12 July 2024
Making Life Happen
Ngā Manukura. Local Legends.
writer: ANNA BRANKIN (KĀI TAHU, KĀTI MĀMOE)
photographer: VIVIAN GEHRMANN
Connie Maraki lives by the philosophy that if you want something, you’ve got to go out and make it happen. After a life that has included solo parenting, learning how to shepherd and weathering the sudden loss of her husband, it is by acting on this maxim that she has ended up in her happy place amidst her menagerie of beloved dogs, horses, sheep and chickens in Rerewhakaaitu.
Top image. “I’ve got my horses and my dogs, and that’s my happy place,” Connie says. “Sometimes it’ll take me all day to get stuff done, but once I get the horse on the float and I’m out there, I’m fine – even if I’m by myself. And then I get home, and the dogs come to greet me.” Above. Connie’s small herd of cows. “There was no grass on the place when I first came here. Heaps of sheep, fences, no trees. The clothesline was out the front door; the washhouse had no floor; the stove was bloody held together with cigarette papers – it was just a mess.”
Never one to shy away from hard work, Connie, 71, has tried her hand at just about everything. “I always had a point to prove– that women can do anything,” she says. “That’s just how I’ve always been.”
Born and raised in Te Awa Kairangi ki Uta Upper Hutt, as a child Connie would look to the paddocks of sheep and horses across the road and dream of a different life. She’d climb the fence to ride the local draught horse and befriend the neighbourhood dogs. “I’ve always loved animals,” she says simply.
In later years, Connie has come to realise that, in many ways, she and her mother were cut from the same cloth. As a teenager, however, she chafed against her mother’s strict rules and expectations. “I used to have to sit at the table on the back porch, on the concrete floor, doing homework until 10 o’clock at night, ”Connie says. “Then she enrolled me in a shorthand typing class. Well, I couldn’t spell to save myself! I reckon I was a bit dyslexic.”
When she was sixteen, Connie left home. “For a while I was a street kid. I remember the Wahine Storm of 1968 – I was sleeping in a post office in Lower Hutt because I had nowhere else to go.” Over the next few years, Connie scrabbled to find her feet. She trained as a hairdresser while working as a Mobil hostess, pumping petrol in a mini skirt. She worked as a postie, and took a job at General Motors working in new car conditioning and later in the spray paint department. It was during this time that Connie married for the first time. Although the marriage itself was short-lived, it led to the birth of her son, Grant, and Connie says that made it all worth it. Her next relationship took her to Ruatōria, and when it ended she suddenly found herself in the middle of nowhere with a young child. “So I went shepherding,” Connie says matter-of-factly. “I loved dogs, and I loved horses, so I got myself a dog. I got given this and that, and off I went."
Above. “Everyone just loved my husband. It’s just been twenty-five years since he passed and I put something on Facebook about it, and I had over eighty people reply with remarks and memories about him. It’s just so heartwarming.”
When Grant was about five, he and Connie boarded with a couple who would help out with childcare when Connie was at work. Shepherding was a totally new challenge, but Connie was determined to make it work. “The East Coast country is real rugged, it’s pretty up and down. Sometimes I’d muster a paddock and the head shepherd would say, ‘There’s a mushroom in that paddock over there. You missed one,’” she says. “Because he could see the white thing sitting in the paddock, you know. So I’d have to go back and get that one sheep, which was not easy. But I got the job done.”
Connie must have done alright – it wasn’t long until she was married to the same head shepherd. “He respected me and treated me well, and he was always very encouraging,” Connie says. “He had a lot of aroha and a beautiful heart.” Pine Maraki was Ngāti Porou and had lived and worked in the Ruatōria area for most of his life. Shortly after they were married, he and Connie made the decision to move. “We moved up to Rotorua, and went farming on a Māori land block at Wharenui owned by Ngāti Whakaue,” Connie says. “It was a sheep farm, Drysdales, and I remember one of my jobs was taking the rams up the road and back again, just to keep their feet in trim.”
The head shepherd at Wharenui was an experienced dog trialler, and he encouraged Connie to pursue trialling. “We used to take the sheep up the shed in a big mob, and then we came to a particular place and we’d put them up the hill three at a time. That’s how we’d train the huntaways,” she explains. “He had a pen back at his house and that’s where we’d train the heading dogs, putting them on the rope and teaching them their lefts and their rights.
