Acts of creation

• Author: Tom McKinlay
• Published date: 03 May 2021

So all consuming was the love between Ranginui and Papatuanuku they held each other in perpetual embrace, between them only darkness, no room for light.

However, their children, trapped between them, became restless and led by Tane separated the two to reveal te ao marama, the world of life and light.

It's the creation story we all know.

Though maybe not all of us.

In the telling of Matiaha Tiramorehu, the 19th-century Moeraki-based Ngai Tahu rangitira, the sea god Tangaroa was in fact Papatuanuku's beau. Ranginui was an interloper who, after fathering some children with Papatuanuku while Tangaroa was busy elsewhere, beseeched Tane and company to separate him from his paramour.

Quite a different story that, and just one small example of the many, many layered storytelling captured in Witi Ihimaera's new book Navigating the Stars: Maori Creation Myths.

A shopping list written by the multi-award winning Ihimaera would read well; he of Whale Rider and Bulibasha and Nights in the Gardens of Spain.

But these stories are on another scale again, rich in time and distance, they sweep across ocean and space, wrapping back on themselves, stretching to the farthest corners of imagination and matauranga.

In recent years, the British writer and comedian Stephen Fry has breathed new life into Greek mythology, with animated retellings of those lusty adventures. But they begin to look a tad time-worn, a touch extraneous set beside this new volume by Ihimaera. Part of that might be because, for all Fry's enthusiasm, he does not whakapapa to Mt Olympus. That's not the whole story, though. These purakau (myths) of te ao Maori are epic; not just one heaven but 12, a cast of gods and tipuna to dwarf Hollywood spectacle.

Ihimaera says while the book took about six months to write, he's really been writing it all his life. The time had arrived to publish, galvanised as he was by a desire to reclaim and decolonise the taonga tuku iho (stories handed down).

"There comes a moment when you read all the badly told, inaccurate or incorrect purakau about Tane separating earth and sky or Maui defeating Hine-nui-te-po," Ihimaera says from his Herne Bay home, "or you pick up a children's book by a New Zealand author, Maori or Pakeha, and realise that they are still taking their course from [colonial-era governor] George Grey, among others, and you say 'enough is enough'."

(Following his invasion of the Waikato, Grey retired to a life of ethnography.)

"So you go back to the source, the well before it started to be poisoned and — dumbass you —...