My grandmother Maudie Tamehana was 9 when the American stock market collapsed in September 1929. Also known as the Great Crash, It was considered the worst economic event in world history and it signalled the beginning of the Great Depression.
As an agricultural country, New Zealand was particularly vulnerable because it relied on income from exports. As those earnings plummeted, jobs and wages were slashed. Soon people were desperate and hungry. Māori were almost entirely left to fend for themselves.
Born in Maxwell in November 1919, and raised in Pūtiki from the age of 3, Maudie often spoke to me of her experiences as a child during the Depression, usually while we were sitting in her kitchen, polishing the silver.
"We were poor", she told me. "Everyone was poor. But every family at Pūtiki had its own maara [garden]. We always had veges, there was plenty of fish and we had eels.
"My parents worked very hard tending the garden. There was always a lot of puha around. We never bought cabbages or silverbeet. Our greens were puha and watercress. My brother and father would go fishing around the bluff in their little boat.
Pūtiki Marae, around 1936. Photo / Photograph Mete Kingi whānau archive
"In those days the river was ours, we swam in it. It was our river. During the floods we all knew that there would be wood coming down the river.
"That was a source of income, we would catch the logs as they drifted down the river. Each family had their own landing on Pā road (now Takarangi St). No one dared touch wood that had been gathered by other families.
"My father would cut the wood into lengths and sell the excess. The floods in the river were a good thing for us. It brought us a lot of joy because we all knew we would have wood. We had open fires. We didn't have electricity, we didn't have stoves or running water."
"We had a huge open fire that my mother would cook on. It was made from bricks. My mother would send me down to the river with a bucket and a scooper to collect a type of clay that turned a blue/grey colour when it dried. She would dampen a rag and dip the rag into the clay and use it as a polish for the fireplace.
"We lived in a big wooden house with highly polished floors. I would help my mother polish those floors. It was a job I hated. Every Christmas my granny would make my mother a set of five whaariki (woven mats) to cover the polished floors. My father Haimona, as a small child, when visiting his grandparents on Pā road, would straighten the mats."
Gifts for children in Maudie's family were unheard of. There was no money for Christmas or birthday presents. In 1925 Maudie was 6 and she was given the one and only gift that she received as a child, a porcelain doll, given to her by her Aunty Kara who had just returned from a world tour with Tahupōtiki Wiremu Ratana and his band.
"It was so beautiful, that I cried and cried. I could not believe that it had been given to me," she told me.
She cried again a couple of days later when she found that her brothers had pinched the doll and had tied it to a fence post and were practising sling shots at it with stones.
"For many around the world, the Depression was devastating, but for my grandmother, in her formative years, it was a time of family and community, of helping and supporting one another. Families who I push the stop button on the old cassette player and pop out the tape. It's been 16 years since I've heard my grandmother's voice. I can hear her, clear as a bell, speaking in an interview recorded by the Whanganui Regional Museum in 1994.
"We may have been poor but we were loved, and there was always food on the table and a fire in the hearth."
It must be time to get out the Silvo.
• Lisa Reweti is programmes presenter at Whanganui Regional Museum.
