Journalism’s loss was education’s gain when Kāren Johansen met Florence Duff in Gladstone Rd, Gisborne, in January 1970.
Johansen, made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) in the New Year 2026 Honours List for services to education and human rights, recalled the meeting from the comfort of her riverside Gisborne home on Friday.
“I’d finished at university, been overseas and come back home,” she said.
“I was walking down Gladstone Road on a gorgeous summer’s day and was heading to the [Gisborne] Herald because Ted Dumbleton [the editor] had offered me a job. I had done some writing when I was in South America, Ted had liked it and he asked me to come in and see about working for the paper.
“He made no set time, so I was going to have a swim before I went to see him.”
Then she “banged into” Miss Florence Duff – the first principal of Gisborne Girls’ High School, known to the students as “Flo”.
“What are you going to do with your life?” Miss Duff asked.
When told journalism was a possibility, she said: “You will report to my office at 9am on Monday.”
Johansen never even thought about questioning the order.
“I presented myself to Miss Duff at her office and she said, ‘I want you to become a teacher’. It was the last thing I wanted to do.”
To her surprise, Johansen fell in love with teaching.
In Lima, Peru, she had been pressed into service as an English teacher for adults when the British Council chief librarian heard her speak the language, but it was a brief and incomplete introduction.
She started the 1970 school year at Gisborne Girls’ High as a fulltime teacher in English, social studies and history. She had a university degree – she’d gone to Victoria University with a Ngarimu VC Memorial Scholarship – but no formal training. She was 24.
“I had good heads of department, particularly Keith Simpson for history and social studies. I was given a programme of six or seven periods a day in front of classes, and I had a curriculum to follow.
“Very quickly, I learnt that to get the best out of a class of 30-odd kids, you had to start from where they were at.
“I started reading them Witi Ihimaera’s Pounamu, Pounamu stories, and some sort of magic happened. These kids were just falling off their chairs with laughter and excitement.
“It was like hearing their own nannies’ stories.”
The writing that came from students talking about things they knew and understood, using language they knew and understood, “was magical”.
She used similar techniques when guiding older students through Shakespeare.
“You have chiefs, love stories, selfishness, bad and kind behaviour, disastrous decisions and how you come back from them, even a bit of witchcraft. If you understand the issues, [understanding of] the language comes.”
Florence Duff resigned at the end of the first term in 1973 and three months later, she died.
“She didn’t tell a soul she had cancer,” Johansen said.
“A month later, I received a parcel from a lawyer in Hawke’s Bay. Inside was a well-worn, chalk-dusted black academic gown that Flo had left for me. I knew at that point that one day I would be principal at Gisborne Girls’ High School. I spent a long time trying to run away from that.
“When I finished at Girls’ High, I donated the gown to the school, and it is now in a glass case in the assembly hall.”
In 1975, Johansen felt she needed to get out of Gisborne and taught at Marlborough Girls’ College in Blenheim for three years. She returned to Gisborne and taught at Campion College for seven years, and was briefly assistant principal.
In 1985, she was encouraged to apply for the Gisborne Girls’ High position of senior mistress – now called assistant principal – and under the leadership of Beverley Pitkethley she became deputy principal.
She was the principal from 1996 to 2008.
“The school slogan was ‘Tall poppies grow here’. It meant we worked for every young woman to have her potential recognised and developed, no matter what her skill or interest.
In 2006, at the school’s 50-year jubilee celebrations, where tikanga Māori was integral to the formalities, a former pupil from the 1950s told Johansen she had intended to give the school a lot of money but had changed her mind.
“She told me she did not recognise the school as hers any longer,” Johansen said.
“I replied that I was thrilled she didn’t recognise the school as hers because that was 50 years ago. I would have been horrified if the school had not changed radically.
“When I told the staff what had happened, I said that for me it was a wonderful message, in that we hadn’t sat still. We had moved and reflected the times.”
She felt it was time to move on around mid-2008.
“It had always worried me that I would be there too long,” Johansen said.
“I wanted to go when the school was humming, and it was.
“I went to Spain for six weeks for my niece’s wedding, and when I came home something had shifted. It was July/August and I thought I was ready for a change. Not long after that, an advert popped up in my computer for a human rights commissioner.
“I thought, ‘I do that sort of stuff every day . . . I’ll give it a go.’ I became a part-time human rights commissioner.
“The New Zealand Human Rights Commission is an independent Crown agency. It doesn’t have to follow Government priorities, yet is still funded by the Government. Its job is to protect the human rights of all New Zealanders.
“Quite quickly, I became responsible for indigenous rights. That was about the time the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was being supported by all member nations of the UN except four – Canada, Australia, the United States and New Zealand.
“When I first went to the UN, it was embarrassing. My colleagues from Latin America wouldn’t sit with me.”
The UN General Assembly adopted the non-binding, aspirational declaration on September 13, 2007.
The New Zealand Government’s decision to support the declaration was conveyed by Māori Affairs Minister Pita Sharples in a speech to the United Nations in New York on April 20, 2010.
For two five-year terms, finishing in 2017, Johansen filled an advocacy and education role with the Human Rights Commission. Part of that was to report to the United Nations about the state of human rights in New Zealand, and the way in which human rights were honoured by the Government.
She was on the Tairāwhiti Polytechnic Board for 10 years, and was a member of the Education Review Office Advisory Council, the 2002 Ministry of Education planning and reporting working party and the Reap (Rural Education Activities Programme) Aotearoa national board.
She mentored in the First Time Principals programme, focusing on Māori principals, and was the Ministry of Education adviser to the Tūranga Tangata Rite School Establishment Board from 2019 to 2021.
Community organisations to which she has contributed include the Tairāwhiti Rainbow Collective, the Waimatā River Catchment Group and – as a board member – the Tairāwhiti Voyaging Trust.
Johansen is a Justice of the Peace and is a life member and patron of the Gisborne Justices of the Peace Association.
Her father, Harry Johansen, was also a Justice of the Peace and devoted much of his life to community work, particularly to the ambulance service through the Order of St John.
Through her mother, Rena, Johansen has whakapapa to Rongowhakaata, Te Aitanga a Mahāki and Ngāi Tāmanuhiri.
Johansen thanked the colleagues, friends and organisations who had helped and challenged her in the work she did in the community.