“We live by the sea, which hems and stitches the scalloped edges of the land,” writes New Zealand author Patricia Grace of the beachside town that is the setting for her novel, Potiki. The land in the book bears a striking resemblance to the settlement where Grace lives, and walking up the coastal road to her home in Hongoeka Bay, north of Wellington, you can see things the way her characters do: the dark morning sea, “strident bands” of gulls, and the capital’s notoriously “edged wind”.

In 1975, Grace, now 82, was the first Māori woman to publish a book of short stories in New Zealand, despite the fact that she had not – by the time she finished high school – read a book by a local writer, let alone an Indigenous one.

Potiki, the 1986 novel about a Māori community fighting to save its ancestral land from developers, has been relevant ever since; New Zealand’s government continues to seize Māori land legally, even as it seeks to provide redress for what was taken in the past. More than two decades after the book’s publication, officials attempted to seize Grace’s own.

Potiki will shortly be published as a Penguin Classic in Britain, an unusual prospect for a writer from New Zealand who was raised entirely on the works of Shakespeare and Milton but nothing that resembled “anything that was about me or where I lived or my culture”.

When Grace eventually wrote novels, short stories, and children’s books about what she knew – the ordinary, everyday lives of Māori people and their families – she was surprised to be branded a political writer. At a time when stories about Māori honed in on social inequity – New Zealand’s Indigenous people fare worse than Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent) on nearly every social and economic metric – Grace wrote instead about what she had seen growing up Māori: loving family and a close-knit community.

“One comment that I had was that I wrote it to cause social unrest and racial disharmony,” she says of Potiki. “I wasn’t a very politicised person at all.”

Besides, Grace says, laughing, those who levelled accusations at her of having made Māori “the good guys” of Potiki, and white New Zealanders “the bad guys”, did not realise she had never specified what race the greedy developers in the story were.

Eventually, she had to fend off a real-life attempt on her land. In Hongoeka Bay – a quiet, sparkling curve of land, where the community is centred around the wharenui, a Māori word for a communal meeting house, and residents gather kai moana – seafood – from the beach, Grace lives in a light, airy, wooden house nestled into the hills.

Hongoeka Bay. Photograph: Flickr/ Steve Attwood

In 2014 Grace won a high-profile legal battle against the government, which wanted to purchase her land by force – under a law called the Public Works Act – to build an expressway. She is incredulous, she says, that such a law is still in force, even as an official tribunal seeks to settle claims with Māori tribes for land seized when the British colonised the country in the 19th century.

“You can take anybody’s land, not only Māori land,” she says, referring to the Public Works Act. “But I know it’s being researched at the moment and I think we’ll find that a bigger percentage is Māori.”

‘I didn’t want Māori to be treated as a foreign language’

Reviews of Potiki were mixed when it was published in 1986, and some were condescending, she says.

“One said that one day she might write a truly New Zealand novel,” says Grace. She thought the reviewer had meant a “bicultural” novel, one with more white people in it.

Her use of the Māori language, known in New Zealand as te reo Māori, throughout the book had been intended “to alienate the readers”, critics said.

“What I was really trying to do was having my characters speak in the way that was natural to them,” she says. She refused to include a glossary of Māori terms or italicise the book’s Māori words; the year after Potiki’s publication, the Indigenous tongue became an official language of New Zealand.

“I’d had a glossary in a previous work and then I suddenly thought that a glossary is there for foreign languages, italics are there for foreign languages,” she says. “I didn’t want Māori to be treated as a foreign language in its own country.”

She didn’t mind the criticism, she says. It freed her to write “the way I wanted to write”.

Softly spoken and self-effacing about her part in New Zealand’s literary canon, Grace agrees that books like Potiki helped to usher in change for the Māori language. Her grandparents’ generation was punished for speaking the Indigenous tongue, and her parents were not given the chance to learn.

The tide began to turn following language activism in the 1970s and 80s – decades when Grace wrote prolifically. While earlier this century many assumed that the language would die out, it has in recent years experienced a resurgence.

Grace started to learn the language as an adult, but had found it “very, very difficult” due to the painful legacy of missing out on it earlier, she says. “I think the best thing I’ve done is to encourage my children, and to babysit for them while they go and do courses and classes.”

Grace has not, she says, kept track of the discussion in the global literary community about whether authors should write characters of different races to themselves, but encountered it early on in her career when she was wrongly accused of having said “that Pākehā writers should not write about Māori characters”, she says.

She had simply said, she claims, that certain established writers had not depicted Māori people credibly, and faced harsh criticism for her remarks. Now, as a respected New Zealand author, she is sometimes contacted by other writers wanting her approval of how they have written Māori characters.

“I just can’t deal with that, I’ll just send it all back,” she says, adding that the answer lay in research of other cultures, rather than prescriptive rules. “I’m not going to give anybody a tick. It’s up to them to do what they do.”





