Moana Holmes (not her real name) was a fun-loving, cheeky 17-year-old Māori girl who occasionally called into Cobb & Co to see her cousin Jay who worked out back with me as a kitchen assistant. Moana was 5’10’’ with large brown eyes, a thick nose, brown-black shoulder length hair and a small scar on her left temple. On a busy Friday night she ordered a coffee and sat on a barstool directly in front of the kitchen. She was wearing a tight black dress, a dark blue denim jacket and boots.
When I took a short break I decided to go out and introduce myself. She was unexpectedly chatty, telling me she just finished a shift as a waitress at a restaurant on Tamamutu St. She was waiting for Jay to finish his kitchen shift here and then planned on going out to a friend’s place who was hosting a late night party out at Acacia Bay.
I wished her a good evening and headed back to my duties as I could see glasses and dishes trickling in and piling up. Moana yelled out, “Andrew, do you want to come and join us?”
Soon enough we were puttering over the Taupō Control Gates in her blue Morris 1100, through Nukuhau and onward toward the sleepy Acacia Bay suburbs.
As Moana drove along the Acacia Bay Road straight I quickly glanced sideways at her and could not get over how much she resembled Diana Ross of The Supremes. I told her that and she giggled, as did Jay, sitting in the back seat.
We arrived at the party and after introductions were made to the hosts and 10-12 partygoers, we found a quiet corner to talk. She told me she lived with her auntie and uncle in a very small home out at Waitahanui, about five miles south of Taupō. Her mother’s family descended from the Ngāti Tūwharetoa iwi and her father was originally from Samoa. Both her parents currently lived together in the Gisborne area and although she had no siblings she had plenty of family all living in different suburbs around Taupō. Moana worked most evenings between 4-10pm waitressing at the Suncourt restaurant.
Everyone at the party was dancing to Stevie Wonder, War, The O’Jays and Chaka Chan blasting out from a decent stereo system. After another hour mixing with the others, Moana and myself ended up down at the lake edge nearby, beneath a multi-cloured crochet blanket. I was unsure what had happened to Jay.
The weeks rolled on into a warm spring and I was constantly with Moana. It meant getting home later and later and on several occasions I got home to my concrete bunker room just in time to change clothes and prepare for my day job.
As I spent more time with Moana, I got exposed to an after-midnight lifestyle and a partial awareness of Māori culture that I previously knew nothing about. Up until now I wrongly assumed everybody lived similar to my family. I felt privileged to be accepted in her extended family homes around Taupō town, often arriving close to the midnight hour. Lightbulbs were ablaze in the households when we arrived and a party vibe always seemed to be only a heartbeat away.
Her cousins, aunties and uncles were always welcoming, relaxed and genuinely happy to see me. It was the polar opposite to my parents’ more formalised and stilted ways of welcoming guests. They were magical evenings with beer or wine flowing freely, everyone smoking cigarettes and 70s music. Moana absolutely loved the funky Stevie Wonder album Innervisions and we’d boogie on down to ‘Higher Ground’ or ‘Living For the City’, both great dance tracks.
One night at a small home near Brice St we walked in with the sweet smell of crackling pork floating through the air from an outdoor hangi. I looked around at the framed family photos hanging on the walls, showing men with facial tattoos, tribal clothing and pretty wahines in flax skirts and wearing beads, sitting in small flax covered huts.
Even though there were three-in-one stereo systems in most homes, one or two young Māori guys would be strumming battered acoustic guitars in a lounge for a small group of seven-eight guests. They picked out NZ anthems like ‘Pretty Girl’ by Hogsnort Rupert and ‘Brandy’ by Bunny Walters. I remember one guitarist had black frizzy hair very much like Jimi Hendrix. He was known as Fizz, and worked on the production line at Fletcher timber mill, always ready to party after work and then sleep during the daytime before repeating it all over again.
One night I got chatting with Fizz. After successfully capping another beer with the end of a spoon, he proceeded to inform me a little of Moana’s recent past. She had recently broken up with a boy who was at Tongariro High School in Turangi with her, and had been sad and down for the past few months. Fizz looked at me sideways and said, “But that was then and Moana seems happier these days.”
On many evenings Moana and I would fall asleep together on a couch or on a bed in a spare room and on those nights I would walk home in the early morning light. Moana rarely drove out to her digs at Waitahanui, opting to stay in if she’d had a few wines.
One evening at a party on Tonga St, a cousin of hers started telling me about a new roots music slowly floating onto Aotearoa’s shores. I was intrigued. The English magazine New Musical Express was starting to report on reggae and Eric Clapton’s album 461 Ocean Boulevard album was often on the turntable, propelled by the single ‘I Shot the Sherriff’. Moana’s cousin pointed out to me that it was a cover from a song by a true Rastafarian, Bob Marley.
But I was still into the classics. I bought a Sanyo portable cassette player as well as Santana’s Greatest Hits and Led Zeppelin 1. Some additional good news was that the panelbeating repairs were almost completed on my MK 1 Cortina.
At 17, Moana lived in the moment, never asking about my family, history or quizzing me at all on any past girlfriends. She once laughingly told me she’d never been with a Pākehā boy before and then from a laughing mood her emotions changed without warning as she switched topics, crying about a family member who’d become critically ill. I had never really experienced this happy/sad fluctuating behaviour before. Her extended family accepted it at face value but I could never hold out hope that would be the response from my own family.
I spent many nights after work with Moana. She had so much energy and and joy for life. I was spellbound. But my own family and even friends had no nowledge of my life outside of work. I rarely saw anyone else in my twilight world. Moana only phoned me once at home, on a Saturday morning, inviting me to play golf at the Tauhara course. I couldn’t get away and after the phone call I came to reflect that I’d actually never seen Moana during normal daylight hours. When we next caught up I raised this with Moana, and we made arrangements to travel over to Gisborne in her Morris 1100 to visit her parents over the Labour Weekend.
Working two jobs was taking its toll on me. On the two nights off from Cobb & Co, I slept. I was too fatigued to work as well as I could at my clerical job at Fletcher Plyco, so I quit the Cobb & Co job. It was a no-brainer. I couldn’t have kept up the frantic pace for much longer anyway. But at the same time I made another decision that I instantly regretted with a passion.
One late night as Moana drove us along Spa Rd toward Brice St I foolishly blurted out that I needed a break in our relationship. A tear rolled down her left cheek. Without looking at me, she said, “Get out of my car now, please.” I stood on the sidewalk watching her Morris 1100 turn into Tauhara Rd.
Once I had caught up on some much-needed sleep I made it my sole mission to woo her back. My heart was suffering. But the manager of the Suncourt restaurant had already shown a dislike toward me and he would not let me enter to see her.
Her extended family wouldn’t talk to me either. As time went on it felt like fine grains of sand slipping through my fingers and I was helpless to stop it. Then it simply was too late when Moana hooked up with her previous boyfriend and shifted back to Tūrangi to live with him.
A mildly abbreviated chapter taken from the newly self-published memoir of growing up in Taupō during the 1970s, Ramblings of an Old Record Collector by Andrew Figgest, available on amazon.com.au for $30.51 + 3 day delivery.
