Dame Hinewehi Mohi will be inducted into the NZ Music Hall of Fame/ Te Whare Taonga Puoro o Aotearoa at this month’s Aotearoa Music Awards. The honour also marks some anniversaries for the te reo advocate and founder of the Raukatauri Music Therapy Trust.
It’s 25 years since she was the voice of the 1999 hit album by Oceania and her coming to attention for singing the national anthem in te reo at Twickenham during that year’s Rugby World Cup. It’s 20 years since the establishment of the trust and this year marks the fifth anniversary of the Waiata Anthems project she has spearheaded. Mohi discussed those pivotal moments and much more with Elisabeth Easther in this Listener cover feature from Māori Language Week last year.
Rugby has played an important role in Dame Hinewehi Mohi’s life, and not just for that day at Twickenham during the 1999 Rugby World Cup, when she famously sang God Defend New Zealand in te reo Māori.
“My father was a good rugby player and he played for Pōrangahau’s Te Poho o Kahungunu team in rural Hawkes Bay,” says Mohi (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tūhoe). “He was also their coach and captain, so when they travelled to games outside the district, if they went to another marae, Dad would be pushed up the front to speak. Only, he was from that generation that hadn’t been taught te reo Māori, whose parents thought their children were better off focusing on English.”
Which is why, in the mid-1970s, Mike Mohi started learning te reo Māori, not only out of a sense of responsibility to his rugby team, but also to his whānau and hapū. “I was about 10 when Dad signed up for a correspondence course. Us kids grudgingly learned with him, although I’d rather have been outside on the farm, playing with the animals or riding motorbikes.”
Today, New Zealanders can mihi to Mike Mohi for his gentle insistence that Hinewehi and her two sisters learn their language. Having travelled a long road from that Central Hawkes Bay farm, she is now widely acknowledged as the woman who helped merge te reo Māori with commercial music, working with contemporary artists to oversee the translation of their best-known songs into te reo Māori.
Since 2019, Mohi has spearheaded Waiata Anthems, a series of bestselling recordings featuring music by the likes of Don McGlashan, Lorde and Bic Runga. Runga re-recorded her 1997 hit, Sway, as Haere Mai Rā under Mohi’s direction, and it’s now the version she often sings live.
“People almost don’t notice that it’s not in English, as it’s still recognisable and familiar to them,” says Runga. “This has brought its share of tears, especially from those people who’ve grown up Māori but haven’t heard their own language in a pop music context.”
To mark this year’s Te Wiki o te reo Māori (Māori Language Week), further additions to the Waiata Anthems series have been released on streaming platforms, accompanied by short documentaries. Among the artists are the Black Seeds, Georgia Lines and Dillastrate. With their songs translated by the likes of Sir Tīmoti Kāretu, Hēmi Kelly, Mātai Smith and Pānia Papa, the experience has brought linguists and musicians together to celebrate our blossoming bilingual landscape.
TV and radio host Stacey Morrison is in awe of what her longtime friend has achieved and how seminal Mohi’s work has been. “Seeing stadium crowds singing waiata anthems really brings home the impact this movement has had for our country and people,” says Morrison, who is also active in promoting reo.
Beautiful cocoon
In Mohi’s childhood, there was no opportunity to hear pop music sung in te reo Māori, although the household did listen to LPs by opera star Inia Te Wiata and the Māori Chorus of the NZ Opera Company.
As the family’s language skills developed, Mike Mohi decided Hinewehi should attend St Joseph’s Māori Girls College (Hato Hōhepa) in Taradale.
“I’m so grateful for my time there, because Hato Hōhepa was a beautiful cocoon where it was deemed wonderful to be Māori,” she says. “Performing in the concert party – what we now call kapa haka – was the greatest privilege, with younger girls learning the harmonies from the seniors, finding those wonderful high notes, to carry on the traditions.”
After leaving school in the early 1980s, Mohi considered a student exchange somewhere exotic. Her father had other ideas. “Dad was set on me focusing on my own language and culture, which is how I ended up doing Māori studies at Waikato University.”
