Script (short). Scene: a one-bedroom council flat in Christchurch, New Zealand., A Sunday in 1990. Lunchtime. Characters: Adult, pakeha, 45, offspring of elderly woman, 75. The conversation is ongoing.

Mother: I’m a racist. Like your dad. He was a racist, He hated Māori. I hate Maori too.

Offspring: (stoic) Dad didn’t hate Māori. He fought beside them. In the war.

Mother: He hated them. Hated them. So do I.

Offspring: No, he didn’t. Anyway, your best friend is a Māori.

Mother: Who?

Offspring: Mrs Ball.

Mother: Mrs Ball? No, she’s not.

Offspring: Yes, she is.

Mother: No, she’s not.

Long silence, the subject is changed.

Three weeks later. It is again Sunday lunch.

Mother: She is.

Offspring: Who is? What?

Mother: A Māori. Mrs Ball, She’s a Māori. I asked her. She’s a Māori.

Offspring: Good for you. And good on her.

Jump forward twenty-five years and it’s 2015, Tamaki Makaurau, Cornwall Park, Auckland Archery Club. The land on which the club has sat since the 1940’s has been handed over to the Tūpuna Maunga Authority, a body established under the Ngā Mana Whenua o Tāmaki Makaurau Collective Redress Act 2014 to care for the historic volcanic cones of the region and there are plenty of them.

Club Captain (NZ Pakeha, 45): What can we do? We’ll have to find a new place. Māori will want the land back.

Club President (Australian, 50+): I guess you’re right. We’d better start now.

And they did. They looked and looked but found nothing.

But still, to anyone who would listen, ‘we’ll have to find a new place. Māori will want the land back. They’ll want the land back.’

In time, saner voices prevailed, but I still hear the echo.

‘They’ll want the land back.’

Always ‘them’, always ‘they’, always othered.

The maunga overlooking the club is silent.

Everything changes, everything stays the same.

Hone Kouka MNZM (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Kahungungu) has polished up his taonga and given new life to it and I, for one, am mighty glad he has.

We need to learn everything Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland tells us to learn, and we need to learn it tout de suite.

The stories at the top of the page are true.

They’re my stories, but they mirror the sub plot of Kouka’s play with disturbing accuracy making each as relevant today as Kouka’s was in 1965 when his story is set, in 1996 when it was first staged, and today as we unpack and assess its contemporary relevance. I suspect it will be different for each generation. It’s certainly been like that for me as I reflect my way from 1965 to 1996 and on to 2026.

The enemies of equality, equity, and Ti Tiriti of Waitangi certainly aren’t silent though, just listen to the Whare Pāremata (Parliament) on any sitting day and you’ll hear them – David, Winston, Christopher, Erica, Louise, Simon, Shane, Nicola, even Uncle Tom Potaka, and they don’t hold back using the power of legislation to promote their racist agendas. The rest of us have made ourselves heard too, at the nationwide Hikoi mō Te Tiriti that saw 100,000 descend on the Beehive, every year at Waitangi, every year at Rātana, via the Kingitanga at the Koroneihana celebrations at Tūrangawaewae, and at the Hui-ā-Motu called by the late Kīngi Tūheitia, and most recently by his successor Te Arikinui Kuīni Nga wai hono i te po who is a staunch supporter of the Kotahitanga (unity) movement founded by her father.

We hear the reo everywhere and what blessing that is. We’ve come a long way since our awareness was raised by the lone figure of Dame Whina Cooper in 1976, by the sterling work of Ngā Tamatoa in the ‘60s and ‘70s, by the opening of the first kura kaupapa Māori at Hoani Waititi Marae, by Ngoi Pēwhairangi and Kāterina Mataira who started Te Ātaarangi, a te reo Māori learning programme using coloured plastic Cuisenaire rākau, still used today. Contrary to the opinions of the noxious Hobson’s Pledge cohort, ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has’. Anthropologist Margaret Mead is reputed to have said those words, and all around the motu people are doing just that.

Early theatre productions in Aotearoa included some Māori elements, and Māori performers featured in film and theatre, though often without community input. The 1965 production of Porgy and Bess, featuring Īnia Te Wīata, led to the creation of the Māori Theatre Trust but it was slow going.

