Bringing David home
James Panui remembered playing with his brother David on the floor of their family’s one-room home at Orakei Pa.
And he remembered his brother being taken away from the family’s Auckland home.
It was 1944 when 3-year-old David Panui left, but it was only when James’ daughter, Katrina Mulitalo (Ngāti Whātua) decided to try to find some answers that the truth was uncovered.
David was sent to Nelson Mental Hospital – which would later be renamed Braemar – after being assessed by a eugenics board. It was there that he died, aged 9, of pneumonia.
He lies in an unmarked grave in Wakapuaka Cemetery.
Now the family want to bring him home.
Mulitalo said her father, James Panui, never knew why the man came and took his brother away, and had assumed it was polio.
In the 1940s the family lived in a one-room shack at Orakei Pa in Auckland, Mulitalo said.
Living conditions were ‘‘horrendous’’ – there was no power or running water, and the walls were held together with paper mache but the parents worked hard to provide for their 12 children. Her grandfather worked at the docks, while her grandmother worked in the market garden.
‘‘I think that is where my father gets his green fingers from ... she had her own vege garden down at Orakei.’’
James and a sister remembered a big man coming to the door to take David away, and their mother pressing a shilling into his hand as they said goodbye.
They were told he was taken to Nelson to be taken care of.
‘‘We just thought he had polio, maybe he was adopted.’’
During lockdown in 2020 Mulitalo, a former postie, started trying to discover David’s fate, and learned that he had been sent to Nelson Mental Hospital in 1944, after being assessed by psychologists in Auckland.
According to a letter to the chairman of the Eugenics Board in Wellington, when David was 1 year old he caught cerebrospinal meningitis, which left him partially paralysed and ‘‘with an IQ of barely 30% and will probably be totally dependent all his life’’.
‘‘That was when [the doctors decided] that they could no longer care for him ... they just said to my grandmother that because she already had four other children that she was incapable of looking after him,’’ Mulitalo said.
David stayed at the Nelson Mental Hospital for the remainder of his life, dying there in 1950.
While it was satisfying to have answers, it was upsetting learning his fate, Mulitalo said. ‘‘My grandmother must have felt helpless.
‘‘I just hope that they are now together in heaven dancing to Elvis Presley – David’s mother loved his music.’’
Many questions remained. Was he cared about? Did they treat him with respect when he died?
When she presented the findings to her father, his immediate response was that ‘‘he shouldn’t be down there’’.
‘‘He wanted his brother to be home, to be surrounded with his whānau ... in Māori culture in their kawe mate it is significant for their dead to be placed in their urupa with whānau.’’
After contacting government departments about getting David reinterred to be with his parents, Mulitalo decided she ‘‘didn’t want a big battle’’, so instead the family was trying to raise money through a Givealittle page to bring him home.
Adjunct research fellow at Victoria University Dr Hilary Stace said stories like David’s were common.
‘‘We can just hope he was one of the lucky ones that did have some kind staff,’’ she said.
The Eugenics Board was established in New Zealand in 1928, and eugenics was a ‘‘powerful policy driver’’ for the first half of the century, Stace said. Eugenicists believed people with disabilities should be separated from the rest of society to protect the population.
Families would be told it was in a child’s best interest to be sent away and it was common for them to be sent to another city – with many families never knowing where their loved ones were sent.
Much of the history was ‘‘invisible’’, which was why the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care was so important,
Stace said.