Bianca Fallon's time at Māori Television 20 years ago ignited her journey to rongoā.
With over 25 years of experience in hair and makeup and a master’s degree in Applied Indigenous Knowledge, Bianca Fallon has seen a huge need for rongoā Māori medicine in her business.
Rongoā Māori is traditional Māori healing, which incorporates herbal remedies, physical therapies, and spiritual healing.
“They are coming to me for hair and makeup, but it ends up being about something else,” Fallon said.
“Particularly after lockdown, they have been coming in and they have mental health issues.”
In 2022 ACC began offering rongoā Māori services for all injured New Zealanders, to help them rehabilitate from a covered injury.
As the daughter of former All Whites coach Kevin Fallon, and sister to current interim All Whites assistant coach Rory Fallon, football was a huge part of her upbringing, and this shifted her away from her tūrangawaewae in Gisborne.
“I should have been brought up on my marae. I should have had my tohunga beside me to teach me,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter that it’s taken this long, the fact is that I’m here now.”
Her journey to rongoā began at Whakaata Māori where she was head of hair and makeup from 2003 to 2011.
“When I was at Māori TV, I got rid of all the mainstream products that were filled with talc and lots of chemicals. I just felt for some reason I had to go down this mineral path,” she said.
During her Master’s, she discovered Māori wore kōkōwai (red ochre) combined with shark liver oil for its medicinal purposes but also to ward off unwanted spirits.
She uses mineral cosmetics, karakia, sound vibrations, and cleansing rituals, to shift a client’s mauri (life force).
Different states of mauri can help to explain different levels of well-being.
For example, mauri noho (languishing); mauri rere (unsettled), mauri oho (activated); mauri tau (in balance), and mauri ora (flourishing).
“They’re coming in highly tapu [sacred] and I’ve got to lay hands on them. So my job is to get them back to tau, get them balanced, and shapeshift them so that their wairua [spirit] reconnects with mauri ora,” she said.
While her aim is to get her clients to mauri ora, she believes mauri is constantly changing and we can’t be in mauri ora 100 per cent of the time.
“We change every single minute of the day, every time we change our mind, and our emotions,” Fallon said.
“One minute we’re angry, we are sad, and the next minute we’re happy. Those are all states of mauri that shapeshift us.”
Fallon also believes that clothing, haircuts, and makeup can be used to create a shift in a person’s mauri.
She has been asked by Toi Mai Workforce Development Council, which deals with creative, cultural, recreation, and technology issues, to sit on the hair and makeup advisory board.
“My job is in a bi-cultural way to explain to these policymakers, this is why Māori think the way they do, and also help Māori to understand the way our governments, universities, and our policymakers think, so that everyone feels safe,” she said.