The 1970s saw a surge in Māori activism and in theatre, with groups like Te Ika a Maui Players and Te Ohu Whakaari touring the country. From the 1990s, Māori theatre gained international recognition through works like Jim Moriarty’s Michael James Manaia and Hone Kouka’s Nga Tangata Toa. Marae theatre emerged, and Taki Rua shifted towards touring te reo Māori plays. In the 2000s.

Twenty-first century festival culture has provided opportunities to promote Te Ao Māori and this week my team and I have reviewed Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland, Moana and the Tribe’s Ono, E Ipo. My Love, and Warewaretia. Still to come, the development seasons of He Kakano, Marmite and Honey and He Kakano Becoming Jeff Bezos, Te Pou’s Wet, and Ihi. Wehi. Mana (kapa haka and choir).

It’s a long way from 1956 and The Pohutukawa Tree by pakeha visionary Bruce Mason to 2026 and iteration three of Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland but it’s seventy years seemingly well spent.

Eternal vigilance is still needed, however, to ensure we don’t lose a single diacritical macron of any of it.

In 1965 – the year Kouka has set Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland – I was twenty, still living at home, starting my first job as a probationary assistant at Lyttelton Main School with a class of forty-five eleven-and-twelve-year-olds in a rough seaport town. From memory I had one recognisably brown kid in my class.

I was born and raised in Christchurch, the white power capital of the universe. There are reasons why author Lynley Hood called Christchurch a ‘A City Possessed’ but I won’t go there now. My parents had two rules for us kids: don’t marry a Catholic and don’t marry a Māori. My sister complied, my brother scored one out of two, and I dropped the ball on both.

As a kid I would haunt Canterbury Museum on Sundays to avoid being at home and remember the Māori exhibit well – a primitive people, neanderthal, one step out of the cave.

Better than nothing?

If any NZ history was taught at any of the three schools I attended, I must have been away that day because I have zero recollection of even a single jot of learning. Runnymede and the Magna Carta yes, the Wairau Affray and Te Rauparaha, no.

I didn’t meet a Māori person until I was in the 6^th form at high school when two beautiful wāhine from Te Wai Pounamu Māori Girls College up the road joined my class. We had something in common: we’d disrupted our schools by getting school cert when we had been designated ‘fail’ by all and sundry. This bonded us and, socially, we had a good year. Not evenings or weekends – their lives were managed to the nth degree – but sometimes, after school, if there was no choir practice or church or netball or culture which there usually was, we’d hang out. Turned out decades later that one of the wāhine is my wife’s cousin.

I saw the 1996 iteration of Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland and it blew me away. I was about to head overseas for the first time at age fifty-one. I’d recently shifted to Auckland because it’s where the work was and, to be honest, I’d had a gutful of Christchurch. I’d been working for the city in a ‘responsible’ role and was far too close to the political cynicism surrounding the Civic Creche case to ever be comfortable there again. I’d moved from that hot mess to a drama job with my old high school assuming that thirty plus years would have changed things, but they hadn’t. It had, in fact, gotten worse. The racism was ugly, and I had already moved to the right side of history on that front, so I moved to Auckland and proved Hone Kouka right, ‘everyone is from somewhere else’.

All the 1996 cast of Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland were great, Nancy Brunning was a standout, and I was hooked on Kouka’s work. It took me into a world I thought I knew – I’d spent years teaching in the King Country and in Te Tai Tokerau in the far north – but I discovered, though I’d lived in it, served on marae committees, I didn’t really know that world at all.

And now Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland is back.

It’s back because our theatre – at least in Tamaki Makaurau – is run by futurists who understand how the economics of the business exist exclusively to make great and relevant art designed to take us on journeys of discovery that we may not even know we need to go on.  The forming of the creative partnership between Kouka, Anna Cameron, Miria George, Jonathan Bielski (Auckland Theatre Company), Dolina Wehipeihana and Tama Waipara MNZM (Aotearoa Festival of the Arts), alongside Ataahua Papa (Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival) is a marriage made in arts heaven and we are all beneficiaries of their brilliance, built, as it is, on a legacy of inspired festival invention in Aotearoa that has evolved since those halcyon (read ‘cowboy’) days of the ‘70s and ‘80’s.

