The 1975 Māori Land March
a memoir by vivian Hutchinson

3. Takurua — Winter

 

IT WAS ON RETURNING to Auckland from Taranaki that I began to notice more that Whina was referring to the march as a sacred march.

We were intending to walk over the very land we were fighting for. In many cases, people had given their lives in these land rights disputes. Such a march was never going to be a jolly walk down the road.

Whina explained that the marchers would be taking on the responsibilities of a much wider story of people and their connections to the land. And we wouldn’t be the only ones on the road – we would need to make room for the ancestors who would be walking with us.

It wasn’t until much later — when I was walking on the march itself — that I really began to understand more deeply what Whina meant by this being a sacred march.

I came to appreciate that a land march, this walking itself, is grief-work.

Yes, even nations must come to terms with the grief they have generated, especially in the dishonour of their broken promises.

A land march can begin to address that grief. There is a necessary conversation taking place between our walking and the earth, as we seek to create a genuine pathway to peace and reconciliation.

In Whina’s view, a sacred march would practically mean that every day would begin and end with karakia or prayer, with particular acknowledgement to the mana whenua of the different tribal lands through which we were travelling.

There would be strong discipline expected of the marchers, with people being asked to leave if they couldn’t live up to these expectations.

No drinking or drugs. No visiting hotels when we stopped along the way. No transistor radios while we were walking. We were expected to conform to marae protocol, and treat everyone we meet with respect.

If we encountered any criticism, or hostility from bystanders along the way, we would be expected to hold each other accountable for our own behaviour. We would respond to any provocations in a spirit of peacefulness and goodwill and, if met with force, we were not to respond with any violence ourselves.

The most visible characteristic of Whina’s concept of a sacred march was her instruction that there be no protest placards or flags carried on the march.

She pointed out that the Parihaka prophets or Princess Te Puea never carried placards. And neither did any of Whina’s other mentors. Her view was that protest placards were really a recent media cliché and were designed for photographs in a newspaper. She thought they were a visual assault that too easily became a distraction from a unified message.

“You do not need them,” said Whina. “The people who march have their own mana. They are their own placards.”

The only symbol that the march would be carrying would be the pou whenua. In pre-European times, this would be a large carved pole that a tribe would place in the ground as a symbol of land ownership. The pou whenua would be the single symbol of the intention of the march, meaning “This land is ours!” As such, it would become a potent expression of mana and rangatiratanga.

In her early speeches of her campaigning, Whina said her intention was to carry the pou whenua from Cape Reinga to Wellington, before sticking it in the ground outside Parliament as a challenge to legislators.

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SO HOW DID the march preparation activities get funded? Where did the money come from?

I can tell you that I never saw Whina Cooper filling in a funding application. Nor was she lining up before any philanthropic foundation to plead the virtue of her intentions.

Whina Cooper was already known as a formidable fundraiser. With her charisma and remarkable oratory, she had headlined many fundraising cultural events in the Māori Community Centre in central Auckland in the 50s and 60s, and she had led the fundraising to establish the Te Unga Waka urban marae in Epsom. She also had a reputation for being rigorous about who was looking after the money, and doing the book-keeping.

But when I joined the organising committee, I soon came to understand that the financial backbone of this new initiative was going to be its faith in the Māori cultural economy of koha (gift, or donation). As organisers, we were undertaking the shared risk that if we were doing the right thing, then the money would follow.

There was nothing magic about this process. And in the meantime – until people caught up with our vision – we paid for things ourselves.

Once Whina and the Matakite organisers published our intentions, we looked for allies and supporters ... and all sorts of people came out of the woodwork. Appeals were made to the existing networks of community and activist groups, marae, the union movement, and sympathetic churches.  Every person, whatever their modest circumstances, was invited and encouraged to make some sort of contribution. A bus, the loan of a car for a month, some food, some petrol, medical and cooking equipment, and yes, some cash ... they were all offered on a koha basis.

