ROBERT TUHEKENGARANGI MOREHU MĀTĀTOA

A remarkable man

Robert Tuhekengarangi Morehu was born in Shannon on 9 December 1933, the first born son of Iapeta Tamahou Morehu (also known as Robert, Ngati Tuwharetoa) and Arapera Bella Morehu (known as Bella, Tainui).

Robert Snr and Bella are each described as “Maori of Full Blood” on Robert’s birth certificate. Robert was the second in line of 12 siblings, each born roughly two years apart over 24 years. He claimed that Tuhekengarangi means Evening Star and that his middle name was intended to be Tetuhekengarangi, The Evening Star i.e. the planet Venus, which Robert would view each clear evening before retiring to bed. Robert’s life story is one of hardship, self-reliance, adventure, tragedy, intrigue, accomplishment and ultimate redemption.

Robert Snr and Bella quickly moved from Shannon to Robert Snr’s ancestral land of Hatepe, on the Eastern shore of Lake Taupo. In the journal he wrote of his life up until a few years after he finished his prison sentence, Robert described his early life as lonely. His journal begins:

Hobo Blake spent a lot of time in Hatepe helping me with wood for the Morehu fire…He had a very sad ending as he was one of the best friends I had. He joined the Maori Battalion. On this home coming he arrived in Auckland he bought an Indian motorbike. At the same time whanau, friends, people from all over we assembled at the Waitahanui Marae preparing one of the biggest welcomes ever. He didn’t arrive. He was killed in Kawerau. I cried for days.

Robert had no childhood in any modern sense. The Morehus were poor and lived mainly off the land. The territory out east from Hatepe towards the Kaweka Range had been a beef cattle station farmed by Robert’s great grandfather, The Reverend Hoeta Te Hata, but the farm had been abandoned and by the time Robert Snr and Bella returned remnant feral cattle shared that land with deer and wild pigs. When cattle would encroach on Robert and his father as they sat by the fire on their hunting expeditions, Robert Snr would scatter them by putting a bullet between the fire-lit eyes of the dominant bull. Robert Snr worked on the roads but deer skins were a prime source of income and wild pork was a food staple.

Life was however not without levity. Robert describes in his journal how his father conspired with the kitchen staff to deal with a food bludger at the Marae. Again in Robert’s words:

The ladies placed the watercress, potato, kumara, dough boy all around my Dad’s tutai. “Te Kai” was yelled out. He was first. Sat down. The head waitress gave him his kai. He never budged. Ate all his veges and walked out amid a huge roar from family and friends. He never returned.

The grocery store was a luxury and local ranger Callaghan was a constant pest. One spring day Robert Snr sent young Robert on horseback south to the mouth of the Waipehi stream to net trout. And sure enough up comes Callaghan, demanding to know the content of the sack slung over the horse’s back. Robert blurts “deer” and gallops home, with Callaghan heading for his truck, and briefs his father. Serendipity; a deer browsing through Hatepe is shot and hastily hung in the shed and the trout stashed under the Homestead. In chugs Callaghan: “This deer, Morehu?” Robert Snr wafts an arm at the shed’s open door. Callaghan stares and rumbles off, ruefully eyeing those Morehus males in his rear vision mirror.

Having cleared the Hatepe block of blackberry, a monumental labour for a 13 year old, Robert snuck off with a friend to Wellington. The boys took up lodgings in Courtney Place and, with the watersiders on strike at the time, worked on the docks as (unbeknownst to them) “scabs”. Their disappearance made the national newspapers and it was six weeks before the police found them and drove them home. Back then there were hydro-electric construction works at the South end of Lake Taupo and as the police car passed through Turangi the boys politely asked to be dropped off. Fat chance.

At Maori boys’ college Te Aute Robert played prodigious first 15 rugby and then left to work in Napier, in the Railways during the day and in the bars at night. Then on one such night Robert’s life derailed. Dirt poor, on the spur of the moment Robert determined to rob the notoriously fat wallet of a giant of a man a few doors down on Marine Parade. Caught red-handed and advanced on, Robert lashed out with a clothing iron and fled, brushing past the man’s sister. Hearing the next day that the man was dead and his house burnt down, Robert headed to his sister’s 21st in Taupo where he was arrested within days.

Convicted and sentenced to hang, the teenage Robert listened from his cell to the gallows being built outside his cell window. But with a ground-swell of support, including from President of the Court of Appeal Sir Alfred North whom Robert had often taken fishing, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. From prison Robert wrote an apology to the victim’s sister and they became pen pals. Intrigue surrounds the killing. From Robert’s journal:

“Even today I still can’t say I killed him. It haunts me every day…I can’t write what she told me about her brother. I’ve kept my promise to her.”

Robert certainly didn’t burn the house down. The distinct possibility is that the sister finished her brother off, for reasons one can imagine.

At Mt Eden renowned King Pin Richard McDonald, “Maori Mac”, took Robert under his wing and things got interesting.  There were prison riots in Mount Eden at that time, with Maori Mac the ringleader and young Robert Morehu not far behind, resulting in long solitary confinements for Robert.

However the prison Superintendent and his wife were progressives and encouraged a group of inmates, mainly lifers and including Maori Mac and Robert, to form a band, with Robert on saxophone. From the cell designated for band practice and instrument storage the band members systematically escaped over the walls in over-night sorties, returning each time before dawn. The nights were spent robbing (not Robert), romancing (Robert with a Tahitian girlfriend) and in Auckland’s cinemas, bars and restaurants. Eventually busted, in a secret deal with the Department of Justice the escapees promised not to tell the full story for 55 years. Again from Robert’s journal: “It is actually 57 years today (10/9/2013)”.

Robert served his last periods of imprisonment in Hautu Prison Farm about 30km from Hatepe and then at New Plymouth Prison and finally at Paparoa.

The years rolled by following prison. The wife who bore Robert’s six legitimate children, four sons and two daughters, deserted him for Australia, became the head a drug syndicate and was killed as an innocent pedestrian in a freak accident involving a police chase. Robert played his saxophone in a band, The High Tones, which toured Australia, qualified and worked as a builder and eventually returned to Hatepe, in the early 90’s taking over the chairmanship of Opawa Rangitoto 2C, the Maori incorporation that owns and administers the Hatepe land.

Never one for self-promotion or politicking and preferring to let his tireless work for Hatepe speak for itself, Robert would lose the chairmanship to Lennie Johns, a relative with a diametrically opposite approach to getting ahead.

Robert became something of a Renaissance man. An expert fisherman and hunter from childhood and great conversationalist and riveting storyteller, he became an accomplished performing musician, perfectionist builder, superb cook and lover of Pinot Noir and fast driving, encyclopedic on sport and immersed in world affairs.

Handsome, with dark hair and perfect eyesight to the day he died, in the second decade of the 21st century Robert’s formidable physiology began to fail him and he developed throat cancer in 2016. After a miserable six weeks in residence at Waikato hospital receiving radiotherapy Robert returned to his beloved Hatepe Homestead but could not eat a decent meal again. After gazing at Tuhekengarangi one last time Robert died on 20 May 2017, the end of a heck of a life.

Robert is survived by his second wife, the superb Judy who describes her 20-year marriage as “never a dull moment”.