Fact and Friction for Merepeka Raukawa-Tait

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The last person to advise Merepeka Raukawa-Tait to pull her head in got more than he bargained for: she married him. The outspoken chief executive of the Women's Refuge is telling this story — of how she met her third husband, Theo Tait — from her Wellington office, a paper-cluttered room in a building which is almost as make-do as the safe houses the organisation provides for women and children at risk.

A receptionist types at a word-processor plonked on reams of paper; the rug in reception, in faded purples and pinks, curls at the edges like old toast. There are slightly grubby teddybears and boxes of colouring-books donated by an air-line on which more privileged children might fly somewhere sunnier.

But none of this seems terribly important when you wander down the hall and encounter a framed letter. On paper ripped from a cheap notepad, it says, in part:

"I would like to give this donation to Women's Refuge as a way of saying thanks for being there. When my mother needed yous ... when she got beaten up from her boyfriend. She finally split with him. Two weeks later he broke in and murdered my mother. She is sadly missed."

It is the sort of letter you wish you had never read. It makes you want to turn away.

Raukawa-Tait will not let people turn away.

In the past two weeks Raukawa-Tait has fronted up on television, at the National Party conference and, yesterday, at a Labour Party meeting in Rotorua, to talk about the fact — and this is a fact, she emphasises — "that Maori do not have a good track record in the area of domestic violence."

It is her fierceness in the face of facing up to abuse in Maori families that has led to a very public spat which had its beginnings at a Beehive meeting between Raukawa-Tait, Maori Affairs Minister Parekura Horomia and Associate Maori Affairs Minister Tariana Turia.

Raukawa-Tait says she thought the meeting was to discuss solutions to the domestic violence problem. By the time she left that meeting she felt that she had been thoroughly ticked off, told that her outspokenness on the issue was damaging to Maori, that she ought to accentuate the positive and that, in her own words, she had been told to "pull her head in."

On Monday things became gnarlier. On National Radio, Turia extended the argument by claiming that the issue of abuse in Maori communities was being portrayed (by media, she said, but surely — by implication — also by Raukawa-Tait) as "the result of some inherent genetic weakness in our people. It would be appropriate, I think, if people familiarise themselves with the issues of colonisation and the effects on indigenous peoples."

Women's Refuge, Turia said, had done incredibly good work. "However, they have moved their focus and they are not an organisation that I consider to be an authority on child abuse."

On Tuesday there is a story in this newspaper, yet another story, about child abuse. A 3-year-old boy has been bashed to death and his stepfather has pleaded guilty to manslaughter.

The boy's mother's lawyer says she could not intervene. She has been a victim of domestic violence for a large part of her own life and is suffering from battered woman's syndrome. The names in this story are Maori names.

On Wednesday there is the story about Turia's objection to statistics on Maori violence appearing in the Com-
missioner for Children's report on the killing of James Whakaruru at the hands of his stepfather.

Recent statistics show that Maori children are five times more likely to be abused than other children.

Beyond those statistics, beyond those stories, what right, the question seems to be, does Raukawa-Tait have to set the cat among the already nervous kereru?

She is the head of an organisation whose core business is regarded as the mostly silent work of the refuge: to provide invisible houses where women and children can go to heal their wounds, then, hopefully, move on to new, abuse-free lives. The insinuation is that making use of statistics about abused children is akin to Maori-bashing — at least, that's how she sees it.

As much as anything, says the petite woman in the heels and sailor-influenced power-suit, all of this "is this sort of thing that makes us [Maori] look bad."

Small chance that Raukawa-Tait is going to let anyone make her look bad — or challenge her credentials to take on the issues. She wasn't raised to give up easily, and that's quite possibly partly why she ended up in this job.

Raukawa-Tait was born in Fielding 51 years ago to a Maori mother and a father of Irish Catholic ancestry. It was, she says, a very Pakeha upbringing. It was also an upbringing in a home where there was domestic violence. Her mother was hit by her father.

It was only earlier this year (her mother died at the age of 86 two months ago) that Raukawa-Tait raised the topic.

It is a part of her history told in a way which sits oddly with a woman who makes headlines for her directness. It takes some getting to. She punctuates
the conversation, as she frequently does when it turns to the personal, by a bit of verbal fiddling: "Shall I put on my glasses? My staff hate my glasses. I think they make me look interesting but they say, 'Take the bloody things off.'

