By the final years of World War II, Gisborne’s population had swelled to some 19,000 or so people. New Zealand’s links to its former colonial masters remained strong. When Great Britain declared war on Germany it had joined the effort immediately. ‘Where she goes, we go; where she stands, we stand,’ its Prime Minister, Michael Savage, had pledged. The nation’s navy was placed under Admiralty control and New Zealand’s pilots travelled to England to form the first Commonwealth squadron in the RAF.
A battalion of volunteer Maori troops was dispatched to the front line from where it would return garlanded with honours. While Mita Te Kanawa was among them, his brother Tom stayed behind to help maintain the flow of mutton, wool and food supplies that was among the loyal Kiwis’ greatest contribution to the war effort.
As New Zealand played quartermaster to the warring northern hemisphere, Gisborne’s harbour was filled with cargo ships bound for Britain and other parts of Europe. As it did so, its industrial base mushroomed. As well as freezing factories, the town became a centre for dairy, ham and bacon processing, tallow and woolscouring works, brewing, canning, hosiery and general engineering. Such would be its growth over the following decade that Gisborne would be officially recognised as a city in 1955.
For the young Kiri, the bustling quays were a place of endless fascination. She would make the short walk to the docks and stand for hours watching the ships sailing in and out, flocks of sea birds attached to their masts.
Her home at Grey Street was no less a source of fascination. In the grounds at the back Tom tended a few chickens, there was a disused tennis court and apricots, peaches and strawberries grew freely. At the front a huge, old pohutakawa tree, to be rigged with a swing later, stood outside the porch. The house stood opposite one of the town’s main ‘granaries’, or general stores, Williams and Kettle. The store had donated the Te Kanawas’ two cats, unimaginatively christened William and Kettle.
Given its central position, and the town’s hyperactivity, the Te Kanawa guest house was never short of boarders. Recounting her earliest memories later in life, Kiri realised she could barely remember a time when there were less than twenty people in the house. The one permanent fixture was an elderly boarder, known simply as ‘Uncle Dan’, who inhabited an upper storey bedroom he liked to call his ‘office’.
‘Every available space she could find Nell put someone in it,’ recalled one boarder, Myra Webster, sister of Nell’s son-in-law, Tom Webster. ‘Every little store shed was done up as a room. Upstairs she would have about four people crowded in each room. She wouldn’t turn anyone away,’ she added.
Nell’s head for business extended to a detailed knowledge of each tenant’s financial arrangements. ‘She always knew when their paydays were. She’d stand at the bottom of the stairs when they came home and she’d make sure they were paying up to date. Most of them were young Maori people who came down from the coast to work in Gisborne. She charged the going rate, about one pound ten a week, so she had a pretty good income.’
The healthy living the boarding house provided meant Nell could move away from her earlier sideline. According to one member of the family, Tom insisted that she stop performing abortions when they married. When he discovered she had defied him on one occasion, an enraged Tom grabbed his golf bag and broke each of his hickory-shafted clubs across his knee.
For Kiri as a child, the house – and its sprawling grounds – was a wonderland in which she could run free. Bedrooms climbed all the way to the third floor attic. Downstairs was dominated by a huge, farmhouse-style kitchen and dining room. At the front of the house, a lounge, complete with comfortable sofas and an upright piano, family portraits and Nell’s collection of knick-knacks, offered the only real refuge from the constant comings-and-goings. While the rest of the house was left in a ‘take us as you find us’ fashion, the lounge was kept spick and span for entertaining guests drawn from Nell’s ever widening social circle.
Nell’s social aspirations were clear to see. ‘Nell used to play croquet with a group of ladies at a club in Gisborne,’ remembered Myra Webster. ‘I think they enjoyed afternoon tea more than the croquet, but whenever these ladies came to the house, out would come the best china and all the dainty little trinkets and cakes.’
In his own way, Tom was upwardly mobile too. Unlike many of his family and the vast majority of the Maori population, he was in favour of assimilation into New Zealand’s dominant, white European culture. As he removed himself further from his family he immersed himself in the middle-class enclaves of the town, becoming a popular figure at the Poverty Bay Golf Club. ‘I think he wished he had a paintbrush and could paint himself white,’ one relation used to say.
His success in business only opened the doors wider. On his wedding certificate, Tom listed his profession as ‘winchman’. Since leaving school early he had worked on construction projects all along the east coast, specialising in driving trucks and operating cranes. With the contacts and cash he made from the most lucrative, blasting a road link to Gisborne via the previously impenetrable gorge of Whakatane, he had set up a small contracting company.
Tom, though no more than 5ft 10in, was a muscular and powerful man and prided himself on his physical strength and his capacity for hard work. ‘He had fingers like sausages, and these wonderful hands, worker’s hands,’ Kiri recalled once. ‘He never believed that he couldn’t dig a tree trunk out, lift a boat, lift anything because he was so strong.’
By the end of the 1940s he was able to build his own holiday home, a comfortable cabin, or ‘bach’, on the shores of Lake Taupo, a favourite New Zealand holiday destination in the heart of the North Island. Tom had always been famously industrious. In Kiri he had found a reason to work even harder. Nothing was too much trouble if it was for Kiri, the unquestioned apple of her father’s eye. When she was very young Tom built an elaborate dolls’ house complete with fitted windows, linoleum floors and a dressing table. ‘Kiri stayed in it for about a week, and then the old lady put a tenant in it,’ said Myra Webster.
In time Kiri came to value the Maori qualities bequeathed by both her natural and adoptive fathers. ‘I was given two marvellous gifts. One was white and one was Maori,’ she said later in life. It was not an opinion she voiced often as a young girl, however.
Kiri admitted later that Tom had ‘basically rejected the Maori side’ of his life. ‘My father would not speak Maori and I would not learn Maori because it was just not fashionable to do that,’ she said. ‘I was brought up white.’
Yet as Kiri took her first steps into a wider world, at St Joseph’s Convent School in Gisborne, her unmistakable heritage drew unwanted attention. Mixed race marriages were far from unusual in Gisborne. At St Joseph’s, however, Kiri found herself in more conservative company. She recalled once how her entire class had been invited to a grand birthday party at a well-to-do home in Gisborne. ‘They sent me home because I was the Maori girl.’ At the time, she claimed later, she was too young to notice, but Nell’s anger at the humiliation ensured the incident was burned into her memory. ‘My mother kept reminding me, and I thought, “Why does she keep reminding me?”’
The treatment meted out to Kiri and the two other Maori girls at St Joseph’s on another occasion left even deeper psychological scars. One day, without any warning, the three children were taken from school and forced to have a typhoid vaccination. ‘At that time in New Zealand, Maori children were considered to be dirty,’ Kiri wrote three decades later in Vogue magazine, the memory still painfully vivid. ‘It made me ill. I was on my back in a darkened room for two weeks afterwards. My mother was furious that she hadn’t been consulted and I never forgave the powers that be for doing that to me without bothering to find out that I came from a good clean home.’
At school, Kiri’s sense that she was somehow apart from other children was confirmed on an almost daily basis. Nell never appeared at the school gates to collect her, she recalled. ‘When it rained there would always be a little crowd