When most New Zealanders hear the term “marae” they think of the typical Māori meeting house.
The angular facade, decorated in red and white carvings, and the open space for the “encounter” where guests arrive in the warmth of welcome, in the grief of a tangi (funeral), or in the uncertainty of a disagreement.
Technically, the “marae” refers to that open space, but most people assume it means the meeting house. In most parts of the North Island, marae – taking the common meaning of the meeting house and the open space – dot small, rural communities. In Te Teko, where I trace my whakapapa (ancestry), there are four marae within a couple kilometres of each other.
Each marae on that golden mile in Te Teko acts as a physical statement – this is Māori land. Marae embody deep connections to the land and to the ancestors who exercised rights and responsibilities in respect of it. They make perfect sense in New Zealand.
But in Australia, where the Sydney Marae Alliance are preparing to construct that country’s first marae, they make no sense. In a landmark deal the Alliance are planning a $4m facility in Greystanes, a suburb in western Sydney. For the 65,000 Māori who call New South Wales home the soon-to-be marae will act as a tangible connection to their ancestral home, creating a space for Māori culture to thrive on a foreign land.
“Foreign” is the operative word, though. Marae are a statement of indigeneity. In Te Teko, the marae on the golden mile signal a deeper, longer connection to the land than the Pākehā farms and towns that surround them. But in Australia Māori aren’t indigenous. Māori are indigenous to New Zealand.
And that distinction is at the heart of the matter. In Australia, Aboriginal peoples are Indigenous. In Greystanes, the Darug are the people who maintain an ancient connection to the land and exercise their rights and responsibilities in respect of it. In the more than 60,000-year history of Aboriginal peoples, Māori – arriving in Sydney shortly after white settlement – are Johnnies-come-lately. Can the Māori community in NSW really call on a connection deep enough to justify a marae?
The Alliance point to the 19th-century farm that one rangatira (Māori chief) maintained in the area as well as the Reverend Samuel Marsden’s former seminary for Māori only eight kilometres from the proposed site. There are Māori ancestors buried in and around what is, today, western Sydney. But on that logic we could also rationalise the monuments to European imperialism – from statues to churches to prisons – on the basis that white settlers can point to a few hundred years in Australia as well. None of this is enough to make Māori or Europeans indigenous to Australia because Indigenous people already exist. Building a marae would form part of a grim history of erasing Aboriginal indigeneity.
None of this is to suggest the Alliance is acting in bad faith. The facility in Greystanes forms one part of several proposals to construct marae in Australia. In 2010 a proposal was made for a marae in Melbourne, and then one for Western Australia in 2013. Māori in Australia obviously yearn for a space where they can just be Māori.
But the answer to that yearning is rather obvious – if you want a marae, return to New Zealand. If you want a space to be Māori, build a community centre or lease a hall. The carvings that decorate marae are another statement of belonging, telling the story of an indigenous people and their connection to the land in question. But whose stories will the carvings in Greystanes tell?
The Alliance confirm that they’ve sought and won support from Darug elders for their marae. Again, this indicates the good faith in which the proposal was created, but it still doesn’t address the “indigenous” question.
Mamari Stephens illustrates this well when recounting the opening ceremony for a pou – a carving that communicates a certain meaning, in this context a welcome and connection to New Zealand – in the south Pacific garden in the Nurragingy Reserve where (quite wrongly) Māori took on the role of welcoming the visitors. That might seem harmless, but the visitors appeared to include members of the Darug community. In this context Māori can never be indigenous, and so they should never take on the traditional (in New Zealand) role of welcoming the actual Indigenous people – the Darug – in a powhiri on to their own land.
Morgan Godfery (Te Pahipoto, Sāmoa) is a senior lecturer at the University of Otago and a columnist at Metro
