GLAVISH THE CHILD

to two DHBs [Waitematā and Auckland] – about to become three [Counties Manakau] DHBs.” She had her moment on this matter when she attended Kaipara College’s 50th Jubilee in 2009. “Gee it was poetic justice, it really was.” Glavish’s story starts in 1946 on the front seat of a Studebaker. It was her father Frank Glavish’s car, though he wasn’t present at her birth. She rather suspects she was “conceived on the back seat and born on the front”. Frank, a New Zealand bornCroatian and something of a Lothario, fathered nine children with four different women. “He always claimed he didn’t understand women,” Glavish laughs. The existence of the other women and children was never a secret. Frank lived until he was 101 and insisted on driving himself to his 100th birthday celebration. Though, as Glavish recalls: “He was a menace on the road.”

Glavish was Frank and Nora’s second child – the first, a boy called Robert, had died when he was 6 months old. Because of her mother’s youth, baby Glavish went to live with the newly widowed Māmā. She spent the early part of her childhood in an earth-floored nīkau whare near the Glavish farm on the banks of the Hoteo River on the Kaipara. “Māmā organised her whare and her life according to tikanga.” And she instilled this into Glavish. “Growing up there was to grow up with that knowledge... knowing the pull of the tides and the relationship of the tides with the moon’s cycle. And in terms of that relationship, the bird life, understanding the cry of the birds and the difference between the land and sea birds. And they’re all messengers...”

Her paternal grandmother, Marija – who came from Croatia as a young bride with Marino, her gumdigger husband – also played a part in Glavish’s upbringing. Marija ran the homestead which still stands at Glorit, not far from Puatahi Marae. Neither grandmother had much English and, as a result, Glavish was more comfortable speaking te reo and Croatian until she went to school. Glavish’s childhood didn’t have much in the way of creature comforts but she is emphatic when she says: “I was loved. We lived up there happily, we didn’t even know we were poor until somebody told us. We were rich in our language.”

This loving childhood was in stark contrast to her early teens spent in foster care on Auckland’s North Shore. She ended up in the system for four years, after taking the blame for some petty theft. When she was released, at 16, she returned to the Kaipara, got married and had children. She stayed at home until her children started school. On one level, she must have been a typical young Māori woman at that time, living on Stewart St in Helensville, running a household. But on another level, she was involved in the re-emergence of the Māori protest movement that gathered momentum in the 1970s. “I was chained to the bridge up in Waitangi. I was in good company. I went to Waitangi every year. Protested every year,” she says. She was also involved in the Springbok Tour protests in 1981. “I was in the Patu Squad,” she says proudly. “We marched to honour Steve Biko.”

I was loved. We lived up there happily, we didn’t even know we were poor until somebody told us. We were rich in our language.