Witi Ihimaera: ‘Whenever things get hairy I think to myself, they’re only angry because we Māori survived’
The revered writer angered New Zealand audiences two decades ago with his play about an ancient woman who has witnessed 160 years of colonialism. Now it is premiering in Australia
Witi Ihimaera was in his 20s when, while sitting in front of the television with his mother, they watched an old Māori woman receive a birthday greeting from Queen Elizabeth. “If I received a telegram from the queen,” his mother said, on the couch beside him, “I would spit on it.”
Now 82, the revered Māori writer was at first inspired by this moment to write a novel about an ancient Māori woman who had lived to see all of their people’s clashes with New Zealand’s colonisers. “I realised writing a novel about a woman who would then be about 150 would take 150 years to write,” he chuckles.
Over more than five decades, Ihimaera, who lives in Auckland, has often written about Māori politics and resistance in his more than 40 works for adults and children, including the 1987 bestseller The Whale Rider, made into a much-loved film in 2002.
His idea for a story about a wizened Māori matriarch eventually became a play, Woman Far Walking, which is finally having its Australian premiere later this week at Brisbane festival, 26 years after it premiered in Wellington. The play follows Tiriti o Waitangi Mahana, a woman named for the Treaty of Waitangi signed between Pākehā (white New Zealanders) and Māori in 1840, her birth year. She is furious that she was named for the treaty, fuming: “What a namesake. A fraud. Full of lies and Pākehā promises.”
When the play premiered in 2000, Tiri had somehow lived 160 years and witnessed many of the major moments in the country’s history – including surviving a massacre at Ngatapa in 1869 and the 1918 flu epidemic that killed scores. The play didn’t receive an entirely warm reception because, Ihimaera says, many Pākehā were then resistant to acknowledging Māori losses of lives, land and language.
“It got booed a few times by people who didn’t like the fact they would have to apologise,” Ihimaera says. “It got angry as well as acclamatory responses … In my work, whenever things get pretty hairy I just have to think to myself, they’re only angry because we survived.”
Tiri is now 186 years old in the new bilingual adaptation from Auckland Theatre Company, directed by Katie Wolfe. When Woman Far Walking opened in New Zealand last November, audiences greeted it with “much more receptivity”, Ihimaera says.
“You just have to keep going through [angry responses] and make sure, for ever and ever, you keep putting the Indigenous point of view, or the alternative, radical, subversive point of view,” he says. “Keep on putting it because, somewhere or another, the equality will come in the middle, between the negotiations of both sides.”
The Treaty of Waitangi, a broad statement of principles on which the British and Māori made a political compact to found a nation state and build a government, has been the subject of fierce debate since it was first signed. There are major discrepancies between the two texts: in the English version, Māori cedes sovereignty to the Crown, while in the Māori text, they gave “kāwanatanga”, or governance, to the Crown.
Director Katie Wolfe sees the Treaty of Waitangi as, on balance, “a very positive document” and she is proud of the robust political conversations New Zealand has had. A new beginning to the play is being written for Australia, in which Tiri acknowledges she and the audience are on Turrbal country, in Meanjin/Brisbane.
“One of the sensitivities around that is there has been an ongoing struggle for treaty in Queensland,” she says. She hopes the acknowledgment of this local context by Tiri will be “very positive”.
Miriama McDowell, who plays Tiri, says the treaty is “at the centre of so many conversations I have as an artist”.
“It’s extraordinary: we have a document that is still so alive, that is beating so loudly, that we talk about it in so many different contexts. That is the power of this play: we just continue to bring it out into the light.”
Ihimaera likes to go to the national library in Wellington to look at the treaty: for him, it is a triumph. “The fact we have a treaty, first of all, is the main thing,” he says, emphasising that subsequent renegotiations have led to the return of Māori land and more equity for Māori language and health in national legislation.
He was worried that the treaty principles bill, defeated last year in the New Zealand parliament, would wind back Māori rights because it proposed abandoning the principles that courts and parliament had developed over decades to guide the relationship between the crown and Māori.
“There’s always that risk, but fortunately now there are really good, young negotiators, and we have been able to use the law to fight the law,” he says. “We have now been able to use our understanding of government process to make endless submissions to government, making sure we appear on television, on the radio, on daily news, constantly putting the Māori position. The younger generation is now front forward.”
Remarkably, two years ago at the age of 80, Ihimaera enrolled in a year of te reo Māori classes to learn to write more fluently in his native tongue; he felt he had been “ventriloquising” for most of his life. He has just written his first book completely in te reo Māori, out next year.
Learning his ancestral language was a quest to more deeply understand his culture – but te reo Māori also has unique challenges for a novelist. “It’s difficult because Māori think in terms of the collective, rather than the singular, ego-driven character. We have certain principles at the centre of our psychic world. But I’m hopeful people will understand why Māori are always standing up for their language, because if you don’t know the language, then you don’t understand the legacy.”
Ihimaera’s life has always been extraordinarily adaptable: in the 1970s he served as a diplomat, including a stint as second secretary with the New Zealand High Commission in Canberra where he would sneak away to join the Aboriginal tent embassy protest and “sing songs all night”. He cites many female Indigenous Australian poets, novelists and activists as influences, from the late Oodgeroo Noonuccal through to Larissa Behrendt, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Melissa Lucashenko, Anita Heiss and Marcia Langton.
Ihimaera was celebrating his 50th anniversary as a writer at the 2023 Brisbane writers festival when news of the failure of the Indigenous voice to parliament referendum came through. “I was with my Aboriginal friends, who started to cry and scream,” he recalls. “I found myself saying to them, ‘Tomorrow will be a new day. This will happen; it might take another 100 years … but one still must keep on walking.’”
In Australia, Victoria is the only state or territory to sign a treaty with Indigenous people, which occurred last November. Ihimaera “wouldn’t dare” to give specific advice about treaty negotiations to Aboriginal people “who have been on this Earth longer than any other peoples in the southern hemisphere”. But he does share a saying of his Te Whānau-a-Kai tribe: “hei whana pana mārō.” Which essentially means “Never retreat.”
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Tiri: Te Araroa Woman Far Walking is at Brisbane Powerhouse 10-13 September as part of Brisbane festival