There’s a swamp behind the houses on SH67 in Birchfield, just north of Westport. A scraggly swamp, giving way to paddocks giving way to beach giving way to the driving surf of the Tasman Sea.
“It wasn’t not dangerous,” recalls Becky Manawatu. “It had water and we were climbing pretty large trees. There was a kid, or a couple of kids, in every second house, pretty much, and we just used to go nuts.
“There was a tree that you could walk out on and it was like you were – I don’t know how to word it – you walked right across this tree and it was so large and so flat on the top it was like this little township above the swamp.”
Manawatu is divvying up fresh pies from the West Coast Pie Company on the kitchen bench in her home in Westport, just after the bend in the road that arrows straight through the town to the clattering masts and screaming gulls of the harbour.
It is a busy home. Gumboots by the back door, bikes in the carport, dog Bro patrolling the backyard, seven seats at the kitchen table for Manawatu, her husband Tim, her two children, Maddox and Siena, and three younger family members.
A swamp, or kūkūwai, runs under and through Kataraina, the sequel to Manawatu’s first novel, the award-winning Auē. It is a shifting, changing body of water – an expansive wetland, a drained and lifeless bog, a deep lagoon. Like poet Seamus Heaney’s Irish bogs preserving Iron Age bodies in places where “there is no reflection”, it is a repository for memories of ancestral violence and retribution.
As Aunty Moira says in the book, “That kūkūwai is all roimata. Tears.”
“A swamp is so mysterious,” says Manawatu. “It can be quite beautiful, but it can also be quite a frightening-looking thing. It reminded me of Aunty Kat – even to me she felt like a mysterious person, and as the swamp kind of grows, so she is mirrored in the swamp.”
Kataraina takes up the story of Kataraina Te Au, Aunty Kat. In Auē, she is a partially drawn character, seen through the eyes of the nephew she looks after, young Ārama, and feisty Beth. They see her spark, her love, her defensiveness, but also her bruises, meted out by Stuart Johnson, Uncle Stu, and never talked about. Never discussed.
“The feeling of having left a story untold made me feel it was important to keep going. Those characters had done so much for me, so it was really cool to be returning to some of those people.”
Family violence, hidden yet brutally exposed, is a rough blade cutting through the storyline of Auē.
The book was dedicated to Manawatu’s young cousin Glen Bo Duggan, who lived with her family on the West Coast until 1994, when he was taken to Christchurch by his mother. It was there he was killed by his mother’s boyfriend.
Manawatu – then Becky Wixon – was 11. Her mother gave her an axe, which she used to smash a log over and over again, and a blank book, which she filled with memories, poems and taped photos.
“But I am wondering if I might have talked enough about Glen Bo. It made me worry afterwards because I talked a lot about him and I felt I lost him a little bit, which was a really strange feeling – not in the writing of the book but in the talking.
“It was a big part of our lives and it changed the family forever – that is why I keep returning to his story, because it is the ongoing consequence of violence.
“You can’t completely go back to who you were before something like that happened.”
Stories ruled
Born in Nelson in 1982, Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mamoe a Waitaha, Pākehā) grew up in Birchfield, attended Waimangaroa School (which closed in 2012), then Buller High School in Westport. She liked English and history, but “did not get much into school” – the result in part, she wrote in 2020, of “the dumb streaming test which told me and all my teachers and all my peers that I was average before I’d even opened my brand-new books”.
But always she had a love of stories. “It took me to get baptised in an Anglican church out country way. I just loved reading the Bible stories, listening to people talking and telling stories. I think that was the initial attraction to church, and a little bit about living in the countryside, which made me feel in awe of the world all the time.”
While religion is not part of her life now, “stories are the big thing for me in any form”.
On leaving high school, she and her boyfriend, now husband, Tim Manawatu (Ngāti Kurī/Ngāi Tahu) moved to Hawke’s Bay, where Tim took up a contract with the Magpies rugby team and Becky worked at Hawke’s Bay Seafoods and, briefly, on a fishing trawler.
From there, rugby took them to Taumarunui where their son was born, then to Italy where their daughter was born, then to landlocked Frankfurt in Germany where the pull of home gripped hard.
“Missing the sea made me quite … I was really, really homesick.”
By the time they returned to New Zealand in 2016, she was working on a draft of Auē, then called Pluck. While studying creative writing at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology, she submitted some draft chapters to Mākaro Press publisher Mary McCallum. McCallum was interested and, early the following year, Manawatu submitted her completed manuscript.
By then, the young family had returned to friends and family on the West Coast, where Tim took on a position as development officer for the Buller Rugby Union and Becky found a job at the Westport News.
“Fiction writing was the big love, always, but I was fortunate to get that job, because it helped with my writing in general and it was so interesting.
“I don’t think I was a very good journalist, but my favourite part was writing ‘Our People’, a weekly feature about people in the community.”
Snipping the person
Auē was launched at a historic villa overlooking the beautiful, tumultuous coastline of Cape Foulwind. It won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction and Best First Book of Fiction in the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and was on bestseller lists for 31/2 years.
It has been published in the US, the UK, France, Argentina, Uruguay, Bulgaria and Turkey. From an initial print run of 500, it has now sold more than 26,000 and is in the early stages of being adapted into a series by New Zealand production company Caravan Carpark Films.
