![]() In 2014 Grace won a high-profile legal battle against the government, which wanted to purchase her land by force – under a law called the Public Works Act – to build an expressway. In Hongoeka Bay – a quiet, sparkling curve of land, where the community is centred around the wharenui, a Māori word for a communal meeting house, and residents gather kai moana – seafood – from the beach, Grace lives in a light, airy, wooden house nestled into the hills. “I wasn’t a very politicised person at all.”īesides, Grace says, laughing, those who levelled accusations at her of having made Māori “the good guys” of Potiki, and white New Zealanders “the bad guys”, did not realise she had never specified what race the greedy developers in the story were.Įventually, she had to fend off a real-life attempt on her land. “One comment that I had was that I wrote it to cause social unrest and racial disharmony,” she says of Potiki. At a time when stories about Māori honed in on social inequity – New Zealand’s Indigenous people fare worse than Pākehā (New Zealanders of European descent) on nearly every social and economic metric – Grace wrote instead about what she had seen growing up Māori: loving family and a close-knit community. When Grace eventually wrote novels, short stories, and children’s books about what she knew – the ordinary, everyday lives of Māori people and their families – she was surprised to be branded a political writer. ![]()
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