CLAUDIA ORANGE

Treaty witness

The Treaty of Waitangi, Ma¯ ori Affairs. I remember the phone going at night and it would be Whina Cooper wanting to talk about the development of land in the north. She would come to dinner and they would be speaking Ma¯ ori. It was normal.

‘‘I just accepted the fact that Ma¯ ori had really important issues they were dealing with as a whole in this country.’’

Orange, whose mother was a descendant of the Puhoi German community, was raised in Auckland with her two older sisters.

As a Catholic, she was taught to see issues, think them through, judge what could be done then act on them: see, judge and act became a critical part of her way of operating as far back as her teenage years.

At St Mary’s in Auckland she learned fast that strong women ruled the place so it was a shock to leave school and discover men were running the world, she says.

She studied school dental nursing purely because she couldn’t think of anything else to do and at 20 married Rod Orange, whom she had met during Lent when she was going to mass every day. Faith has been another thread throughout her life.

After the birth of their third child, they upped sticks to Bangkok, where Rod had been given a job setting up an English language institute for the Thai government.

When they came back after three and a half years, she enrolled at university for the first time, studying the effects of colonialism in The Treaty of Waitangi Dictionary