Suzanne Aubert

This essay was first delivered at the Faculty of Medicine, Otago in 1998, Humanities Elective, and has been re-printed with permission

Her Rongoa: The meeting of cultures in healing

‘Ka mätütü taku mate. I am quite recovering’
Suzanne Aubert and her rongoa: the meeting of cultures in healing

Introduction

Contemporary documentation for a bicultural dimension to Suzanne Aubert’s healing is not plentiful. What is certain, though, is that the rongoa or herbal remedies she developed were the first widely-known, widely-used bicultural health treatment in our history.

I feel Maori have more prerogative to speak on bicultural subjects than I do, as biculturalism is a core element of their lives. Brenda Tahi writes from a Maori viewpoint: ‘In New Zealand today, virtually all Maori are bicultural.’ Most Pakeha are not. Professor Andrew Sharp of the Political Studies Department of the University of Auckland quotes a friend trying, from a Pakeha perspective, to express what this must be like for Maori:

A great many Maori are bicultural, meaning that they have to and do think like Pakeha with part of their minds and Maori … with another part. This cannot be comfortable, and furthermore it’s not of their own choosing, having been dumped and sometimes forced upon them. There is no known way for them to dump the corresponding necessitation on any Pakeha, and if there were they ought not to have the power to do it – any more than Pakeha ought to have had (but did have) the power to do it to them.

Therefore I feel diffident talking here, but as Andrew Sharp also says: ‘There are perfectly adequate bases for bicultural communication and procedure other than bicultural selfhood’.[1]One is that I think Suzanne Aubert would have liked telling of her experience, especially in a medical studies context. She’d have loved to have gained a medical degree and would have made a very good doctor. One doctor said that there was no need to reset broken bones she had already set. She was also well-learned and inventive in chemistry and pharmacology; she pioneered specialist care of the disabled in this country; she founded a hospital in Wellington – an A-grade training hospital for nurses, held in high regard by Wellington doctors.

As a little old woman in her eighties, she spent six years in Rome during World War One. She often nursed twelve hours a day in the casualty wards, impressing doctors with her expertise in nursing and in massage physiotherapy – as well as with her stamina. One even told her: ‘You work like a horse!’ She would have upheld ‘medicine and the humanities’, the importance of bicultural understanding in health, and the therapeutic power of spirituality.

Suzanne:

Suzanne Aubert came from France to New Zealand in 1860 at the age of twenty-five to work in Catholic mission. But she wasn’t ‘just another missionary’. Her story’s so full that it’s hard to give a brief résumé.

She lived nearly seven decades of great social change in New Zealand until she died in 1926 aged ninety-one. Her lifespan here covers a huge block of post-Waitangi history, years of uprooted, dislocating, graunching change for Maori and Pakeha. Suzanne Aubert travelled along a fast-changing timeline. In her life she had many adventures, took risks, had her share of pain and grief, but also a lot of fun. Very importantly, she had greater experience of what was happening than most and an intelligent discernment of consequences and implications.

She taught, she nursed, she could walk thirty, even forty kilometres a day on her mission ‘rounds’; she wrote a very significant book in the publication history of Maori language; she set up New-Zealand’s home-grown Catholic congregation, the Sisters of Compassion; she ran a hill farm and orchard; she was ‘Grandma’ to scores of homeless kids she helped bring up, – and she developed and manufactured the medicines we’re talking about now. After that, she went straight on to develop a range of social welfare services.

The scope of her work did not discriminate on the basis of ethnic or racial origin, sex or religious belief. This was not so usual at the time. She worked alongside people of differing backgrounds and experiences – Maori and Pakeha, Catholic and non-Catholic, very old and very young, men and women, physically abled and disabled, healthy and sick. On behalf of these, she set up support systems wherever she could, and lobbied intensively with church hierarchy, city mayors, government ministers, imperial governors.

She was a skilled, persistant and informed political advocate for the needy and powerless. She was a gifted publicist and tactician, and made sure that the health and welfare of the less powerful in society were issues of relevance in newspapers and Parliament, not to be ignored, not to be sidelined. She believed in the equality and self-esteem all people had by right as equal representatives of Christ. In this she lived out the principles of her religious faith far more than many other missioners.

