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New Zealand's most distinguished Maori poet.

16 Jan 2008 Hone Tuwhare leaves literary legacy Creative New Zealand mourns the loss of poetry icon Hone Tuwhare (Ngâ Puhi, Ngâti Korokoro, Tautahi, Uri O Hau, Te Popoto), who passed away on 16 January at Ross Home in Dunedin.

"The expression ‘the mighty totara has fallen' is entirely appropriate in the passing of Hone Tuwhare," said Alastair Carruthers, Chair of Creative New Zealand. "He has been pivotal in developing the literature of this country."

In 2003, Hone Tuwhare was one of three outstanding New Zealand writers to receive the inaugural Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement. Fiction writer the late Janet Frame and historian the late Michael King were also recognised.

"Hone helped us understand what it means to live in New Zealand. He celebrated love, life, our natural surroundings and wrote about many contemporary issues. His beautiful observations and wit form a legacy for generations to come," Alastair Carruthers said.

Hone Tuwhare was born in 1922 near Kaikohe. His first volume of poems, No Ordinary Sun (1964), was the first published collection of poems in English by a Mäori writer and was continuously reprinted.

Other collections and plays followed, including Mihi (1987), Deep River Talk (1993), Shape-Shifter (1997) and Piggy-Back Moon (2002). Twelve of his most celebrated poems were turned into songs by leading New Zealand musicians in the CD Tuwhare in 2005. He won many awards, fellowships and accolades for his work, including the Te Mata Poet Laureate and the Arts Foundation Icon Award.

Great Poet Hone Tuwhare, one of New Zealand's literary icons came to Dargaville on A Sentimental Journey.
Travelling with the award winning poet playwright and short fiction writer on the Northland-wide Sentimental Journey tour will be Northland poets and musicians Glenn Colquhoun, Mahina Kaui and Lavinia Kingi.

The title of the tour is fitting for a man whose life began in Northland and whose associates on the tour live in or are from Northland.

But the title also touches on what Tuwhare's work is best known for - themes of love and friendship, the celebration of life and feelings, and the experience of death and loss.

Among other literary awards and recognition, he has twice been the Otago University Burns Fellow, the Hocken Library Fellow, the Auckland University Literary Fellow and in 1999 New Zealand's second Te Mata Poet Laureate.

Born in Kaikohe in 1922, Tuwhare grew up in Auckland. He has links to Kaipara through Te Uri O Hau ties.

His father was an accomplished Ngapuhi orator and storyteller who encouraged his son to explore imagery, rhythms and language. The young Tuwhare spoke only Maori until he was nine years old.

When he was an apprentice at the Otahuhu Railway Workshops, Tuwhare met the late R.A.K. Mason who encouraged him to write.

He became politically active in unions and until the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956 he was a member of the Communist Party. That membership had repercussions later when his early work was banned from publication in the Maori Affairs publication Te Ao Hau because he had been a communist.

Tuwhare's first published volume, in 1964, was No Ordinary Sun, one of the most acclaimed, widely-read and often reprinted books in New Zealand poetry.

He has since published over a dozen volumes of poetry, short fiction and essays and a play called In the Wilderness Without a Hat, first performed in 1989.

Tuwhare's early work excited readers with its ability to cut across the social and cultural divisions and thinking of post war New Zealand. His work was notable for its haunting lyrical response to the country's unique land and seascape, and his evocation of Maori myth and images, comfortably integrated in modern poetic idioms.

Also notable was his sometimes edgy but always controlled angry protest from a Maori perspective on issues affecting Maori. He was actively involved in the 1975 Maori Land March.

But Tuwhare's work avoided the limitations of being labelled Maori or non-Maori. It was widely accepted and admired for its pathos, humour, intimacy, controlled anger and a comfortable New Zealand vernacular familiarity.

In the 1970s the raised voice of protest changed to a conversational tone but never wavered from its satirical, humourous, evocative and emotive intensity and variation.

One of the best known political poems from this period is To a Maori Figure Cast in Bronze Outside the Chief Post Office in Auckland, a rich, dramatic monologue touching on New Zealand politics, economy, class divisions and race relations.

Around this time his work also often represented a kind of sentimental journey, invoked through the subject of relationships or visits to family.

But although over the years his work became increasingly tied to land and rights issues, it also highlighted multi-culturalism and suggested a world of shifting, multiple identities.
Behind all the identities, however, was one true to the language, voice and aspirations of working class New Zealand.

It is a voice which can be and deserves to be heard, and one that will be joined by Hone Tuwhare's friends and fellow travellers on their Sentimental Journey throughout Northland.

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