Ana Apatu: Rowley found himself in writing

Rowley Habib

My holiday is coming to an end. Before I leave Taupo, I call on my friends Rowley Habib and Birgitte Vogt.

Old friends who were also close to Jono (Randell), my late husband. We take shelter outside under sun umbrellas to find shade from the scorching heat. Ashtrays are found and Rowley and Birgitte light up.

Rowley Habib was born 1933 and grew up in Oruanui, a timber-milling place north of Taupo. His father owned the only shop there at the time. "It was a post office as well as a general store and, for a while, my father ran a taxi service as well. You can imagine that it was the hub of our little settlement. People - it seemed the whole of the village, kids and grown-ups - used to come down in the evenings to do their shopping or get their mail."

His father was from Syria, and his Maori mother a Pitiroi from Nukuhau, Taupo. Rowley was the youngest son in a family of seven.

He said he was always a lonely child, even when he was surrounded by a dozen or so other children. "I knew right from the start that in some way I was different from the rest of the kids - and I didn't like it." He did not shine at primary school. "I was no scholar." He was especially hopeless at arithmetic.

Rowley stayed at primary school - "for lack of anything better to do" - until he was almost 16. Then he went to Te Aute for a couple of years. "At Te Aute, I was thrown together with young Maori from all over the country. I was always a shy and rather reserved person and I wouldn't otherwise have made, on my own, the friends and acquaintances that I know today. At Te Aute, living so close together, I was forced to mix, I had no option. With all due respect to my old school this is the one thing that I can say that I am really grateful to the place for.

"I always wrote about things and people I knew personally. I found I couldn't write about imaginary things, they had no interest for me. But with the things and people I knew, all I had to do was to be honest, and they would have life and meaning.

"Sam Dwyer, a teacher at Te Aute, seemed to recognise this as my strength, and he encouraged me to keep going."

It was a little later, when he was 20 and in his first year at Ardmore Teachers' College, that Rowley suddenly decided that he wanted to be a writer. "It hit me like a tornado. I couldn't think of anything else."

He left Ardmore, worked for a year in a bookshop in Auckland, then spent three years wandering around the North and South islands - working in freezing works, timber mills, woolstores, hydro works, on the wharfs, digging ditches and "a dozen and one" other jobs for short spells. All this time, he was writing furiously. He sees this period as being a kind of apprenticeship as a writer. "My only regret now is that I didn't take more notice of what went on around me and the people I met. I didn't start out drifting entirely because I was after experience - although it has worked out that way. In much of my writing now, I am drawing on those restless years - at the time it was a hand-to-mouth way of living, as far as I was concerned." At this time his writing "just poured out. It was pretty shapeless at first - I had practically no control over it. All I knew was I had to get it down on paper."

Like so many other writers, he is concerned chiefly with the people and places which he knew as a child, particularly working people. "By 'working people', I mean manual workers. They have more vitality and warmth than white-collar workers, and this seems to rub off on to me and into my writing."

Rowley's first published work was a prize-winning story which appeared in the Ardmore Teachers' College annual magazine. He was also a Katherine Mansfield fellow in Menton, where he met Birgitte.

During our conversation, Rowley says: "You know, Ana, I think you are winning."

When asked to explain what he means, he growls, "$4.60 extra for a packet of 20s from the first of January. That is a big tax hike. It'll make a big difference."

-Ana Apatu is chief executive of the U-Turn Trust, based at Te Aranga Marae in Flaxmere