A heartfelt plea for aroha and tolerance

By Virginia Winder

Florence Winder, my mum

It all began with the mountain and moved on to my mother. 

When I was a baby reporter working at the Taranaki Daily News back in 1984 I was sent to a job in Stratford. 

The Taranaki Maori Trust Board and representatives of mountain users, like trampers and ski folk - and others I can't remember, probably DOC - were meeting about the name of the mountain. 

Should it be Taranaki or Egmont?

On the way there I remember thinking "how ridiculous, our mountain is Egmont".

Then I sat with notepad and pen in a meeting room, leaving all my biases at the door, and I listened. 

What I heard startled me - to the iwi spread around its slopes the mountain was always known as Taranaki and was seen as an ancestor, a living entity. There was a story about how Taranaki fought with Tongariro over the beautiful Pihanga and, being injured, was forced to flee to his present place, led by the rock Rahotu. 

From a colonial point of view, the mountain was named by Captain Cook on January 11, 1770 after John Perceval, 2nd Earl of Egmont, a former First Lord of the Admiralty who had supported the voyage. In other words it was named after a sponsor. 

The impassioned words from these Maori elders touched me deeply, changed me profoundly and from that day forth I never called the mountain Egmont again. 

Mt Taranaki from Fitzroy Beach

But even though the co-name change happened officially in 1986, the newspaper style remained Egmont until 2005 when it became Mt Taranaki under editor Lance Girling-Butcher. 

But for years before that I had been quietly subversive, always referring to the mounga (that's Te Reo o Taranaki's way of spelling it) as "Taranaki's mountain" in my stories. 
Nobody ever changed my wording. 

Next, was a marae visit. I don't know if it was my first - I don't remember that moment; I've always felt at home on a marae. I love the powhiri (welcome), the hongi and the hugs, the waiata and listening to the beauty of te reo Maori even if I can't understand everything that is said. It has always been soothing to my soul being on a marae.

In the 1980s, I was sent out to cover an educational programme at Owae Marae in Waitara. 
A bunch of street kids had been brought down from Auckland and a man of mana called Sonny Waru was there to teach them about who they were and where they came from. 

On that first day, these teenagers, homeless and many tagged with the glue-sniffer label, were a bedraggled lot who stood with their heads down, mistrustful of the world. 

I went back a week later and these kids were totally different. They stood tall. They looked proud and alert, strong and confident, all because they had learnt their whakapapa, had been immersed in their culture and knew who they were. 

Again, I was profoundly moved by the importance of knowledge, of understanding one's own culture and of aroha. 

Then it was my mother's turn to change. 

It happened in the early 1990s when she and my husband, Warren Smart (of Ngati Porou

Warren Smart, my husband 

descent), went to night classes to learn te reo. I was working nights so couldn't attend. 

Mum, a stridently passionate woman, fell in love with Maori language and the culture. She took to answering the phone in te reo, asking how you were in Maori and expecting you to reply in the same language, correcting your pronunciation if need be. 

Mum - Florence (she hated Flo) - read avidly about Maori current affairs and would get furious at any injustices. 

One day I visited to find her feeling frustrated and constrained. 

"Oh, I wish was a Maori," she declared. 

"Why mum?" I was perplexed. 

"Because then I could protest at Moutoa Gardens," she said, of the 1995 occupation of the land by iwi in Whanganui. 

She also used to practice writing in te reo by penning letters to her dear friend Gail in the US, who didn't understand Maori language at all. Mum thought she was hilarious.

Howard Winder, my dad

Dad was another story. He was an Egmont man, although he wasn't staunch about it. He was a man of great humour, whose skin turned the colour of mahogany in summer. An old Maori man from across the road, Mr Butler, came to visit one day and said: "Look at you, you should be the Maori not me."

Dad used to love telling that story, taking pride in his dark skin. 

He also supported mum's passion for all things Maori. But dad was more of a detached observer than participant, until a weekend wananga at Parihaka, the place of passive resistance in coastal Taranaki.

