New Year Honours: Anne Delamere

By ALAN PERROTT

Anne Delamere is back in Opotiki today to see the smiles when her family learn she has joined the ranks of Distinguished Companions of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

The 82-year-old battler for Maori women was reluctant to accept an individual honour, and says she carries it on behalf of all those she has worked alongside.

"I'm not sure if I've achieved anything except that I've been there for any of our people and I try to continue that.

"But it'll be a surprise for my whanau and I'll be there with them when they hear.

"It is an honour, not for me, but for all the other women from the North Island to the South, in the rural communities and the urban areas, who keep things going - those unsung women who keep the wheels turning."

Miss Delamere lives in the Wellington suburb of Hataitai, but credits the tiny eastern Bay of Plenty communities of her youth with shaping her social vision.

"We were raised by all the adults and relatives who were always there to put you in your place at the same time as they were teaching you. Those values of caring for each other remain strong, but the greatest thing I ever learnt was that everybody has to make a contribution to the well-being of the family and the community."

Miss Delamere is of Te Whanau a Apanui and Te Arawa descent and is a life member of the Maori Women's Welfare League she helped establish in 1951.

She has also served with the Maori Education Trust, the Wellington TB Association, the New Zealand Planning Council, the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, the Community Health Initiative Funding Scheme, the projects funding committee of the Ministry of Women's Affairs, the Prison Chaplains Advisory Committee, Age Concern and Pacifica.

The long-retired social worker said her role model has always been the famed Hokianga kuia Dame Whina Cooper.

"I have worked alongside her and she really was a tremendous person with a simple philosophy: if you nurtured the family, you also nurtured the community."