Rowley Habib A New Voice in New Zealand Writing Rowley Habib, whose poem ‘The Raw Men’ is published elsewhere in this issue of ‘Te Ao Hou’, comes from Oruanui, a township—‘practically a ghost village now’—twelve miles north of Taupo on the old north-south road. He says that when he was born, in 1933, Oruanui was a timber-milling place; his father owned the only shop there at the time. ‘It was a post office as well as a general store, and for a while my father ran a taxi service as well. You can imagine that it was the hub of our little settlement. People—it seemed the whole of the village, kids and grown-ups—used to come down in the evenings to do their shopping or get their mail, and there used to be a great din. People standing about talking, lingering on—some of them were fairly isolated and it was their chance to catch up on local gossip.’

Father from Syria, Mother from Taupo His father was from Syria, and had come out to live in New Zealand with his parents when he was a young man. Rowley's mother, a full Maori, belonged to the Pitiroi family at Nukuhau, Taupo—‘There's a big swag of us at home. I'd say about every second Maori you meet in Taupo is related to me.’ Rowley was the youngest son in a family of seven. He says that he was always a lonely child, even when he was surrounded by a dozen or so other children. ‘I knew right from the start that in some way I was different from the rest of the kids—and I didn't like it. I started to brood.’ The latter part of his home life was a disturbed one, and he did not shine at primary school—‘I was no scholar; I'd like you to mention that.’ He was especially hopeless at arithmetic.

Went to Te Aute Rowley stayed at primary school—‘for lack of anything better to do’—until he was almost 16. Then he went to Te Aute for a couple of years. ‘At Te Aute I was thrown together with young Maoris from all over the country—I could go almost anywhere in New Zealand, Rowley Habib, from Oruanui near Taupo, is one of the most promising of the younger Maori writers. In the last few years he has published many short stories, poems and articles, some in ‘Te Ao Hou’ and some in other periodicals. At present he is working on a novel. and I'll bet you I'll meet someone I was at school with, or someone who knows someone.’ These contacts, and the friends he made, had a great influence on him. ‘I was always a shy and rather reserved person and I wouldn't otherwise have made, on my own, the friends and acquaintances that I know today. At Te Aute, living so close together, I was forced to mix, I had no option. With all due respect to my old school this is the one thing that I can say that I am really grateful to the place for.’

Wrote About Own Experience In his last years at Te Aute he wrote essays which, he says, were not far removed from the kind of writing he does today. ‘I always wrote about things and people I knew personally. I found I couldn't write about imaginary things, they had no interest for me. But with the things and people I knew, all I had to do was to be honest, and they would have life and meaning. Mr Sam Dwyer, a teacher at Te Aute, seemed to recognise this as my strength, and he encouraged me to keep