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Hui Vercoe

The making of a ‘radical bishop’

Lloyd Ashton traces the life and times of a man who has carried the voice of Anglican Maori
From: Anglican Taonga Magazine - No. 22 - Spring 2006. (pp 16-21)
(c) Taonga Magazine - Reproduced here with permission

Whakahuihui Vercoe completed his two-year term as Archbishop of the Anglican Church here in May. His critics – and he has a few – no doubt breathed a sigh of relief when that happened.

They’d say he was impatient. Cranky. Lacking in good grace. Authoritarian. Inclined, sometimes, to feud. And they’d point to the clanger he dropped right at the outset of his term as Archbishop – a clanger trumpeted in the NZ Herald headline: Top Bishop’s vision - a world without gays.

The record will show, of course, that he was flawed. He didn’t escape being human. But it will also show how, in 1998, he was one of the leaders of the Hikoi of Hope to Parliament, to encourage a real fight on behalf of New Zealanders suffering from poverty, unemployment, bad housing, poor health care and schooling.

They’ll record too, his dogged efforts, as Pihopa o Aotearoa, to help secure the 1992 constitutional reforms of the Anglican Church, whereby Pakeha Anglicans were persuaded to relax their control of the church – and to share power with their Maori and Polynesian partners.

And above all, when all the critics are dead and gone, they’ll speak about his simple eloquence one summer’s morning in 1990…

“One hundred and fifty years ago, a compact was signed, a covenant was made between two people… But since the signing of that treaty… our partners have marginalised us. You have not honoured the treaty…

“The language of this land is yours, the custom is yours, the media by which we tell the world who we are, are yours...

“What I have come here for is to renew the ties that made us a nation in 1840. I don’t want to debate the treaty; I don’t want to renegotiate the treaty. I want the treaty to stand firmly as the unity, the means by which we are made one nation… The treaty is what we are celebrating. It is what we are trying to establish so that my tino rangatiratanga is the same as your tino rangatiratanga.

“And so I have come to Waitangi to cry for the promises that you made and for the expectations our tupuna (had) 150 years ago… And so I conclude, as I remember the songs of our land, as I remember the history of our land, I weep here on the shores of the Bay of Islands.”

[NZ Herald, 7 February 1990.]

In his 54 years as a priest, Whakahuihui Vercoe has preached a few messages. But chances are that none of them made people sit up and take notice the way the Waitangi speech did. And it wasn’t even delivered in church.

On the other hand, there were a few notables in his congregation that day. Two Queens, for example: Elizabeth II and Te Arikinui. Then there was Geoffrey Palmer, Prime Minister of the day, and any number of politicians. Just about a who’s who of heavyweights in contemporary New Zealand political life.

Queen Elizabeth was out here in 1990 for the ceremonies marking the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, and February 6 was the pivotal day of her visit. Whakahuihui Vercoe, Pihopa o Aotearoa at the time, had been wheeled up by the authorities, who no doubt expected him to give a reassuring religious gloss to the proceedings. Certainly not to rock the boat.

They got more than they bargained for.

When Bishop Vercoe started to speak, it was to the jeers and chants of the protesters clustered behind a police cordon. As he continued, and began to use words like ‘marginalised’, they craned forward. They fell silent.

When he’d finished, the VIPs were silent too. As in, icecold silent. Paul Reeves, who sat next to the Queen that day as Governor-General, later reported that she’d leant over to him, to ask a question: “Is this a radical bishop?”

“No Ma’am,” Sir Paul replied. “But he’s doing pretty well.” If Bishop Vercoe’s speech hadn’t been recorded by the media, there’d be no record of what he actually said. It was impromptu – in the same way, perhaps, as the messages from the Old Testament prophets were unscripted, but with plenty going on to stir them up.

“I’d been seeing what a lot of our people in the North had to endure,” he recalls, “living in derelict houses and milking sheds and so on. It was terrible. Something came upon me and I knew I had to say something.”

After that speech he got the cold shoulder from Wellington, and was never asked back to Waitangi. There were denunciations in Parliament of the troublesome bishop. Letters to the editor tumbled in, and the talkback radio callers, predictably, spluttered with indignation. That he should be so discourteous, and behave so badly, in such distinguished company...

