Will I die! Or will I live!

*Attribution statement: Te Rauparaha was the composer of Ka Mate and a chief of Ngāti Toa Rangatira.

It was a soul destroying, mortifying, I-wish-the-earth-would-swallow-me-up moment.

But it was also a life-changing one that catapulted me through a door I never would have opened.

Growing up, I lived a tough existence at times. Domestic violence, alcoholism and the unshakable poverty that came with those clothed me for my childhood years, which were mostly spent in government housing. There were always lights to cling to; I was bright at school and gifted musically. My mother was extraordinarily loving and kind and my father had periods in which he exuded pure joy like he was a child himself.

I attended a prestigious high school based on my academic achievement, and while I knew my life was different from the other wealthier children – nobody else had fled home at 15 and was working to buy uniforms and textbooks – I never questioned my path.

My brightest shining light was theatre. I was good at it. I received a standing ovation in a school musical. I felt at home and alive on stage. I topped the school’s theatre subject and I was destined to be an actress. There was no question.

In my last year of school I was back at home with my family, and as I prepared for my first university audition (and the only audition for the only theatre school in my hometown at the time), my mom and dad scraped together enough money for me to see a prestigious, haughty theatre instructor, who was hired by all of the elite school parents to help get their children through doors.

It enabled me to walk into that university audition confident. Many others auditioning seemed to know each other, but this didn’t matter to me amidst my excitement at what lay ahead.

Then I saw something on the audition program I hadn’t tried before – improvisation. As a group improvisation routine started, I appeared to be the only person in the room who hadn’t done it before. Teenager after teenager got up with ease, diving into some new story of their own making as the others, who had just undertaken the same challenge, adapted to the new scenario before them. They were witty, they were sharp and they were creative. I was none of those things. I was petrified. As my anxiety built, sitting there on the carpet, I tried to come up with the best solution. The very first person who had put their hand up was given a scenario. There was going to be a second round so I just waited and made sure I was the first person to volunteer so I would be given a topic. I could take it from there, I told myself. But when I put up my hand and I was chosen, they told me I could do anything.

There were three adults on the panel, including one of our state’s most revered actresses. They stared at me. I stared back. The group of teenagers stared at me expectantly. I stared back. In that moment of desperation, I thought of the Haka. My father’s side of the family is part Maori, or at least that is the story we were told. We weren’t connected to the culture at all, but whenever I saw the Haka it excited me, and it was dramatic, so I started. ‘Ka Mate! Ka Mate! Ka Ora! Ka Ora!’. They were spellbound. ‘Ka Mate! Ka Mate! Ka Ora! Ka Ora!’ I repeated, but as I did so, I realised I didn’t know any other words. Why I had chosen to do that in that moment I had no idea, but I stopped. I stared at the group in front of me. They stared back. And after the longest time I was told to sit down, and they started a new group routine with someone else. I was the only person who didn’t end up improvising with others. I sat ashamed on the carpet.

When I walked in to my solo audition, I knew I had blown it, but I thought there might still be a chance. I could be so outstanding my previous audition might be overseen and I gave it my all. It was in front of the actress, and she watched me blankly. At the end, she asked me what my second option was for a career. I told her there was no second option. She told me everyone needed one. I had put down a second option when applying for universities – the Arts, but I never really considered I would be doing anything else but theatre. When the university acceptances were published, I went into a black hole. Arts was written next to my name. I had failed. The only thing I wanted to do in life, I had failed at.

On the first day of university, I couldn’t bring myself to be as excited as all of my friends. Walking among the sandstone buildings, moving through the throng of excited chatter of young people and hope, I felt lost. I randomly chose subject introductions that sounded vaguely interesting. One of those was journalism. I had undertaken a perfunctory academic exercise in high school that I seemed good at – writing the how, who, why, what and when into short, sharp sentences – but that was it. What I didn’t know, was that I was about to experience another life-changing moment. At the front of a lecture theatre, a small, kind-looking man with a strawberry blonde beard stared up at hundreds of expectant faces. Kerry Green was his name. Like all of the other serious chats journalism lecturers had with us, I am sure he talked about how hard it was to get a good job and how hard you had to work. But all I remember was him asking the audience if they wanted to have a career where they made a difference – truly made a difference on a state, national and international stage. A career where if you cared about the world, and people, you could be a voice for those who didn’t have one. You could expose injustice, hold governments to account and reveal the truth.

Outside of theatre, the only other subject at school I had truly enjoyed was modern history. Man’s unkindness to man transfixed me – why were we like this? How could there be genocides? What caused wars? The humanity locked underneath all of that cried out to me, and I used to spend some of my part-time work savings in high school each week on Time Magazines, tearing out the articles and cataloguing them by country. I didn’t realise that journalism was my home. But it was.

I have had many embarrassing moments. I’ve had tampons fly out of my bag dramatically down a city street in front of a crush. I had my dad routinely try to embarrass me as a child and teenager – grabbing my hand to skip down the street or yelling out, with my first-ever training bra lifted high above his head, ‘Yoo-hoo, Tanya, this is your bra, you come and pay for it!’, as I tried to slink out of Target. I’ve had medically embarrassing moments that I will save you from. But, when I hear the word embarrassing, I find myself standing back in that audition room, bringing my hands down from the Haka, watching the audience watch me and me watch them.

And as I feel myself wanting to disappear, I tell myself that everything is okay. Everything worked out just like it was meant to.

*Note only: The attribution statement is a legal requirement under the New Zealand Haka Ka Mate Attribution Act 2014 for any communication of Ka Mate to the public.