Three men in a waka
Stanley Conrad, Jacko Thatcher, Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr
Te Moana nui a Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean, is 165.2 million square kilometres of water. It covers a third of the planet. You could squeeze all the world’s land into it and still fall inside the edges.
That’s a long drive to the store if you forget the bread. Especially if the store is Rarotonga, which is only 67km2; and you’re sailing 3200km from Aotearoa on two wooden hulls lashed together, with a space in between for your gear and food. Even more especially if all you used to guide you are stars at sunset and sunrise, birds, ocean swells.
If you’re a Māori or Pasifika person stuck in a car, or toiling at work – if life is getting you down –remember, you descend from the world’s greatest explorers. They travelled and settled this vast, singular oceanic homeland, extending beyond anything else humans have navigated.
This story is about three men who sailed like those ancestors, proving with each voyage that, despite what we were taught, Māori were not an accidental nation, washed ashore by chance. We set our own course.
Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr, Stan Conrad and Jack Thatcher have been awarded Creative NZ’s Te Tohu o Te Papa Tongarewa Rongomaraeroa Award for services to Māori arts. They are also tohunga (experts) for Manu Rere Moana | Pacific Voyagers, a freshly renewed Te Papa exhibition. They are experts after decades of sailing, building and navigating waka in the Pacific.
Conrad was born in 1963 in Te Kao in the Far North, the youngest of 15 siblings. He grew up on a farm – and out on Parengarenga Harbour, fishing. In 1974, his father, Niki Conrad, captained waka taua Ngātokimatawhaorua, as part of Waitangi celebrations with visiting royals, including the Queen. It sparked a lifelong connection with waka for his son, Stan.
Paddle-powered waka taua are different in design and purpose to the double-hulled waka hourua used for voyaging. They also differ in routine. On the ocean you’re hot-bunking, Conrad says, which sounds much like office hotdesking but you’re sharing a slab of plywood with a thin mattress on it, sheltered under a sheet of plastic. When your bunkmate’s up, you’re down having a sleep; when you’re up, they’re down.
There is a navigator, and a captain. There are shifts of about four people, and a shift captain in charge of each. Your life, for days on end, revolves around these shifts. Privacy is limited.
Often you are scared, Conrad says. After all, you are on a waka, on the biggest ocean in the world, being navigated by traditional means. Out here in this endless expanse of water, you are nothing – while simultaneously you are ‘‘all one person’’.
His first voyage was on the Hawaiian waka Hōkūle‘a, on the Rarotonga-to-Aotearoa leg of a Pacific voyage in 1985. In 1992, he captained Sir Hekenukumai Busby’s waka Te Aurere on its maiden voyage to Rarotonga, with the help of navigator Mau Piailug from the island of Satawal. His most recent major voyage was in 2012 when he skippered Te Aurere to Rapa Nui – the easternmost outpost of Polynesia.
Out in the ocean there are people on all those specks of islands, he says; they all share iterations of the reo, the whakapapa, of a nation of world builders who spread across Te Moana nui a Kiwa.
‘‘You arrive at a place and the only story you hear is, ‘The last time we ever saw a voyaging waka is when our ancestors left here, now you’ve come out of the south and you returned.’ That’s just an amazing kōrero on its own.’’
It was on the first voyage of Te Aurere when Conrad crawled out from under shelter as a storm hammered the waka, to inquire why Thatcher and Piailug were laughing so hard amid the wind and rain, and, frankly, the terror.
Thatcher, a navigator and fellow voyager for decades, started learning to sail with the Tauranga Intermediate Boat Club. ‘‘Mainly so I could get out of the class and every Wednesday go over to Pilot Bay,’’ he says.
Thatcher joined the army but instead of travelling the world he ended up in Waiouru, and Tauranga, where he’d already spent most of his life. In 1988, he went with one of his uncles to a meeting about building a waka for the Mataatua Federation in Whakatāne. Before he knew it, he had retired from the army and was on Te Aurere for its 1992 maiden voyage to Rarotonga, and back.
