Ports in the storm

Amid the destruction wrought by Cyclone Gabrielle, marae stand as places of refuge, support and aroha.

- REBECA MACFIE

On the Sunday before Gabrielle unleashed her violence across Hawke’s Bay, whanau gathered at Waipatu Marae on Hastings’ eastern edge, to raise money for those in Tairawhiti still reeling from Cyclone Hale a month earlier.

They called it a slash fundraiser”. They wanted to manaaki those whose struggle with log-strewn farms and beaches, smashed riverbeds and barely passable roads had been overshadowed by the weather bomb that hit Auckland on January 27.

“Our northern whanau needed some support, so we just whistled everybody up over the week,” says Ngahiwi Tomoana. He is a kaihautu co-ordinator) at Waipatu Marae and until last year, the long-serving chair of Ngati Kahungunu, the large iwi that stretches from Paritt, east of Wairoa, down to Turakirae at the southern tip of the North Island.

It was a seamless operation, long practised, not just with frequent tangi and hui, but also through decades of trauma. After the loss of thousands of jobs from meatworks and manufacturing plants in the 1980s and 90s, after Cyclone Bola in 1988, after the 1996 eruption of Ruapehu, which sent ash to the coast, after the Havelock North campylobacter crisis of 2016, and after floods, Waipatu and other marae in the district have pulled stricken whanau and communities into their collective embrace.

In the past 18 months alone, Waipatu has produced 16,000 hangi meals to feed poor communities during Covid, for school lunches when food banks were closed by lockdowns, and for fundraisers.

By three in the afternoon on the day of the slash fundraiser, they’d made 12,000 for their cousins to the north from the sale of meals and raffles. Gabrielle was brewing. They cleaned up and said, Well, that’s it, we'd better go and batten down the hatches at home,” says Tomoana.