Karangahape Rd tours shine light on Auckland's Pasifika history
Friday, 1 April 2022
Auckland’s Karangahape Rd is known for many things – its eccentric inhabitants, its glorious nightlife, the people-watching opportunities.
It also has a deeply Pacific history. In the 1950s, some of Auckland’s earliest Pasifika migrants settled in Ponsonby, Grey Lynn and the surrounding areas, and congregated on Karangahape Rd.
Samoan Aucklander Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua and his brother Sofi Pua have made it their business to know this particular history inside and out.
For the past 15 years, they have been developing an intimate tour of Karangahape Rd and its neighbours, stopping along the places its former Pasifika owners or congregants knew best in the 1950s, 60s and beyond.
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The pair started the tour to honour the anniversary of their parents’ deaths. They left Samoa like many young couples in the 1950s, looking for opportunity in the land of milk and honey called New Zealand.
“As we did it, we discovered we felt better. We felt good.
“Friends that came with us, we all cried, we all hugged, and Sofi and I began to realise, there is something about this process that needs to be shared,” Strickson-Pua said.
“Other people started to join in and we began to realise this is bigger than mum and dad.
“It’s about celebrating the nation, celebrating the New Zealand of the 1950s that had that idealism, that love of social justice, the love of egalitarianism and hearing our parents say ‘we look after everybody’.”
The tours have been popular with all kinds of people – from history buffs to the descendants of those early migrants from the islands.
Strickson-Pua said some of those descendants, often grandchildren, had a hard time grappling with systemic racism and poverty that stemmed from the years their grandparents were pushed out of Ponsonby and sent to new homes in south Auckland.
“They live south, and they hear the older generation lamenting the glorious 50s and 60s and where is that associated with? Grey Lynn and Ponsonby,” he said.
“There are these amazing stories they have been brought up on, but they have also lived the reality of racist New Zealand … so when these young people come to our walks, oh man. The pain, the honesty.”
On April 2, Strickson-Pua will run a tour as part of the Auckland Council ‘World of Cultures’ festival.
Their tour begins at the most recent Pasifika monument in the area: the Polynesian Panthers’ 50th Anniversary mural on the corner of Karangahape and Ponsonby roads.
The Pua brothers like to open with a kind of urban Pasifika pōwhiri, welcoming the group to the tour and inviting them to share their own K Rd stories if they have them.
Other stops on the tour include: the original Ponsonby Police Station and Community Arts Outreach service, the VAANA Peace Mural of 1985, the Pacific Islands Presbyterian Church Newton Parish (as seen in the Sione's Wedding films), Maota Samoa House, Myers Park and the Symonds St Cemetery.