Hone Tuwhare's sentimental journey

Poet Hone Tuwhare turns 80 this year and celebrates by returning to his birthplace, Northland, for an 18-date poetry tour. His biographer, JANET HUNT, reports.

A wero! A haka! A challenge! This was the cheeky look-at-me call of seduction, in the form of a poem published in the Listener last November. Written by Glenn Colquhoun and entitled An invitation for Hone Tuwhare to attend a poetry reading in Northland (or, A haka to Kaka Point), it aimed to winkle Tuwhare out of his South Otago sea-coast hideaway, and, siren-like, draw him towards the north, back to where he was born, the land of his tipuna.

Kaka Point. Give us back our boy!

Sky! Unwrap your cotton wool!

Sea! Untie your ropes of surf!

Wind! Call off those howling dogs!

Soil! Get your puha-picking hands off our man!

Bring back that silver head!

Bring back those too-full ears!

Bring back his liquid eyes!

Bring back that greenstone skin!

Bring back those juicy lips!

Bring back that fat mouth dripping words!

Bring back our drumming heart!

The winner of the Jessie Mackay NZSA Award for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2000 Montana Book Awards with The Art of Walking Upright Here, Colquhoun says, "The tour grew out of an idea to bring Hone Tuwhare back to read up here. We've been talking about it for a couple of years."

Apart from thinking the journey might present many possibilities, Colquhoun also confesses to another hunger: "I'm just being greedy and selfish. I wanted to read with Hone, to be with one of my literary heroes."

Colquhoun appeared with J.C. Sturm at the Readers and Writers Week of the New Zealand Festival and, at the 2001 Going West Festival, had the honour of introducing Allen Curnow's last public performance.

"These people are the kaumatua and kuia of New Zealand poetry. It's nice, as a young poet, to connect with these guys. In 20 years' time they're not going to be here, so to meet with the ones who began it ... this is the whakapapa of the poetry."

One reading will be at Te Tii Marae, Mangonui, north of Kerikeri, a special place for Colquhoun. A pakeha and city kid, he grew up in South Auckland and always thought the city would be his home.

I am from a concrete land

The stretching tile lids are my mountain

The snaked black tar is my river (Mihi).

He trained as a doctor, "but then I took a year off and went up north, and that was the end of me".

Colquhoun lives at Rawene on the shores of the Hokianga and practises medicine. He aligns himself with Ngati Rehia, about whom he wrote in The Art of Walking Upright Here.

But it was one thing to have the idea for the tour and another to bring it into being. Contacting Tuwhare is notoriously difficult. He has no phone. He lives by himself in a half-light clutter of poem scraps, fish-heads and bread for the birds. Days flow over him as the tide washes the rocks on the beach below his crib. The mail on one day alone may bring possibilities as diverse as an invitation to read at a poetry festival in Colombia, a letter from a friend, a manuscript from a hopeful admirer, a request from a publisher and a couple of bills. He reads it, it piles up, and is soon submerged and consigned to distant memory.

Although Tuwhare has enjoyed his visits north over the years, he has also proven remarkably resistant to a lengthy return. Northland is his ancestral home; he spent his first four years there before his family moved to Auckland. But his mother became ill and the family returned north so his mother could die among her own people.

Apart from that occasion and sporadic visits, Tuwhare has not lived there since. He had retirement dreams of a mud-brick cottage on family land but they were abandoned in favour of a crib at the other end of the country. Reluctant to wear the responsibilities of kaumatua, unwilling to concede to the loss that might mean for his writing, and equally, in love with the south and content with his lot at Kaka Point, he has not visited the area since the early 90s.

At first Colquhoun received no reply to his plea to Tuwhare to visit. He persisted, and many letters and copies of letters were sent. The help of publisher Roger Steele was enlisted, Tuwhare's friends and neighbours contacted. Finally, the message got through and Tuwhare wrote to say he would like to come north some time although he did not know when that could be. Then Colquhoun published his poem/invitation and out of the blue, a call came to say Tuwhare would come.

The tour is billed A Sentimental Journey after the Frank Sinatra number Tuwhare and friends used to sing in modified form en route to Japan after the war.

Gonna take a sentimental journey, Gonna set my heart at ease, Gonna make a sentimental journey, To renew old memories ...

Aside from Tuwhare, Colquhoun will also read works, with musicians Mahina Kaui, Nopera Pikari and Lavinia Kingi. The group will be based at Rawene, with performances at Pangaru, Mangamuka, Kaikohe, Kaitaia, Kerikeri, Waitangi, Dargaville and Whangarei.

The accent will be on informality and spontaneity, on going with whatever happens on the stage or the road - and plenty of time for rest.

It may be, though, that Tuwhare is less sentimental about the trip than those accompanying him. When asked how he feels about returning to his old home town, he shrugs and pulls one of those faces. Still, he hopes to make a pilgrimage to the home of his late friend Shirley Grace, and he nods at the thought of a visit to family, to the old homestead and the new marae, Te Kohewhata, which was constructed on land donated by Tuwhare and his siblings on the initiative of his late sister Hoana. His nephew, Jimmy Rapatini, is part of the marae organisation. When it is suggested that means he will be an esteemed guest, however, he reacts: "I don't want to be honoured," he says. "I just want to read my poems."

Which is what it's all about - the poems, and reading the poems. Before going on the road in Northland, Tuwhare has spent time with family on Waiheke Island, and has made several public appearances.

Smaller, not really frail, but thinner, slower and sometimes with an old man's step-and-caution, he is hard-of-hearing and lost-of-hearing-aid but possesses radiantly good skin and thick, white hair.

In performance, he fumbles for his glasses, accidentally reads the same verse twice, makes masterly and comic recovery, cannot hear the audience response. Yet his small, black eyes gleam. He pulls faces. He smiles. He sings. The audience barely breathes. Rapt, they are old fans and friends as well as new, younger admirers, many of them also musicians, poets, performers. Whether reading from the well-worn poems of No Ordinary Sun, or the comic adventures and sorrowful reminiscences of the cosmically apposite latest collection, Piggy-back Moon, the magic endures.

* The poetry readings run from Sunday to April 27. Email bigbellywoman@xtra.co.nz