But the book was unfinished business. “The feeling of having left a story untold made me feel it was important to keep going. Those characters had done so much for me, so it was really cool to be returning to some of those people.”
Why Kataraina? “Mostly because in Auē, her story was just perceived from the kids’ point of view, so you didn’t really get a sense of who she was. I felt who she was while I was writing, but wasn’t able to tell that story.”
As a feature writer, she says, she learnt the art of “snipping the person clean”, defining them with hard, identifiable edges. In Kataraina, it is all about the shading.
I don’t think I was a very good journalist, but my favourite part was writing ‘Our People’, a weekly feature about people in the community.
For Kat, smart, loving, self-recriminating, to “snip” herself clean of the violence of her and Stu’s relationship “was like she would end up bleeding out if she tried to pretend she was free of blame”, says Manawatu.
“She is so caught up in and connected to Stuart’s violence that it makes her feel that that is part of who she is.”
In 2021, Manawatu used a University of Otago Robert Burns Fellowship to work on Kataraina’s story, then called Papahaua after the mountain range east of Westport.
This time, the writing was less frenetic.
“I was more furious with Auē and had more of an addictive quality to my working. I could feel something quieter happening as I wrote Kataraina.”
This time, too, she was talking with other writers, especially other Māori writers, “and feeling like I am telling a story among the many. Not that I wasn’t before, but I feel excited to be part of something.”
As with Auē, this new book is set in Kaikōura. “Tim took me there when I was 15 years old and I was, like, this feels like another sort of home. It is not my turangawaewae – it’s Tim’s – but my ancestors a long way back, Kāti Māmoe, were in Kaikōura – so I try to claim it.”
Manawatu’s whakapapa is Southland, the Chatham Island and Stewart Island/Rakiura, a place that still tugs at her heart. “We went back most recently a couple of years ago with my dad. He took my tāua [grandmother].”
This is where Kataraina opens, with the survivors of Auē – Colleen and Hēnare, Ārama, Beth, Taukiri, Jade and Kataraina – sitting around the fire close to the river mouth looking into the twilight, “one month after the girl shot the man”.
“We were still not ourselves,” we are told. “One month is nothing to murder. And some of us – Ārama and Beth – sometimes forgot that Stuart Johnson was not even the first victim; he was not even the second. And if we went right back through our whakapapa, his murder could be deemed quite unremarkable.”
Past & present
This story, of the Te Au and Johnson families, is old, complex, indelible, like the dark swamp swishing its tail through the generations in a non-sequential chronology defined in relation to the “day the girl shot the man”. The collective “we” of the story, the voices of the living and the dead, similarly compresses time, bringing the persistent past into the urgent present.
When Nanny Liz tells the ancient story of Hine Rukutia, split in two with a pounamu mere by the man she betrayed, for example, she describes the pain, the mamae, “like it was a real gushing bloody thing, happening and happening and happening. The story was always happening.”
Then there’s the can opener, spinning through Te Au and Johnson family history as a recurring instrument of coercion and death, engulfed but never quite lost in the ever-shifting swamp.
Near the end of the book, Aroha, Kat and Taukiri stand close to the boggy land: “Maybe a hundred years ago, eels swam right where we stood. Weeds grew. Perhaps there was once a tree here, a tall kahikatea, and maybe sometimes a kāhu sat in it and peered across the swamp, looking for silver eyes close to the surface of the black water.”
A story insisting it be told? Or people of the past insisting they not be forgotten?
That has always been a fear of mine – the thought of an empty seat at the table really frightens me. I feel for people who have had that loss, that they can’t have that person back.
Manawatu smiles her sunny, outdoorsy smile. “It’s a bit of both, eh? I think maybe more is on the story, wanting to be told. But also the people are coming up to tell the story, even the ancestor.
“It’s what people do, isn’t it, when they say, ‘I thought you were over that’? It is something I wanted to explore – how something can happen and cause that trajectory for your life, and I do go there, but I really want to talk about the people – why they are and why they do the things that they do.”
The swamp in Kataraina has a parallel in Tina Makereti’s much-awaited new book, The Mires. The covers are similar, the persistence of these vast wetlands, despite attempts to drain and pave and forget, a recurring theme.
But the books, says Manawatu, are quite different. “I read The Mires about two months ago – it’s fantastic. There are similarities, but I think we have taken different approaches. I hope we will be paired up on some panels or something.”
For now, she is looking forward to a summer surfing at Westport’s Tip Head, working on her third book (not about the Te Au family, “but I may return to them”) and keeping watch over her family.
Like Aunty Kat, Manawatu is a hākui – a Kāi Tahu word for “mother” or “aunty” – for younger members of her whānau. It is a role she takes seriously – she feels lucky, she says, to have so many nieces and nephews.
But the fear of losing family, of families fraying apart, a persistent threat in both her books, still cuts deep.
“That has always been a fear of mine – the thought of an empty seat at the table really frightens me. I feel for people who have had that loss, that they can’t have that person back.”
She leans towards a wooden chair.
“Sorry, I just need to touch so much wood. That worry – it feels like you always want to bring everyone together one more time. Not for a sad reason; you just want to have everyone in your house one last time.”
Kataraina by Becky Manawatu (Mākaro Press) will be released on October 1.