There was support though, from some Pakeha who felt he’d hit the nail on the head. The industrialist Hugh Fletcher, for example, sent him an encouraging note, and a gift to acknowledge the environment he’d landed in – a hotwater bottle.

Among Maori, certainly, there was jubilation.

Bishop Vercoe hadn’t been at Waitangi’s Te Tii Marae the previous night. Had he been, he would have heard the late Tom Te Maro and others looking for someone who would say something to the Queen. They couldn’t find anyone. “It wasn’t till you got up,” he later told Whakahuihui, “that we said, ‘We didn’t find him. He found us’.”

And for many young Maori, there was a surge of hope. Don Tamihere, Kaihautu of the Anglican Centre for Youth Ministry Studies and a priest in Te Tai Rawhiti, was a 17- year-old in the crowd at Waitangi that day.

“That speech,” he recalls, “had a profound effect on me. It was an outstanding example of the potential of the church, of the Bishop of Aotearoa to be the voice of our people, to be the voice of God in those very serious political moments.”

At first sight, there isn’t much in the first 30 years of Bishop Vercoe’s life to indicate the emergence of someone who would box the establishment’s ears at Waitangi.

Whakahuihui Vercoe was born on June 4, 1928 in Torere, a coastal kainga in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, at the end of the last flat stretch of Highway 35 before it snakes up into the hills on its way to East Cape.

He was given the name Whakahuihui (‘to gather together’) because he was born the day his grandmother, Ngarama, died. The whanau gathered from far and wide to pay tribute to their matriarch.

His parents, Joseph Vercoe and Wyness Williams, who supplied him with Tainui, Tuhoe, Arawa, Whakatohea and Ngaitai links, parted company soon after his birth and Joseph returned to Ruatoki, the heartland of Tuhoe. In Joseph’s absence, Whakahuihui’s recently widowed grandfather Harry Williams picked up the father’s responsibilities; Whakahuihui, his sister Monika and their mum Wyness lived with Harry.

In their early years together they lived in a tiny earthenfloor kauta. This had two rooms: in the one, Wyness slept with her two children; in the other, Harry slept in a bunk by the open fire. He made sure the fire never went out. Harry had a farm of nearly 30 acres, and young Hui’s chores, like most Maori kids of that era, included milking the cows and tending the gardens. Half the food gathered from the sea or grown in the gardens was set aside for feeding folk who’d arrive for hui or tangi.

Whakahuihui recalls his grandfather Harry as a kindly, hard-working, practical man, who took his mokopuna under his wing. He’d teach him, for instance, how to fashion handles for axes, hammers and hoes, and they’d finish shaping these with shards of broken glass.

They were Anglican in those parts, and pretty serious about that too.

“We always had morning and evening prayers in our kauta,” says Hui. “My grandfather would bang on the wall, and everybody sat up in bed. He led the prayers and we responded. All learned by heart from the prayer book, all in Maori.

“Everybody went to church on Sunday. You milked your cows on Saturday evening, and you didn’t milk them again till the Sabbath was over.

“You weren’t allowed to walk more than three miles on the Sabbath, so if you lived more than three miles from the church you moved into the marae the night before.

“There were no cooking fires, either – you cooked all your meals on Saturday and took them down to the church in baskets and pots and pans.

“It was a solemn day. No sports. No fishing. No walking around idly. On Sundays the old people used to sit up on the hill, and look over the whole valley. If they spotted someone walking dogs or whatever, they found who he was and he was fined.”

In a sense, therefore, Torere was a strict, almost puritanical place.

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“My people at Torere,” recalls the Bishop, “were evangelical. Very much so. They kept to the letter of the Bible and their doctrinal teachings were of the evangelical strain.

“They were conscious they were part of a church, that there were certain rules and certain things to be done, and you practised what you believed.

“Do the right thing. Be supportive of those who fall into the cracks. Always offer hospitality, no matter to whom, or where you are.”

Hui has vivid memories too, of the visits to Torere of two men whom the people would flock to hear: Apirana Ngata, and Bishop Frederick Bennett, the first Pihopa o Aotearoa, who had confirmed Hui, at the age of 12, as a member of the Anglican faith.