Koha is a fragile basis on which to base any sustained struggle. But during this time, I learned that the cultural economy of koha is not primarily about the money or goods being offered. It is about the relationship that was established through the gift. The giving, in itself, was a way of weaving the tangible foundations of this new movement.

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ONE OF THE SIGNIFICANT networks of allies and supporters came from CARE, or the Citizen’s Association for Racial Equality. It was during this period that I first met and reported on the activities of David Williams, who was the CARE Secretary. In later years, we would go on to become great friends and often travel to significant cultural events together.

CARE Secretary David Williams, in the 1970s

CARE was an unusual and inspiring group of Auckland active citizens who were playing a key role in generating a public conversation about racism and race relations.

David had brought some unique skills to his role as CARE Secretary — he had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and had taught law at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. In 1975, he was lecturing in history and law at Auckland University.

David is Pākehā, as were the majority of the CARE committee which included some other distinctive personalities such as Tom Newnham, Joris de Bres, Keith Sorrenson, Richard Northey, Ian Mitchell, Mary Hume and Helen Clark (later to become a Labour Prime Minister).

And the committee also included some key Māori and Pacific community activists such as Betty Wark, Fred Ellis, Helen Kesha, Titewhai Harawira and Agnes Tuisamoa.

When CARE members learned about the proposal for the land march, they immediately saw it as an opportunity to make sure that Pākehā were educated about the ongoing issues of Māori land, and how these concerns could also tell us about the real state of our nation in terms of race relations, equity and opportunity.

As the planning for the land march progressed, many CARE members also took it as their role to become practical allies by reaching into their wider community and church networks to gather support in terms of fundraising, petition-signing, and help with other resources and logistics.

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MEANWHILE, AT THE BEGINNING of July, things were starting to stir in government offices in Wellington. Matiu Rata, the Minister of Māori Affairs, thought it was time to try and stem the growing support for Matakite and the Māori Land March. He decided to launch a massive publicity campaign to tell would-be marchers of the progress he had made in settling Māori land grievances since he took office at the end of 1972.

Not on his watch. Matiu Rata photographed in 1968

It was no real secret that Mat Rata did not want this demonstration to take place on his watch. He felt undermined and discredited, and he saw the existence of Matakite as a vote of no-confidence in his efforts.

He was, after all, the first Māori that had been appointed Minister of Lands, and Minister of Māori Affairs. And it was especially galling to him that the march was proposed to start in the Far North, at Te Hapua, which was his own home town.

1975 was also going to be an election year for a Labour Government that was still on its first term. He did not want to see his political opponents use the march to their own advantage.

Mat Rata travelled to Auckland to launch his campaign which he hoped would get across the “facts” which would counter “a great lack of knowledge” about his many steps taken to overcome land problems.

These steps included the return of thousands of acres of land to Māori owners, plans to make changes to the Town and Country Planning Act, and his instruction to the Māori Trustee not to alienate Māori land without a Court order. Rata was also encouraging as many Māori land owners as possible to combine their interests into Māori Land Incorporations.

Rata said that the idea behind his publicity campaign was to let people know what has been going on “so they can judge for themselves”.

The campaign included a feature interview with the City News. Because of my role with Te Roopu o te Matakite, I had to step back from undertaking the interview, and it was done by an independent journalist, Wayne Brittenden.

In introducing his interview, Brittenden commented:

“As a person, Mat Rata is warm and congenial, as a political interview subject he skirted many direct questions with rambling answers that employed all the familiar expressions from the politician’s phrasebook.

“Mr Rata is in an unenviably pressured role as the representative of the increasingly impatient Māori community, and the Cabinet Minister of a party suffering from a severe bout of pre-election jitters.”

The Matakite organisers immediately convened a meeting to discuss the Minister’s publicity campaign.  We issued a press statement that gave a different view on many of the “facts” and specific points in Mat Rata’s comments. And we noted that while Mr Rata might feel contented with his performance as Minister of Māori Affairs, there was still a widespread sense of bitterness and impatience over the fact that the government hadn’t done more. The statement pointed out that

“… The march is an illustration of this growing impatience and is designed to make Parliament act with greater haste to satisfy Māori demands. It is also designed to provide the Minister with the support to implement more meaningful policies.

