Southside rising:¯The changing face of Otara
The changing face of Otara
It was meant to be a promised land for young families. Instead, O¯ tara in south Auckland produced shocking levels of poverty, crime and gang violence. Now residents say it has grown up and should be allowed at last to shake off its bad reputation. Harrison Christian reports.
Aupito William Sio remembers the night police banged on the door and his cousins took off, chased by dogs across a creek.
It was about 4 o’clock in the morning. When Sio’s parents answered the door, their faces were lit up with torches and an officer with a police dog marched into the house.
Sio, then 14, had heard murmurings at school about the dawn raids targeting overstayers. He knew his father had been meeting church leaders, discussing how to approach the government about the inhumane treatment of Pacific people.
It wasn’t just the raids on their homes; it was the way people were stopped in the street, arrested and taken in for questioning. And then the church leaders would go down and negotiate their release. In some instances they found the person wasn’t an overstayer, or was actually Ma¯ ori.
Sio didn’t figure his own family would be raided next.
The night it happened, some of his cousins were sleeping in the garage, their work permits recently expired. Waking up to dogs barking and lights shining in the windows, they ran into farmland behind the property.
The police dogs gave chase, and one of his cousins was caught and deported to Samoa. He later returned under a new work permit and fathered an All Black.
Sio, now the minister for Pacific peoples, says given what O¯ tara residents went through in the raids in the 70s, it’s a marvel where his suburb is at today.
Auckland is now the world’s largest Pacific city, and no suburb epitomises that more than O¯ tara. It’s everywhere you look: the Pacific nation flags in the streets, the fresh taro in crates on the footpaths, and the Samoan banana panikeke, or pancakes, served from the food warmers at the takeaway shop.
‘‘Anyone who grew up in O¯ tara has grown up like a phoenix out of the ashes,’’ Sio says. ‘‘I think people are really resilient, and despite the challenges of that sad and bitter and traumatised era, people grew from it, and learnt how to work together.’’
A cautionary tale
O¯ tara began as a promised land for young families.
After World War II, Auckland was desperately short of houses. In the late 1950s, planners came up with a solution: a new community on the city fringes to take the overflow population.
Within 10 years, there were 4000 homes in O¯ tara, mostly state houses. On paper, it was a slice of the suburban dream. The houses still smelled of fresh pine. A job in the neighbouring industrial hubs was guaranteed. All you had to do was move in.
But in practice, the suburb felt more like a labour camp than a community. It lacked halls, kindergartens or parks. There were no shrubs or trees, because nothing had had time to grow. Instead, the streets were festooned with power lines.
Bill McKay, a senior lecturer at Auckland University and an expert on state housing, sees O¯ tara as an example of what not to do when building a suburb.
‘‘They were increasing the density and getting people to live cheek by jowl, but not providing the amenities that need to go with increasing density.’’
Crucially, state houses didn’t acknowledge Ma¯ ori or Pacific ways of living, as Housing NZ does in its guidelines today.
Pacific people live as extended families, but a standard Kiwi house was neither large nor robust enough to withstand the pressures of that lifestyle. To this day, about four in 10 Pacific people live in crowded homes in New Zealand.
Ma¯ ori, lacking marae, also lost their ability to meet in formal or ritual gatherings. As a result of the limits of Pa¯ keha¯ style housing, double garages across O¯ tara were converted into rumpus rooms, sleepouts and meeting houses.
You can still spot them. Another method of creating extra space is to drape a tarpaulin over a carport.
The oversights in O¯ tara’s early years would prove a costly mistake, leaving whole generations of young people with nowhere to gather except the street.
The machete murder
‘‘If you can survive in O¯ tara,’’ says Gray Theodore, ‘‘man, you can survive anywhere.’’
The kaumatua, 84, has seen the suburb at rock bottom. When a young man was hacked to death with a machete in front of hundreds of shoppers at the town centre, Theodore was just across the road in his vicarage.
‘‘Terrified crowd watched brutal gang knife attack,’’ was the headline in the Auckland Sun in May 1988.
‘‘A stunned silence hung over the normally bustling Otara town centre after the brutal revenge killing of 21-year-old David Fuko.’’
On an autumn morning, Samoan Iupeli Pauga attacked a
group of Tongans at the flea market with a machete. He was consumed with a need for revenge after being injured in a fight with a Tongan. Pauga fatally slashed Fuko, an uncle of future All Black Jonah Lomu, in the neck.
He nearly cut another young Tongan man’s arm off, and chased him through the shopping centre.
The year of the murder, Theodore had just been appointed minister for the O¯ tara Ma¯ ori Anglican Church. He, wife Gloria and their four kids moved into the vicarage across the road from the town centre.
Gloria came racing in one morning and said ‘‘there’s been a murder at the flea market’’.
Theodore headed to the town centre, where he found throngs of shoppers gathered around Fuko’s body. The police were there trying to keep order, but nobody was listening.
At midday, there wasn’t a young person in O¯ tara, Theodore says. His own children had left.
‘‘They’d taken all the buses and gone into town. They said, ‘We want out’.’’
Thirty years later, O¯ tara is still trying to shed that image. But Inspector Wendy Spiller says in recent years crime in the area has dropped – especially violent crime.
In fact, the bigger challenge for officers in the district isn’t the offenders, but being able to afford to live there.
‘‘Police officers don’t want to move out of the area because of the work they do. They want to leave because they can’t afford to buy a house.’’
Lotu Fuli, the chairwoman of the O¯ tara-Papatoetoe local board, says she doesn’t lock the front door to their home, and hasn’t for years. She often doesn’t lock her car, either, when she parks at the town centre.
She says it’s now a place where you’re more likely to run into churchgoers and youth groups than gang members.
