1967: I hadn’t heard from my family in Rotorua for months and months, not a letter or a phone call, nothing. One weekend I decided to go back on the Herald bus, along with bundles of newspapers tied up with rough twine that were stacked in the side compartments and at the back of the solid Road Services Bedford. It was a cheap ride, but slow.
Snoring workers heading home for the weekend woke up only for a smoke or a sandwich as we lumbered through tiny country towns, offloading the news. Mine was the final stop. A watery sun rose over the lake as we drove down to Rotorua. I was home.
I trudged back to the pā and a house empty of people. One of the aunties next door said they were all at a tangi at Maketū, which seemed impossibly far away. I was home alone for the weekend, so I phoned around and heard there was a social in town that night, fundraising for an indoor basketball team: booze, a big supper and a good band. But most of my mates were married with little kids or had moved away, still doing the Real Thing. I decided to go on my own, just for a look, with my mother’s quarter bottle of rum pushed into my back pocket.
Reckless and randy, I soon found someone pretty to flirt with: Rita. Curvy, cute and very short, she preferred to dance up close, and I liked that. Sneaking smokey swigs of Captain Morgan, we folded easily into each other, following a gentle rhythm – fast, slow, fast. I steered her to the side door, into the carpark. We ended up pashing in the dark. But she was a handsy number, almost as aggressive as me. I was sprung.
She screeched in disgust, “Fuck! You’re a girl!”
Sprung; exposed. Caught out; caught. Headlights flashed on us, and a cracked voice called out, “Rita? Sis? You okay?”
Her brother was there, with his mates. They hurled themselves at me; I ran, chased by their words. “Fucken dirty bitch! Fucken bitch! Get her, the dirty bitch!”
Glad I was so small, close to the ground, I ditched the bottle and ducked behind a car. I ripped off my black snap-button shirt and aproned it around my hips, buttons inward. Stuffed the cap into my jeans and perked up the red skivvy, while I shook out all my hair, spilling it loose down my back. I then launched myself at a solitary young male leaning against the doorjamb.
“Dance with me!” I gasped, and he did. He was tall and graceful, utterly unaware of his beauty, – gentle and young, painfully shy. I liked him.
Around us, the hunt went on for the dirty fucken bitch; the story got wilder with every telling. No one found her. Still drunk, and extremely excited by all the drama, and wanting more, I took him back with me to our bath. It was his first time with a female; he had just turned 16. It was more or less okay for both of us. The next day, I waited for the whānau to turn up. But they didn’t, so I wrote Mum and my kuia a note, then went to the bus stop. The last one was about to leave. I jumped on and returned to Auckland.
*
1971: Having a Pākehā girlfriend in Mandy, and being ‘like that’ so shamelessly and openly, meant I was spending much more time on women’s rather than Māori issues. Hana’s gentle brother Patrick lived with a man, and we’d all talk about how hard it was being camp and Māori in the Big Smoke, and how sometimes you had to choose which fight to take on.
A few weeks after Waitangi, the university year began. A campus Women’s Liberation group was organised by Sue Kedgely and others from Political Science along with a gathering of disaffected backroom protest workers. Across town at Herne Bay, Women for Equality – a collective of socially aware thinkers, professionals, Republicans and young parents – was meeting to consider the same issues: equal pay for equal work; state-sponsored child care; free, safe, effective contraception; equal education opportunities; and freedom from sexist oppression.
Consciousness-raising groups were encouraged. We had three awkward attempts at 56 and 60, but they never worked while Mandy and I had so much to hide or bullshit about. No one knew she was back on the game, trading sex for cash. Our sexuality was something we performed, but some aspects of it we held close. I also instinctively knew my Māori self would never fit in to their consciousness-raising conversations. My experiences would never make sense to these women and their lives.
Mandy, a working girl, was more comfortable with the homely Herne Bay crew. They always had food, sometimes booze, and even though there were husbands and boyfriends around, the conversations were easy and far-reaching, with simple messages and a family atmosphere – yet they were radical. Women for Equality was also keen to work with the campus group.
The opportunity came with the University Capping Parade, which took place every May as a graduation tradition, promoting and celebrating Town and Gown, a frivolous counterpoint to the robed ceremonial procession of graduands and staff along Queen Street to the Town Hall. The combined women’s groups choreographed a parade of women’s roles, intending to expose the limitations of a sexist society.
We wore sashes or held aloft banners that proclaimed our identities. Sue, a former model and beauty contestant, portrayed Miss New Zealand in slithery emerald silk. I wore my Māori costume and boldly walked out as my former self, Miss Haere Mai, sashaying with the Stripper: Mandy in a G-string, fishnet stockings and a wiry ash-blonde wig. She wielded a douchebag like a slingshot, spinning it around our heads. Jackie, a voluptuous neighbour from 60, packed her remarkable curves into a black swimsuit stitched up with a little bobbing rabbit tail. Stilettos and perky fabric ears declared she was a Playboy Bunny.
