In the spotlight: Celebrity chat with Tamati Rimene-Sproat.

Tamati Rimene-Sproat, 26, is a reporter for TVNZ 1’s Sunday. He grew up in Wellington with a Scottish father and a M ori mother. He is fluent in Te Reo M ori and spent a year in Scotland after high school.

What is your current job?

I am a reporter for Sunday. I’m on a sixth-month secondment filling in for another couple of reporters who are taking a bit of time off.

How long have you been at TVNZ?

Coming up five years. I was at Te Karere for a couple of years, then I got an opportunity to move across the room to Seven Sharp. I was at Seven Sharp for about a year and a half.

Is the moustache back in fashion?

I think they are. I think the renaissance of the slug on the top lip is alive and well. I also think mullets are coming back too. I’m not sure if I’m the one to bring the mullet back. But I feel like in small pockets of New Zealand, you’ll find the mullet and the moustache are well and truly alive and coming back.

Does anyone else in your family work in media?

No. Mum has been a public servant for as long as I can remember. Dad was a lawyer and is now semi-retired because he can’t stop working.

Tell me about your childhood.

I grew up in Wellington. I was lucky. My parents saw value in Te Reo M ori so they started a preschool in our lounge basically where Te Reo M ori was the only language spoken. Then I graduated from that preschool and they put me into a full immersion M ori school. Then I went to Wellington College. From there I went to university down in Canterbury. My father is actually Scottish. Between finishing high school and university I went over to Scotland to reconnect with that side of the family.

What was that like?

It was an amazing experience. My father came to New Zealand when he was quite young, like I think he was around six or seven. So we still had a strong connection back to Scotland. But obviously we were on the other side of the world but we would go back every now and again. But for me to go over by myself, and

make those connections, was a pretty amazing experience and a bit of an eye-opener too. I was 17, coming up to 18 at the time, and didn’t really know what I was going to do at university. I didn’t really know what I was going to say with my life. Then my grandmother said to my father, ‘Look, you were doing the same thing during that time in your life and what I did was I sent you back to Scotland so why don’t you send him to Scotland?’. He originally said, ‘No, I’m not paying for his flight to Scotland’. She basically tugged on his ear and said, ‘No, you are’.

Did going to Scotland connect you to your Scottish roots?

One hundred per cent. For me I’ve always grown up knowing I was M ori. Being M ori was natural to me but seeing that side of my whakapapa and being exposed to that side of the family really ingrained in me how proud I am to be Scottish as well. I see a lot of similarities in the culture. Obviously, wh nau is a big thing. Having a big laugh is another big thing. Singing is as well. There are quite a lot of similar characteristics between M ori and the Scots.

Where in Scotland is your family from?

The nearest town is a place called Dumfries. There’s a little farm there ... it’s actually one of our original family farms. At the time I thought I was a bit of a farmer. I wanted to do something in the outdoors. I thought, ‘Oh I’ll give farming a go’ and I was driving tractors in Scotland – basically in the backblocks, in the middle of nowhere. I spent a couple of months doing that and they realised I wasn’t a farmer. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when we were doing some silage work and they left me to my own devices. I busted up about 10 forks in their big harvester thing and my uncle looked at me and said, ‘You’ve just cost me a few K (thousand)

so we’re going to put you on spraying weeds’. So I ended up spraying weeds for a couple of weeks.

Te Reo M ori is your first language. Why is it so important to you?

I think it’s really important to me because my mum, who is M ori, her parents (my grandparents) and the generation above them never had the opportunity. Even if they could speak little bits of Te Reo M ori, it was stripped away from them. So for me, it’s really important to promote Te Reo M ori and to speak Te Reo M ori. I look at it as a privilege.