“Despite government action, we continue to lose Māori land. Te Roopu o te Matakite wants to stop the alienation of Māori land altogether. We don’t just want to slow it down.”

The publicity campaign was not the end of the matter, as Mat Rata and his team would continue to reach out to their own considerable networks to discourage their participation in Matakite and the land march.

And while this was going on, the march organisers had no idea that Mat Rata’s influence was much closer to home than they realised.

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IT ALSO FELT to the organisers, and to the Cooper family members in particular, that there had been moves taken to amplify the discontent with Whina Cooper’s own track record of dealings on Māori land. The family felt that some of the rumours were being spread by Māori Affairs officers who were loyal to their Minister.

As Michael King, Whina’s authorised biographer, later reported,

“... rumours began to spread from the minister’s office (not from Rata himself) that Whina was a hypocrite, because she herself had sold family land to Pākehās and made a great deal of money from the transactions. It was not difficult to find people in Panguru to add smoke to this fire by talking about Whina’s wheeling and dealing which they had not understood, and which some of the members of the community there had resented.”

Whina was naturally upset about these stories. They were being put about by people who did not know the details of her earlier business activities and land transactions. She told her biographer that, in order to stop the rumours, she arranged a meeting to confront one of the culprits at the Department of Māori Affairs in Auckland. The man subsequently apologised and admitted that the allegations were groundless.

Meanwhile, Mat Rata’s wide network of contacts were encouraged to make their own independent statements to news media to show that the support for the march was far from unanimous. Ironically, one of these statements later came from Waipu Pita, an elder of the Ngati Wai. He told the Northern Advocate,

“Mrs Whina Cooper is putting into the minds of our young people the idea to march on Parliament, while failing to tell them that if they lack land, it may be because of the selfishness of their own parents. Many Māori have sold their land to the Pākehā. Do they want that land back, to sell it again? ... I am sorry that the march puts Mr Rata in a position where it appears he is discredited before his people.”

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Fundraiser Ticket for the Matakite Benefit Concert at Te Unga Waka marae, Epsom, July 1975, sponsored by the Maori Women's Welfare League.

IT WASN’T UNTIL the end of July that Whina Cooper held her main Matakite fundraising event at Te Unga Waka. It was a very familiar context for her, and the event was being sponsored and co-organised by the Māori Women’s Welfare League.

The night saw performers from Hato Petera College, Tamaki College, and the Te Rongopai cultural group. A highlight of the evening was the unveiling of the freshly-carved pou whenua. This had been carved by Moka Puru, Whina’s son-in-law. The design features lizards, which Moka explained would have special significance for the marchers because lizards were territorial and never left their land.

The long pole was carried into the marae by two of the college pupils. After congratulating the performers, Whina said,

“What good is it performing if we have no land and we have to perform on Pākehā land? I don’t want our young to be a burden on the State. The pou whenua means that this land is ours. We’ll stick it in the ground to say the land will be ours.”

Interview with pou whenua carver Moka Puru from the documentary Te Matakite o Aotearoa -- the Māori Land March, directed by Geoff Steven (1975) http://youtu.be/fDRQYEr-yks

WHILE OTHER PREPARATIONS for the march were progressing, Whina herself was bringing together a new element of the Matakite strategy. She wanted the march to carry with it a “Memorial of Right” that would enshrine the demands of the Matakite movement and could be formally signed by rangatira along the route of our journey.

Again, in pursuing this strategy, Whina was symbolically weaving this 1975 demonstration into previous examples of Māori appeals for their land rights. King Tawhiao in 1886, and King Te Rata in 1914, had both taken petitions to the British Crown in London. These expeditions had involved the preparation of a Memorial or Statement of Māori Rights.

Whina’s own Memorial of Right was to be somewhat clouded in secrecy. She didn’t want the press getting hold of its details, and for it to be pulled to bits by public debate before it was delivered.

