GOING WHERE THE GRASS IS GREENER
Auckland was promoted as the land of milk and honey for Pacific Islanders in the 1950s. They came in their droves, and Ta¯maki Makaurau is now home to the South Pacific’s largest Polynesian population – and could soon have its first Pasifika mayor. Torika Tokalau reports.
Saofa’i and Luataunu’u Samuelu Sauni, with two toddlers in tow, took a leap of faith when they boarded a plane to New Zealand. It was 1955, and they had heard about job opportunities in a land 3000 kilometres away from Samoa.
They knew nothing about New Zealand or where the plane was going to land.
Their son Papali’i Pale Sauni, who was two years old at the time, said his parents didn’t even know that New Zealand had its own indigenous people.
But his parents came for the money, education and a better life.
It’s an experience shared by many from the Pacific who braved the journey at a time when labour was short in New Zealand after World War II – when the Government decided to look to its Pacific neighbours to raise the country’s economy.
Before then, the Pacific Island community in New Zealand numbered only a few thousand.
Sauni’s family, like many that came after them, chose Auckland specifically because they already had relatives in the region with whom they could stay, and there was a church where they could worship. That was important.
‘‘And work was here,’’ Sauni, a Pacific consultant, says.
Sauni was born in Samoa in 1953, to a district nurse and a lay preacher. Back then, he was the youngest of two children – his older sister was two. Five more children arrived after the family moved to Auckland.
Sauni, who has ties to Fale’ula and Faleasiu villages in Samoa, arrived in New Zealand with his older sister and parents when the international airport was still at Whenuapai.
They moved in with his uncle, who owned a three-bedroom house in Ponsonby, overlooking the Harbour Bridge.
It was on Vine St, and it’s still there today. Sauni laughs as he remembers how back then, his uncle bought the house for £500, ‘‘but today it’s $500 just for the letterbox’’.
‘‘So when we came it was my uncle, his wife and two kids, and then my parents and their two children under that roof.
‘‘That small house housed a lot of families coming over here for work and education – the same reason our parents said yes to the invitation by the Government to come here.’’
Throughout his childhood, Sauni remembers watching a swarm of adults coming to live with them.
His parents joined the Adventist church in Mackelvie St, a congregation filled with middleclass palagi (white) families, dominated by men. But it was also there that they met more Pacific Island families who had had a similar journey to New Zealand.
The church was a fundamental part of the family’s orientation into Kiwi culture, as it was for many new Pacific migrants.
Sauni’s parents eventually bought a house in Millais St, and later at Ma¯ ngere in South Auckland.
‘‘It was faith that brought them here, and I really trust that faith in them, and they worked their magic, for dad to work and mum to be a fulltime home provider for us seven kids.’’
His dad, who was known as Sam, worked at Westfield Freezing Works company until he retired, and his wife looked after the children, with some part-time jobs on the side.
Families that arrived in Auckland later from the islands ventured to Wellington to work in the