My sister, husband and I were all there with mum and dad that weekend, when the stories of Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi, of the plunder on November 5, 1881, of the imprisonments and also the meaning of the mounga were shared by the mesmerising Te Ru Wharehoka. 

At the end of the weekend, we all shared what we got from that weekend and dad said, with great emotion: "I'll never call the mountain anything but Taranaki again."

I teared up with pride. 

My own journey continued with books like Ask That Mountain by Dick Scott and Days of Darkness by Hazel Riseborough. 

But then I had the privilege of being employed by Puke Ariki to write stories about Taranaki. It was like being immersed in the past, learning about the Parihaka prophets, and others, including Sir Maui Pomare and Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck) and history like the land wars, the Peka Peka Block and Te Atiawa chief Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitaake. 

I learnt from the archives, from books, from historians and best of all from the people, who passed down the knowledge - Te Miringa Hohaia, Wharehoka Wano and Miria Pomare and many more. 

I was unbelievably privileged to learn by doing what I love best - telling stories. 

But the point of this blog is to share with you about how change takes place in a person. 

Mum, meeting one her greatest heroines, Dame Whina Cooper.

How learning about other cultures, especially of our tangata whenua, the people of this land, doesn't make you radical (well, perhaps mum was a bit); it makes you less fearful, more enriched, more understanding, more tolerant. And kinder, much kinder. 

Like Mayor Andrew Judd, once there is understanding of the past, acknowledgment of the gross injustices by our British colonial forefathers, there is no going back.

You can't un-know what you now know. 

I will always stand up for what I believe is right, opting for equity before true equality can come. 

I am my mother's daughter, one who stands with fierce love in my heart for all people. 

On the edge of addiction

By Virginia Winder

My legs are wriggle-aching like fish on a hook. Jerk, stretch, thrash. 

My arms feel the same - twitch, quiver, clench. 

A low-level headache pulses in my frontal lobe and behind my eyes. I've been shivery cold and sweaty hot. Throw in diarrhoea and nausea and you've got the entire picture - one of withdrawal symptoms. 

When I was in the three-month torment of sciatica that hovered between 6 and 10 on the pain scale I was given codeine, then Tramadol, Sevredol and long-acting morphine. The pain still fired and the doses went up. 

At my peak of painkiller taking I was on 40mg of long-acting morphine twice a day and, 10mg Sevredol (fast-acting morphine) every four hours. This was taken with ibuprofen and paracetamol. 

They barely touched the pain because the surgeon found a piece of jagged

bone sticking into my nerves. 

When I woke up from surgery the sciatica pain that had cursed me from right hip to foot was gone. 

But my need for painkillers hadn't. 

I was physically in need of morphine. 

There are thousands of people like me, who get hooked on opiates, not from dabbling with illicit drugs, but through a medical event. 

I've weaned myself off the morphine but it took time - just under two weeks in total. 

I wasn't perfect either. There were nights when my wiggle-twitching limbs sent me seeking another pill to help settle me down to sleep. I began to wonder if I'd ever get off this powerful but useful opiate, derived from opium poppies. 

The thought of a full-blown addiction terrified me and yet this is a reality for many. 

But I was lucky because my body was having the reactions, not my mind. I was not psychologically hooked, didn't need morphine for my brain or my moods. I got no feelings of euphoria because the drug was only working on my pain. 

It was just the physical effects that churned me up when it was time to cut it out. 

But imagine being on higher doses and for much longer.  

Those addicted to morphine may, according to www.morphineaddictionhelp.com have:

* Loss of control that results in compulsive use.

* Continuation of behavior despite adverse consequences.

* Obsession or preoccupation with obtaining and using the substance.

By tonight I will be 72 hours without morphine. 

And just to make sure I can't regress, I packaged up the morphine sulphate, the Sevredol, Tramadol and codeine and, between dark-as-night thunderstorms, walked the lot back to the pharmacy across the road. 

I'm now opiate free and so is my home. It's a damn good feeling. 

But I also have deep feelings of empathy for those living the nightmare of addiction - especially those who become hooked from a medical event, whether physical or mental. 

It could've been me.