Torere is tuturu Maori. Yet most of the whanau there have English names. The Williams, Richmonds, the Davis clan, the Wilkinsons, the Patersons and, of course, the Vercoes. So where did these names come from?

After the murder of the missionary Carl Volkner in 1865, the Crown confiscated 490,000 acres of Maori land in the Eastern Bay of Plenty. English troops were garrisoned at Opotiki, and fanned out through the territory.

Inevitably, as time went by, local people got together with the soldiers and settlers who came in their wake. One of those was a Cornish farmer, Henry Vercoe, who settled in Ruatoki and begat the Tuhoe dynasty of that surname. He was Hui’s grandfather.

Torere was spared the raupatu. The line that marked the southern boundary of the confiscation was the Waiaua River, just to the north of Torere.

“We were fortunate,” says Hui. “We were further down the line. I was aware, of course, of what had happened. My great grandmother came from the Whakatohea people.

“We were conscious of the history. It had been told. We were familiar with it, and we knew our bloodlines connected us with the people of Opotiki.”

You might wonder if the time he spent at Torere Native School added another sense of grievance, because teachers haven’t always been overly encouraging to Maori youngsters. Actually, no.

“We liked going to school,” he recalls. “It got us away from the weeding and the carrying and the chopping and the milking. It was a sort of holiday.

In particular, he devoured the books that he was introduced to by the Englishman who was his teacher.

“I slavishly read all about old Hereward the Wake, and King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. I knew all about Boadicea, and Godiva. They were all in the little primers, and I read them avidly. We didn’t have a clue about who they were.

“And as soon as we got home, we just faded into the Maori world again…”

That Maori world wasn’t flush. Not a lot of spare cash around there. But in relationships, he says, the Torere that he knew as a child had almost unlimited riches.

“As kids we lived a very natural, free and open existence. There were always people there for us. I fondly remember going with my grandfather and listening to the old people at meetings. I knew my whakapapa, who my tupuna were, and whether they were good or rascals.

“We children moved around from family to family to family. I could go to my cousins, be there for the whole day, and come back at night to milk my tally of cows.

“We were supportive of one another, and my generation lived a life of being woven into the fabric of the extended family.”

In the normal course of events young Hui Vercoe would have made his way to Te Aute College. He’d passed Standard 6, got his Certificate of Proficiency, and even reeled in a Maori Scholarship that would have set him up to head to the famous school.

But the second world war put paid to those ideas. St Stephen’s school near Pukekohe closed for the duration, and all its students were sent to Te Aute.

By the time Hui Vercoe was old enough to go to high school, Te Aute was crowded out. They wouldn’t take any more new pupils. So Hui headed off to Feilding instead. Feilding Agricultural High School to be exact, which, as the name suggests, was all about equipping future farmers.

The teachers there spotted that he had talent, so he was drafted into an academic course. And in his first year at the school he made the 1st XV, as a nimble, scooty little winger.

The boarders at Feilding used to trundle off to the local Anglican church on Sundays, and on Maori Mission Sunday he heard a guest Maori preacher trying to recruit people for the ministry. His talk must have stuck in young Hui’s mind.

“Towards the end of my four years at college,” he recalls, “we had inspectors come around from the Maori arm of the Ministry of Education. We had to tell them what we wanted to do when we left school.

“That’s when I said, quite suddenly: ‘Oh, I want to enter the ministry of the Anglican Church.’

The next few years rolled out this way: Church House in Christchurch for three years; ordained as a deacon in 1951 at St John’s in Feilding, the same year his koro Harry died. He was ordained priest the following year, and married Doris Eivers in St John’s Hiona in Opotiki – where Carl Volkner is buried, and where Mokomoko’s pardon is displayed. Doris and Hui had grown up together in Torere (her mother was a Richmond), and Doris had become a teacher.

After two years in Feilding, Hui was sent, in 1953, to take on the Wellington Maori Pastorate while Manu Bennett was doing his doctorate in Hawaii.

The Sunday services were held in an old army hall opposite the central railway station. In peacetime, that had become Ngati Poneke, epicentre of things Maori in postwar Wellington, when Maori migration to the cities was in full flood.

Life at Ngati Poneke was good, he recalls. “A lot of things were happening. The church was flourishing, Maori Affairs was in full bloom, and all the leaders of Maoridom congregated down there.