"Now," says Raukawa-Tait — obviously more comfortable in the "now" — "I lead an organisation where women can go. Now I wouldn't have to ask my mother that question."

Her mother, who she describes as "a beautiful woman," was an abused woman intent on ensuring that her daughters "when it was our day, would be strong."

The nuns had a hand in reinforcing Raukawa-Tait's spine of steel. Her mother, grandmother and two sisters were also convent girls. Says the now-lapsed Catholic, "If the hand of a nun has been in your upbringing somewhere you tend to develop a streak of independence. You see these women getting on with their lives, making decisions with no men around."

But it took until the last year of her mother's life to ask the question: Why didn't you leave?

"She said to me, 'Well, where would I go all those years ago? With three little girls and no money?"'

There is nothing evasive about Raukawa-Tait's response to such questions, despite the verbal meandering. She's giving herself time to think — and she's not the sort of woman to leave silences. Indeed, it is her very frankness which might leave her vulnerable to the enemies she admits she's adept at making.

Take this story, for example. A Maori woman marries a Pakeha man with four children. She didn't really want to be a mother. The biological link was missing. The kids got the occasional clout and whack around the ears. In some instances they got a bit more than that. I think, says the woman, that there was a form of abuse there.

Many years later that woman becomes the chief executive of the women's refuge. "I feel," she says, "whakamaa [ashamed.] My step-children deserved better from me."

How do you reconcile? "If I could turn back the clock, I would. But you can't. What you can do is learn, go on and make things better for other people."

Raukawa-Tait doesn't tell this story in the third person, although she would likely say she is talking about another person because, "Theo has been the making of Merepeka."

Theo is her third husband. She married him in an electric-blue sari she bought at a spice shop in Cuba St. She popped in to buy garlic and came out with a wedding dress. (She buys all her designer label clothes at op-shops.)

She and Theo married three years ago after living together for 10 years. They met when she was stirring up the Te Arawa trust board, of which she is a beneficiary, by writing letters of complaint every time they made a statement. Theo, who was on the board, was sent as an emissary to tell her — surprise, surprise — to pull her head in.

It wasn't a popular marriage. Tait had been married for 38 years to his first wife and they had nine children. Those children, Raukawa-Tait says, somewhat redundantly, "are somewhat indifferent to me."

Theo is 20 years older — 18 years older really, but "I always make him out to be older." It is obviously a shared joke. "But I think he's quite spunky actually." It's a statement accompanied by Rauawa-Tait's trademark laugh, delivered at decibes which threaten to dislodge those mountainous paper piles.

And Merepeka does often talk about herself in the third person. It's an observation, which, when pointed out, stops her in her usually unstoppable tracks. She's never noticed. "Do I? Now why would that be?"

Perhaps, she ventures, it's because she has to stand back from, create a distance from, the self she's "quite harsh on. There's no room for slippage. I've got to be doing the best, to be onto it the whole time, never getting tired. It's really quite bloody tragic, isn't it?"

But you know she doesn't really think so. The woman who seems to live out of her office — there is a tidy row of spare heels, a wardrobe full of those
op-shop bargains, shelves of books with titles like Positive Economics and Power Interviews — is more concerned with what she sees as real tragedy.

On the phone for an interview with the Wellington-based Ngati Porou radio station, she reaches for a tissue, and turns away. There's nothing in her voice to let on. She's a good public performer but a lousy actor.

What upset her? A question about not speaking out.

"We're so concerned about what the Pakeha thinks of us that we would put our people at risk. We continue to say: We'll work it through at home. And what happens? We never work it through at home." She is now very angry, talking fast, her voice steely.

She's threatened to resign should her stance be seen to threaten the refuge's Government funding. It receives $3.9 million a year and she wants that doubled.

She has instigated what is bound to be a highly controversial survey of which iwi have the highest incidence of abuse. They should pay up, she says.

If she does herself out of a job, she worries she might not get another. She's well aware of the perils of being out-spoken.

Will she pull her head in then? "No."

"And," — here comes the full force of a Raukawa-Tait laugh, — "I'm not planning on marrying Horomia."