Mike Williams: Friend's knighthood sparks fond memories

Mike Williams reminisces on childhood and a childhood friendship. Photo / File

Opinion

I felt a huge sense of pride when I saw Justice Joe Williams dubbed a Knight at his home marae at Manaia on the Coromandel last week.

Joe grew up in Hastings and my family's first Hastings home, in Outram Rd, was just a block away from the house where Joe spent his childhood.

My mother told me years later that we got to know the "other Williams family in the street" when our mail got mixed up. No matter how it happened, our families became the closest of friends and my mum was in contact with Joe's whangai mum, Chris Williams, either in person or over the phone, every day of her life until Chris' passing.

As kids we all referred to the other Williams family grown-ups as "Uncle Mark" and "Auntie Chris" and in truth, they were much closer to us in every way than our real uncles and aunts who we saw little of and who lived in the Manawatu.

Joe's brother, Mark junior arrived first, and I remember - as a child - knowing that there were two perfectly normal ways for babies to arrive – one was the way my brother Bruce arrived - at Hastings Memorial Hospital - and the other was to go to Kerepehi and come back with a baby - that was how Mark and Chris Williams assembled their family.

I was about 11 years old when Joe arrived, and I remember mum and Chris discussing names. Chris liked the name Joseph so that was settled, and my mum particularly liked Victor for a second name - "because he looked like a winner".

How right she turned out to be.

Joe's whangai dad, also called Mark, was badly injured playing rugby as a young man and was told he would never walk again, but he did walk with a painful shuffle and he spent his working life on the chain at on Tomoana Freezing Works as a brisket puncher – a job done standing.

For years Mark and Chris owned a green Bradford van which my dad helped Mark to keep going long after its use-by-date.

Mark had a vegetable garden and a dry sense of humour. I was visiting one day when Mark was cultivating his crop and Chris was loading blankets into the Bradford in preparation for a holiday.

I asked Mark where they were headed and he said, "as far as the money will take us - Paki Paki".

Towards the end of Mark's life, my brother Chris, a nurse, looked after Mark in an old folks' home and told me that the old sparkle was still there.

When I was 19 my sister Sandra and I were accorded the honour of becoming godparents to Rea Huhana Williams, the third baby Mark and Chris brought back from Kerepehi and a sister for Mark junior and Joe. Rea was a ray of sunlight in our lives for many years.

I have a hazy recollection of the event, and for many years I thought that it was Joe's baptism, but my sister corrected me.

I later learnt that Mark senior was fluent in Maori, but I never heard him speak Te Reo and the Williams kids were not taught the language.

This is a monument to a phase of colonisation, now hopefully long gone, where Maori kids were forcibly dissuaded from speaking Te Reo at schools and their parents did not pass the language on to their kids.

Joe later became fluent in Te Reo and drove Chris mad talking to Mark in a tongue she could not understand.

In his teens, Joe won a scholarship to Lindisfarne College in Hastings and at my mother's funeral he said that his decision to go on to Victoria University was partly the result of seeing me follow that path. I was the first in my family to university and Joe was the first in his whanau.

Completing a law degree at Victoria University, Joe then accomplished a Master of Laws degree (LLM) with first class honours from the University of British Columbia in Indigenous Rights Law.

Joe is versatile, immensely talented and once fronted a rock band with a song that climbed the charts. He was quickly drafted into the judiciary and in 1999 he was appointed Chief Judge of the Maori Land Court.

Promotion followed rapidly, in 2004 he was appointed chairman of the Waitangi Tribunal, in 2008 a Judge of the High Court, and in 2018 a Judge of the Court of Appeal.
His appointment to the Supreme Court is a first for Maori and a very welcome milestone for Maoridom.

None of this success has gone to Joe's head and he remains the thoroughly nice bloke I had the very good fortune to grow up with.