It’s a wrap for 2025 & it’s been another busy year for the Tuwhare Trust. Like so many creative Trusts in Aotearoa, we are volunteers, we have to hustle for funding, our Trustees live in Te Tai Tokerau, Tamaki, Hauraki, Te Tai Rawhiti and Te Wai Pounamu & we are deeply committed to the Tuwhare kaupapa of inspiring people through the celebration of the Tuwhare legacy. To close out the year, here are a few words about the Tuwhare legacy spoken at Otakou Marae, Otepoti on October 17 as part of the Ahi Kaa opening event of the 2025 Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival.
Hone Tuwhare’s poetry invoked nuclear apocalypse and taniwha, listened to the sea, rivers and rain, tasted kina, mussels and women and tuned in to the clang of working men’s lives and whakapapa etched in the land. His legacy continues to rumble through the life of poetry in Aotearoa – slow, deep and unstoppable.
Tuwhare’s legacy embodies. His poetry did something subtle and seismic: it redefined what counted as “New Zealand literature.” He brought te ao Maori — its humour, its cadences, its spirituality — into the mainstream without translation or apology, he simply embodied it. To you I will sing of the water he wrote, and in that simple act of address he reminded us that the land and its people are not subjects of poetry; they are poetry.
Tuwhare’s legacy creates space. His influence can be seen in all the poets who have followed, all of you in the whare tonight. Each of you carries some ember of Tuwhare’s insistence that language be lived in, not merely used. His easy toggling between English and te reo Maori, between the lyrical and the colloquial, cracked open space for writers to bring their whole selves to the page.
Tuwhare’s legacy is relational. He performed in pubs and marae, laughed loud, signed books with a wink. He was our poet of the people not because he wrote for them, but with them, his work echoing the oral traditions that predated and will outlast the printed word. Even his politics, anti-nuclear, anti-colonial & community inspired, came from that same whakapapa of care, where resistance and aroha are intertwined. Where the heart can protest, and the protest can sing and poems can hum with paradoxical joy: fierce, funny and deeply rooted in relationship.
The kaupapa of the Tuwhare Trust is to continue to stoke the fire of Hone’s legacy by inspiring new generations of poets. The forge is still hot. The hammer still rings. And in the echo, you can hear Hone smiling.
Arohanui
Jeanette Wikaira, Chair = Tuwhare Trust.