It was envisaged as a large scroll that could be ceremonially unrolled each night on the march, before inviting local rangatira to add their signatures. It would be housed in a leather-bound box, and wrapped in a protective cloak. As the Memorial gathered more signatures on its journey down the North Island, it would also grow in stature or mana and come to be considered a sacred artifact of our protest.

The Memorial would be addressed to all the Members of the House of Representatives – not just the Government – and they would be personally named up front.

Whina had asked her son, Joseph Cooper, to come up with the wording on the document. Joseph chose to write the three clauses in somewhat archaic terms. But in his final paragraph, he cut to the chase:

“... that all pernicious clauses in every statute of the present day or in new statutes of the future, which have the power to take Māori land, alienate Māori land, designate Māori land, or confiscate Māori land, be repealed and never to be administered on the remaining Māori land at the present day, and whereas management, retention and control remain with our Māori people and their descendants in perpetuity. Ake ake.”

Whina’s intention was that when the marchers got to Parliament Grounds, they would hand the Memorial over to the Prime Minister, and this would constitute the climax of our month-long demonstration.

 

Acting Parliamentary Speaker, Jonathan Hunt, with the Memorial of Right and cloak presented to him by Te Roopu o te Matakite, after the Māori Land March reached Parliament Grounds on 13th October 1975. He is also holding the signed forms of the Petition of Support. Photo by the Evening Post.

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AFTER WHINA EXPLAINED to us the purpose of the Memorial of Right, I discussed with her the need to also have a much wider petition. I understood the importance of her strategy of focusing on the signatures of tribal rangatira ... but we also needed a strategy to solicit the signatures of ordinary citizens – Māori and Pākehā – who supported the protest.

Whina agreed, and asked me to design a petition form that would be carried with us on the march, and we could invite onlookers to sign it as we walked through the towns and cities.

Whina was adamant that every page of the petition would carry her own signature. And she also wrote an introduction explaining the reasons for the march.

 

 

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AT THE END of August, we finally broke through into the mainstream media when the weekly newsmagazine The Listener decided to do a feature article on Whina and the preparations for the march.

Whina also did an Encounter television interview, which TV2 curiously promoted by describing Whina as a “80-year-old radical”: 

"... Mrs Cooper’s view is that the march will be a final bid by Maori people to prevent the creation of a landless proletariat with no dignity, no mana, and no stake in society."

The march organisers felt that the media exposure was finally giving us some of the national coverage that the land march needed in order to attract more tangible support. We needed as wide a group of New Zealanders as possible to be informed about the reasons for the march, so that there would be support for the necessary political action on land rights issues.

Throughout the campaigning, I continued to write articles and updates in the City News, including a larger front-page feature that discussed the history of Maori land rights issues, the reasons for the Matakite march, how the current legislation was continuing the land alienation, and the Ngati Wai case that was a clear example of discrimination.

A version of this article was later reprinted as an information brochure that would be passed out during the march itself as we walked through towns and cities.

Information brochure handed out during the progress of the Maori Land March, taken from articles by vivian Hutchinson in the City News.

I had begun this feature article with a quote from the well-known New Zealand poet James K. Baxter. He had become more recently famous for leading a hippie commune experiment at the Maori community of Jerusalem on the Whanganui River. He died in 1972, but in that year he produced a small pamphlet called A Walking Stick for an Old Man in which he outlined his wide-ranging thinking on Maori issues and the state of race relations in New Zealand. This pamphlet was later reprinted in the first edition of the local hippie guide-book, The New Zealand Whole Earth Catalogue under the title He Tokotoko mo te Koroheke.

 

Baxter’s thoughts had a huge impact on me at the time when I was a teenager living and working on the marae at Parihaka. As I read He Tokotoko, I felt as though my own intentions were also being named and seen.

In it, Baxter penned a memorable comment about land rights:

“ ... In relation to Maori lands, the government is like a dog crouching under a table on which somebody is crumbling a loaf of bread. Each time that crumbs fall to the ground the government licks them up with its tongue. It hopes in time to devour the whole loaf. This is the effect of the present Maori land legislation.” 