“And Aunt Daisy… Good morning, good morning, good morning… she was one of our parishioners at Ngati Poneke, too. She came down there with old Walter Nash. He was a regular attendee at the Maori services.”

From there it was on to the Wairarapa Maori Pastorate, in Masterton, where he was based from 1955-57, before heading back to Feilding in 1958. And that was when Hui Vercoe’s political awakening began.

Curiously, the trigger for that was another old boy of Feilding Agricultural High School, the Rev’d Keith Elliot, VC, hero of the second world war.

Keith Elliot had been a farmer but the war turned his life on its head, and in February 1946 he was one of a number of ex-servicemen who began training for the Anglican ministry at Church House in Christchurch.

And that, you’ll remember, was where 18-year-old Hui Vercoe had begun his training, around the same time. Keith Elliot was 12 years older than Hui, but that didn’t stop the two becoming friends. Keith was a blunt, practical man with a strong sense of social justice – which no doubt motivated him, in 1959, to volunteer for the Anglican Maori Mission.

In 1960 the All Blacks were due to tour South Africa, and the South African rugby administrators made it clear that their welcome extended only to white players. The Rugby Union here caved in to that demand, angering a minority of the public sufficiently for it to protest, publicly.

The Rev Elliot was one of them – and he wanted others to join him.

“Keith Elliot roped me in to the ‘No Maoris No Tour’ movement,” recalls Bishop Vercoe.

“We were particularly conscious of what the Maori Battalion had done in the war. Very conscious of the sacrifices they had made, and the losses they had sustained.

“And yet our Maori players weren’t allowed to go on the tour. They were excluded from our national team. I think we were woken out of our sleep by that, really. It became apparent that something had to be done.

“That’s when I became politically conscious of what was happening around me. That’s also when I became conscious that there are certain things that we as Maori should do together and sustain and back one another up.

“That was a good launching pad for me.”

There were more insights into life and values and priorities when, in 1960, he joined the army. He stayed for 10 years – two of them in Malaya, and one in Vietnam. In an interview a few years ago he spoke of how, inMalaya, he and the Roman Catholic padre had insisted on patrolling with the soldiers:

One of the fruits of that was when we came home. I still get soldiers from that battalion coming to me to baptize their mokopuna, or to take a funeral. We are still included in that group.

An offshoot for me, as a churchman, was that a lot our soldiers are now in the Maori Mission. They saw the light – (they) wanted to be ordained and work among their people.

And he spoke of his company of soldiers being “ferreted out of the country at night” and arriving in Vietnam as the full ferocity of the 1968 Tet offensive burst.

The Kiwi troops had been spurned at home, and were now under nerve-shredding stress abroad. In the face of those pressures, the soldiers (and their padre) forged a rare bond, which was only strengthened when a comrade was killed or badly wounded.

I think the army accomplished something then that the rest of the nation has still not been able to do. That is, people learnt to trust one another. The army was able to foster that spirit among the soldiers.

And I know that a lot of our soldiers, when they left the army, found it very difficult in civilian life. They couldn’t make the same connections with their work mates, or anyone. Me? I was there for the soldiers, to be with them in case they got wounded. I was on hand to offer solace, advice. To build up self-esteem.

And his feelings as he looked back on those years?

I think the first one is of the futility of war. Of any sort. But from that crucible of conflict, there emerges a spirit among men, and women, who served in the armed forces – a spirit of co-operation, of caring, and being responsible. Not only for yourself, but for your mate.

That experience will always stay with me. And there are friendships that will always remain with me.

You remember characters. And people who were efficient in their duties. And who were dependable. Your life depended on them.

After the army, Hui Vercoe spent 1971-75 in Christchurch as Maori Missioner for Te Wai Pounamu, and chaplain to Waipounamu College; 1976-78 as Vicar in Ohinemutu; 1978-81 as Pastor of Ruatoki-Whakatane and Archdeacon of Maori Work.

And on April 4, 1981, at Houmaitawhiti Marae in Rotorua, he was consecrated as the fourth Bishop of Aotearoa, succeeding Bishop Manu Bennett. He was the first Pihopa o Aotearoa to be elected by Maori.

