The chairs have been stacked to the side and we shuffle ourselves roughly into rows. There’s akarakia, a few words of welcome, and the guitar starts, the words flash up on a screen at the front.
It’s the weekly waiata singalong, the first of the new year. Tenants in the building, staff and volunteers, casual visitors in for a feed, all in together, smiling, welcoming each other, cracking jokes.
The second song is a mōteatea, a semi-chanted waiata in traditional form, written specifically for the mission. If there’s another song more difficult to sing, I haven’t heard it. All around me, voices rise to the challenge.
One bloke in yellow from top to toe bubbles with enthusiasm. Another leans on his walker by the wall, watching quietly. Denise is there, free now from her old world of drugs and abuse.
And there’s Richard, 82 years old and 30 years sober, managing his life as a recovering alcoholic. He’s an actor, a poet, a historian and he’s got a PhD. And Denise’s friend Maryann, also an escapee from drugs and abuse, and once briefly notorious for hiding prison escapee Dean Wickliffe. Singing away.
Near the end, the group divides, tāne to one side, wāhine the other, and belt out a spirited waiata-ā-ringa, an action song.
“Bit rusty,” they say at the end, laughing. Seemed pretty good to me.
HomeGround is home to 80 tenants and also the mothership for all the mission’s work. Facilities include a large medical centre, a couple of closed floors for detox patients, a dining room that serves a good cooked meal in the mornings and a weekly dinner for wāhine, a pharmacy and activity rooms. There’s also a rooftop garden, tended by the tenants and just now featuring an explosively lush passionfruit vine, although to be fair it’s more leaves than fruit.
The principle underlying this place is called “housing first”: give a homeless and usually traumatised person somewhere decent to live, and on that foundation you can help them manage their life. But HomeGround is not just housing-plus-services, it’s community.
This week, the building turned 3. It’s fully occupied.
I talked to Maryann and Denise, and then Richard, in a room just off the rooftop garden. All of them live at HomeGround.
Maryann was the first person to move in, when it opened in February 2022, and Denise followed shortly after. Their apartments are on the same floor, opposite each other.
There was a water jug on the table and a dish of lemon slices. Denise started eating the lemons.
“I like them like that. And they’re good for your skin.”
Denise presents as good time and stroppy. Her T-shirt said, “If you can’t handle me at my worst, then fair enough, I’m psycho”.
Maryann is small, with wispy dyed hair and a way of being delicate while letting you know she’s not going to put up with any shit. They’ve known each other 30 years.
“I grew up in Otara,” said Denise, “and it was a druggie world. I ran away from home when I was 16, 17, and I met someone and life goes mental and I had children. And then fast forward to now and I ran away again and came here.
“I was with him for nearly 40 years, I think I was 53 when I ran away and I’m 57 now. It’s good here.”
Denise mentioned “him” and “my ex” a lot, but never used his name.
“When I ran away the second time, I banged into this one,” she said, flicking a finger at Maryann. She too had fled a violent, controlling partner and they found themselves in the same emergency housing block.
“We put our names down for this place. I said to her, ‘Be positive, we’ll get it,’ and we did. It’s been awesome ... it gives me space, I can go for a walk in the park, come back, push that button in the lift, come up here [to the roof] and water the garden. I love it.”
“For me, it wasn’t really domestics. I mean we fought, I’ve been pulled up for fighting. And he was mean, people remember black eyes and stuff. But that was life. For me it was normal.
“But my son told me. He went, ‘Mum, I’m sick of looking at you stoned’.”
She had thought maybe she was coping.
“I could still do things. I don’t know how, but I did. I still washed their clothes, made all the beds, I stripped the beds every day.
“Every few days. Because they worked, so depending on how sweaty they were, I changed the beds, dusted and cleaned and that. When I left it turned into a pigsty.
“We were on the wrong side of the road, we didn’t look over the sea. Mum and Dad both worked for the Post Office. I had a good upbringing so I don’t know why I got into drugs.
“I tried it and I liked it and that was that. I was 17, 18. I can’t blame my parents. I’ve got an addictive personality or something. Everything I’ve ever done, I’ve overdone. Alcohol. Drugs.”
“Can’t tell you what we overdo now,” said Maryann.
“That’s a secret!” said Denise, laughing again.
When Maryann was pregnant with her first son, she went on methadone, to stop her using heroin.
“I’ve been on it for 30-something years. That’s been a saviour, as well as my children. My children are actually what made me get on to the methadone programme. I knew I couldn’t look after children when we were hanging out for drugs.”
Richard peppers his conversation with drily-delivered jokes, but his story doesn’t start with one. When he was 3, living in Hāwera, he wandered into the garden to find his father lying in a pool of blood.
His special interest was local history as it related to Māori, and he fell in with the brothers Syd and Moana Jackson and their sister Jacqui.
“I took Jacqui out. She married somebody else and I’m a bit cross about that, but I knew Syd and Moana very much in those days.”
He applied for a job in External Affairs but was rejected.
“I wanted to be a big diplomat overseas, so then I did the second-best thing. I went to teachers' college in Christchurch. I taught for 30 years and I was drinking all through that. Beer, usually, with a few whiskies. By the 90s I was a mess.”
So was his marriage. He went into treatment. Then, in the mid-90s, he enrolled for a masters degree in social policy at Massey University in Palmerston North, focusing on Māori land loss through the courts.
“I think it was the acknowledgement of my work. ‘Remarkable insights,’ they said. That was insights about the confrontations and meetings of tangata whenua and the colonial regime.”