— James K. Baxter, He Tokotoko Mo Te Koroheke  (1972)

This seemed the perfect allegory to introduce my own article on what our land march was for.

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JUST A MONTH before the march was about to start, we finally gained an Editorial comment in the New Zealand Herald:

"The march will, of course, be more than a demonstration. It will be an exercise in logistics of a scale and nature rarely undertaken in this land. Even though only a hard core of people may march the whole distance, between some stages probably thousands of people will be on the road. Many of them will require feeding, overnight accommodation, and other support which the places they will reach will be hard pressed to provide without advance organisation.

“There will, too, be more than a touch of sadness about the march. Can it really halt or reverse a process that began more than a century and a half ago? Can old traditions of land ownership be reconciled with new realities, not least in their tribal implications? At best the answers are clouded in doubt. But the spirit and sense of purpose that promote the striving are in themselves achievement."

And a few days later, we heard from The Auckland Star:

"The extent to which the march snowballs or tapers off will tell the Government and the country much about the Maoris today. Is land still "the soul of the Maori people," as Mrs Cooper and others assert, now that the race is partly an urban one? Does legislation recently passed and promised on Maori Affairs and the Treaty of Waitangi really satisfy true Maori feeling? Can the race's culture survive if more of its land goes? And, more fundamentally, is this resurgence and reverence for the land a wave of the future or nostalgia for the past?"

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AND THEN AT A TIME when we least expected it – just two weeks before we were about to begin – the march was called off.

It was Betty Wark that told me, when she suddenly turned up in a taxi outside my flat, saying we had to go to a meeting. She said that the march had been cancelled, and Whina was going to lead a deputation of elders to Wellington to meet with the government and talk about legislative changes. A meeting with the Prime Minister, with full press coverage, was also being organised for the following week.

To say that we both were angry is probably an understatement. There was a feeling of deep betrayal by Whina who had made this unilateral decision without consultation with the rest of the Matakite organisation. We could only anticipate a sense of disempowerment amongst the whole organising team.

We were not unaware of the other forces that had long been in play. And the Minister of Māori Affairs, Mat Rata, had bided his time to see whether march preparations were indeed coming together before he made his move.

Just three weeks before the march was due to start, Rata had met with about 200 march organisers and supporters at Te Unga Waka marae in a five-hour meeting behind closed-doors. No press were allowed. Here, an initial proposal was made for organisers to call off the march and instead go to Wellington and put their case to the Prime Minister. The idea was soundly turned down by those at the meeting. 

But obviously this had not proved to be the end of the matter. Just a few days later, Whina Cooper had unilaterally endorsed Mat Rata’s proposal.   

One of the big surprises to us at that Te Unga Waka meeting was to find that our main kaumatua – the man who had led us in marae protocol during the previous six months, and had spoken for Whina in those ceremonial spaces when it was the role of men to speak – had been revealed as a Labour Party plant. When Betty Wark and I sat down with him to ask what was going on, the first words he said to us were, “I am the Minister’s man.”

Anyway, with the march definitely called off, Betty and others decided to call an urgent extraordinary meeting at the Māori Community Centre in Freemans Bay and clear the air about what had happened and see if anything of our plans for a march could be rescued.

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THE MEETING TURNED OUT to be a fairly small gathering of the usual suspects of the central city organisers. At first, we had no idea whether Whina Cooper would actually turn up. But, before it started, she did indeed arrive with a large entourage of family and other supporters. Her supporters would easily have outnumbered the other people in the room.

We sat in a circle and we all got to speak and express the sense of betrayal and frustration that our six months of organising and campaigning was going to end in nothing.

Titewhai Harawira, in particular, did not hold back her opinions and fierce feedback to Whina. The air was thick with accusation and disappointment.

Whina and her supporting speakers weathered this feedback and stuck to their position. They shared the view that a delegation to Parliament would have a more direct and immediate effect on the land rights issues we were concerned about. If we could directly change the legislation, then it would make a huge difference right throughout the country. The delegation was a practical and wise alternative that meant we didn’t have to step into the complete unknown of an untried and untested demonstration.

