Her song features in Ryan Gosling’s hit movie, but Erima Maewa Kaihau was once a star too

Hollywood science fiction blockbuster Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, opened to generally positive reviews and strong box office receipts, but in Aotearoa New Zealand it made news for another reason.

Local audiences were surprised, and seemingly delighted, by the movie’s soundtrack featuring a song in te reo Māori, alongside tracks by the Beatles and Harry Styles.

The waiata (song) in question is a version of Pō Atarau, sung by the Turakina Māori Girls Choir, a bittersweet song of farewell. In a film about a human and an alien learning each other’s language and coming to care for each other, it is also remarkably fitting.

Known and loved by many, Pō Atarau first appeared in the mid-1910s when Māori words were added to the tune of a popular piano piece known as the Swiss Cradle Song composed by Australian Clement Scott.

The waiata circulated within Aotearoa as Pō Atarau or Haere Rā and was often included in cultural performances for tourists. Visiting Rotorua in the 1940s, British actress and singer Gracie Fields heard the song sung at the home of tourist guide Rangitīaria Dennan.

It soon shot to worldwide fame, performed in English as The Māori Farewell or Now is the Hour, recorded by various artists including Fields, Bing Crosby and Vera Lynn. But despite the song’s extraordinary popularity, most people know little about the woman credited with its lyrics and adapted tune, Erima Maewa Kaihau (1879–1941).

In her day, Kaihau was a well-known composer and singer. She was one of the first Māori composers to have her songs published and to gain wide recognition in the Pākehā (European) world.

But she was also a woman with considerable political mana (authority). A kind of cultural “broker”, she used her music and voice to foster understanding between Māori and Pākehā.

My research involves reconstructing Kaihau’s story and music. As an opera singer, I have sung her songs many times. And as a poet and translator working in te reo Māori, I return often to her hauntingly evocative words.

Being a Pākehā New Zealander, Kaihau also offers me an example of how song and literature can be used to foster connections between the Māori and Pākehā worlds in general.

But she has been strangely overlooked despite her talent and significance. I have discovered forgotten manuscripts and unpublished songs by Kaihau that have lain unnoticed or miscatalogued in archives across the country.

By piecing her story back together, I want to show what her music and life can tell us about how wāhine Māori used waiata as tools of diplomacy – to express their own mana, and to build relationships between peoples.

Between worlds

For those who take the time to listen to her, Kaihau offers a vision of what it means to live with and to love one another on these islands we call home.

Born in 1879 with the name Louisa Flavell, she grew up in Whangaroa in Northland. Part of a prominent Pākehā-Māori family, she belonged to the Ngāpuhi iwi (tribe) in the north and to the Ngāti Te Ata iwi around Waiuku near Auckland.

She traced her descent from prominent ancestors from both tribes, including her great-grandfather Ururoa, a rangatira who signed the 1835 Māori Declaration of Independence.

As a teenager, Maewa (the name she most often chose to be known by) and her family moved from Northland to live with relatives in Waiuku, where they discovered most of their ancestral land had been confiscated. Like neighbouring Waikato, this was a Māori community still reeling from the Crown’s invasion and land confiscations in the 1860s.

She later married Hēnare Kaihau, a politician and rangatira of Ngāti Te Ata who was chief advisor to the Māori King Mahuta. She attended political hui (meetings) alongside her husband and occasionally on her own – always impeccably dressed, and often one of the only wāhine (women) present.

We don’t know when Kaihau started composing, but her earliest published songs were printed in 1918. Many of her songs focused on unhappy lovers, but she also composed and published a number of songs of welcome and farewell used when foreign dignitaries visited Aotearoa.

In 1926, she even performed her songs for famed Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, who was performing in New Zealand at the time. In 1927 she welcomed the Duke and Duchess of York with her song The Huia. In 1930, she farewelled and welcomed the wives of successive governors-general with her own compositions.

Kaihau’s work as a cultural guide flowed in both directions. In 1900, for example, she took King Mahuta (who spoke almost no English) to watch a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Gondoliers – one can only imagine what he made of it.

Waiata diplomacy

Kaihau’s songs work as a kind of musical diplomacy. As a wahine Māori, to perform them allowed her to assert her right as tangata whenua to undertake the work of welcoming and farewelling.