For the girls of St Mary’s the event represented the romantic zenith of their adolescent social lives. ‘It was a big thing for us,’ recalled Gillian Redstone, who joined Kiri in walking the length of the Town Hall to meet the Archbishop of Auckland, James Liston, that night. ‘We all looked forward to reaching the age of seventeen when we could actually be presented.’
Kiri was one of the undoubted belles of the ball afterwards. The tomboy was rapidly metamorphosing into a striking young woman. Her emerging beauty shone through in the carefully posed studio portraits taken to mark the event. Kiri’s dazzling white lace dress was set off by a pair of long silk gloves, an elaborate pearl necklace and floral earrings. The pictures offer a jarring contrast to the story of the girl who, in Kiri’s own words, ‘came from nothing’. They stand as evidence too of the skill with which Nell was now moulding her daughter’s image.
Nell had become friendly with the leading Auckland couturier Colin Cole. Cole’s salon on Queen Street was the domain of New Zealand’s high society. The designer’s exquisite garments were all one-offs. A Cole blouse cost around £250, four months’ wages for the average New Zealander, while evening gowns retailed at a stratospheric £1,200 – the cost of a modest home.
Cole’s client list included the Governor General’s wife and her social circle. Cole was regularly asked to lend his clothes to his socialite friends but invariably refused. Few New Zealanders possessed the persuasive charm of Nell Te Kanawa, however. The designer’s manageress of the time, Terry Nash, is unsure when the friendship started but saw its results.
‘Her mother was one of those ladies, a big lady, who really pushed,’ said Nash. ‘She would come and say, “Oh, it’s for Kiri, you know, so I think you should be giving it to her.” She expected people to do things for Kiri.’
Cole found it impossible to resist her. Kiri, in return, sang for free at several of Cole’s shows. ‘I don’t think Colin ever turned her down. He was a big softie,’ said Nash. Terry Nash is unsure whether Kiri’s debutante ballgown was a Cole creation. Regardless, it was magnificent, typical of the clothes which gave Kiri an allure her rivals could not match. As Kiri took the debutantes’ ball by storm, however, only one accessory was missing – a steady boyfriend with whom to share the romance of the night.
Kiri’s first experience of dating the opposite sex had been less than successful. She had begun seeing her first serious boyfriend when she was sixteen. According to her own account of the relationship, he was ‘several years older but rather less wise’. The courtship had come to an abrupt ending during a telephone conversation in which Kiri invited him to watch her sing at the prizewinner’s concert following the Auckland Competition of 1960. The boyfriend had been utterly disinterested in her music and had never once watched her perform publicly. ‘He replied that if I went in for the concert he never wanted to see me again,’ Kiri recalled. ‘It had never entered my head that anyone was going to try and stop me, so I just said goodbye and slammed down the receiver.’
Of her other crushes, only one, on the most handsome of the Hanson brothers, Robert, had lasted for more than a few weeks. Gillian Redstone would travel to Taupo for summer holidays with Kiri and the Hansons. ‘There was a bit of rivalry, boy-wise,’ recalled Redstone. ‘Kiri was keen on Robert at one stage.’ Kiri’s hopes may have risen when Robert Hanson agreed to accompany her to the debs’ ball. His lack of interest was immediately apparent, however. She had settled on the least promising prospect of all the Hanson boys.
Her dawn shifts at the Auckland telephone exchange left Kiri exhausted and often too tired to concentrate fully on her singing with Sister Mary Leo. For a while she tried working the ‘graveyard shift’ instead, rising at 2 a.m. and working until breakfast time. Even after a morning ‘nap’, however, Kiri arrived at her weekly lessons with Sister Mary drained of all energy. ‘They were terrible, terrible hours,’ she later opined.
Soon Nell had found her a less taxing alternative, at a sheet music store in Mount Roskill, not far from Mitchell Street. As well as offering less demanding duties and more convenient working hours, Nell’s logic argued that Kiri might also learn a little more about the great composers and the great music of the world at the same time. This did not work out either. Kiri soon clashed with the two elderly women who ran the store. She later claimed that they forced her to stand on her feet all day, eventually leaving her in need of a varicose vein operation. Six months into the job she quit.
Kiri worked briefly as a stenographer. Ever the dutiful father, it was Tom who eventually found his daughter the ideal job, however. Through his connections at Caltex he got Kiri an interview for a position as a receptionist at the company’s head office in Auckland. The work was undemanding – Kiri recalled once how she would spend most of her day chatting to people and the other half ‘enjoying tea and biscuits’. Monday mornings were frittered away shopping for flowers for the office. Most importantly of all the relaxed nature of the job meant she had time to travel to St Mary’s for lunchtime singing lessons with Sister Mary Leo.
Sister Leo’s doubts about Kiri’s dedication had deepened. Like Nell she knew that Kiri’s easy-going nature posed the greatest threat to her progressing as a serious singer. In addition, her fears that, freed from the cloistered peace of St Mary’s, Kiri would be drawn to the more straightforward, ‘trivial’ music she regarded with such disdain had quickly been justified.
While at Caltex Kiri had been introduced to Auckland’s ‘dine and dance’ circuit. For a few pounds a performance, Kiri would charm nightclubs full of inebriated couples with full-blooded renditions of hits from West Side Story, My Fair Lady or The Sound of Music. She would roar around Auckland in her car, accepting as many engagements as she could fit in a night. Often she would work until 1 a.m. to earn £20. At her lessons with Sister Mary Leo the legacy of her late nights in smoke-filled rooms was obvious. Eventually Nell was summoned for a council of war. Nell’s relationship with Sister Mary Leo had remained a difficult one. ‘I rather liked it, a certain aggravation going on there,’ Kiri laughed later. ‘I thought it was quite fun, rather a good floor show.’ Both women realised that Kiri had reached a crossroads, however. Sister Mary Leo suggested Nell might want to look for a scholarship that would pay for Kiri’s fees and allow her to concentrate more fully on her singing, Nell was in complete agreement. Back on the phone at Blockhouse Bay, she had soon identified a potential source of funds.
After generations of marginalisation the Maori were discovering their voice within New Zealand life. In the post-war years thousands of New Zealand’s indigenous people had moved away from their old lifestyle in the rural heartlands. Predictably the incoming population had found assimilation into the European-dominated cities a difficult process. By the 1960s the majority of Maori lived in conditions defined by poor housing, poor sanitation, poor health, poor education and a rising crime rate. The comparative life expectancy of the two communities in 1964 illustrated the point perfectly. For Europeans it was sixty-eight years, for Maori it was a mere fifty-four.
Driven to act, the New Zealand government had introduced a raft of initiatives designed to alleviate the problems. Among the most important stemmed from the Hunn Report on Maori education which in 1961 highlighted the low achievement of Maori pupils; just one in 200 of whom reached the seventh form. At the end of that year the government established the Maori Education Foundation (MEF) to provide scholarships to enable Maori secondary school pupils to continue their studies. An initial grant of £250,000 was soon attracting applications from talented young Maori. One of the first to arrive at the MEF’s Auckland offices was from Mrs T. Te Kanawa of 22 Mitchell Street, Blockhouse Bay.
Nell’s awareness of the quiet revolution under way may have been provided first by Kiri’s St Mary’s colleague Hannah Tatana. While Anna Hato from Rotorua had won great acclaim singing the pop songs of the day during the war years, Tatana had become the first female Maori singer to follow the pioneering trail into the classical field blazed by the barrel chested bass Inia Te Wiata in the 1950s.
‘The feeling then was that the Maoris were quaint, rural people,’ said Tatana. ‘Maori culture was looked on as being very “pop”, as it was, because the real culture