Going home: Touched by something in the air in Rotorua

For a middle-class Pakeha girl, JAN CORBETT had a good dose of Maori education growing up in Rotorua.

One of my favourite childhood memories is of rising early on Christmas morning, heading for the lounge where the presents were waiting and finding Dad - a habitual early riser - still in his dressing gown pacing the floor, as is his habit.

Before the excitement of opening presents began, he would direct our gaze out the front window, which frames a panoramic view across Rotorua to the lake and the unchanging bluish hump of Mokoia Island. "Can you see the hangi fires?" Dad would ask. Around the lakefront, plumes of white smoke would be rising into the early-morning air.

Even in my child's mind it would intrigue me that, while people like us up on the hill were celebrating a European sort of Christmas, down at Ohinemutu people were marking the moment in an entirely different way. It impressed me more that my white middle-class parents seemed to have this wonderful inside knowledge of how things were done down at the pa.

Funny how going home for Christmas makes you think about these things. It is only a three-hour drive from Auckland, but going home to Rotorua can seem like travelling to another world. By the time I reach the Mamaku ranges something in the air changes. It becomes cooler. The bush gives an aura of mystery and speaks of ancient times and muscular warriors.

The route into town takes me past the cemetery where my grandparents, and several of my classmates from long ago, are buried. Kids in my class started dying in accidents from about the age of 10.

The road takes me on past Rainbow Springs where tour buses bring in load after load of Japanese, Americans or Australians or whoever to see rainbow trout, among other things. Here I slaved through a couple of summers selling them fake Maori carvings, sheepskin rugs and possum fur coats and developing an abiding contempt for tourists and the industry. Does that make me an economic saboteur?

The high point was the day a pre-Band Aid Bob Geldof came in and bought postcards.

I travel on down Fairy Springs Road, looking now like the entrance to any North American town, lined with car yards, fast-food joints and petrol stations. The old home town at least looks prosperous and a four-lane highway must mean it's been growing.

I glance always at the car firm where my father spent his accounting career, and maybe where he learned from the staff about the Christmas hangis. I remember the hot afternoons when we were a one-car family and after shopping with Mum we would have to wait there for Dad to finish work to take him home. And I remember my sisters and I going in to the office with him on the weekends to play on the telephones, until the operator complained.

I do not love Rotorua in the way that I love Auckland. It always seems colder and cloudier than the rest of the Bay of Plenty. But I am glad to have grown up there.

To the thousands of visitors who pour into Rotorua each year, it is nothing more than a giant theme park. To me it is where I got as close as possible to a bicultural education - at least as close as was possible in the pre-politically correct 1970s.

At my convent school on the poorer side of town I was one of the whitest kids in the class. Looking at the faces in the old school photographs, at least three of them were Morrisons.

Probably because the head nun, Sister Zita, was Maori, we started learning Maori from about the age of 8, sang mostly Maori songs with actions and pois, did field trips to the marae at Ohinemutu and learned, unsuccessfully in my case, to weave flax baskets.

Once we were asked to put together some material for a school in Christchurch where they were "doing the Maoris". The teacher had to explain to us that there weren't many Maoris in Christchurch. I can remember trying to imagine this town of prissy white people, and it made me shiver even then.

By secondary school things started to change. It is about this time that most New Zealand children become vaguely aware of our informal class structures. Many of the Maori kids I had played with at primary school did not follow the rest of us into the single-sex Catholic secondary schools. They went to the state high school and from our perspective were never seen again.

Secondary school still had a large Maori population, but there were more Pakeha in the class, and in time that made a difference. A well-meaning Pakeha principal, new to Rotorua, made Maori a compulsory subject and the fourth-formers, who included my sister, were corralled into the school's Maori concert party.

The teaching of Maori today continues to suffer from having too few good teachers trained in the subject. In the 1970s the problem was even worse. The teaching was lacklustre, the class mostly uninterested and out of control. But it was positively civilised compared with what was going on in the co-ed Maori concert party.

My sister came home one day with the distressing story of how the male instructor had said to the girls, in front of the fourth-form boys, that he could tell when they were breathing properly because he could see certain parts of their anatomy going up and down. And he didn't use the correct biological term.

Mum went to see the principal. The Maori cultural instructor wasn't seen around the school much after that and membership of the concert party became voluntary.

These days when that story is told around the family dinner table we cry with laughter.

The Pakeha backlash was borne out in the parent survey the following year and after that Maori language classes became optional. The lesson, I think, was that appreciation of Maori culture cannot be forced by patronising Pakeha.

In its place we were taught a wildly more popular subject - New Zealand history from a largely Maori perspective. Long before Bastion Pt or the Waitangi Tribunal we were taught what was meant by the call to ratify the treaty. That would have been a rare discussion in New Zealand secondary schools in 1977.

By sixth form the number of brown faces in the class had diminished significantly. By seventh form there was only one. I've lived and worked in a Pakeha world since.

I wonder sometimes what happened to those Maori kids from school. I know one, my best friend in Form Two, went on to be a broadcaster and that another, my other best friend since primer two, lives not far from my parents on the hill. But we have so little in common now and swap Christmas cards only occasionally.

As I write this now I read that Rotorua Maori account for the city having one of the most shameful health records in the country. I cannot help thinking that, for some of them, life might be tougher than we imagined it could be at school.

I doubt they give a second thought about me, although they might remember how they teased me for being so white or if I mispronounced a Maori word. They, too, could be racial bullies. They might also remember that their parents would be confused on meeting me because most of the Corbetts in Rotorua are Maori. They would sometimes look at me hard, then conclude, "You must be one of Dave's girls."

I doubt they have any idea of the impact which growing up with them had on me.

It is more than the fact that when I am showing visitors around the town I can take them down to Tamatekapua, the meeting house at Ohinemutu, and explain how he was the chief who captained the Te Arawa canoe from Hawaiiki.

It was there one night when I was still a child, after a concert to which Mum and I had taken two English visitors, that a Maori woman took my mother aside, called her by her maiden name and embraced her with a hongi. It surprised me to realise Mum had had the same sort of friends at school that I had.

I can point to the Tunohopu marae next door and know not to put a foot on it without being invited. I can tell them about how Rotorua was discovered by Ihenga, who crossed inland from Maketu and found the lakes because his dog vomited whitebait and that Rotorua was the second lake he discovered. I can show them the jade-coloured waters of the Green Lake and explain that no one swims in it because it is tapu. At Tarawera I never leave out the story of the ghost canoe.

I could never claim Rotorua is not a racist town, even though there is a high degree of interaction between Maori and Pakeha. I could never claim to be conversant with Maoritanga in anything other than a Pakeha way. I cannot now string together a Maori sentence like I could in Form Three, but then the same is true of French which I took on to School C.

But growing up on the fringes of Te Arawa means there will always be a part of my soul that is touched by things Maori - and can see through the rhetoric. Mostly it means I can sit down with kaumatua, as this job sometimes demands, and feel that a part of me has come home.

* Jan Corbett is a Herald feature writer.