He was recommended for a PhD and “shoulder tapped” by the historian Michael Belgrave, at Massey’s Albany campus.
“Michael asked me to be his research assistant into the processes of the Māori Land Court in Te Tai Tokerau and Tāmaki Makaurau.”
Richard moved to Auckland, worked with Belgrave, did some research for the Waitangi Tribunal and finished his masters degree.
He became friends with Sir Hugh Kawharu and his whānau at Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and, for a while, lived in the poolhouse of a property on Paritai Drive in Ōrākei, looking across to Kawharu’s marae at Takaparawhau, or Bastion Point.
“It was ‘the white hill’ and ‘the brown hill’. That’s what we called them.”
How did he keep body and soul together?
“I didn’t drink.”
And for money?
“Yes, I know. Sorry. I managed to con the administrator at Avondale College to give me relief teaching. I did that for 10 years, 15 years. Other schools too.”
If I ask a question out of order he won’t answer. He likes stabbing the table with a finger, friendly but firm.
The women laughed a lot and poked fun at each other in a way that only close friends can. Richard wore his “trademark” cap pulled low; his pleasure was more quietly expressed.
The pounamu Maryann wears at her neck was a gift from her sister; their mother’s wedding ring hangs next to it.
All three of them looked me in the eye. Confident, also checking to see if I understood.
The tower block and the restored old pub are both part of Auckland City Mission's HomeGround building on Hobson St.
Photo / Dean Purcell
Denise said she’d been in the paper before.
“‘Woman runs naked to garage’, that was the headline. It was in the Herald when I was living with him in Whangārei. In 91 or 92.”
“I went to answer the door, and a guy was there with a knife. It was a bone-carving knife from the butcher’s. ‘Don’t move.’ And my dressing gown came off, and my ex came out with something to smash him with.
“It was all over a tinnie, ’cos we were selling drugs of course. I hoofed it and jumped the fence and ran across the road naked.”
“I’ve been in the papers myself,” said Maryann. “For harbouring escaped prisoners. They were friends of my partner’s.
“In 1991, Dean Wickliffe escaped from Paremoremo Prison for the second time. We were living in GI at the time. Glen Innes. That was my place, I had a state house there and I got the rude call at five o’clock one morning. ‘Get out of bed! The house is surrounded!’ Marched down the road in my pyjamas, half asleep. Fun and games.”
Richard has lived at HomeGround for exactly two years. He knows this because he was in a Kāinga Ora flat that got swamped by “six feet of water” during the Anniversary Weekend floods.
Wilf Holt, then a staffer at the mission and a deacon at St Matthew’s, called him and offered the spot.
“I’ve been a worshipper at the church regularly. Well, intermittently rather than regularly. For 20 years.”
He’s also a member of the Hobson Street Theatre Company, which operates out of HomeGround, and belongs to the Street Poets and Artists Collective Enterprises, a poetry writing group run by the author Dominic Hoey. And there’s a men’s group.
What does the men’s group do?
Richard answered by talking about Holt, “a wonderful man in every sense of the word, but I can’t say that to him”.
Why not?
“Well I can, I do say it in indirect ways. I’ve given him hugs at times.”
“We met through our partners,” said Maryann. “Which was about the only good thing that came of that relationship. And a son.”
Denise’s ex had taken her to a party at Maryann’s.
“I was in the toilet, stoned,” said Denise. “Cleaning it.”
“I walked past the bathroom and here she is, cleaning my toilet. I made her a coffee and my partner told her, ‘Oh, she must like you, she never makes coffee for any woman, let alone talks to them’.”
But Maryann had recognised a kindred spirit. “No matter what state I was in I was always houseproud.”
“My children were always clean and clothed properly and fed. I had CYFS [Children, Youth and Family, now Oranga Tamariki] watch me for half a day, watch me with my children, and they said, ‘Oh well, we’re closing this file.’ Yep. No problems.”
“Yeah,” said Denise.
“They watched me too and they looked in the cupboards, they looked in the rooms and they said, ‘It’s immaculate. There’s food, there’s a freezer with food in it, you know, you could eat off the floor’.”
“It’s just that Mum gets stoned,” said Maryann.
“I’d fall asleep in shopping centres,” said Denise. “I did that not long ago, just after we moved in here.
They all said it. They thought they’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for HomeGround. They’d been saved and because of HomeGround they’d been able to start again.
Maryann will turn 65 this year. “I’ll be a pensioner”.
Denise is looking forward to the concessions. “It’s the only reason I’m her friend.” She laughed again.
“I don’t feel that age,” said Maryann, “and I don’t think I act that age either. I act like a kid.”
“Living here,” said Denise, “we got our childhoods back”.
Richard called it “a marvellous place. It has incredible energy, and there’s a feeling of wellbeing, and of security.
“There are a lot of people here who are very caring, very loving, very empathetic. And just in the last few weeks, months perhaps, I’ve noticed, there’s a bit of respect. They pat me on the shoulder and give me a hug.”
“There’s a lot of people here who are allergic to soap and water,” said Maryann. “Unfortunately, we all have to suffer for it.”
“Especially in the lifts,” said Denise.
Richard said, “HomeGround has been a positive reaffirming of who and what I am”.
“It’s peace of mind,” said Maryann. “You can go out, get wet, and you know you’ve got somewhere to come home to. You can do all your shopping, drag it all back and drop everything.”
She sighed. “It’s your apartment. It’s all yours.”
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, social issues, the climate crisis and urban design, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
