AUGUST 10 2019 LISTENER 75
ATLthe whole country and movement was
restricted. People travelling through the
country had to declare themselves to the
Health Department and anything that
brought people together, where you could
transmit the infection, was shut down.”
His family escaped both polio and TB,
but he and three siblings had scarlet fever,
including his little sister, Dorothy, who
was kept in isolation at the fever ward at
Taihape Hospital for a month. Another
sister developed rheumatic fever and still
has heart problems as a result. “Strep throats
were common, and I just wonder if scarlet
fever wasn’t endemic in the community.”
INVISIBLE MĀORI
In Ōpunake in the 1930s and 40s, the local
Māori population was all but invisible to
the Woodwards. “There were a significant
number of Māori kids in the earlier classes
at school, but as you moved up in years,
they dropped out and by the time you got
to high school, there were only a handful.
The families were very deprived. Their living
conditions were considerably poorer than
Pākehās. Now, at Ōhākune, you talk about
the marae and it’s a well-established place.
When I was a kid, you talked about the
Māori pa, but I don’t think Pākehā kids ever
went there. At the movie theatre, the Māori
kids and adults would generally congregate
at the front downstairs; there wasn’t any rule
about it, that’s just what they did.”
Although Pākehā with TB were admitted
to sanitoriums, Māori, whose death rate
from the disease was estimated to be 10
times higher, were segregated in shanty-
like “hutments” in their own communities.
Asked if that was the result of racism or
choice, Alistair Woodward believes it’s the
latter. “In some ways that made sense; at
least in the earlier days, being admitted
to hospital was a very foreign place.
Understandably, it was not somewhere they
felt at ease or secure.”
In The Healthy Country – a History of
Life and Death in New Zealand (2014), he
and his co-author, University of Otago
epidemiologist Tony Blakely, say they were
prompted to write the book because of the
observation that New Zealand non-Māori
had the lowest mortality in the world in
the early 1900s. The likely reasons included
the exclusion (and exploitation) of Māori, a
wealth of natural resources locally, health-
selection of migrants and the lack of thecrowd-and industry-related pressures that
stalled Europe’s mortality decline. “The
non-Māori population of New Zealand
was so far ahead of the rest of the world
in the middle of the 19th century that it
took everyone else 80 years to catch up. The
experience of Māori in New Zealand was
different, and illustrates [that] in mortality
studies, as in the rest of life, there is no such
thing as a free lunch.” lC
rown decisions made decades
ago still affect Māori health
today, the Waitangi Tribunal’s
Health Services and Outcomes
Inquiry has heard. In 2018, the Wai
1315 and Wai 2687 claims over Māori
health opened at Tūrangawaewae
Marae – a significant venue given
Princess Te Puea Hērangi’s thwarted
attempts to establish a Māori hospital
in the Māhinārangi meeting house,
built at the marae in 1929. She
wanted Māhinārangi to be a Māori
environment, observing the rules
of tapu, while providing European
medical care. Te Puea cared for the
sick and dying at the marae during the
flu pandemic in late 1918.
Sir Āpirana Ngata helped Te Puea
get government money and timberfor the building, and his iwi, Ngāti
Porou, contributed £1300 to the cost,
but health officials refused to allow it
to be used as a hospital.
The ramifications of this decision,
and many others, continue to affect
Māori health, Wai 1315 claimant Lady
Tureiti Moxon, managing director of
Waikato health provider Te Kōhau
Health, told the hearings.
“Currently, Māori live shorter lives
by seven years compared with others;
Māori are twice as likely to face
discrimination in health; Māori are
less likely to be referred for diagnostic
tests; Māori children are more than two
and a half times more likely to have
unfilled prescriptions due to cost and
more than twice as likely to die from
preventable diseases.”Institutional racism
Caring for Māori:
Te Puea Hērangi,
centre right, at
Turanga waewae
Marae, with Sir
Āpirana Ngata
at far left.