The worst storm you’ll experience on the ocean is your first, Thatcher says – regardless of its strength. His first was on that voyage. It was also very strong. ‘‘Mau Piailug was out in the middle of that first storm, where he didn’t look afraid, and he was sipping raki, which was Taitokerau moonshine . . . and he shared some of that with me in the middle of the storm.
‘‘It was Stan [Conrad], and some of our crew that crawled on their hands and knees into the storm to find out what we were doing laughing when, for the most part, we should have been s...... our pants.’’
After that voyage Busby asked if Thatcher would consider learning traditional navigation, as part of a group that became known as the Boys of Summer. ‘‘There were Hawaiian guys, Cook Island guys, a Samoan fulla and a couple of Tahitians, and what we did was we came together in Hawaii to train under Mau Piailug and Nainoa Thompson and sail on Hōkūle‘a.’’
From 1992 till 1995, they sailed Hōkūle‘a for the Hawaiian summer, then Thatcher would return to Aotearoa, sailing Te Aurere. He didn’t see winter for four years.
When Thatcher graduated in 1995, Piailug told him: ‘‘You’re the light, you’re responsible for preserving life.’’ Now, before a storm, he feels a tiny knot inside, a reminder he has to be calm – ‘‘be the light’’ – like the great navigator.
In 2010 Piailug died, at 78. Busby died in 2019, aged 86.
Like Conrad and Thatcher, Hoturoa BarclayKerr continues their work of staving off the extinction of knowledge. He knows about preserving taonga – this Tainui man grew up for his first six-or-so years in Rūātoki, Tūhoe country, where te reo Māori was his main language.
Stuff: He aha ngā ahua o te tipu ake i roto i te reo Māori anake? Nā te mea i pānui au, koira tō reo . . . anake – te reo Māori, i tērā wā.
HBK: e, i taua wā koirāĀnoa iho taku reo, Māori. Kāore au i tino ako i te reo Pākehā … [engari] nō tō mātou taenga ake ki roto o Tāmaki Makaurau . . . kei te maumahara tonu au i te kata o ngā tamariki ki taku kore mōhio ki te reo Pākehā, me ērā mea i te wā i timata au i te kura.
His parents, Wharetoroa and Ngarungatapu Kerr, were teaching in Rūātoki before shifting to Auckland, where the other schoolkids laughed at his struggle with English.
Nowadays Barclay-Kerr sees parallels between te reo and waka voyaging. ‘‘We had to go through these difficulties of trying to recover, revive and regenerate systems of knowledge that were becoming extinct.’’
As a kid, he would visit Tūrangawaewae Marae in Ngāruawāhia, and trek down to waka taua stored on the sandbanks of the Waikato River.
They were made in the 1930s, one from the 1800s – he wandered among them, looking at how they were put together. This was no museum: they were real, alive, lying next to the water.
‘‘For me, it was a time of imagination, because I’ve been hearing all these stories as I’m growing up of my tūpuna who came to Kāwhia and all these people who I’m around who talk quite proudly of who they descend from . . . people who’ve travelled across the ocean on canoes.’’
His iwi said ancestors purposefully made their way here. Schoolteachers, on the other hand, said it was ‘‘a stroke of luck’’ after getting blown off course.
As soon as he graduated from university in the early 1980s he headed to Hawaii to learn about traditional navigation, sailing and building waka. Ever since, he has worked with waka taua, waka ama, and voyaged on waka hourua, dispelling myths about Polynesian exploration.
These modern sailors and navigators, Thatcher, Conrad, Barclay-Kerr, help people understand the truth. That is, if people believe Māori arrived by accident, they don’t have to accept the mātauranga, the science, the brilliant audacity of purposeful travel.
The truth is, to visit the islands is not to find isolated cultures cast about by the Pacific winds – rather, it is to find a living portrait of a nation of explorers.
‘‘We had to go through these difficulties of trying to recover, revive and regenerate systems of knowledge that were becoming extinct.’’