Coming from the protective world of a single-sex Māori Catholic boarding school, Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato proved the perfect springboard for the 17-year-old from Hawke’s Bay – although Mohi was astonished to discover not everyone held her culture in high esteem. “If I said I was studying Māori, I was often told it wouldn’t get me a job. Many people thought Māori studies was a pathway to nowhere, yet language and culture is really all I’ve ever done.”
Inspired by a charismatic faculty that included Kāretu, fellow academics such as Wharehuia Milroy and acclaimed composer Hirini Melbourne, Mohi graduated with a bachelor’s degree. In 1986, she shifted to Tāmaki Makaurau, the first move in what would become a stellar career in media and music. The very next year, the Māori Language Act was passed. “I’d never really been that political, and I certainly didn’t approach issues in a way that might cause offence, but te reo Māori was incredibly important to me – to my life, my career and who I am.”
In Auckland, Mohi was determined to work in television, specifically on TVNZ’s Koha, a weekly primetime programme on te ao Māori, broadcast in English. Her persistence in canvassing the show’s producers paid off. “I was offered a role as a reporter, although I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I made it up as I went along. But through that work, telling amazing stories about incredible people, I came to understand myself, and my place in te ao Māori. I figured out what was important to me, and what else I might do with my knowledge.”
Her interest in music didn’t abate. In 1992, Mohi released her first single, Kia Ū, an evocative waiata in te reo about being steadfast and rising above adversity. “I was surrounded by some very powerful people back then. I worked with people like Moana Maniapoto and Dalvanius Prime, which is how I came to understand the feistiness of their political stances, as their experiences were so different to mine.
“I could also see that we were becoming leaders for our language and culture. That we were on the cusp of something really important.”
Mohi continued to find success as a musician and work in television, with roles that included producing Marae for TVNZ. In 1996 her daughter Hineraukatauri was born with cerebral palsy. “That was the toughest time of my life. Hineraukatauri couldn’t eat or breathe or do anything for herself. For those first few years, we were in and out of Starship Hospital and I searched far and wide for anything that might help her.”
She married George Bradfield (Ngāti Ranginui) and a confluence of events took the family to the UK three years later. Mohi was promoting her double-platinum hit record, Oceania, and the couple were keen to explore the potential of musical therapy for their daughter. Their visit coincided with the Rugby World Cup and Mohi was invited to sing New Zealand’s national anthem at the All Blacks’ match against England at Twickenham. Once again, rugby was to have a profound effect on Mohi’s life. “I didn’t know the English words off by heart – this is before Google – so I sang it in te reo Māori. I’d sung it before like that at a Kiwis league international and had no problems, which is why I never expected the explosion it caused.”
But explode it did, with Mohi finding herself at the epicentre of a linguistic furore. Had she opened ears to the beauty of te reo, or embarrassed the country? Talkback radio went ballistic with the debate; daily papers and the Holmes show weighed in. While some critics were apoplectic, other Kiwis applauded the performance.
“It was so beautiful, and a long time coming,” recalls actor Robyn Malcolm. “Being 1999, Hinewehi dragged us into the 21st century and I feel so proud when I sing it today.
“I love how it speaks to Aotearoa as an independent country rather than a nation clinging to the dirty apron strings of the British Empire. I love that my kids know the te reo version and not the English, plus it sounds so much better.”
The goddess of flutes
Upon reflection, Mohi will always feel proud to have sparked such an important conversation, though it was hurtful to hear how vociferous some of her detractors were. But, she says, she didn’t give it too much attention, as she had bigger fish to fry. She had returned from the UK with the seed of an idea – that music might be the key to helping her daughter live a richer, more fulfilling life.
With music impresario Campbell Smith, Mohi and Bradfield established the Raukatauri Music Therapy Trust in 2004. Hine Raukatauri is the Māori goddess of flutes, the personification of music. In Māori legend, she is the case moth, and spends her entire life suspended in a cocoon, which is the inspiration for the shape of the traditional Māori flute, the pūtōrino. “In spite of being confined to her cocoon, her voice is heard through the forest,” says Mohi. “Which is why I named my daughter Hineraukatauri, because she is trapped in her body, confined to her wheelchair, but through music her voice resonates out into the world.
