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On Auē

My boyfriend (now husband) and I drove away from home at 18 years old in the silver Lancer his mum gave us. I had spent my last few years at high school disengaged, barely turning up. I did attend my final English exam though – a symbolic gesture to my dream since I was six years old: to be a writer.

Tim and I drove away, and the unease in my belly increased and by the time we arrived at his cousin’s house where we would stop for the night the acidic feeling was rising to my chest. We went to a pharmacy and bought a bottle of Mylanta. Late that night we went eeling. Tim and his cousins packed the tilly lanterns and gaffs. We dressed in heavy jerseys, beanies and shorts. It wasn’t the first time Tim had brought me to Kaikōura. The first time he took me to a black-sand beach and we ate fresh crayfish sandwiches looking out at the sea. He took me by his marae, Takahanga, and out to the urupā where his dead family members were buried, and he would be too one day, he said. Below was the village of Oaro, and the Kaikoura coastline. The small trees around the cemetery grew whimsically, like oversized bonsais.

Being back in Kaikōura on our way to live up north, in Ahuriri, where I would take a job at Hawkes Bay Seafoods and Tim would play rugby for the Hawkes Bay Magpies, was both magic and frightening.

That night we walked up the Conway River with the gaffs and the tilly lanterns and Tim was telling me how his Uncle Tono used to bring him and his cousins out eeling in this river. I watched Tim gaff an eel, and pull it, writhing violently, onto the rocks, a boyish smile on his face.

Eight years later we were walking up the same river, with our six-year-old son, my father on the banks holding our twoyear- old daughter. Tim told our son how his uncle Tono had brought him here. Then he taught our boy to eel.

Several years later, having worked a number of jobs I knew could never sustain my spirit, I sat down and started to write. There were many people I wanted to write for (mother, father, cousins, brother, sisters, aunties, uncles and ancestors), but one person whose attention I wanted to hold the most: my husband’s. To do that I needed to go for magic. For longing; and for fear.

Aue

WINNER OF THE JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE MITOQ BEST FIRST BOOK OF FICTION
WINNER OF THE NGAIO MARSH AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL

aue

(verb) to cry, howl, groan, wail, bawl. (interjection) expression of astonishment or distress.

Taukiri was born into sorrow. Aue can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates, and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father’s. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father and sent his mother into hiding, and the shame he feels about abandoning his eight-year-old brother to a violent home.

But Taukiri’s brother,…

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Becky Manawatu

Becky Manawatu (Ngai Tahu) was born in Nelson, raised in Waimangaroa,…

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Aue

Becky Manawatu

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