Nicola Kāwana is an acclaimed actor-turned-landscape gardener. Photo / Supplied
Nicola Kāwana - Ngāruahine, Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāti Kahungungu o Wairarapa - is an acclaimed actor-turned-landscape gardener who will be seen onstage in Auckland Theatre Company’s season of North by Northwest.
My parents were teenagers when they started our family in Hāwera. Mum had just turned 18 and Dad was 17 when my oldest sister was born and I was born a few days after dad turned 21, the third daughter of four girls. Starting a family young was the norm in small-town New Zealand in the 60s and 70s, but now it’s seen as a social problem.
My Mum came from a large Catholic family and Dad came from a massive Māori family. There were very few other mixed-race kids in our small town, what people called half-caste back then, and we didn’t really belong to te ao Māori, or to te ao Pākehā. Although maybe that’s been valuable for my career - because acting involves being able to sit on the outside and look in.
I did do a bit of performing at school. I played Henny Penny at primary school. I wore a paper Kleensak for a costume, and ran around the stage warning my other Kleensak-clad cast mates that the “the sky is falling”. I also had speech therapy to help me say my Rs, which led to speech competitions, so it’s not like I’d never been onstage before, and at high school I was in the orchestra, Māori club and drama club. But I was also shy and introverted and had no confidence, so I half loved being onstage and half hated it.
Racism has been normal for me my whole life, but it’s only over the last 10 years that I’ve started to realise how wrong it was, for teachers to have such low expectations of Māori students. Going into third form, during my interview, I said I wanted to be a lawyer, and I was told I was too average and should think about being something else. At high school, when my music teacher first saw my surname, he mispronounced it and said: “Another Kirwahnah ? I suppose you’ll be like your sisters.” I was asked to leave school at 15, at the beginning of fifth form, which I realise now was a racist request.
After leaving school I went to New Plymouth to do a course for unemployed teenagers before ending up back home aged 17, riding around town on my ten-speed, op-shopping with my bestie, waiting for dole day. Eventually, my parents put pressure on me to get a job. After Mum suggested I work as a checkout girl at the local supermarket, I scanned the situations vacant in the local newspaper, looking for an out. It was then I saw an ad to join Taranaki Youth Theatre in New Plymouth, and that was it, the door to performing arts.
Katie Wolfe lived in New Plymouth back then, and she was this super cool chick who I’d see about town. When I heard she’d been to The New Zealand Drama School, I decided to apply. I was only 18 when I was told I was the first reserve, so I spent the summer of 1989 waiting to see if someone pulled out, or got run over, but they didn’t so I didn’t get in.
I moved to Wellington anyway, thirsty for a bigger life. One day I was walking down the street with my groceries, when this Māori fella jumped out of his car at the lights and ran after me. It was Apirana Taylor. He’d been on the panel when I auditioned for drama school, and he asked me to be in Jim Moriarty’s theatre group Te Ohu Whakaari. They were doing Hone Tūwhare’s only play, In The Wilderness Without A Hat. Rangimoana Taylor was directing, and I was to understudy Tungia Baker, this amazing kuia. When Tungia had to pull out, I ended up playing this matriarch, aged just 19, with all these actors I’d seen on television.
I got pregnant during the run of that play and I was just 20 when I gave birth to my daughter in her paternal grandmother’s house in Wellington. After Eden was born, we moved to a farm under the mountain in Eltham. My relationship with her father fell apart and that Christmas we separated. I was 21 and a solo mum in Hāwera with a little bit of theatre training and one big play under my belt. There were some grim times, but I auditioned for drama school again in 1991 and that time I got in.
After graduating from drama school, there were all the usual highs and lows, but I was fortunate to be frequently employed in theatre, or working cafe jobs. Because having a child meant I had to be pragmatic about my career, so I’ve always seen acting as just a job. Sometimes the job is great, and sometimes you’re paying the bills, but it’s still just a job where you get paid for your skills. Mum cleaned banks before she studied to be a nurse and Dad left school at 14 to start working at the Pātea Freezing Works with his whanaunga, Dalvanius. Because my parents worked hard, I’ve never seen work as a measure of how good a person you are.
I was a child gardener. I grew up with parents and grandparents who gardened and I belonged to my primary school’s horticulture club, so when I turned 40, I took a year out from acting to study horticulture. It was partly because I wanted some kind of agency, not to be at the mercy of the next acting gig, and doing that course means I never have to accept demeaning acting jobs. I knew the roles I was likely to be offered as an ageing actress would become less and less satisfying. The sort where the woman stands behind a man and says three lines while he has a big monologue. I’d rather be in a garden, because gardening makes me feel good.
There are more living organisms in one teaspoon of soil than there are people on the planet. In te ao Māori, te oneone, the soil, is the mother that everything comes from and everything goes back to. The life cycle begins and ends in Papatūānuku, and if you don’t have healthy soil you can’t have healthy plants. Soil has mauri and whakapapa. Soil is everything.
For about a decade I suffered from panic disorder. I was crushed by anxiety to the point where I didn’t think I could be an actor anymore. Those devastating feelings stole the joy from my life. I tried therapy, medication, breathing techniques, supplements, bodywork, with varying degrees of success. Then this staunch anger kicked in where I said, “this is my life”. In spite of the crippling feeling, where I sometimes felt I was dying, I had to process it and keep going. Eventually it passes, everything does.
Gardening is essential for my hau ora. I have never had a panic attack while gardening, because it is literally grounding. When I think of how many trees I’ve planted, not only for myself but in my job, that really excites me, because everything you stick in the ground makes a difference. I also find climate change overwhelming. It genuinely freaks me out, so to take a breath and put something in the ground, that is all I can do. Gardening reminds me that I am part of nature, not separate from it.
I realise now, I inherited that trauma. That my anxiety was the impact of historic colonisation that comes to me through my father’s whānau. Because his life was stolen from him. Being a man of his generation, he was born a second-class citizen on his own land. As were his grandparents. They were native speakers whose lives were destroyed by colonisation. That burns into me. But I will not be defeated, regardless of what life chucks at me. So much has been taken away from them and me, so now I see it as my responsibility to keep going.
Language is not just a collection of words. It is a world view, a philosophy, a celebration and an understanding of what it means to belong. Relearning a language which should have been a birthright carries a lot of mamae, pain and shame. But it also helps heal the brokenness. Dad’s parents were native speakers of te reo who wanted their kids to assimilate in order to get ahead. We now know that is not possible.
For a long time, I didn’t realise how much racism I’d absorbed, whether through the media or in real life. Then you start learning and realise you’ve been lied to your whole life. Because there is nothing wrong with you, or your race, or your people, and that feeling is something that has been done to you. I don’t know if I’ll ever fully recover in my lifetime, but I do know I feel driven by history to achieve some kind of visibility, and not just literally, in the sense of being a presence on stage, but in the world, full-stop, on my ancestors’ behalf.
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