PEOPLE’S POET

SE Á N M C MAHON WITH A WHĀNAU RESPONSE FROM ROB TUWHARE

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Hone Peneamine Anatipa Te Pona Tuwhare (Ngāpuhi; 1922–2008) was one of New Zealand’s foremost poets. His early childhood love of reading spurred his own serious writing, which he himself dated from 1957. In the 1960s he began publishing poems in journals and performing them at festivals around Aotearoa. His first collection, No Ordinary Sun, was published to wide acclaim in 1964.

He was one of the initiators of the first Māori Writers and Artists Conference, held in 1973, and he walked on the 1975 Māori Land March.

Performance of poetry was vital to Tuwhare. In her book, Hone Tuwhare: A biography, Janet Hunt writes: ‘[He] believed that poetry is to be spoken, it is an art that lives not only on the page but also in the voice, breath and very being of the writer and the reader…A “people’s poet”, he was loved by New Zealanders from all walks of life.’

The self-portrait shown here was among a collection of Tuwhare’s papers acquired by the Turnbull Library in 2009 as part of its extensive holdings of Aotearoa New Zealand writers.

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Hone Tuwhare, 1986

MAKER / ARTIST Kenneth Quinn (1920–2013)

REFERENCE Portraits of prominent New Zealanders (ATLGroup-00559: 1/4-089310-F)

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‘Self-portrait in pen as a gift from self’, 16 August 1999

MAKER / ARTIST Hone Tuwhare (1922–2008)

REFERENCE Literary drafts, 1980–2001 (MS-Papers-9503-2) Hone Tuwhare sketched this rare self-portrait when he was 76 and living at Kaka Point, Otago. The typically wry note reads: ‘I always design glamorous self-drawn pictures of me.’ The photo portrait was one of a series that the Turnbull Library commissioned Kenneth Quinn to take of prominent New Zealanders. Quinn was an accomplished photographer and writer as well as a Professor of Classics at Otago University.

And a response from Rob Tuwhare:

Hone was the son of Mihipaea Anehana and Ben Tuwhare. Mihipaea passed away when Hone was just six years old and he spent the next 14 years of his life close to his father, who worked at Chinese market gardens in Avondale, Panmure and Māngere. Ben read Hone verses from the Old Testament, and from an early age Hone loved to read comics, cowboy novels and books he found on visits to libraries around Tāmaki Makaurau.

When he was a teenager, Hone trained as a boilermaker. He formed a musical quartet called The Maori Ink Spots, and wrote his first known poems in 1946 while travelling to Japan to serve alongside 4500 other New Zealanders in Jayforce. In 1948, Hone met his future wife, Jean McCormack, who worked at Progressive Books in central Auckland. The bookstore was a meeting place for people who believed in entitlement to education for workingclass people and in social unity. Hone’s eyes were opened to a vast range of international writing unavailable in most bookstores and libraries then. Hone was welcomed into Jean’s Pākehā family. Alongside Hone, Jean was frequently published in The Listener, often with stories of the racial divide that she was quickly learning about.

The publication of Hone’s first book of poems No Ordinary Sun in 1964 launched him into ‘literary stardom’; it sold 700 copies in 10 days. The poem ‘No Ordinary Sun’ speaks of the devastation of nuclear warfare, the aftermath of which he had experienced in Japan. The award of Otago University’s Robert Burns Fellowship took Hone to Dunedin in 1969 and helped him to transition from tradesman-boilermaker to poet. He then made his home in Otago until he passed away in 2008.

Hone particularly loved his readings for school audiences, where he urged young people to find their own voice and write. Although he never attended secondary school, his many awards included honorary Doctorates from both Otago and Auckland universities. Hone would joke, ‘I’m a double doctor and I can’t even fix my sore leg.’

Today, his poems are available in an extensive collection entitled Small Holes in the Silence—the title taken from a line in his much-loved poem ‘Rain’. His work continues to be read, studied and enjoyed in Aotearoa and internationally. His poetry has been translated into several languages. His small house in South Otago has been restored and is available as a residence for writers, musicians and artists, of all ages and abilities.