Alison Mau
The centre of Wellington is ringing to the sound of Aotearoa’s best kapa haka groups right now. Walk into Westpac Stadium and the language you’ll hear all around you will be te reo; but if you don’t speak it or understand it, no worries – the folk running Te Matatini have a translation frequency, and even an app, that will turn the melodic korero into English for you, and also, for the first time this year, into Mandarin.
Most of the signage inside the stadium is also in English and te reo. If you were a tourist who had lucked into tickets for the event, you’d be well pleased with the way your needs are covered.
Unfortunately, if you started your Kiwi holiday at Auckland International Airport and took the airport bus to town, you would not have been offered the same level of service. The helpful audio instructions will tell you where to get off (heh) in English, Spanish and Mandarin, but not in Ma¯ ori.
The service has been operated by SkyBus, an Australian company, since 2015. On its website it says that 75,000 airport employees and travellers use it every month, and those numbers are rising by 15 percent every month (if you’ve ever sat in the back of a taxi in an airport traffic jam you won’t be surprised by that last one).
Leaving te reo off the list of languages on a service like this seems odd. Yes, the bus caters for tourists, but it also caters for workers, and travelling Kiwis. It does not tell you in Spanish how lucky you are to have chosen Aotearoa as your holiday destination and the delights that await you – it tells you the basics of what the next stop is, and where to alight. It should be in Ma¯ ori, too.
When approached, SkyBus declined to say whether it would agree with that or not.
When I came to New Zealand 25 years ago I didn’t really know much about New Zealand. Like many Australians back then, it had not occurred to me to choose New Zealand for a holiday and I hadn’t visited until I had actual ties to the place (a Kiwi boyfriend).
I should point out the picture today is very different. Last year almost 1.5 million Aussies came here for holidays, staying 10 days on average. Whether you see that as a good or a bad thing depends on your perspective, but I digress.
The point is, I had a conceptual picture of New Zealand in my head and the thing that excited me most was that this would be the first country I had lived in that was officially bilingual (NZ Sign Language did not join the list until 2006).
Having lived in Europe and travelled to places where I was often the only English speaker on the train, in the cafe, at the hotel, I was not afraid of the sound of a different language like so many Pa¯ keha¯ New Zealanders appear to be. That will get some backs up – but what else can it be, but fear of what you don’t understand?
I had expectations when I arrived, and they were not met. I did not see the kind of dual signage, or the explicit expressions of the Ma¯ ori language, that I thought I would be seeing.
I was diligent about getting my unpractised diction around the correct pronunciation – I had to get that right quickly for my job on the telly – but I did not at the time understand how complex this country’s relationship with te reo was. I assumed the language would be taught in all schools. If my mid-20s self had known we’d still be arguing about that a quarter of a century later, I’d probably have fallen in a dead faint.
As he ate his lunchtime kai at Te Matatini, I talked to Waihoroi Shortland from Te Ma¯ ta¯ wai about it all. Te Ma¯ ta¯ wai is the Ma¯ ori language revitalisation authority, and Shortland is its board’s co-chair.
He was very complimentary of the way Kiwis of all stripes are taking up te reo and admits that ‘‘until Ma¯ ori take responsibility for evolving change there will be no change’’ – but he also pointed out that we need to hear, and see, it all around us to lose that sense that it’s somehow something strange.
‘‘One of the things that contributed to the loss of the language is the number of places you see your language in everyday life,’’ he said. ‘‘The fact that you can hear it, you might think,
‘oh I don’t know what that’s about’, but if you hear it often enough you start to understand, oh, that’s the morning greeting.’’
He says signage in te reo would be particularly useful.
‘‘Signage would tell you something about the place, and that might make people curious about why it was named for that. Because nothing was named without a reason.’’
That made me think of an old Walt Whitman quote, ‘‘Be curious, not judgmental’’, which fits perfectly.
When I asked him about the SkyBus, Shortland said examples like that are ‘‘a small part of a much bigger landscaping project’’, but without those little things, we won’t get there: ‘‘I’m on the bus that normalises the language. Wherever that bus is going, I’m on it.’’
Why wouldn’t we all be on that bus? Why wouldn’t we all just agree we won’t be scared (or whatever it is that’s holding us back) any more, and allow ourselves to be open to it instead? No-one’s suggesting we tie Pa¯ keha¯ boomers down and force them into fluency. But we ought to be teaching it to all of our kids – at the very least.
It’s the rangatahi (youth) that will really carry the language forward, but the rest of us could help by dropping the bloodyminded objections and try something new. Maybe buy a couple of tickets to Te Matatini 2021, rock up to the stadium and bathe in surround-sound reo for a couple of days. Thanks to the translation app you won’t miss a thing, and you might just learn something.