It was Manu Bennett who, in the late 1970s, had led the charge for the liberation of the Maori section of the church, under the Treaty of Waitangi.

Since the late 1800s, the Maori section of the church had wanted a bishop of their own. There were constant requests to General Synod for this to happen.

The first Bishop of Aotearoa, Frederick Bennett (Manu’s father), was consecrated in 1928. But in a sense, his ordination was a grudging concession.

He was only a suffragan bishop, a deputy, and he needed the grace and favour of other bishops to minister to Maori Anglicans in their territories. It was permission that was sometimes denied.

It wasn’t until 1978, late in Manu Bennett’s watch and after the seventh church commission to look into these matters, that the church agreed that the Bishop of Aotearoa should become a bishop in his own right, with licence to operate in all the dioceses.

By this time, a tipping point had been reached. A critical mass of influential people within the church – Pakeha and Maori – began to sense that the reforms needed to go much further.

And so the church committed itself to an in-depth look at partnership, and took as its point of reference the Treaty of Waitangi. It concluded that the Treaty was based on Gospel principles, that it had been brokered in good faith by members of the Anglican Church – and that it had become a binding and sacred covenant.

A vision for a radically new, three-Tikanga constitution emerged – a constitution in which Pakeha Anglicans would no longer dominate the church, but share equally with their Tikanga partners, Maori and Polynesia.

In 1990 the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, General Synod/te Hinota whanui grappled with the implications of the proposed new deal – and committed itself to it. And in 1992, it came into force. “We felt,” says Bishop Vercoe, “that a great weight had been lifted from our shoulders.”

In 2004 General Synod chose Whakahuihui Vercoe, by this time almost 75, as its Pihopa Matamua, or Archbishop, for a two-year term.

The appointment was intended, perhaps, to be the crown of his career. The pinnacle of his ministry. But it turned out, at least in some ways, to be a frustrating, lonely time. He’d suffered a stroke some months before, and there was the slow path back from that. More significantly, he was appointed Archbishop without a See: he had to step down as Pihopa o Aotearoa and was left, in a sense, homeless and rootless, without hui amorangi or diocese. Without his being, almost.

Then, there was that headline.

That “world without gays” story was before my time as media officer, so I don’t know the circumstances. But having had seven years in Maori media, and therefore having closely observed the mainstream media’s routine mishandling of things Maori, I’m sceptical that the new Archbishop, whose first language is Maori, would have had a fair deal.

He believes he was set up, but he doesn’t worry overmuch about that. He doesn’t fret about past mistakes. And he points out that while he had to weather a storm of criticism over his reported comments, he also received heaps of support.

He chuckles at the memory of the clucking that followed earlier broadcast remarks.

“My first language,” he’d said, “is Maori. I will never become a New Zealander. I am a Maori.”

“I was advancing the fact that we need to treat each other as Pakeha and Maori. Let’s not manufacture something that’s non-existent. I’m Maori,” he says, looking at me, “and you’re Pakeha. Yet we can find a unity that we can share together.

“It’s the very substance of who we are, what we are. Why should I interfere with your Pakeha-ness? Why should you interfere with my Maori-ness?

“But we can still respect one another, and become very close. For me, my focus must be on Christ, and for Him to draw me into that oneness.”

In a sense, perhaps, your reading of Whakahuihui Vercoe’s contribution to New Zealand life will depend on your assessment of those two front-page New Zealand Herald stories.

The June 4, 2004 story with its blaring headline of a “world without gays” – and the February 7, 1990 report in which he told the Queen, to her face, in front of her elected representatives, that the Crown had not honoured the covenant that it had struck with his tupuna 150 years earlier. Sixteen years after his 1990 Waitangi Day speech, how does he assess its value? And in the intervening years, what gains have been made? How much does he think have Maori been able to move away from the margins of New Zealand society?

There’s a tone of resignation in his reply: “My feelings about that,” he says, “are very similar to what I discovered when I took part in war. And that is, in spite of whatever you do and whatever you say, nothing changes.”

Lloyd Ashton is the Media Officer for the Anglican Church
From: Anglican Taonga Magazine - No. 22 - Spring 2006. (pp 16-21)
(c) Taonga Magazine - Reproduced here with permission

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