Native Agent

Kotahi ano te kohao te ngira
E kuhuna ai te miro ma, te miro whero
Me te miro pango.
There is but one eye of the needle
Through which the white, red and black threads must pass
Na Potatau Te Wherowhero, 1858

The origins of our story date back to Te Aroha, 18 August 1902, when Mary Alice Dearle, aged 20, married George William Mace, a farmer, aged 30. In the previous generation three Mace brothers, cricket-playing adventurers, traveled far from their alehouse home in the north of England, in search of gold, but that’s another story.

In 1902 Mary Alice’s father Charles Dearle was employed as a Native Agent – one of a group of men who were fluent Maori speakers employed by the Crown to assist Maori in matters of law. His beautiful Maori wife Alice (known as Aunty Sarah or Granny Dearle) lived on to be one of the last old kuia in Te Aroha who wore the moko on her chin.

Mary Alice Mace, widowed and living comfortably in Remuera, Auckland, had no desire to re-connect with her Maori heritage and denied passing it to her grandchildren. Her own children had been punished at school for speaking what few words of te reo maori they had gleaned from Granny Dearle’s visits from Te Aroha. The Maori family and the pakeha family grew separately and are now two trees growing from the same soil, sharing roots that are firmly implanted in the land of Aotearoa.

The denial of Maori heritage was endemic in the cities of post war New Zealand, belying the fact that many New Zealanders share a mixed cultural history. However, the social engineering that brought about the cultural segregation of the 20th Century was planned and implemented the previous century by Granny Dearle’s parents, Mr and Mrs W G Nicholls of Paeroa – his name was William George and hers was Te Whakaawa. It was their decision, as their “half-caste” children grew up in the harsh world of the rural pioneer, that their daughters would all marry pakeha and thus elevate themselves into “society” – and their sons would marry Maori and the Nikora family would continue its tribal bloodlines.

Now here we are in yet another century. From 2005 we have traveled back to the 1840s in this story and covered five generations of one family. Similar stories exist for many other families in Aotearoa and we represent a blending culture that is emerging. It has taken two more generations for the cycle to turn – the generations the future – the conscious efforts of the great-grandchildren of those in Mary Alice and GW Mace’s world, have allowed their children the great good fortune to be able to speak Maori and identify culturally with things Maori. They recognise the words, the music, the pictures and the soul of their cultural heritage.

When we established a business along creative lines, we wanted it to mean something, to embody the essence of our colonial and tribal histories, to celebrate the patterns of our lives in Aotearoa and recognise and respect the creative minds that design and make beautiful things for us all to enjoy. Thanks to Granny Dearle’s brooding dark-bearded husband Charles, there was a Native Agent already in our whakapapa – waiting for us to pick up the concept and make it work for us. And so, Native Agent, our brand, embodies our philosophy and pays respect to those that have gone before us and given us the strength to care for their taonga.

Lindsay, Rona and Dan
September 2005