ANGLICAN TAONGA
Hariata Turei (nee Waititi). The bishop's mama whangai.
Teki (Dick) Turei, papa whangai to Bishop Brown Turei.
Dick and Hariata chose for their new son. They named him in honour of Dick’s older brother, The Reverend Paraone Turei, who had been the vicar of Hikurangi. He’d been cut down by typhoid fever, and died in 1912, aged 28. But to grasp the extent of Archbishop Brown’s priestly whakapapa we need to go one generation further back. Dick and Paraone’s father was Mohi Turei – a legend in Ngati Porou circles. Mohi was among the last students of Te Tapere Nui a Whatonga, at Rangitukia, where he became a tohunga1, an expert in the ancient disciplines of Te Ao Maori. Later, thanks to the evangelist Piripi Taumata-a-Kura, and William Williams, Mohi became a Christian, then a student at the Waerenga-a-Hika mission school – and, finally, an Anglican priest, ordained by Bishop Williams in 1870. But Mohi Turei never became a westernised priest, and in Don Tamihere’s view, he shaped the “template for Tairawhiti Christianity.” His haka: Tihei Taruke, which is a Ngati Porou classic, expresses this. A taruke is a crayfish pot, and that was Mohi’s metaphor for catching the old knowledge and the new. As we’ll see shortly, Mohi’s mokopuna, Brown Turei, has also contributed to the weaving of Ngati Porou culture and Christianity. *
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Dick and Hariata sent Brown to Te Aute College. By that stage, Dick was farming, so Brown was enrolled in a farming class. But his parents hadn’t lost sight of the vow they’d made when he was born. So they travelled to Auckland, hoping to sign Brown up at St John’s College. There, they bumped into an ordinand
ADVENT 2016
He shaped a “template for Tairawhiti Christianity”.
Trentham military camp, 1945: L-R: Bill Stafford, John Waititi, Brown Turei, Hati Grey.
Rev Mohi Turei, father of Dick Turei and Rev Brown Turei snr (Bishop Brown's namesake.) Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library.
named Terrence Loten, whose father was headmaster of Te Aute. The upshot? Young Turei was pulled from Te Aute’s farming stream – and set down into the academic one. As Archbishop Brown recently told Maori Television: “Irrespective of the path I took, I was redirected to the life I have led.” *
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He left Te Aute in 1943 and headed to College House in Christchurch to prepare for ministry. His mind was elsewhere, though, because the war was raging. The age of enlisting to the army was 21, he was only 19 – but he signed up anyway. He wasn’t being gung ho. He just figured that he needed to share in what the 28 Maori Battalion soldiers were going through. So he trained at Trentham, and as Private Turei, Serial no 811818, set sail from Wellington in early 1945 with the 15th reinforcement of the 28 Maori Battalion. As it happened, the war in Europe ended on May 7, 1945, five days before the ship docked in Egypt. But the guiding hand of God still reached him in The land of the Pharaohs. Padre Manu Bennett (later Bishop Manu) spotted young Turei there – and took him to visit the Holy Land, before the Battalion sailed for home on Boxing Day, 19452. So Private Turei never fought in the battalion’s great battles. But because of his willingness to do so, he won the respect of
the veterans who had fought – so many of whom he later pastored. *
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After the war, Brown picked up his studies at St John's College. He was deaconed in 1949, priested in 1950, and then did two years’ curacy in Tauranga. In 1952, the newly-minted Reverend Brown Turei was appointed Vicar of the Whangara Maori pastorate, near Gisborne – and straightaway, he joined a team organising a kapa haka competition to be contested between parishes from Anaura Bay to Wairoa. They called that competition: Tamararo. Sixty-five years later, Tamararo is a keystone of Tairawhiti life – and it has led, in part, to Te Matatini, which is the Olympics of kapa haka. To this day, says Don Tamihere, the Tumuaki of Gisborne’s Te Rau College, “every kapa haka roopu taking part in Tamararo has a song book that is full of the Gospel.” Mohi Turei would have approved. *
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The other significant development during the Whangara years was Brown Turei’s courtship of Mary Jane King. Or, as we’ve come to know her: Mrs Mihi Turei. It was a slow-burning romance, because for months at a time, Mihi (who has links to Ngati Porou and Ngati Kahu) was at Ardmore
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