Ordinary People Like Us
by Kelly Ana Morey

Kelly Ana Morey died a year ago at the age of 57, one of a new generation of Māori novelists who began publishing in the first decade of this century. Her first book, Bloom, appeared in 2004 and the next year won the Hubert Church Prize for best fiction debut. A ‘wonderfully accomplished first novel,’ said the judges, ‘that reads like the work of a veteran writer rather than a first book author’. Veteran was an apt word for Morey, an avid reader, accomplished prose writer and astute critic, certain of her strengths and determined to make her own way in what she saw as a fickle and unsympathetic literary world.

After three novels in four years, all published with Penguin, Morey moved to Huia for her fourth novel, Quinine (2010). The time between books began to stretch: HarperCollins published Daylight Second, about the race horse Phar Lap, in 2016. Ten years later, Morey left the sprawling manuscript of a sixth novel. Despite the illnesses and financial strains of the last years of her life, she had been focused – as ever – on writing fiction and developing as a writer, even without an ongoing publishing contract.

Ordinary People Like Us is a novel that spans decades and generations, rich with the stories of a family of Māori-Croatian women from the far North, sharing the author’s Ngāti Kurī, Te Rarawa and Te Aupōuri ancestry. The manuscript was wrangled into shape by two of Morey’s friends, the novelist Catherine Chidgey and editor Harriet Allan, both of whom had discussed the work-in-progress over the years with the author; part of it had appeared, in an earlier form, in Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers (Penguin 2019), a wildly successful anthology edited by Allan. Kate Stephenson at Moa Press, who never had the chance to meet Morey, moved quickly to publish this final novel and to sell rights for it overseas. Everything about Morey’s death is sad, including the fact that she is no longer here to experience both the critical and commercial success she desired and deserved.

Morey’s final novel is also a likeness of its author – wry, iconoclastic, enthralled by the possibilities of beautiful decorative objects and spaces. It is a love song to Northland and the city of Auckland, to interesting books and complex people, to demanding pets and watchful ghosts. Ordinary People Like Us pays testimony to Morey’s talent, her compassion as a writer and deep imaginative engagement with personal and built histories.

The novel’s many stories are grounded in reality and inflected with the supernatural, something Morey has been doing since Bloom. From Bird the matriarch – born in 1865 in Te Hāpua, our northern-most settlement – to her daughter Kaa, granddaughter Annie, Annie’s daughters Lorna and Jen, and great-great granddaughter Pax, these are complex, flawed, intriguing women who seem anything but ordinary. Husbands disappear or prove inadequate or die; old loves and old friends re-appear. Characters find community in unexpected places, from secret rooftop shanties to retirement villages to rows of small, eclectic shops. Treasures are unearthed in china cabinets, in waka huia hidden beneath floorboards, in a wall of whakapapa photographs. When Bird dies, her great granddaughter, Lorna, is disappointed to be left nothing. But:

Lorna has to concede that Bird has given her something that most in her extended family would kill for, through the transference of whakapapa, of DNA and spooky old-Māori-lady business: the ability to see the kēhua and to know instinctively that they are there to help. There to carry you home when that time comes.

Lorna and Jen’s mother, Annie Novak, is one of the novel’s major characters: in the late 40s, the great era of urban drift, she boards at Queen Victoria School then at a hostel for Māori girls in Freeman’s Bay, training as a nurse. Assigned to the notorious Kingseat psychiatric hospital, Annie meets long-term inmate Mereana, the ‘Ariki Street Child Killer’ who has been there for decades, ‘a bundle of rags and blankets curled up in some corner, her hooded lids dropped almost completely over her blank reptilian eyes’.

Mereana tells Annie she is the mythological ogress Rūruhi-Kerepō. When Annie marries a Drago Devich, a much-older widower, they buy the dilapidated Grey Lynn house where the so-called child killer once lived. For the rest of her life, Annie will have visions of Rūruhi-Kerepō all over the city (‘I see you, girlie’), and we’ll learn from the watching kēhua (ghosts) that she is ‘not a taniwha. She’s one of us, but a very old spirit who doesn’t seem able to return home’.

Annie, too, is restless and unsatisfied, carrying the sadness of the children she lost. The novel threads lines backwards and forwards in family history, exploring deep and sometimes invisible inheritances:

Annie will always flirt with the idea of death. She sings along to the old lament, which some days reminds her of the distress call of the huia, or rather, the sound her grandmother once mimicked. To Annie, Bird’s high, circling whistle was like that of the matapōuri, the scaup that swim on the dune lakes. As Annie ages, the keening fades into the background, mostly whispering in her head when she glimpses Mereana. By then, though, the girls are on their way in adult life, and the million and one ways a woman can take her own life have become old friends, a comfort in a strange way, not that different from Kaa soothing herself with elaborate thoughts of murder and smite.

Annie teaches her daughters to have their own ‘running-away fund’. Like their mother, they both choose to move away to make their mistakes. Lorna heads to Northland. Jen follows Will, her boyfriend, to London, realising later that they ‘travelled to the other side of the world to go to work, go to the pub and sleep’. Will ‘loves London in a visceral, almost instinctive way’; he wants to earn as much money as possible in corporate law, not travel around Europe. In 1981, in a Britain that is ‘grim as hell’, they get married to qualify for a mortgage. Nothing – not their relationship, Jen’s various teaching jobs, drinking to excess, moving up the property ladder, having revenge sexual encounters – makes her happy.

When Will asks Jen why she doesn’t ‘ever talk about being Māori’, she replies:

What’s to say? Obviously, I am, and that’s hardly a secret. I might not look the part, but there’re numerous people in my family who do. What else is there to say? We’re ordinary people, living our lives like everyone else.

Later, Jen tells her Annie that ‘we’re not that Māori’ but her mother disagrees: ‘You’re Māori because those women who came before you were Māori. It’s not about waving your bone carving around. There’s more than one way to paddle a waka’.

Auckland’s landmarks reveal the city’s changing face: Tanfield Potter, the Crown Lynn kilns, the Peter Pan supper club and the Māori Community Centre in Annie’s youth; Gopal’s, Cook Street Market and Ivan’s on Ponsonby Road in her daughters’. The 80s brings the Verandah Bar and Grill in Parnell and, in the CBD, Alfie’s, Le Brie and the Melba (where Morey worked as a waitress). When Jen returns, she thinks that ‘Auckland sounds different from London in ways I don’t really understand. It’s the rumble. The roar. The siren song of the taniwha from deep, deep within the land’.

The novel draws one last line in the sand, of course, for who could imagine Morey leaving the room without expecting to make an impression, without demanding that we keep talking about her? She even makes a personal appearance in one of the kēhua kōrero:

Kaa: Tell me, e hoa, how many times are you going to kill this poor man?KAM: As many times as I need to.

In her hands, Māori characters can stay home or travel far; they can dig gum or attend university; they can have many children or none at all; they can live in farms or flats or villas or hostel rooms; they can scrape by or make a real estate killing; they can be laid to rest in a urupā high on a hill above the Te Hāpua marae or in the sprawling acres of Waikumete Cemetery. In the end they are all welcome to gather as kēhua in ‘the space in-between’, what the novel envisions as a ‘Māori version of the Pearly Gates’.

Bird says that this place, with its manuka fire and a gum-digger’s whare ‘under the wide expanse of the sky and its stars’, is the ‘kōpū from which we all first emerged’. This is the truth that Morey’s entire body of work asserts: the necessity of human adventures – and missteps – and the enduring promise of whakapapa, that we all have a place around the fire.