“Parenting a child with special needs is exhausting and sometimes overwhelming, but music can be an incredibly powerful tool for healing.”
Today, the trust’s music therapists work from centres and schools and outreach programmes across Northland, Auckland, the Bay of Plenty and Hawke’s Bay. Mohi and Bradfield are active trustees.
In 2011, Mohi was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a double mastectomy, but even that she views through her innately positive lens. “The silver lining? My reconstruction operation involved a tummy tuck,” she says with a grin.
On a more serious note, she adds: “I also have enormous gratitude to Hineraukatauri for the inspiration she gives me every day. She can’t do anything for herself. She can’t walk or talk and she has to feed through a tube in her stomach. So, even if I’m having a bad-hair day, that’s not a problem because at least I can brush my hair.”
Mohi’s mahi
Raukatauri may have changed the lives of thousands of families coping with a family member with special needs but it was Mohi’s next project that would bring music to a broader audience. If you’ve sung along to Rob Ruha’s 35 or Six60′s Pepeha, tapped your foot to Stan Walker’s Take It Easy sung as Tau Te Mārire or Benee’s Kua Kore He Kupu (Soaked), you’ve heard Mohi’s mahi.
“About five years ago, I bumped into my friend Adam Holt, the head of Universal Music, and I asked him, ‘What say we get well-known artists, translate their songs into Māori, then record them?’ He said, ‘Sounds good, hit me up.’
A few months later, I rang him and asked if he remembered the idea I’d mentioned, and he said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
At the time, Mohi was working full-time on the TVNZ series Haka Global. “I was only able to work on Waiata Anthems in my spare time, yet somehow it has become the most intense project of my life.”
As part of Waiata Anthems, some of Aotearoa’s most notable contemporary artists have explored themes of personal empowerment, cultural revival and ancestral bonds through music. As an accompaniment, a series of short documentaries has also been made about the project, to widen those reverberations.
For Bic Runga (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Rongomaiwahine), raised in Christchurch by a Chinese Malaysian mother and a Māori father, the Waiata Anthems project blew her away. “We’re in a moment in history where, if you have it in you to say something about race and prejudice, you can’t go back to writing a sad little love song that doesn’t mean anything.”
Sense of belonging
Don McGlashan was learning te reo Māori when Mohi approached him, so the timing was perfect for him for a new version of Bathe in the River, the hit song he wrote for the film No 2, sung by Hollie Smith. “Immersing myself in the process of my song’s translation, then recording Kōrukutia really deepened my engagement with the language, which has made me even more committed to continue my te reo journey,” says McGlashan.
For Barnaby Weir (Taranaki), frontman of the Black Seeds, working with Mohi as part of the star-studded ensemble Fly My Pretties opened a portal. Weir’s mother had been adopted into a Pākehā family in the 1950s and Weir knew very little of his whakapapa. “Our experience has been life-changing,” he says of the journey that led from the recording studio to being welcomed onto his Parihaka marae.
“Through the process of translating, performing and filming the song Tō Kātua Whānau (Family Tree), my family and I began an important journey, finding meaningful connection with our Māori heritage and with te reo Māori,” says Weir. “It fast-tracked a sense of belonging we had not felt before. It changed our perception of who we are and who we can be. It’s been such a blessing to use our music as the waka for this growth, and to share it.”
As well as the empowerment the project has given musicians, Mohi is also quietly pleased she’s been able to get the artists’ individual record labels to work towards a common goal.
“Labels usually compete against each other, but making commercial music in te reo Māori has seen those organisations join together. I don’t think that could happen anywhere else but in Aotearoa.”
In 2021, Mohi was made a dame companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Māori, music and television. “Music is a wonderful way to embrace te reo Māori, to be proud of our culture and heritage, and to represent ourselves with pride,” she says.
“These days, you can hear an artist just step into a Māori or bilingual song in the middle of a concert. They don’t make a big song and dance about it, and the audience reaction is incredible. The cheering that erupts [is] because this is us. It’s what we’re all about. This is why we are who we are.”