Waiora – ‘wai’ (water) and ‘ora’ (life) – is a mātauranga Māori concept of holistic wellbeing uniting health, spirituality, and the natural environment with spirituality at its heart, reinforced by practices like karakia and driven by whakapapa and the responsible stewardship of the land.

Waiora Te Ūkaipō – The Homeland describes the dislocation Kouka’s own family experienced when they left their traditional home in Te Tairāwhiti for a ‘better life’ in the Catlins in Southland and, in so doing, risked losing everything they valued – including the reo which the kids were not allowed to speak. It’s easy, looking at their situation with 20:20 hindsight, to say smugly that this was never going to end well, and while it certainly doesn’t, we are drawn deep into the narrative and I find myself experiencing Kouka’s world through the painful lens of my own less than worthy historical experience – my racist parents (Māori are lazy, Māori time, can’t handle the booze, dirty, untrustworthy, violent) – and Kouka’s supreme generosity and courage in sharing this ‘warts and all’ story.

We meet the play head on. It’s what Mervyn Thompson would have called ‘a play in a room’ – a Mark McEntyre set (beach scene, picnic downstage, raked boardwalk at the back), recognisable characters, single storyline, and a traditional theatre construct – in other words, a play as we know it, Jim.

But is it?

We meet the family in happy times preparing for a ‘barbeque’ on the beach and awaiting the arrival of guests, local schoolteacher Louise Stones (Mykah Keall) and John’s boss Steve Campbell (Ben Ashby) from the timberyard where John/Hone (Regan Taylor) works. There’s much busy work as a hangi is prepared off stage and tables, rugs, chairs, all the detritus of outdoor entertaining, are set up.  We get to meet the family – some tension, some niggle, plenty of laughter – with mum Sue/Wai (Erina Daniels) and the kids Amiria (Rongopai Tickell), Rongo (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne), and Boyboy (Te Mihi Potae) setting up what is to come. At the centre of it all is John/Hone, dad. He’s garrulous, funny, and excited at the prospect of promotion.

Yes, John/Hone.

I had a mate in 1975 called Bill Smith. Bill was Māori, around 40. I was 30. Bill and I played rugby together and he was on my school committee. After far too many beers one night in the Mangōnui pub, through tears, Bill told me he was Christened Wiremu Mete but changed his name so he could fit in.

Heartbreaking, and I’m left wondering did Kouka’s John do the same thing, to ‘fit in’?

Louise arrives and she fits right in.

Big boss Steve enters along the boardwalk – we get a good gander at him as he makes his way down to the barbecue area and he seems just like any other middle class pakeha bloke of his era.

And so it transpires.

This is a play that expresses, on the surface, all the racism of the day. I hated it because I’d lived through it; an arrogant and partially conscious bigotry that made me fume, but it was impossible to blame the characters because, well, Hone Kouka is too smart to let us off that easily.

No spoilers so no giveaways beyond saying the structure is pure Greek tragedy and that Kouka is a magnificent playwright.

Greek tragedy?

Absolutely, the unities of time, action, and place are all observed, there’s a flawed hero, John, who has buckets of hubris, there’s a prologue and a chorus (more about them later), and enough beer drunk to make it positively Dionysian.

It would have been so easy to make Steve a character to hate but he’s really quite nice, a man of his time doing what his dad told him to do which, in some ways, makes it even worse. Yes, Steve is wrong on so many levels and we know it now. We actually knew it then too, but we said and did nothing. On 08 March 1965 – same year, same season – Martin Luther King Jr said, ‘our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter’ but we didn’t know that then, or if we did …

We do now, so there’s no excuse.

Kouka could also have made us dislike Louise, but he doesn’t do that either. Instead, he makes her a sympathetic character struggling with her own demons, a liberal pakeha woman, an educator, doing her best in a grim situation.

John is expecting a promotion, but we realise, as time passes, that this is increasingly unlikely. There’s something going on with Boyboy too, but we can’t guess what. Rongo stands alone and unwraps the narrative – we hear her, but we don’t really listen to her despite her frightening prophesy of what is to come,

Context is all, and while this is, in part, a play about racism, the overt nature of that racism is a sub plot that can readily overwhelm – especially for pakeha – the real message which is to know, understand and protect what really matters, to treasure what keeps us grounded, to know who we are and where we come from.

It’s all in the title – Waiora, the Homeland.

