says.

“It’s not for public performance. But ballet pushes me physically and mentally. I’m more committed now.”

She recently completed grade four Royal Academy of Dance again.