Recording the life of a leader -- a heroic task

Dr Ranginui Walker's definitive biography of Sir Apirana Ngata fills a gaping hole in our country's history, writes MARGIE THOMSON.

The sunshine, the newspaper, the coffee plunger, the cereal bowls. Dr Ranginui Walker sits in the garden of his Meadowbank home, his choice of full sunlight a characteristic snub to current dogma, and the heavy suburban peace of the mid-morning scene like an advertisement for retirement.

The scene, however, is a ruse. While Walker is indeed retired - he became an emeritus professor of the University of Auckland a couple of years ago - that was just the prelude for what has proved to be one of the busiest, most intense periods of his life. And it's not over yet, as he remarks with rather unfair impatience at the number of interviews he's been doing since the launch of his weighty biography of Sir Apirana Ngata, He Tipua.

The interview is classic Walker: the bristly beginning which soon runs smooth once he hits his stride. He's a man with an intimidating reputation, largely because he has for 30 years said things which have stung the status quo, battering the comfort zone of the dominant race.

Now, he's getting on in years, but certainly not in looks or mental faculty, and refuses to accept that he's mellowed or changed in any way. The only thing that has changed, he says, is that public opinion has shifted so that the things he says no longer seem so shocking.

The famous sharpness is still there. I comment that He Tipua is a difficult book for a non-Maori speaker to find one's way around because of the Maori chapter headings and subheadings. He looks at me and I know what he's going to say.

"That's deliberate," he says. "That's to force you Pakeha to engage with Maori culture. Maori have crossed the cultural divide a long time ago and it's about time Pakeha started learning to cross it. Although the book is written in English for the benefit of a Pakeha audience, these are signals interspersed throughout the story to Maori that this is their story as well."

By 1990, Dr Ranginui Walker had given up on the hope that someone else would write the biography of Sir Apirana Ngata, so he went to see the great man's son, Sir Henry Ngata, seeking his permission to undertake the enormous project.

This very post-colonial act of ethical professional practice - in contrast to the old style where an academic would simply waltz in and conduct a "one-way discourse" on his or her subjects - was rewarded with a wonderful, terrifying gift: 25 bulky piles of papers, wrapped in brown paper and string, and three or four steel filing cabinets, also full of papers, all rescued by Sir Henry from his father's bungalow at Waiomatatini, near the northern tip of the East Cape.

That collection, bolstered by visits to Gisborne and to the National Archives where he waded through 50 years of records of the Department of Native Affairs, eventually, and with much help and inspiration from Walker's "very clever wife" Deirdre, laid the foundation for the volume which was launched late last month in Ruatoria by Prime Minister Helen Clark, Sir Henry himself and another of Ngata's children, Mate Kaiwai.

Although Walker was hindered in his progress by the demands of several years as Head of the Maori Studies Department at the University of Auckland, it's not hard to see where the intervening decade went. Ngata was a sweeping figure in the history of New Zealand and Maoridom, his parliamentary career alone spanning from 1905 to 1943, almost across two world wars, across two cultures, and even across two eras. Any biographer, therefore, faced an enormous, daunting task.

Even once the research was done - and after his "retirement" - Walker worked on for 22 months, thinking, reading and writing seven days a week, for 12 or 13 hours a day, coming down from his office for meals, and leaping to his feet before his wife had finished eating. But it was, he says, a labour of love, executed under an extremely compelling deadline once he had been gently reminded by Sir Henry that he, Sir Henry, now an old man, wouldn't be around for ever but would love to read that book about his father.

There is a distinctly Maori flavour to He Tipua that could probably not have been achieved by a non-Maori biographer. The first chapter, for instance, provides a mihi-like framework, being a tribal history of Ngata's tribe, Ngati Porou, which has never been written before, followed by modern tribal history.

"No man is an island, notwithstanding what the New Right thinks," Walker says. "All human beings are related to other human beings. So it was with Apirana. He grew up in a tribal context and worked for the common good, both Maori and Pakeha."

As Walker says in his introduction, he himself, while not of Ngati Porou, was of Whakatohea, "a kindred tribe to Ngati Porou, close enough for me to undertake the task but distant enough to be objective and avoid the pitfall of producing hagiography".

While he was too young to have met Ngata, the parliamentarian was a great hero in the region and Walker remembers his older cousins being selected to go to the Ngarimu VC hui in Ruatoria in 1943, organised by Ngata. "I was too young," he says regretfully. "But we grew up with words ringing in our ears about this important man."

Walker doesn't subscribe to the argument put forward by some Maori that Pakeha should not touch Maori history. "Histories written by people like John Gorst, Judith Binney and Michael King help us to understand British imperialism and its effect on Maori people. But there is some validity in the position that I subscribe to, staked out by Ngata and Buck, that Maori people have the insider view of the reality of the Maori, and it is appropriate that Maori write their own stories. But in the absence of Maori writers it was valid for Pakeha authors to develop the field. Our understanding would be the poorer if they hadn't done that work."

While Walker describes himself as a modern scientific man who has never had a "road to Damascus" spiritual revelation, Ngata believed in matakite, or second sight, and such incidents are like stations of the cross throughout the biography.

The extraordinary story of Ngata's conception, for instance, where his birth was foretold by a tohunga ("te tipua, te tahito, te taniwha", a promise of a supranormal being) plays a number of roles in Walker's project, establishing the biography as distinctively Maori, signalling the division of the worlds, as well as heralding Walker's own opinion of his subject as "monumental ... I'm agog at the power of the man".

It also provided a useful thematic link with something Walker was told by a man who worked with Ngata for many years. Jock McEwan, who Ngata originally employed as a cadet in the Department of Native Affairs and who rose to become Secretary of the Department, on being asked by Walker what kind of man Ngata was, replied: "Ehara i te tangata, he taniwha" ("Not an ordinary man, a superhuman").

As Walker progressed with his work, he sent completed chapters to Sir Henry and Mate Kaiwai for fact-checking, but he maintains that his construction of the story was not constrained by the family - only by the scholarly conventions of research, citation of references and the search for truth. Skimpy allusions to Ngata's private life - thought by some to be sometimes adventuresome and to have resulted in children born outside his marriages - Walker ascribes to the lack of public record.

"I'm not chasing hearsay and gossip," he asserts. He does mention, in the epilogue, that a granddaughter "unknown to her Ngati Porou kin" unexpectedly appears at Ngata's funeral. A further incident, not in the book, involved a beautiful young woman whom Ngata had admired being sent to his bed under a custom called whariki. But the descendants of that union did not want the affair publicised and Walker respected that wish.

No biography is a definitive record of a life. Walker describes his own work as a construction; says it felt like cutting off his own leg when the publisher required him to excise 35,000 words from what he had hoped was his finished product; hopes others will pick up where he has left off, or take the story in new and so-far unexamined directions. There is plenty of rich material there, for sure.

Walker, however, is content that he has gone some way to filling a gaping hole in our country's history, and put this "magnet of a man" in his rightful place in our historical landscape.