There are other figures in the work too – tipuna – they’re there at the beginning, at times during, and at the end, a prologue and a chorus if you like, they bookend the work, and they, with Rongo and Boyboy, change the arc of the narrative from racism to wairua. Credited as ‘tipuna’, these figures are played superbly by Anatonia Te Maioha reprising his role from 1996, Awerangi Thompson, Mathieu Boynton-Rata, and Huia Rawiri. They are ever-present to us, and the actions they take are entrenched in a gripping soundscape by Maarire Brunning-Kouka, daughter of Hone Kouka and the late Nancy Brunning, and animated by haka and waiata lifted from the original and taught to this almost entirely new cast by composer Hone Huhihanganui.

It’s seldom we get to see such synergy and it’s simply magnificent.

The bedlam created by John and his deferential family as they ride roughshod over their own kaupapa is grasped by the tipuna and turned about with profound effect. When Hone and Boyboy join the tipuna, utilising haka, waiata, and ancient chant, they return the world to balance but just how, this pakeha struggled to grasp.

I get it now, at least on one level, thanks to my Ngāpuhi spouse generously sharing what she learned about ‘wai ora’ from her mentor the late Paraire Huata (son of Canon Wi Huata) about the power of water in the journey towards resurrection, and all this sent me down the Huata rabbit hole.

What actually happened to Rongo?

Paraire’s teachings are firmly anchored in knowing the significance of water, regarded as sacred in tikanga Māori. Water serves not only as an essential element for sustaining life but also embodies substantial spiritual and cultural meaning. It is intrinsically linked to mauri, the life force, and often plays a key role in rituals and ceremonies. The Pōwhiri Poutama framework, build by Huata, highlights water’s integral function in the cleansing and healing processes, and in the preservation of cultural traditions. Huata acknowledges cultural difference and would often quote Te Puea Herangi: ‘If I dream, I am alone, If we dream, we can achieve together.’

If it wasn’t Rongo’s time, did the drowning actually happen?

And is the play about racism, or is that merely a path to resurrection?

In 1965 I knew virtually nothing about Māori, but I knew that the little I had learned from others was mostly wrong. By 1996 I knew more but still mostly nothing. Waiora gave me a gentle kick up the bum to learn more. After another thirty years, in 2026, Waiora has done it again. My sagging glutes have had another tickle up from the jandal, and I’ve willingly learned more, much more.

Still far from half full, at least the bottom of my glass is wet.

Thanks, Hone Kouka and your team, life is good and gets better. I’m still ‘someone from somewhere else’ but I’m doing what Maya Angelou suggested, and it seems to be working, ‘do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.’

He iti hau marangai e tū te pāhokahoka.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

I sit at the back of the Opera House to watch Waiora: Te Ukaipō, not far from a school group in their uniforms, and think about this play – now being remounted as a flagship piece in the curation of the Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts and its place in Aotearoa theatre.

Hone Kouka reflects in the program about the 30-year history of the play – about a whānau in Māori Urban drift of the 60s, each character symbolising a different response to modern demands of colonisation and staying true to their Maoritanga. I am Pākehā and one of the cohort of University students who had studied it and was excited to see the 2018 Kia Mau festival production.*

The production is self-conscious of this history: its former cast, its original impact, its presence in a growing canon of theatre; Māori theatre, Aotearoa theatre. The excitement and the support from the audience for this new production is palpable on opening night. As I watch it, I move from feeling that I may be watching a waiata tangi to realising I am just as much watching a love letter to what this play has meant and the people it has belonged to.

I am particularly struck by this when listening to the bold soundscapes composed for the piece by Maarire Brunning-Kouka – “our daughter,” Hone Kouka writes in the programme, referencing her mother Nancy Brunning’s original performance as the heroine Rongo who is caught between immediate whānau and her love and longing for home in a deeper sense, Te Ukaipō, her homeland and a language she is fearful of forgetting. It is clear throughout that this production is one generation gifting this story to the next through collaboration. Ancestors are embodied as characters on stage and yet this production is almost more about speaking to the descendants in its cast and audience.

The strongest moments of performance are in Te Reo and Te Ao Māori, with the action of the play bookended by confident moments of ensemble work that draw you in. I wonder if this is deliberate. This is appropriate to the heart of the play and yet I am simultaneously aware that these particular gestures to the past are only possible because of the movements that came after the history unfolding on stage, like the Māori language and Kohanga Reo movements.

