It's really important for me.
Not just Maori culture as in, hey we can speak te reo,
or we can do kapa haka, but the actual way we live,
you know, like learning to plant by the moon
and where to fish.
(gentle music)
I mean sometimes we sit here when it's raining
and it's cold and we look at our little whanau
and think, oh man, what shit you done there?
But no, wouldn't.
You know, we've come from a house in Brisbane
that had en suite.
Our last house was six bedroom, two bathroom.
two kitchens, swimming pool, air conditioning.
We never really got into a smooth groove.
It was always just go, go, go,
which is what we didn't like, you know.
You'd get up in the morning, you'd go to work,
you'd come home and tend to the kids,
you go to sleep, you get up in the morning,
and that's all that life was.
There's 12 of us living here,
so we've got my parents and daughter in this cabin.
That's my sister, her partner and our nephew.
The third cabin is myself, my husband,
and our three youngest kids.
And then this last cabin is my brother's.
It was Bill that made that decision.
He just got the job and did it,
we didn't even discuss it.
It was just, "Hey I've got a new job, I'm starting
"next year". Yeah he told us all
at dinner.
"Yeah, I got a new job, it's here."
We were like, "Hang on".
That sounds Maori. That sounds Maori.
(both laugh)
Yeah, just something that happened when we're young.
This was the life then.
Hunting, fishing, diving.
Real life rather go the supermarket,
buy your meat in there.
It is just a bucket, ultimately.
You get them from the camping shop
where that's actually got a toilet seat on it.
Yes, we have to clean it every day or second day,
empty and clean, but it works.
Pretty much this whole bungalow has been built free.
So this is our dining room.
We don't have any power here,
but we do have a generator that we run
for about four to five hours a night.
You know the whole time, my husband never, ever
wanted to be there, and every single month,
(laughs) every single year, it was like,
"I wanna go home, I wanna go home", but we couldn't
'cause financially we couldn't afford to come home.
Here, I well, spent that long over there,
didn't do much diving or hunting over there.
Scared of the spider and the snake.
None of that over here, just the fucking mosquito.
So all our cooking is pretty much done on the Weber.
We have got a water tank outside
that we hook up a hose to, so that gives us
our water through the kitchen, our tank's out the back.
And then we've got our hot tap.
So that's our instant hot water,
so at least the kids can still sort of
have hot showers and stuff like that.
We've got a lot of the older generation here
are loving it, like they'll come,
we'll see them at the marae and things like that
and they'll say, "Oh we love that you've come home.
"We can tell you's are living back to basic".
And they love the fact that we've got the kids around
and doing it, because again, I guess it's that
instilling what they grew up with
more so than us grew up with.
I think just so that they kind of learn
about who they were, like who our ancestors were,
and how they all grew up, and then hopefully
they have those same morals and things that, yeah,
my parents and grandparents had.
If you know where you come from,
and you know where you're going,
then you will never be lost.