In Maori view of life, the past is powerful and alive, held out front for its key to present reality and attitudes. Suzanne kept her French formative influences, her family roots and her ever-accumulating New Zealand past with her right through her life wherever she went, never stalling new initiatives, but giving them the confidence and energy of experience. She kept past and inherited experience riding alongside her like a packhorse, as a vital companion and source of supply. She would tell her experiences as ‘parables’ or exemplary tales to help convey a message or theme to the sisters, to journalists or anybody. She used history dynamically and positively. She would think it natural to look back at her experience of biculturalism for a relevant message for now.

Biculturalism

Professor Mason Durie of Massey University offers this 1991 definition of biculturalism, which he tags as ‘tortuous but comprehensive’: ‘biculturalism is the coexistence of two distinct cultures, Maori and Pakeha, within New Zealand society with the values and traditions of both cultures reflected in society’s customs, laws, practices, and institutional arrangements, and with both cultures sharing control over resources and decision making’.[2] Brenda Tahi from Te Ohu Whakatupu, the Maori Policy Unit of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, says ‘most of us understand [biculturalism] has something to do with being able to understand and use, but not necessarily adopt, the concepts, customs and practices of a culture other than one’s own.’ She asks a question: ‘Sussing out one’s own culture is often a job in itself. What would send us off to try and suss out another?’ and gives a straight answer: ‘Maori are not going to go away (nor are Pakeha) and we have to live together.’[3]

‘Living together’ can be close or distant. Even ‘side by side’ implies a slight but significant gap. J.C. Sturm, one of the first Maori women writers to appear in print, refers in a recent poem to ‘the perilous passage / From one world to another’.[4] Even now, it is seen as perilous. Last century the passage or gap between was greater. Anne Salmond in her book on very early contact,Two Worlds, has used the same adjective. She called it ‘the perilous space in-between’. Judith Binney, in Redemption Songs, her study of Te Kooti Arikirangi, has termed it ‘the borderlands of thinking between cultures’[5]. It is how Suzanne viewed the gap, how she made that passage, how she ventured into the borderlands, whether as Pakeha Mother Aubert or as Meri, that speaks for her sensitivity to biculturalism.

There are some documented clues to her bicultural awareness. They help situate the woman of the medicines. In Auckland in the late 1860s, when Suzanne was about 33 years old, she and a Nga Puhi woman called Hoki, also known as Peata, cared for a group of girls. Suzanne said Peata was the person who ‘taught her everything’. There are two photos from this time. In one, Suzanne and Peata are seated on chairs, the girls standing between and behind them. Suzanne’s arm is around one little girl who cuddles into her lap. It is a Pakeha picture, but a relaxed one. In the other photo, the scene is different. Four of the girls are seated on the floor, draped in cloaks, their hair loosened. Peata and Suzanne are sitting down on the ground with them. Even if posed, the photo projects Maori culture, – although Suzanne is firmly holding her cross in her hands. The girls were mainly of mixed parentage. The photos affirm both strands of those girls’ biculture. And there can’t be many other 1860s photos of young Pakeha women, or of Catholic nuns, sitting on the ground with their indigenous charges.

The girls went out on the hills and to the beach with Suzanne. Sometimes on these excursions they were seen gathering pipi and cooking them outdoors. Suzanne said that Peata had taught her the girls needed this release, especially when the hot wind blew. They shouldn’t always be cooped up indoors or in a walled yard as in a typical nineteenth-century girls’ orphanage. For those days it was a lateral, holistic, bicultural approach to education. And Suzanne wouldn’t have needed much persuading. She loved being out and about.

A very positive newspaper report in May 1868 shows observance of Maori protocol, tikanga, in the way Suzanne arranged a welcome to the new Governor, Sir George Bowen, and his wife. It is clear that the governor's party was being welcomed to the school as if on to a marae, with karanga and probably speeches from the chiefs mentioned later in the article.

… native girls under the direction of the Sister in charge of the Institution came out and welcomed the party with their usual salutations, 'Haere mai, haere mai' (Welcome, welcome). His Excellency and Lady Bowen acknowledged the compliment in a very cordial manner.