The domestic action of the play is a period piece now and the actors occasionally feel too bright and overpronounced despite a clear respect for all the characters. The jarring sound of mangled Te Reo in Pākehā mouths like mine however, and Pakeha culture being represented by politeness and sugary pop music, is probably still more accurate than I want to believe.

I feel discomfort in watching two cultures miss each other’s meanings as we head towards inevitable disappointment for the characters, and hope this in itself is a sign of progress. But I hear a ripple of laughter from the audience when a Pākehā character suggests he understands the connection to the land because he knows how to make money from it. This resonates easily in a time of Treaty Principles Bills and Fast Tracking, where Māori connection to this place is being debated as a roadblock to a different kind of progress.

Waiora: Te Ukaipō sits in conversation with the past, present and the future, making a case both for itself and for more Māori stage stories that meet us in the modern moment.

*[Hone Kouka also directed Waiora: Te Ukaipō with The Court Theatre in 2016.]

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

I walk into this show not really knowing what emotional state I will leave in but … wow. This show sits with you – right in the heart. It feels like looking at a whānau you recognise. Not in a literal way, but in the energy of it. The dynamics. The unspoken tensions. The pride and the pain living in the same space.

Written by Hone Kouka and first performed in 1996, this play has now been remounted almost thirty years later, this time directed by Kouka. That alone says something. To bring a work back after that long and have it feel this alive, this relevant, proves it truly stands the test of time. It does not feel dated. It feels necessary.

Set in the 1960s, the story follows a Māori family – John/Hone (Regan Taylor), Sue/Wai Te Atatu (Erina Daniels), Amiria (Rongopai Tickell), Rongo (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne) and Boyboy (Te Mihi Potae) – who have moved away from their homeland in search of something better. More opportunity. More stability. More of the dream they have been told exists somewhere else.

What unfolds is the ramifications of dislocation and disconnection. It’s about what happens when you leave your ūkaipō and try to plant yourself somewhere that does not necessarily want you.

The writing is beautiful; it feels honest and lived in. What hits even harder is that nearly thirty years after it was first staged, we are still facing many of the same issues born from urbanisation and colonisation. Disconnection from whenua. Systemic racism. The quiet erosion of language and identity. Watching it now does not feel like looking back at history. It feels like looking at something ongoing. That is what makes it powerful.

It makes you think about responsibility. If we are aware of these patterns, if we can see them clearly laid out in front of us, then we cannot pretend we do not know. There is a sense that awareness demands action. That we carry a responsibility to respond differently moving forward.

There are moments that are funny and then suddenly you are aware of this deep undercurrent of grief sitting just beneath everything. The racism portrayed by Hone’s boss, Steve Campbell (Ben Ashby), makes my skin crawl. On the other side of that, the saviourism embodied in Louisa Stones (Mycah Keall) feels painfully true. It is layered in politeness and progressiveness, but is still rooted in control and assumption.

What really strikes me is how the play explores the veil being thin between Te Ao Wairua and Te Ao Kikokiko. As Māori we innately understand that the spiritual and physical realms are not separate. They are layered and exist alongside each other. But to watch that performed on stage with such clarity and power really cuts deep.

The presence of Tīpuna (Anatonio Te Maioha, Awerangi Thompson, Mathieu Boynton-Rata, Huia Rawiri) as ‘unseen forces’ feels natural and grounded. Sitting there, I feel even more aware of the continuum of whakapapa that I and everyone in that audience is part of. It is a reminder that we are not isolated individuals. We are extensions of those who came before and are responsible for those who come after.

The ensemble works beautifully together and there is a strong sense of collective storytelling, rather than one person dominating the stage. There are moments of stillness that are just as powerful as the confrontations.

Beautiful kaihaka, beautiful manu tioriori te katoa!! Also gorgeous costumes! (Cara Louise).

Even though it is set decades ago, the themes are not stuck in the past. The fact that it was written in 1996 and can be remounted now with this much impact is proof of its strength. I leave feeling grounded, stirred and deeply connected. It is the kind of theatre that reminds you why storytelling matters.

Show photos by Roc Torio

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