As any student of Crown Lynn ceramics knows, handles were an issue. In the early 1940s, Aucklander Tom Clark moved his family business beyond its established trade in bricks and pipes and into tableware, filling a wartime gap when crockery could not be imported. There was just one problem: the handles kept breaking off the cups, and would do so for nearly a decade until the problem was completely fixed.
By the time it was, Crown Lynn’s Handle Room was a very particular place – one largely staffed and overseen by Māori women.
“That’s what made me start thinking of the story,” says Poata Alvie McKree, writer of The Handlers, which opens at West Auckland’s Te Pou Theatre tomorrow.
“In Valerie Monk’s book on Crown Lynn [Crown Lynn: A New Zealand Icon] she makes an interesting statement about all the Maori women being selected to be handlers because they were really good at making handles and attaching them efficiently. When I read that, I thought, ‘Hang on, if you’re going to put all the Māori in one department, what happens if there’s a tangi?’ If everyone’s in one spot and they’ve got to go to a tangi, you’ve lost your whole department, haven’t you?”
The Handlers builds on a narrative highlighted by last year’s documentary, Crown Lynn: A Māori Story, which told the stories of the whānau who left their rural homes to work in the city. The timing of the documentary, says McKree, “was uncanny”.
“I didn’t know it was even being made, then it aired on the night we started workshopping the play at Te Pou. It really helped deepen the story.”
McKree, of Māori (Ngāti Kahu, Ngāpuhi ki Whangaroa) and Caribbean heritage, could also draw on the experience of her own mother, who “went backwards and forwards between Crown Lynn and the Post Office in the 1970s” and, more broadly, “the stories of my aunties and my nannies and the kinds of experiences they had in Auckland in the 70s”.
Crown Lynn, she says, actually had a relatively enlightened approach to whānau and tangihanga leave, but, “The story is really the story of wāhine Māori and wāhine Pasifika in Auckland in the 70s.”
McKree worked with the Crown Lynn Museum Te Toi Uku as part of her research, and the museum has put together a display for the theatre foyer. In today’s era, where most discussion of Crown Lynn revolves around the prices the products fetch, museum director Louise Stevenson says it is keen to “be a platform for Pacific and Māori people to come forward and tell their stories. It’s really important that we actually understand that side of manufacturing in New Zealand at that time.”
It’s a story in danger of being lost, along with the people who made it. McKree says they were three days into the original workshop when several of the younger actors came forward “and said, ‘Look, we’re just going to be honest, we don’t know what Crown Lynn is.’ They didn’t know what we were talking about! We had to backtrack and lay it out.”
For subsequent workshops on a final draft of the play, McKree asked everyone to bring in a piece of Crown Lynn pottery and a story to go with it. “Everyone had a story.”
The Handlers: Te Pou Theatre, Corban Estate, Auckland, May 16-June 2.
