It’s in the blood
Kelly Ana Morey meets the ‘Kia Ora Lady’ who made a difference.
“Māmā taught me if you ever see something wrong in front of you, that you must fix it,” says Dame Rangimarie “Naida” Glavish. “Because if you don’t, you become like it. Part of that wrong.”
It’s an approach Glavish has applied to her life and her long career in the Māori health sector.
“I’m kind of like, ‘Don’t do anything wrong in front of me, because I have to do something about it.’ You see, I was raised in the values of those two generations ahead of me – and if you’re raised like that, you live it. That’s what tikanga Māori is all about. And I’ve always lived by that, and it hasn’t made me popular at all.”
Glavish’s “Māmā” is Ngapeka Teririkore Nahi, her beloved Ngāti Whātua maternal grandmother who raised her, teaching her what it was to be Māori. It was this woman who “massaged the reo into me”, equipping Glavish to work as one of the first specialist te reo Māori secondary teachers in the late 1980s, and then spend 27 years in the health sector fighting to have Māori ways of doing things incorporated into mainstream practice.
Māmā is still a real presence in Glavish’s life, and she mentions her often as we talk a few weeks after receiving the title of Dame Companion. It follows Glavish’s 2011 appointment as an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
Glavish garnered national and international fame as the “Kia Ora Lady” back in 1984, when she faced losing her job for greeting callers with the “nonstandard expression”, but her work in Māori health put her on this year’s honours list. She is the first Ngāti Whātua woman to be made a dame, though is quick to say that the honour really belongs to her whānau, her hapū and her iwi. “It’s ironic,” she says with a smile and perhaps a modicum of triumph, “that the headmaster who expelled me from Kaipara College told me I was to give up Māori things because they would never get me anywhere in this world at all. And here I am, the Chief Advisor Tikanga
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 THE CHILD
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.”
STANDING UP
So the “Kia Ora Incident” in 1984 was a continuation of that activism, even if she has been consistently portrayed in the press as a mouse that roared. The truth is that Glavish was well versed in taking a stand by the time she became the “Kia Ora Lady”.
“I had been working in tolls in Helensville and for 10 years I had been saying ‘kia ora’ without any problems – until this one supervisor at Airedale St decided he wasn’t having it.”
What the supervisor didn’t realise was how determined Glavish was and secondly, just how much support she had behind her. “Professor Rangi Walker needed to have lunch with me [at the time of the incident] because we were talking about the Auckland District Māori Council. So I met with Rangi and I said, ‘You know what, Rangi? I’m being penalised at work just for saying kia ora.’ And he goes, ‘What? Well
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.
that’s not good enough.’ And so Rangi, without telling me, went to the media – it was the [Auckland] Star in those days – and gave them the story.”
The rest as they say is history, the Post Office backed down and kia ora is now a standard greeting throughout the land.
Five years after this all went down, having done a brief stint as a Māori language and culture teacher at Henderson High School, Glavish was shoulder tapped by Ngāti Whātua to become one of two bicultural managers in the wider Auckland health sector. Soon after this, the second cultural advisor’s job was swallowed by Glavish’s portfolio, leaving her to head up the small team advocating for Māori health interests in the greater Auckland area. This was a particularly turbulent period of growth and change in the health sector, which ultimately led to the establishment of the District Health Boards.
Glavish was also the senior tikanga advisor when Auckland Hospital underwent extensive redevelopment from 2000-2003, and was able to ensure protocols around death and tapu were not being transgressed, overseeing innovations such as whānau rooms in the morgue to allow Māori to stay with their departed. This early involvement in the overall process also allowed Glavish to be the driving force behind establishing Te Whetu Tawera Marae in the Acute Mental Health Unit at Auckland Hospital. It’s no surprise, given her history, that Glavish got exactly what she wanted. “We needed a marae for families who had patients in the Mental Health Unit. And I said, ‘You can’t have a wharenui without a wharekai… and it will need an ablution block with showers.’ And so we ended up taking three of their offices in order to create the wharekai. Anyway we got our marae.”
A LOT DONE, MORE TO DO
Her current home, a very ordinary 1960s house with a kid-friendly backyard on a suburban Ranui street, continues with tradition. There are baskets of toys and books for the great-grand kids, the walls are richly appointed with family photos that form the extensive whakapapa to whom Glavish refers throughout our interview. A calendar is marked with the birthdays of every member of her immediate family, including five children, 19 grandchildren and 27 great-grandchildren – it’s another custom inherited from her grandmother. “Every birthday, all my life ’til the day she died, Māmā came to wherever I was to celebrate it. She never, ever forgot a birthday.”
On this hot Thursday morning, the house is bustling with women who are laying out food and making cups of tea. Glavish’s phone and tablet, sitting on the table in front of her, are both constantly buzzing or chiming. It’s been a busy time since the announcement of the New Year’s Honours List, with well-wishers and the media beating a path to her door. Today is no exception, and every visitor will need to be fed before they attend a tangi that afternoon. Glavish sits at the kitchen table quietly observing. Her whānau make sure her giant thermo mug is full, and that she’s eating. A health scare a few days before our chat saw her hospitalised. “I discharged myself. I had an important meeting to chair,” she explains, blowing the incident off as if it were nothing.
Her daughters don’t look so convinced.
At 71, Glavish, or Dame Rangimarie as she’s now formally known, has more than earned the right to put her feet up, but instead she’s embarking on a new challenge. “My focus this year,” she says as our interview concludes, “is Māori. Mental. Health.” She’s committed to affecting some real change – or “kicking some arse” as she puts it. “Well, I’m going to try,” she concludes, acknowledging the enormity of the task ahead of her. “I’m going to try.”
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