OCTOBER 2019 | The Australian Women’s Weekly 27
environment to learn in. The language
course she and Petra did, though,
was the opposite. “It was just
amazingly inclusive and embraced us
immediately,” Judi says. “It’s not like
the European way of thinking, with
pass and fail. It’s more like: what can
we do to help you succeed? It’s not if
you achieve, it’s when you achieve.”
The pair graduated from level four of
Te Wa ̄ nanga o Aotearoa, New Zealand’s
largest institution for teaching Te Reo
Ma ̄ori. The two pass marks available in
the class are ‘achieved’ and ‘not achieved
yet.’ “So even in failure, there’s the hope
that if you applied yourself, or tried
again, or persisted, you could achieve,”
Petra says. This is a world away from
the schooling systems most of us grew
up with (and possibly feared). “There is
no one set of skills that
make a person
successful; you need a
huge gamut of skills in
our community to make
life work beautifully,”
Petra says.
Her own career has
benefited from such a
range; since starting on TV in the 1990s,
her roles have included everything
from youth pop culture show Ice TV,
travel shows that took her around the
world, right through to hosting
TVNZ’s Breakfast. She’s also worked
in radio, is an active ambassador for
Tearfund, MCs numerous events and
just launched her own website petra.nz
for speaking engagements.
Another passion project has been
partnering with Parenting Place, an
organisation that creates programmes
and presentations to help Kiwi families
thrive. But the time spent learning
Ma ̄ori, and becoming immersed in the
understanding of another culture, has
not only required a new skill set, it’s
also made a big difference to daily life
for both women.
One of the surprising trickle effects has
been a visual one. When Petra last
featured in The Australian Women’s
Weekly just under two years ago, she
talked about wanting to go silver but not
quite having the confidence to do so.
That’s changed in the past few months
and the resulting look is, well, stunning.
“I wrestled with it long enough to
give myself permission to try it out,”
Petra says. “The wrestle was: you
colour your hair and for the first two
weeks you feel fantastic... and for the
next two weeks, all the greys come
through and I hated myself. I thought, ‘I
look terrible, I look old.’ That equation
just was no longer working for me. You
look at Judi, with her beautiful hair- we call her ‘the platinum blonde.’”
The journey of going natural with her
hair colour, Petra says, has been the
journey to authenticity. “It’s like if you’re
not young, [then] you’re not relevant to
a culture that mainly values youth and
beauty. Now, youth and beauty are both
wonderful, but not if they come at the
expense of every other way of being.
“It’s less about my sexual desirability,
“Vulnerability is now
seen as a key to good
mental health.”
to be blunt about it. Can I still have a
voice or a role or a sense of purpose
outside of that? And, as an ex television
presenter, you’d say ‘No, you can’t. You
must try to maintain looking as young
and as traditionally beautiful as
possible.’ I just decided it was worth the
risk. I wasn’t waiting for a television
show and I’m not waiting to be 30
again. Maybe we can do ageing well?!”
It’s another step in the lifelong pathABOVE: Three generations at NZ
Fashion Week. LEFT: Petra and
Judi graduate in Te Reo Māori.Exclusive
to pursuing wholeness, she says. “Going
silver is a symbolic representation of
coming home to myself. I think human
beings ask themselves all the time: ‘who
am I? Am I okay?’ There’s a big journey
in that – you have new roles and you
come into all sorts of new and
challenging pressures. As a parent, as
someone’s intimate partner, as a worker,
as a daughter, as a friend.”
Belonging is a large part of the Ma ̄ori
culture; the concept of connection is a
keystone of the language. “Pepeha is
your passport to the land, so ‘my people
are from this mountain and this lake
and this sea’,” Petra says. “That wasn’t
so you could skite about how big yourmountain was, it was an
acknowledgement of the place
you looked after and the place
that looked after you. Your
whakapapa is your genealogy.”
This was designed so when Ma ̄ori
from different areas met, they were
able to find the common ground –
literally – that connected them.
“So the surprising key to speaking
the language is you have to know who
you are. That priority of relationship
and connection gives you an insight
into the priority of connection in the
Ma ̄ori world.” ‘Who am I’ is less →