This is a strange memoir. It’s a contradiction: honest but often frustratingly oblique; explicit in some places and coy in others; its people and places and times evoked in depth but its narrative also, at times, on breathless fast-forward. One of the book’s strengths is its visceral scenes, but when these take place 50 years ago, the level of detail – and dialogue – makes this read more like fiction than a memoir. In other words, it is not wholly satisfying or successful as life-writing. And yet this is an important book: vital to write, vital to publish and vital to read.
Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku has lived a life of many contradictions, warring impulses and interests, changing names and identities and allegiances. It’s a life of collusion and controversy, rejection and leadership. This century, she has been a respected Māori scholar, an expert on tā moko, winning awards and major grants; she is now an emeritus professor. In Hine Toa we have the 20th-century prequel, helping us understand how unique and immense this achievement has been: she is the first Māori woman to be given the emeritus title at a New Zealand university. In 1981, she was the first Māori woman to be awarded a PhD in New Zealand. The first ever, she notes, was Ngāpare Hopa, who received her PhD from Oxford University just two years earlier.
In 1985, when I was awarded my own doctorate from the University of York, Mātiu Rata wrote me a letter of congratulations, telling me I was just the fourth. I was young and ignorant, had no idea of how hard someone like te Awekōtuku, 16 years my senior, had to fight to achieve success – against family pressure, peer contempt, the academic establishment, the Māori establishment, racism, sexism and homophobia.
During her childhood, richly evoked here, the centre of whānau life was “the pā”, Ōhinemutu, on the western shore of Lake Rotorua. This was a place of drifting thermal mists and streams of trout and crayfish; her family had its own bathhouse, mostly open to the sky and sandy below.
Ngāhuia’s kuia, Hera, was a Whakarewarewa guide and an accomplished weaver, commissioned to make a cloak for Queen Elizabeth in 1953. Like many of the family, Hera had travelled the world in a concert party. But baby Ngāhuia was born into a Māori family “on the far side of the lake” and named Baby Curtis by the hospital; Hera’s daughter, Paparoa, was her adoptive mother. In time, Ngāhuia met her troubled birth mother and siblings with their “great big house full of leather-bound books” but she remained on the outer circle of this wealthier “real” family.
If anyone still imagines New Zealand in the 50s and 60s as a wholesome pastoral idyll, Hine Toa will dispel those illusions. Ngāhuia’s parents separated, but to attend her local school she had to live with her abusive father. He beat her and perhaps more: Ngāhuia’s “kuia suspected something – other stuff – was going on”.
Maketū, the weekend destination on the coast, had one picture theatre and one taxi driver who would give the boys 10 bob to “do things to him”. When Ngāhuia and a school friend ran away, she was subjected to a violent sexual assault at a hostel. At a Catholic boarding school in Hamilton, the priest “did something handsy to her”; confronted by her mother, he called Ngāhuia a “rotten apple”.
Despite her academic success at school, the aspirations for Ngāhuia were low. Her mother wanted her to be a bank teller or work at the Post Office. In 1967, when she began her studies at the University of Auckland, she was the only one of the 20 Māori first-years to have attended a state school, and the only Māori in her class at a hostile law school.
“Young, reckless, naive, I wanted it all. I’d saved my money through my years at school and put up with being put down by people at home, and teased and tormented by other Māori who thought I was whakahīhī, full of myself, wanting too much for a Māori girl. I had to prove them wrong. I had to pass. I had to get to the top, and I had to stay there.”
Part of te Awekōtuku’s experience, however, is changing her perception of success, as well as embracing her sexuality and becoming one of the “kamp” girls. At university, she walks away from law school towards literature, theatre and activism.
She becomes a protester: the Vietnam War, the 1970 All Blacks tour of South Africa, Waitangi Day, Women’s Liberation. She opts for Ngā Tamatoa, the “young warriors” group of campus activists, over the Māori Club, who tell them “not to rock the boat”. She meets Hone Tuwhare and James K Baxter and Germaine Greer. When she’s awarded a student leadership grant to the US, her visa is denied because she’s “a known sexual deviant”.
Hine Toa ends in 1975. Shot at by a racist in the streets of Rotorua – “Bloody Māoris think you own everything!” – Ngāhuia flees to an internship at the University of Hawaii. The book’s epilogue hustles through subsequent decades and her return home. “What became of the Revolution?” she asks. “We were fighting for transformative change. Did it happen?”
So much has changed for Māori and for gay New Zealanders. But how “deep, how genuine, how enduring is the change?” In 2024, these are pressing, troubling questions. We need to know the past as te Awekōtuku experienced it and, as she writes, “take nothing for granted”.
Hine Toa: A Story of Bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (HarperCollins, $39.99) is out now.