But O¯ tara remains one of the more difficult areas of Auckland to police. One of the biggest issues now is vehicle crime, Spiller says, which typically involves young offenders.
‘‘They can get into a car quicker than you and I can get the keys out of our pocket.’’
Ganging up
The youth gangs of Otara ¯ have at various times been in the national media glare.
Francis Leilua was only 15 when he was beamed on to national television as a spokesman for the Stormtroopers gang. The 1970 interview with Brian Edwards was intended as a gritty report from one of the country’s worst ghettos.
Among the boys who responded evenly to Edwards was Leilua, the gang’s sergeantat-arms. He explained that he and his friends had started rallying together for protection. They were being picked on by adult gangs from other districts.
The uniform was a denim jacket. They painted these black, and then one of the boys who was good with a paint brush would go over them with the skull and crossbones detailing.
They had no idea what they were doing, reflects Leilua today in his classroom at O¯ tara’s Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate. He’s a teacher at the same school he attended as a Stormtrooper.
‘‘We were just school kids. We’d all gather at someone’s place, and the parents would say ‘I don’t want all you kids around here,’ so we’d move on, to someone else’s garage.’’
After a few years they grew up and disbanded. A couple of contemporary gangs in New Zealand that use the name ‘‘Stormtroopers’’ are unrelated except by name.
O¯ tara has remained fertile ground for gangs. The Tribesmen motorcycle gang emerged in the 80s, and its feeder youth street gang the Killer Beez followed in 2003.
In 2008, Killer Beez president Josh Masters appeared on
Campbell Live in a somewhat more scripted interview than the one conducted by Edwards on the streets of O¯ tara. This time the questions weren’t about swastikas, but about violent attacks on members of the public, and methamphetamine.
‘‘We’re against it. We hate it,’’ Masters said of the drug. Three months later, he and 43 other Killer Beez and Tribesmen affiliates were arrested in a drugs sting. Masters served a 10-year sentence for dealing P and money laundering. He was released from prison in July; many other Killer Beez members remain behind bars.
Soon after his release, he stopped for a selfie with one of his ‘‘fans’’ in Manukau’s Westfield shopping centre. He did not respond to interview requests.
Spiller says that, over the past several years, gang activity in O¯ tara has declined. ‘‘I’m not saying there is no gang activity there, because there is – but I do think that O¯ tara itself is getting stronger as a community in that regard.’’
The place to be seen
Mormons and Muslims are giving away their scriptures within a few steps of each other. Followers of the Chinese spiritual practice Falun Gong have occupied the town centre with their tai chi-like movements, while an evangelist in a fluorescent rain suit preaches the gospel through a PA system in the car park.
O¯ tara’s flea market is a tour of multicultural Auckland, a marketplace for vegetables and clothes and the world’s religions. There is Pacific fare and a growing Eastern presence, with around half of the stalls now Asian-owned.
A Chinese family from Mt Roskill unloads beans, ginger and eggplant out of their big red van; a Cook Islands
Ma¯ ori lady from Epsom shows off her array of ’ei katu (flower crowns) and coconut oils.
The market is widely known as a place to mingle and buy cheap veggies – or if you live outside Auckland, as a well-worn destination for politicians on the campaign trail.
A visit to the O¯ tara market is almost a rite of passage for future leaders: Helen Clark in 1997; John Key in 2008; Jacinda Ardern in 2017.
Political analyst Bryce Edwards says the event is a crucial ‘‘home ground’’ for the Labour Party; a meeting place of low-income voters to whom the party has historically appealed.
But the flea market is even more valuable to politicians on the Right, Edwards says, because it’s such a good opportunity for them to be shown mixing with the masses.
‘‘For people like John Key, attending events like the O¯ tara market was a very strong indicator to the rest of New Zealand that he was capable of mixing with people very different from himself.’’
Untapped potential
Earlier this year, O¯ taraPapatoetoe was ranked the most deprived part of Auckland in an Auckland Tourism, Events & Economic Development prosperity index, given just 0.7 out of 10. That’s compared with O¯ ra¯ kei at 9.8. Income levels in O¯ tara were 22 per cent below the Auckland average.
But one resident says the prosperity stats don’t tell the full story: that of a new generation of entrepreneurs with distinctly Pacific and Ma¯ ori ways of doing business.
The second floor of a commercial building in O¯ tahuhu hosts an open-plan office that looks down on punters waiting for a tavern to open; in it, Stella Muller runs a creative marketing agency called Bright Sunday.
Muller has five employees, and a network of dozens of Ma¯ ori and Pacific contractors. She’s proud that the agency is south Auckland-based, and that people in the city – everyone from government bureaucrats to film-makers – are turning to Bright Sunday for their campaigns.
The 42-year-old says there’s a creative and economic explosion in south Auckland that’s gone relatively unnoticed.
For example, O¯ tara residents Swannie and Terry Nelson last year developed the country’s first phone app to help people pass their driver’s licence tests. O¯ tara-bred stylist Nora Swann, meanwhile, founded the Pacific Fusion Fashion Show.
‘‘There’s lots of enterprising stories that we know, but I think the biggest challenge we have is the visibility of our stories.’’
Soon, O¯ tara’s troubled history will be just that – history – and home buyers won’t think twice before moving there. The question becomes how its Polynesian identity will hold out against the rapid development sweeping Auckland.
Many residents came to O¯ tara after their families were pushed out of the inner city as their suburbs became gentrified. The villas and cottages they left are now multimillion-dollar homes.
Locals hope the city has learnt from other projects that displaced long-term residents, such as the Ta¯ maki regeneration in Glen Innes.
O¯ tara’s redevelopment, they say, should happen in a way that doesn’t uproot families and villages, causing yet another exodus south of the city.