Someone then suggested that we take a vote on the matter as a way of bringing our proceedings to a resolution.

It was quickly agreed, and I just as quickly realised that the march was probably lost. Whina had clearly much more support in the room, and the vote was only going to confirm that.

So we went around the circle quite slowly as each person said their “Yes” or “No” as to whether the march should go ahead. Several of the “Yes” votes, myself included, said that regardless of the outcome of the meeting, and regardless whether Whina was coming with us or not, we were going to go to Te Hapua and march anyway.

As the voting slowly progressed around the room, it was as if all the events of the previous six months were somehow focused on this moment.

I was sitting directly across from Whina Cooper in the circle. I looked up and realised that she was staring at me directly. She wasn’t happy. It was the sort of look that could cut a tunnel into stone.

The voting process then got closer to where Whina was sitting, and she was getting more and more uncomfortable. Then she suddenly stood up and announced that the march would go ahead after all, and she’d see us all at Te Hapua. The voting was immediately stopped.

Whina may have had the numbers to get her own way in a democratic count. But she was not going to submit to any democracy. She was going to make her own call.

Those of us who were determined to march were initially dumbfounded, and then later somewhat relieved. Whina’s family members were exasperated. Several of them told me later that they did not want the march to be called off, especially after dedicating every spare minute over the last six months to its preparations. But they’d fallen in line when the matriarch had made her decision. Now they would have to emotionally do another about-turn.

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This whole process of “calling off” the march — and then deciding to go ahead after all — was exhausting for all the march organisers. It had been a serious assault on our sense of trust and cohesion with one another at a time when there was still so much left to do.

More than this, the Matakite team were being brought face-to-face with the power issues of how this demonstration would play itself out on a national stage. It wasn’t just a mad and naive idea any longer. There was going to be a price to pay for confronting that power. We could no longer disappear into the magical thinking of the possibilities we imagined. Now was the time when we had to shoulder the responsibility and accountability of the huge risk we were undertaking.

Despite all the preparations, no-one really knew what was going to happen. And in many ways this last-minute conflict and show-down with Whina was like the labour pains of giving birth to that unknown.

The incident had its consequences. After the decision to call off the march was reversed, the kaumatua that had been leading our interactions on the marae was never seen at a Matakite meeting again. And the Auckland Star reported that Prime Minister Bill Rowling, the Minister of Māori Affairs Mat Rata, the Minister of Works and Development Mick Connelly, and the Minister of Internal Affairs Henry May, were all left “twiddling their thumbs” as they waited for their scheduled meeting in Wellington with Whina Cooper that didn’t happen.

I was left with a different appreciation of Whina as a woman, as a leader and a rangatira. She too had her doubts. She too was already vulnerable and exhausted. She too had fears that it could all completely collapse and turn into a fiasco that would be a permanent blow to her mana.

But there was also something else there. She might have been grumpy about it but, for all her authoritarian tendencies, there was also steel in her willingness to really listen to her people ... and when it felt right, to change her mind.  

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ANOTHER MATAKITE SUPPORTER that I became good friends with at this time was the poet, Hone Tuwhare. He turned up at one of our early organising meetings, and his immediate response to hearing Whina speak was, “What can I do to help?”

Hone Tuwhare

Hone was living in the South Island at the time, but was doing quite a bit of traveling while performing his poetry readings. He took it upon himself to meet up with various interested parties, explain what the march was about, and solicit their support.

He would often stay with me in my flat when he was in Auckland, and we would spend hours in wandering conversations “trying to fix the world.” But Hone was also a high-functioning heavy drinker, and I think the bigger attraction of being able to stay at my flat was that I was only a couple of streets away from the Ponsonby Hotel known as the Gluepot. And Hone was a regular in the public bar.

So I would rarely see him in the evenings, but after hotel closing time, he would walk to the flat, politely let himself in, and ‘crash’ on my divan bed.

