Senior reporter Yvonne Tahana has recently departed TVNZ.
Former 1News reporter Yvonne Tahana is leaving journalism after nearly two decades, taking on a new challenge to become fluent in te reo Māori.
Tahana (Ngāpuhi) is enrolled in a full-immersion te reo course at Auckland’s Te Wānanga Takiura, following a journalism career spanning nearly 20 years.
In an interview with Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night, Tahana said she still loves journalism – and may yet return to it when she completes her course – but felt the time was right to leave for now because it had all started to feel a little “too easy”.
“I loved it, but we all need new challenges,” she said.
Tahana already has a “working knowledge” of te reo Māori, but wants the sort of fluency that will allow her to engage in meaningful conversation.
“You might get a gist, but you don’t have the deep knowledge,” she told Real Life.
“I’ve had enough [te reo] to get me by, but never any fluency, and if people speak to me in Māori, I never have the confidence to answer them back.
“We’re funny people and I think we’ve all been to a marae when the collective laugh comes up to something someone said, or you’re in the kitchen and people are having a laugh at each other, and you just want to be part of that.”
Already several weeks into the course, Tahana says she’s learning to have fun with the reo.
It’s a return to the language of her tūpuna (ancestors), after she spent most of her early years speaking English in Australia, where her father worked as a truck driver.
Tahana was at intermediate school when her parents, overcome with homesickness, decided to move back across the Ditch and resettle their whānau in Ōtaua, near the Northland township of Kaikohe.
Reflecting now, Tahana says she’s “so happy” they returned.
“I wouldn’t have had an idea or a concept of what it was to be Māori, really Māori, if they hadn’t got homesick and decided to come home,” she told Cowan.
“When we moved back ... we had a whānau rugby league team, and we played netball ... Sport was a great introduction to your cousins ... It was awesome community, it was like a social glue.”
She regrets that she missed some of the trappings of New Zealand childhood, like learning Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi and getting involved on the marae.
But while she feels she hasn’t been a “good participant” on the marae, her mahi (work) as a reporter has pushed her into Māori contexts more frequently.
“I’ve probably been a bit useless on the other front [participating on the marae], but I feel proudly Ngāpuhi, and happy to be from the naughty north,” Tahana said.
“Having travelled the country and seen quite a lot of iwi structures around the place, the north has some of the funniest characters, some of the most intelligent. If you ask someone from Ngāpuhi a question, you don’t wonder what they’re thinking. They’ll tell you what they think.
“I love that they’re upfront and they tell you things to your face.”
As for the career she’s leaving behind, Tahana says she’ll miss the teamwork element of TV news – but it’s time for a change.
“It’s an industry where there’s some of the funniest, driest, drollest list humour, some great characters and there’s a whole bunch of different grapes that make up journalists,” she told Real Life.
“We are all quite different people. You mix that all up and you just try and get a product out at the end of the day, something that means something, something that helps people understand an issue or a place or a time or an event ... the people actually help you get through it.”
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