Heading for the sun: Races blending in Gisborne

Morgan Wibrow (left) and Dylan Thomson of Lytton High School. Picture / Kenny Rodger

On a stiflingly hot day at Gisborne's Lytton High School, two 14-year-old boys link arms behind their backs for a ball-carrying race - one of those silly things that teachers love to make kids do in the closing days of term.

One boy, Morgan Wibrow, is Maori. The other, Dylan Thomson, is Pakeha.

In this race, as in so much in Gisborne, the two peoples are tied together almost unconsciously.

"It's not a big deal. It's just part of the way we are," says Lytton principal Jim Corder.

Some time in the next decade, Gisborne is poised to become New Zealand's first region to have a majority of both Europeans and Maori. By 2016, 58 per cent of Gisborne people will identify as European and 54 per cent as Maori.

Since 1986, the proportion of Gisborne people identifying with more than one ethnic group has grown from one in 30 to one in seven.

The district's Chinese, English and Maori-speaking Mayor Meng Foon, whose parents immigrated from China to run a vegetable shop at Matawhero just outside the town, celebrates the gradual blending of races.

"The philosophy that we have as Chinese people is that love has no boundaries," he says.

"There are Chinese people marrying into Maori families, Maori people marrying into Island families, European people marrying into all of them, and it's a whole melting pot slowly creating that olive look in all of New Zealand one day."

It is happening faster in Gisborne than anywhere else, but Mr Foon is right: every region of the country is becoming ethnically much more diverse.

Thanks to Maori women having an average of 2.55 children each against the national average of 1.95, Maori have become a bigger part of the population in every region since 1986, migrating from their home areas to find work even in the South Island.

But that trend is slowing, and in Auckland the Maori share is projected to freeze at 12 per cent for the next decade as the growth shifts spectacularly to ethnic Asians - up from just 2 per cent of Aucklanders in 1986 to 14 per cent in the 2001 census, and projected to be 25 per cent by 2016.

Pacific Islanders are also growing strongly again, as businesses step up recruitment in the islands to meet labour shortages.

Immigration from Fiji, Samoa, Tonga and the Cook Islands jumped by 45 per cent to 5818 in the last October year.

Nationally, Pacific Islanders are expected to increase only from 7 per cent to 8 per cent, while Asians will almost double from 7 per cent to 13 per cent.

Gisborne Herald editor Iain Gillies, who came from Scotland in 1959 to play soccer for what is now Gisborne City, now has Maori grandchildren.

"In 1959 there were bigger differences. In this area, there were bigger gaps between Maori and Pakeha. The Maori population was run-down and oppressed," he says.

"I think the gaps have closed quite substantially over the years."

He sees the changes in sports.

"Rugby league here would be 95 per cent Maori, basketball would be 95 per cent Maori, rugby union probably 60 per cent, maybe 50/50," he says.

"Waka ama [outrigger canoes] is one of the biggest sports. There are thousands of Maori kids in it and they all have a bit of Pakeha in them."

Pakeha institutions are gradually adapting. At Lytton High School, just over a third of the teachers are Maori, although only about 40 out of 250 students in each of years 9 and 10 have chosen to learn in Te Reo Maori immersion classes.

The Tairawhiti District Health Board holds a monthly powhiri to welcome new staff members who have joined in the previous month.

German-born secretary Eileen Wilford, who joined with her South African physiotherapist husband late last year, says Gisborne was "more of a culture shock than I thought it was going to be".

"I didn't think I'd need quite as many Maori words and stuff, but everyone is very happy to tell us about it as long as I say: 'Can you spell that?"'

Long-serving Gisborne Herald chief reporter John Jones says some Pakeha readers threatened to cancel their subscriptions when the paper made changes such as adding the Maori subtitle "Te Nupepa O Te Tairawhiti" to its masthead.

"When we first started using Maori words, we used to get phone calls from people saying: 'I don't want to use a dead language,"' he says.

"But with words like 'whanau' or something, we would no longer think of putting in a translation. Everyone knows what 'whanaungatanga' means."


The series

* Monday: The big shift to Auckland
* Tuesday: How small towns cope
* Wednesday: Sunbelt boom in the Bay of Plenty
* Thursday: Lifestylers leave the big smoke
* Today: Racial melting pot