The Horror of Hickory Bay by Gavin Bishop

What else has mainstream New Zealand culture absorbed, during the vigorous Maori renaissance of the past 25 years? No longer are we a somewhat smug, colonial, mono-cultural, monolingual nation. It’s one of the two Maori songs all New Zealanders know, the other being the Maori version of the national anthem ‘God of nations,’ now taught to all school children from my own children’s generation onwards. It’s a love song, roughly translated as Stormy are the waters of restless Rotorua – if you cross them, girl, they will be calmed Oh girl, come back to me, I could die of love for you. Pokarekare ana has become the unofficial national anthem, much like Waltzing Matilda for Australians.

There is no S in the Maori language, so to impose a plural S is now an unacceptable transposition from English. Twenty-five years ago I would have said that is what ‘the Maoris’ do, not your average white westerner who typically, I think, would rather die than sing solo in public.īut in twenty-five years a profound sea change has come over our country in the South Pacific.

Perhaps you don’t think of us as an especially musical nation, as you would say, the Italians or the Welsh, but singing a waiata during even the most formal ceremonial events is what Maori have always done and New Zealanders increasingly do. Just after Margaret Mahy was presented with the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in Macau two years ago, Pokarekare ana was the waiata her five New Zealand supporters stood up and sang.

Tena katou katoa – or less formally, Kia ora The explosion of children’s literature in New Zealand since 1980Į hine e, hoki mai ra, ka mate ahau, i te aroha e.

The Horror of Hickory Bay by Gavin Bishop