Trustees

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.