An obligation in Tairāwhiti

It took me years to finally go back home. I didn’t know where ‘home’ was for most of my childhood. As someone who was adopted, I didn’t even know my birth parents’ names, let alone where they were from. I certainly didn’t know what iwi I was, or at one point whether I was even Māori. When at 16 I found out I was Ngāti Porou, it gave me a sense of belonging but also of inadequacy. I knew nothing.
When I started to go back, it was on the pretence of work. As a journalist I had started freelancing for Mana magazine. When running into other Ngāti Porou I’d make awkward attempts at trying to find connections, trying to figure out where I fitted. But then whānau started tracking me down when they heard they had a cuzzie floating around lost.
Eventually I made it to Tokomaru Bay, still hiding behind my professional role. When a kaumātua gently asked where I was from, his eyes lit up when I eventu­ally mumbled my grandmother’s name. He turned to a bunch of kuia standing nearby and called out, “Hey, this is Aunty Pansy’s moko.” I was immediately embraced and clucked over.
I was home.
Home was both beautiful and sad. Sad because it was a shadow of what it was when my grandmother grew up there. But it was still stunningly beautiful. Home is not just a physical place, though, but all the relationships and history woven through it. Through that one trip I would find an aunty living around the corner from me in Levin and a bunch of cousins. From that I eventually found I had a sister I didn’t know existed.
I’d also gradually recover the stories and history of Ngāti Porou and its hapū that I’d missed out on, the journeys, the love stories, the battles against external enemies and the internal family feuds, and the in- house jokes. These stories stretched back hundreds of years to the Whale Rider Paikea and ran right up to the present.
But these weren’t just idle tales for entertainment – they were a source of identity and strength that informs the aspirations and decisions of Ngāti Porou today and into the future.
The Coast has been battered for years by decisions made by those who don’t live there and don’t have any connection to the place. It started early.
Within a space of 20 years, at the turn of the twentieth century, the indigenous forest had been cleared from Tairāwhiti. The establishment of the Native Land Court, which was effectively an act of war by other means, swept away ownership and control. Pākehā farming methods persisted for most of the twentieth century. Generations of Ngāti Porou did the hard, dirty work of shearing and slaughtering sheep, adding to a GDP they got little share in. But they also had to watch as millions of tonnes of that land was washed out to sea every year because it was never suitable to be completely stripped of the indigenous forest that held it together. Then pine took over and overseas companies started moving in. Māori were still doing the dangerous jobs while the majority of the profits went to overseas corporations.
On a photography assignment I’d seen the effects of slash in Tolaga Bay after a storm in 2018. So there was a sense of foreboding when the news of Cyclone Gabrielle’s imminent arrival in February 2023 started to build. I had a faint sense that Tairāwhiti was in for a hiding.
It had already taken a number of hidings before Gabrielle arrived. Cyclone Hale had swept through only a few weeks before. The pictures coming out of the region gave a glimpse but I knew from covering storms like the one that hit the lower North Island in 2004 that the worst- hit areas were often invisible to the outside world because they were inaccessible. So it was and would be for weeks after Gabrielle finally made landfall.
I knew the daily media and bigger outlets would have the resources to get in where I couldn’t. But then they’d be gone. So I timed my trip for weeks later when it was possible to get in and the cameras had left. I’d already covered some of what had happened in Hawke’s Bay. It was a taste of something worse in its own way further up the coast.
However, my coverage of the Hawke’s Bay was from a sense of duty in my role as Māori Issues editor at the online news outlet Newsroom. I also knew people and communities there from previous work which informed that coverage and I wanted to recognise what was going on for Ngāti Kahungunu hapū.
But the Tairāwhiti story was a different sort of obliga­tion. It was personal. It couldn’t be otherwise.
I have been a journalist for 25 years. But as someone who is Māori working in this industry I have constantly been confronted with how Māori are portrayed and how their stories are told, if they are told at all. When the media industry tells Māori stories, the audience is the message – Māori stories are told by and for a Pākehā audience with all the inherent risk of biases, ignorance and outright prejudice that goes with it.
I once spoke at an investigative journalism conference and made the remark that being a Pākehā journalist does not necessarily make you racist. But it doesn’t make you neutral either.
This was brought into sharp relief for me when the foreshore and seabed story blew up in the early 2000s. The media coverage played to all the worst prejudices of Pākehā while ignoring the historical facts that the court decision laid out. The court decision that sparked the controversy was not some anomaly. I found out years earlier one of my cousins had been involved in gaining recognition from the Māori Land Court that one of the hapū in Tokomaru Bay owned the foreshore and seabed in Waima. In fact, Ngāti Porou had the strongest claim to customary ownership because of their retention of significant land along the coast. But examples like this received little to no attention from media.
Being Māori in the media means always being in the minority and trying to counter the imbalance inherent in the way Māori stories are told. As a Ngāti Porou story­teller I also had an obligation to give back to my own by giving Ngāti Porou voices a place to be heard. The worst kind of prejudice is not racist media coverage but being ignored or overlooked by the media. After covering the abuse of children in state custody for eight years I have witnessed the trauma of being silenced.
So my journey back to find out what happened in Tairāwhiti was not just about some dramatic images of forestry slash on the beaches. The repetition of those images starts to dull viewers to the realities they represent.
The images of slash piled up on bridges and beaches were dramatic but also without much explanation or context in a lot of coverage. Some journalists had made decent attempts, but the media is always moving on to the next story. I wanted to know where that rubbish had come from and why.
My questions and my approach were somewhat naive. Because to answer them I had to not only talk to whanaunga who had been hit by the cyclone, but also delve into the convoluted politics, economics and science of what had led to the disaster that is unfolding and will continue to unfold for generations.
My new book Tairāwhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone is an attempt to understand what had happened and explain it as a journalist but also as someone who is grieved by what has been done to my people and our whenua, awa and moana over generations.
It is almost impossible to describe the destruction that not only nature but also human decisions have inflicted on Tairāwhiti. As one local put it succinctly, Toko’s fucked bro.
A mildly abbreviated Introduction taken with kind permission from Tairawhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone by Aaron Smale (BWB Texts, $18), available in bookstores nationwide. It goes deep into the region’s struggle with colonial legacies and environmental mismanagement.