Connie’s second son, Conway, was born while they were living in Rotorua. “I was helping on the farm as well as looking after him. I’d go and dag sheep and all the rest of it, and my son would be asleep on the dags of all places,” she says. “He’d just go to sleep wherever.”
And then there were the horses. Connie and Pine got their first Appaloosa – a mare – while they were living in Rotorua, and about a year later they took on a colt as well. They moved back to the East Coast around this time, to Tikitiki. “We went to the Poverty Bay A&P Show and we showed them, and that’s how it all started. We met up with people who were into western riding, and we went for lessons,” Connie says. “Before that, we were just riding horses up and down the road and mustering. We didn’t know anything.”
Connie and Pine left the East Coast and moved back to Rotorua in the mid-eighties and farmed for Tumunui Lands Trust on their deer farm, and then dry stock until it converted to dairy in the early nineties. During this time, Connie worked as a vet nurse for six years. She and Pine had a good marriage, characterised by an ability to work hard and enjoyment of their shared hobbies. “We never had anything, but we got places, we did things,” Connie says. “We went all over the place horse showing. We took the kids with us, and had bacon and egg pies for lunch. That was our social life.”
Looking back, Connie is glad that they took that approach. “We didn’t own a home or any land, but if we hadn’t done it then, we wouldn’t have had that time together.” In 1999, the kids had moved out and Connie and Pine were living and working on a dairy farm at Tumunui. Everything was normal.
Above. Connie has had many dogs over the years. She vividly remembers her first dog trial, with a huntaway she called Tūtae Toss. “I was shaking like a leaf. I had a headache, just under the pressure of everything,” she says. “Of course, Tūtae Toss would yodel every time he started, and everyone came out of the shed to see who this dog was. I’ll always remember that. There’s a photo of me dog trialling when I was so many months pregnant. In those days, you didn’t see many women doing dog trialling, let alone with a huntaway, let alone pregnant!”
“It was like five o’clock one morning and I was sound asleep at home when there was a knock at the door. It was the farm owners,” says Connie. “They said, ‘Something’s happened to Pine. He’s gone.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, he’s gone?’ I remember those words so clearly.”
Pine had been getting the cows in for milking when his bike went backwards down an eighty-five metre hill. He had celebrated his forty-ninth birthday just the day before. “I had actually been having a dream of him just before that knock on the door,” says Connie. “He was walking and he was waving, and I never thought of it until later, but he was waving goodbye to me.”
After twenty-two years, Connie had to come to terms with a very different vision of her future. “There I was, on my own. I had no job at the time because it was March and I wasn’t due to start rearing calves until August,” Connie says. “I was lucky the farm owners let me stay on in the house and gave me some work as a relief milker.”
Connie was determined to find a property she could settle down on and have some security for the next stage of her life. “We had horses and untold dogs, we had the carafloat and a Bedford J.O., which was Pine’s pride and joy,” she says. “I started selling what I could, getting a four-wheel drive and a smaller float. And I found out from the bank how much I could borrow.
In May 2000, just sixteen months after Pine’s death, Connie completed her mission. The house she found was in disrepair and there was no grass on the property, just barberry hedge and broom with a sheep track around the outside, but Connie could see the potential. She stayed on the farm to begin with and worked on the property in her spare time, and moved in a year later. “I’ve just worked on farms in the area all the way up until I retired. And I’m still working now, but I’m just looking after some stock, moving them every couple of days and checking the water.”
Rerewhakaaitu is a small and close-knit community. Connie’s old bosses still keep an eye out for her, and she has other friends in the area. “I’ve got a sort of adopted family, a young couple whose kids I’ve looked after since they were little. They call me Aunty Nan,” she says. “I have a friend who just lost her husband, and I said to her, ‘You’ll have your moments for years, but it slowly gets better. You’ve just got to remember what they would want you to do. They wouldn’t want you sitting around sulking. They’d want you doing something you enjoy, living life,’” Connie says. “My new motto is ‘use it or lose it’ – I’ve got to do it today because there mightn’t be a tomorrow.”
Glossary. Aroha, love.
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This story appeared in the Takurua Winter 2024 Edition of Shepherdess.
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