On the week before we were to travel up to the Far North, I was about to publish a final feature in the City News about the march starting the following weekend. As expected, Hone was staying with me and getting himself together for the month ahead. I don’t think I really fully appreciated his own struggles with this commitment – he was signing up for a month of sobriety and he didn’t want to let anyone down.

I got up early one morning to go into the office where we were manually laying out the design of the editorial pages for the next weekly issue of the newspaper. Hone was fast asleep on the divan in my room. But he had been up early in the morning, and there on my writing desk was a poem he had finished just a few hours beforehand. A note said it was his koha for my hospitality.

I published it in the City News the next day.

The New Zealand Land March on Wellington
Hepetema 14 - Oketopa 17, 1975

What will I wear? What can I afford to wear? And will my landlord keep my flat for me in Dunedin? This long walk: what a hell of a thing.

I need a haversack. Who will lend me one? I might have to carry my gear in a sugarbag with flax tied to the bottom corners: no sweat. But I need a raincoat. Who will

trust me with one in the immense time of Spring when showers bless the earth? Eh? I am old. Already wrinkles spread inexorably: inching, inching. They’re not all of

them laughter-lines. Agh, what a hell of a thing. But it won’t be a lonely walk. People all around and mostly young: from blue-brown with bits more added right on

up to off-white? Jesus, how self-conscious can you get. Like man, I only want to last the distance, right?

Yeah: and all the different people worrying differently and separately about the decision and the action of commitment they each have taken to grab the burning but elusive

star together. And together not knowing what lies at the end of the star’s reach. Together, not knowing whether they will get a punch in the face at the end of the

road, or, with much pain learn that it is just the beginning... My feet are beginning to ache already. The cracks on my Māori feet are beginning

to widen, my blood turned on. Do not laugh.

Laugh only when the blisters fade with the jaded politicians and their cunning.

Laugh only when the small spies soft-pies pie-eyed freckled ladies and their mafia-men with dark glasses are dug out like bed-bugs from among us. Be watchful, watchful.

I need a haversack. Who will lend me one? I need a raincoat. Who will trust me in a time of Spring when flowers clamour for the yellow and the blue,

the red the green of the life-giving earth? What a good time to take a walk.

— Hone Tuwhare

Hone Tuwhare poem from the documentary Te Matakite o Aotearoa -- the Māori Land March, directed by Geoff Steven (1975) http://youtu.be/vYNxGNbWyV8

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AS THE MARCH ITSELF got closer, at the back of many of our minds was the objective we had set ourselves: how could we cover so many miles each day on foot?

Only a ‘hard core’ of marchers would be expected to walk every day. The others – kuia, kaumatua, and family members with children – would travel most of the way in vehicles, before joining the marchers as we went through the main streets of the towns and cities.

But even for the ‘hard core’, the expectations of walking the large distances on our itinerary just didn’t seem possible. The average fit person might be able to keep up walking 20 miles each day for a month but, beyond this, our best intentions were likely to prove to be impractical.

And there was also another thing to consider: Marae protocol meant that we would have to be at the next venue by four o'clock in the afternoon, and be rested and ready for the ceremonial welcome and speeches that each tribal group would be expected to give.

A collective achievement. Witi McMath and Tom Poata organising the marching route during the Māori Land March, September 1975. Photo by Christian Heinegg. This image was used as the poster for "Not One More Acre" the 40th anniversary exhibition at the Turnbull Gallery, National Library, Wellington September-December 2015

It was Witi McMath who came up with the details of our collective system of marching. His solution to our ‘impossible’ task was to break the marchers up into smaller groups and – by using our buses, mini-vans and cars – space these groups out every 20 miles. In this way, everyone would be walking their specific piece of the march at the same time.

Although we were just making all this up as we went along ... this strategy for our marching was an inspired piece of organising. As Witi McMath explained it at the time, Te Roopu o te Matakite as a whole would be doing the march. He said that was important for us all to understand that this protest was going to be a collective achievement ... and not an individual one.

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Next: 4. Kōanga - Spring

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