Radio icon as cuddly as kina

Broadcaster Henare te Ua at home in Papatoetoe. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Even as we are arranging our meeting, on the phone Henare te Ua is telling stories. One is about how he once interviewed A.W. Reed, the publisher whose name is on the spine of te Ua's autobiography, In the Air. That interview took place, oh, many years ago, yet te Ua, slipping easily into his esteemed broadcaster role, talks about Reed as though he met him yesterday. "He was tall and angular, with rheumy eyes. He had all his wits about him."

This is a grand thing to say about a man who was then elderly.

Te Ua is 72. And I'll say this about him: he most certainly has all his wits about him. Rather too many for my liking. He is soon to tell me that he is "avuncular". He does look quite sweet, holding forth on the red couch with the green cushions with frilled edges. Don't be fooled. He is about as cuddly as a kina. As I am about to find out.

He also, endearingly, and at this age, with 40 years of broadcasting behind him - the final edition of his beloved WHENUA! was broadcast on National Radio in September, 2003 - can still sound like a schoolboy. "Triple yuck!" he writes of kina roe which have been dyed for Japanese markets.

He says come over at 10 o'clock for a cup of coffee. Reading his book makes you quite hungry, there's a lot about food in it, so I take Melting Moments and te Ua's partner of almost 27 years, Dudley Moir, has made date loaf. He offers coffee or tea. And te Ua takes his throne, the couch, and settles in to be interviewed. That is the idea, anyway.

We have scheduled an hour with him; we leave over two hours later. Which is just as well, because it feels like an awfully long time before I get to ask a question he actually answers.

So I ask Moir some and te Ua ticks me off by way of an interviewing tip: "You must ask questions." I was, I point out. Just not of him. Mostly he just talks, and who could mind, because he has been interviewing people for a lot longer than me and no doubt has concluded that he is much better at it. Also, he is a delightful storyteller whose yarns are accompanied by te Ua on make-believe piano, as a printing press, as a train. He sings from time to time, old tunes and Moir joins in to harmonise on You're Just a Flower from an Old Bouquet.

At 20 to 11 Te Ua turns on the radio so that we can watch him listening to himself reading his book on National Radio. I am talking to Moir, again - about various things including how much te Ua has left out of his book, which might have been interesting - and te Ua says sternly: "Listen".

He might say he is "avuncular." I say he is quite strict. Later, I am moved to say: "avuncular, my bum". I ask him to sign his book and he writes: "Your writing leaves much to be desired but it was great meeting you!" He has already told me, with undisguised glee that he had been telling people at the book launch the night before that he was looking forward "to seeing what Michele Hewitson has to say on Saturday. I don't really like her writing but they have bloody good photographs".

Now he's attempting to sell himself as a sweetie. Take note of the "but" of the dedication, he says. The "but" is very important, he insists.

But, then, he has decided we have to leave now, because the telly is coming to interview him and he has to "preen".

"Are you going to be rude to them, too?" I ask. "Oh, no," he says, this is Maori television and "I'm a matua." He puts on his cuddly, sweet old guy face and mimics being treated with kid gloves: "Are you all right, matua? Is everything all right, matua?"

"Is that where I went wrong?" I say and he says, "Yes. I'm an icon you know."

Well, he is. So he gets away with a lot. We might have to shut up and listen to him reading on the radio, and no wriggling, but watching him giggle with glee at what he's written, is at least as rewarding as attempting to interview him.

Writing the book was "a fillip", he says. He had been quite ill for some time: with what, nobody knows. He says the doctor decided to just test him for everything and the tests came back: "Cancer? Clear. HIV? Clear." He's something of a medical marvel.

He's a bit of a marvel, anyway, as well as an icon of course. This boy with the terrible stutter who grew up to be on the wireless. He was a very good boy, a shy boy, a whangai boy raised by his mother's eldest sister and her husband. His birth mother died of TB; he has no memory of her beyond the age of four. The father he never knew is buried in the war cemetery at Cassino in Italy. Te Ua is Apirana Ngata's grandson and his family were like royalty, really. Some people, both Maori and Pakeha, thought them "stand-offish and elitist".

He thinks this was because his family were adept at living in both Maori and Pakeha worlds, and that other people were perhaps "tinged with a little bit of jealousy because they couldn't fit in to that".

I thought he might have felt the weight of expectation as he grew up. He is, after all, the grandson of Ngata. He says he didn't then, but when he "bombed out" at Canterbury University - he was "tripping the light fantastic" - he just didn't go home and he was estranged from his family for, he thinks, between 10 or 12 years. "I thought about them every day and wondered, how the hell can I go back and be the prodigal son?"

He was reunited with his family after a glider crash. His father came to visit him in hospital and "oh, that's when the dam burst. All the fears I'd had for years were a waste of bloody time ... "

In his book he tells this story in passing. The story of the breakdown of his marriage he says he "will gloss over". When I ask him about this he mentions a review by North & South's Warwick Roger, which "takes me to task" for this glossing. "Bloody old queen," he says of Roger. This is breathtaking given his own queenly carry-on.

"You've probably realised," he says, "that Dudley and I are gay, of course. We've been together 26 years and suddenly people are saying: 'Well, why haven't you written about being gay?"' He says other memoirists don't write about being heterosexual: "Why should I?"

Moir says with the sort of amused resignation that often comes with long relationships that he thinks he rates "about one-and-a-half lines".

Te Ua says he's entirely comfortable telling his story but I'm not sure he is when it strays beyond the text of his book. When I ask him about this, he says "I've got no rows to hoe, no barrows to push or anything to hide or anything to be ashamed of. I never murdered someone and got away with it. Not yet." He can do a pretty good menacing look for an elderly gentleman.

And we all puff away on our fags and wheeze and laugh.

I had a pretty good idea he'd tell me how to write this piece, and, sure enough, he gave me some instructions. I wasn't to write "another Hewitson self-appraisal". So he'll probably be calling me something worse than a bloody old queen about now.

But I think he's a jolly entertaining sort of icon and I very much enjoyed meeting him. I hope he enjoys the photograph.