HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Kaea, Issue 5, 1 February 1981, Page 10

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Mrs Ria Moheko Taiaroa looks back on 80 years

The eightieth birthday party for Mrs Ria Wineera on 10 October drew 400 people to Ngati Toa’s rnarae at Takapuwahia in Porirua. All of her eleven surviving children came two of them from overseas and Minister of Maori Affairs Ben Couch was also there.

Paul Bensemann (married to one of Mrs Wineera’s grand-nieces) visited the popular lady of the pa before the party started and gathered these snippets of her unusual life story.

“If I’d known you were coming I would have gone to housey,” she said ... then laughing gave me a kiss at the door. With aroha and teasing, she keeps her secrets. Everyone at the pa knows “Aunty Leah”, but nobody knows Ria Moheko Taiaroa.

“Stop talking you’ll make me go deaf,” she interrupted when I started asking questions. In the last twenty years a city has grown up around her, but I walked off the street into the kitchen/dining room of a friendly old farmhouse. “I’ll make you a cup of tea to stop you nagging.”

While waiting for the kettle she finally talked about her husband, who died in 1952, and their marriage. “I never met him beforehand I was worried in a way but I soon got over it.” She smiled. “I don’t want to tell you any more there were no other pastimes in those days.” She spoke as if her life was all easy. “I think I was born at Otakou at the Kaik* anyway I grew up there ’til I was six, when my parents died. Then I went to my grandparents at Taumutu, besides Lake Ellesmere. We

had eels by the gallon, pukeko, wild duck, swan, trout never had to buy anything. We used an old water-trough to preserve meat filled it with salt and threw the carcass in.”

Just then there was a knock; the butcher’s boy brought in a boxful of meat.

“Gee I’ll starve, this is a tame bill,” said Aunty Leah, looking at the weekly docket. “Here’s the cheque I hope it bounces.”

When the boy had left we went into a dimly lit corridor where Aunty Leah held a small torch to put light on some very old faces. Walking to the woodstove in her slippers and old overcoat, she played down her family’s importance, but admitted what I knew already. Grandfather Hori Kerei Taiaroa was a pioneer Maori member of Parliament and was probably the last man trained in the traditional Kai Tahu wananga. He built a two-storied mansion at Taumutu with exotic gardens any English lord would have envied. The house is now 100 years old and the home of N.Z. Maori Council member Riki Te Mairaki Ellison-Taiaroa Aunty Leah’s nephew.

“I loved it there. We had plenty of visitors Ngata, Dr Buck, Carroll, Dr Pomare they were always too cunning, locked themselves away in the study.”

Aunty Leah’s grandmother had a fulltime maid and servant, and she spoke very little English.

“If a man came in, she’d say to us ‘she come’. Gee we laughed.” But the special Kai Tahu dialect Leah grew up with was knocked out in only three years at Te Waipounamu College. “The only Maori allowed was in the hymns.”

* Southern South Island word for “Kainga”

There are not many things she takes seriously one is her lack of confidence at speaking Maori, another is land.

After a “cup-of-tea” which included a woodstove-cooked leg of mutton and a loaf of rewena bread, she took me out to three large vacant sections amongst the houses across the road.

“People say ‘sell up Aunty, you’ll be rich’ but I don’t want to be rich.” Businessmen and their lawyers wanted to put flats there. “They came and saw me— they had all the answers.” But they tried to win her brain, instead of her heart.

For her, “progress” is the “pollution” sign at the harbour edge, and the scarcity of eels at Taumutu because of largescale commercial harvesting. Her third home at Otakou is now under threat.

“I know where they’ll put that aluminium smelter there’s a place where the people are buried.”

Going back through the gate she picked up the mail, embarrassed at herself for being so serious. We went back into the house.

The oldest (fifty-nine) and the youngest (thirty-six) of four bachelor sons who stay with her sat by the woodstove,

smiling. Their names are Ngahina, Takamaiterangi, Rakaiheria and Te Rauparaha but they are usually known as Hina, Taka, Chocolate and Junior. “They’ll stay until they’re nearly 100. They’ll drive me to Australia, or Hawaii.”

Said Junior, “That’s where two daughters are.” He put his hand on the room-long solid oak table. “There used to be sixteen kids around here.”

Before leaving I enjoyed another feed, with the two sons, and more laughter. When Aunty Leah came out to say goodbye her little dog Spotty followed ... and bit me on the ankle when I started the motorbike. She laughed. “He likes you.” It would have taken more than a dog bite, Aunty Leah, to keep me away from your birthday hui. Porirua M.P. Gerard Wall described the mood of that night: “To say that we love you is to put it mildly .. . but what more can we say?”

Ria Moheko Taiaroa of Otakou is great-grand-daughter of Matenga Taiaroa nicknamed

“Fighting Taiaroa” by the Pakeha and famous for halting Te Rauparaha’s southward conquest. In 1834 he brought 500 men from Otago and Southland in canoes up the coast for the final counter-attack against Te Rauparaha in Queen Charlotte Sound. They chased and skirmished with bands of Ngati Toa for two months before going home when supplies ran out.

Strong feelings continued into this century between Ngati Toa and Kai Tahu then in 1921 Ria Taiaroa became a human peace offering. She was given to Te Rauparaha’s descendant Te Rauparaha Wineera in an arranged marriage.