From baby Claire’s perspective, at least, there were more encouraging threads linking the lives of Nell Te Kanawa and Noeleen Rawstron. Of all the parallels, perhaps none would prove so significant as the fact that both Nell and Noeleen had found themselves involved in mixed-race relationships.
As her second marriage headed towards divorce, Nell had met and fallen in love with a soft-spoken, deeply reserved truck driver also lodging at Grey Street. In Atama ‘Tom’ Te Kanawa, it turned out, she had found the ideal man with whom to reinvent herself.
Tom Te Kanawa’s family originated from the west coast of the North Island, near Kawhia Harbour and the community of Kinohaku. His bloodlines led directly back to a legendary Maori figure, Chief Te Kanawa of one of the Waikato tribes, the Maniapoto. Chief Te Kanawa’s primary claim to a place in New Zealand’s history rests on his exploits in the Maori wars of the 1820s. In 1826, Te Kanawa and another chieftain, Te Wherowhero, had ended the ambitions of the region’s most feared warlord, Pomare-nui, by ambushing his canoe and murdering him. According to Maori folklore, the two chiefs had then cooked and eaten their vanquished rival. As the gruesome ritual had been carried out, strange, yellow granules had been found inside his stomach. Thus, corn is said to have arrived in the Waikato region.
Tom was one of thirteen children born to a farmer, Kiri Te Kanawa, and his wife Taongahuia Moerua. By the time Tom, his parents’ fourth child and third son, arrived in the world in 1902, the Te Kanawa family had moved from Kawhia inland to the lush green hills above the small towns of Otorohanga and Waitomo. Tom spent the formative years of his childhood in a community built around the family meeting place, or marae, Pohatuiri. The community was a remote collection of earth-floored houses made from punga logs – the trunks of a native fern tree – set miles from the nearest roads. His early life there was rooted in a simple, self-sufficient lifestyle that had served the Maori people for centuries.
Tom’s younger brother, Mita, later wrote of the Te Kanawas’ way of life in a privately published history. He remembered Pohatuiri as a ‘very busy community’, and looked back with affection at ‘the closeness, unity and warmth of everyone’ who shared their world. The fertile land around Pohatuiri provided almost everything they needed. The families bought in only sugar, salt, flour, tobacco and alcohol to supplement their home-brewed supplies. Seafood was often provided by family members from Kawhia. In this land of milk and honey, the depression that afflicted the rest of the world in the 1930s passed almost unnoticed.
The highlights of each year were the huis, or feasts, prepared communally. ‘Our family homestead was situated just above where the spring and the orchard trees were. Whenever there as a hui approaching, everyone planned on the preparation for the function,’ Mita wrote. ‘Each family group looked after certain duties, but we all helped each other. Fruit picking was done by all of us – we collected the fruit and our kuia [elder women] would be busy with the making of jams, pickles, sauces, preserves and homebrews.’
Both Tom’s parents were God-fearing individuals. Taongahuia’s family were staunch members of the Christian Ratana movement, named after its founder Bill Ratana, a farmer who had become convinced of his pastoral role after witnessing visions in 1919. Kiri was never slow to chastise younger members of the family overheard using bad language. It was a community steeped in the Maori language, and its tradition of passing its history on orally rather than the written word. According to the family, Kiri was the possessor of a fine singing voice. ‘Kiri and his wife couldn’t speak English at all. They didn’t really have to up there,’ said Kay Rowbottom, Tom’s niece, the daughter of his sister Te Waamoana. ‘They maybe could read a little but not speak it, perhaps just a few basic words.’
At school, however, Tom was introduced to the harsh realities of New Zealand life. Tom and his siblings were taught English as a second language and were banned by statute from any use of their native tongue. ‘In that era they would have been beaten with a leather strap for speaking Maori,’ said Kay Rowbottom.
Tom’s childhood in the hills eventually came to an end when he was sent to a foster mother, Ngapawa Ormsby, in the town of Otorohanga. The arrangement was far from unusual. ‘Kids were fostered out as workers,’ said Kay Rowbottom. ‘They were like slaves. In a lot of cases, the girls worked in the houses and the boys on the land.’ Tom’s unhappiness at the arrangement was soon obvious, however. ‘I don’t think Tom enjoyed his time down there. I remember people talking about it years later.’
Tom went to a local school for both Maori and European (or Pakeha) children but, like all but the offspring of the wealthy, had no option but to leave at the age of twelve. Forced to find his own way in the world, he became increasingly estranged from the Maori family in which he had been raised. The death of his parents and the end of the old lifestyle at Pohatuiri, where the old community was slowly reabsorbed into the bush from which it had grown, only added to the distance between him and his siblings.
While the Te Kanawa family moved to the Moerua family’s marae at Te Korapatu, Tom decided to break away from his roots and move to Gisborne on the east coast. He arrived there in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It was while renting a room at 161 Grey Street that he met the formidable figure of Nell Whitehead.
On the face of it, at least, Tom and Nell made an unlikely couple. At the age of thirty-seven, Tom was five years Nell’s junior. He was as taciturn as she was ebullient. She had been married twice before, he had seemingly formed few, if any, lasting relationships. Yet against all the odds they seem to have conducted a whirlwind romance. They were married in Gisborne on 14 July 1939, only twenty-four days after Nell had been granted a decree absolute dissolving her second marriage.
In many respects Tom and Nell Te Kanawa were older, wiser and, in Gisborne terms at least, more financially secure versions of Jack Wawatai and Noeleen Rawstron. From the very beginning, they devoted their lives to giving their only daughter Kiri everything she could possibly want in life.
Perhaps Tom’s most significant gift was the name he chose for his baby girl. His choice of his father’s name served a dual purpose. In the short term the name short-circuited any arguments within the family over the child’s adoption into the Te Kanawa line. While fostering was a common practice among Maori, full adoption was rarer. Tom’s relations, notably his younger brother Mita, believed the Te Kanawa name was reserved for blood family and adoption diluted that exclusivity. ‘Mita didn’t like adopting kids,’ said Kay Rowbottom. ‘His only daughter Collen was fostered by him and his wife but they never adopted her. She was always known as Collen Keepa, her birth surname, and she’s no relation of the Te Kanawa family.’
Tom, who had been unhappy during his time as a foster child, was not about to condemn his only daughter to such limbo. Deliberately or otherwise, by handing on his father’s Christian name, a gift Maori tradition dictates can only be given once in a generation, he signalled to Mita and the other members of his family that baby Kiri was his own child. ‘They believed she was a blood daughter because Tom had given her his father’s name, Kiri,’ said Kay Rowbottom. In the long term, the distinctive name, and the heritage that went with it, would prove an incalculable asset. Kiri would come to draw on her Maori ancestry, even write a book, influenced by the magical elements of her roots. On a more practical level, she would appreciate too how it lent her a name and an image that would count for much when she left her native New Zealand.
As she herself put it years later: ‘It’s unique to be Maori, to sing opera, have a fantastic name; it’s all rather exotic and interesting. Better than being Mary Smith with mousy hair.’
Kiri arrived at Grey Street around the time that Nell became the house’s new, official owner in September 1944. The colonial style, white, weather-boarded house stood in the heart of the town, on a peninsula near the town’s docks and the estuary of the Turanganui River. Nell had paid £1,400* for the property, which had been repossessed from its previous owners by its mortgagees. When Nell had first arrived in Gisborne it had been a busy guest house run by a Miss Yates. By luck or judgement she took over as its new owner as Gisborne, a shipping centre for the frozen meat industry for more than sixty years, passed through one of the busiest periods in its history.
Gisborne,