As well as popular fantasy figures, more mundane characters included the Receptionist, the Cinema Usherette, the Nurse, the Shop Assistant, the Typist, the Schoolteacher, the Waitress, the Charlady, and a gaggle of women with babies in prams: the Mothers as well as the Invisible Housewives, the biggest unpaid labour force in the country. Placards high, voices shrill, banners flying, we attracted lots of interest, questions and insults as we trawled the long route to the Town Hall.
Some Māori spat their disapproval at me, but I didn’t care. Liberation sang its own loud song. We were a success.
Ngā Tamatoa was polishing its strategy, visiting schools and speaking to the Jaycees, the Lions and the Rotary Clubs around Auckland, and setting up teach-ins at suburban libraries. I stayed with women’s issues and tried to do well in my coursework, though once again I was talking back at my teachers. I proposed the poetry of Hone Tūwhare as a thesis topic. This was rejected vehemently by a panel of wise white people who declared he was evolving but not quite there yet. James K Baxter was suggested instead; I rejected that idea.
Baxter was still creeping in and out of 56 and 60, young girls in tow, and commiserating with Keir about the difficulties of having a Māori wife. He was always a visitor, never a resident, as he had a special project. He was busy setting up his commune for the dispossessed near Hiruharama, an isolated Māori community deep in the island’s interior. He named this remote Christian hippie sanctuary ‘Jerusalem’. Many times after midnight, when Mandy and I were having noisy sex – she was a shrieker and I was a snorter – we’d hear snuffling and groaning from the foliage near the bare bedroom window. Finishing off with a raddled cough, he’d trudge wheezing up the stairs; twice we spotted him lurking and gasping in the dark, but we said nothing. Mandy thought it was hilarious, a messianic peeping Tom, and decided he was harmless.
Later that year, I saw Baxter for the last time. He gave me a present: an old cigar box with green paper edging. “He tohu aroha.” He murmured fumes at me, and I felt obliged to hongi the blown pores and sweaty blackheads of his old drinker’s nose, looking downwards, not seeing the fetid skin tags and rancid creases around his tired eyes. I felt grateful but confused; I didn’t like him. It was a sad goodbye.
I opened that cigar box with Mandy. Poems. About us. Forty small quarters torn from ten unlined sheets of a raw brown jotter pad. I read the first two, neatly pencilled, flawlessly balanced. Compelling. The Songs of Bilitis in Grafton. I closed the box and put it away, never to touch it again. Someone stole it a few months later.
As part of my political work, I wrote articles and tried to dream up slogans. One piece was a searing attack on the status of Māori women, which was circulated at the time and published nearly a year later.
Craccum printed my controversial ‘Lesbianism, the elegance of unfettered love’, in which I argued for the rights of people to love without fear and condemnation, asserting that being made invisible was unhealthy and unacceptable. I emphasised that for women, loving each other was the best way forward. Ensnared by my passion for Mandy, I wanted others to experience that pleasure. As a right. Without guilt, without hiding away.
I was summoned by the two most senior female staff members of the English Department. They were medievalists, one a serene elderly monastic, the other much younger and afraid of being exposed for her own inverted love affairs. They reprimanded me for disseminating material that promoted unhealthy behaviour to vulnerable young women.
They told me to desist. I stood there with my head down, silent, and when dismissed, I backed slowly out the door. Arguing with them was pointless, but I didn’t retract any of it. I continued to hustle and write – and flaunt it all over campus.
Mandy and I were still the only out lesbians in Ngā Tamatoa and Women for Equality, brazenly flaunting it but not actively recruiting, despite my Craccum article. We had each other.
After drinking sessions at women’s social gatherings, some began to covertly express their curiosity. I was hugely flattered by the attention; some were refined older ladies with whom I flirted shamelessly, flashing my eyes, pouring their drinks, stroking their arms, admiring their fashion choices, being solicitous to their questions. I knew who I was going home with; that was understood. Even if Mandy had some secret, lucrative and sordid business happening with a guy around the corner, she always came back for me, and we left together.
One night she turned up as I was helping a slightly tipsy redhead into her coat and arranging her thick glossy hair over her collar. I paused to admire the texture, to inhale the scent. Just for a minute. Mandy noticed, said nothing. At the flat, she flew into a rage.
That night, aching all over and alone, I got my nose reset at the Auckland Hospital A&E. My dreams were beginning to bleed out.
Taken with kind permission from the new memoir Hine Toa: A story of bravery by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku (HarperCollins, $37). ReadingRoom is devoting all week to one of the year’s most important books. Tomorrow: an interview with the author, and portraits by Jane Ussher