And the report ends:

During their stay his Excellency and Lady Bowen frequently gave expression to approving remarks on the happiness of the children, and the appearance which they presented of being so much at home.[6]

From 1871 to 1883, Suzanne lived in Hawke’s Bay. Documentation shows her regularly travelling on her own round Maori communities, often far afield. There are even a couple of references suggesting sleeping on the marae. For someone largely informed by traditional mission mentality and hampered by the limits on nineteenth-century women, she was stepping bravely into the bicultural passageway. A visiting priest wrote a full description of a day with her in 1876 at the Maori kainga of Pakipaki. Amid the detail, one sentence says: ‘The Sister sat down beside [a sick woman] in the tent, next to the mat which served as a bed and got her talking.’

Suzanne is shown actively initiating communication rather than as merely ‘prepared to listen’. This and other letters indicate enjoyment of Maori company, relaxed friendly intimacy, direct, positive handling of problems – and holistic healthcare. Hope, meaning, peace of mind, laughter and high spirits are known scientifically to be restorative and incidents of humour and fun crop up all through the record of Suzanne’s life, even in times of great strain.

Letters she wrote at this period suggest she attended hui, and one shows her distress at the Catholic mission’s disengagement from Maori, engulfed as it was then by Pakeha immigration.

What I’m most apprehensive about for the new missioner, is that he’ll be influenced by all the local anti-Maori feeling here… Quite simply I think I would just die of grief. I’m often told that I’m unreasonable over the Maori question [...]. I can’t be the judge in this case as I’m essentially an interested party.[7]

The simple phrase ‘I’m an interested party’; – i.e. I’m too closely involved, is a clue in itself for her own identification with Maori.

She was right about growing ignorance and a disregard for Maori custom and etiquette. In 1880, at the celebration for the opening of the new church at Pakipaki, the clergy and the Europeans among the congregation went after Mass to eat in an Irish settler’s house. ‘But the Maoris were not pleased about this’, wrote Suzanne, ‘because they had killed thirty pigs.’ She was right. The häkari, the celebration feast, was an important ritual. Only she and two religious Brothers opted to join the Maori. A French priest’s account describes what happened when he and the others rejoined them. His letter suggests he was blithely ignorant of the cultural context:

‘we found them sitting at the entrance of the [wharenui] (meeting house) with a Maori plate on their knees, chewing away with relish. I think they were right to prefer the Maori cooking to ours. I tried some from the basket. It was really delicious. We then went into the house where the Maoris were having their dinner, but they politely reminded us of the old French proverb: ‘don’t disturb an honest man at his meal’. We had to retrace our steps, postponing our visit until a more favourable moment.[8]

Suzanne and the two farmer Brothers had not joined the Maori in the important sharing of kai on the big day of celebration simply because of delicious aromas wafting across an Irish porch. There was polite but clear reproof in the response on the marae at Pakipaki.

Suzanne wrote a very long letter describing the events of this day. The ending to her account of the evening’s discussion in the wharenui – ‘midnight, and their thoughts were drifting away in the direction of sleep’ indicates she probably slept there that night too.

Five years later she was living up the Whanganui River with a small group of Pakeha women in a newly-formed religious congregation. Her life could no longer be quite as free. The daily routine in convent life was traditionally very rigid, yet in the first draft Constitutions of Suzanne’s sisters, she set down the requirement for their timetable to be flexible to meet Maori culture. Because the Sisters always went to Maori prayers in the evening, she wrote this: ‘Since Maori prayers can often run on into tea time and recreation, these will be variable to fit in with Maori prayer time’.[9]

Later in life, in spite of her demanding schedule in Wellington, she tried to carry on honouring Maori culture. She refused to close down the community up at Hiruharama. The Maori link was essential to her. The Sisters rode horses, against the wishes of diocesan authority, because a horse was the appropriate transport for speedy health care among the Whanganui hills. And in the early 1920s, the Minutes of the General Council report her as a very old woman saying that for a new mission centre at Kaiwhaiki to succeed, at least one of the sisters ‘must speak Maori well & understand the Maori ways’.

Suzanne Aubert was a Pakeha woman, a missionary hoping that Maori would turn to her form of Western religious faith. At no point was she was living wholly in the Maori world. And later in her life the burden of her Pakeha projects certainly upset the balance. But she was always traversing between Maori and Pakeha worlds. The important point is that she was comfortable doing this and counted it as natural. She was unaffected and genuine in her occupation of bicultural ground. She could sit on the roadside with Maori friends, feet in the gutter, at one of the long waits they had for the Native Land Court sittings, then leap up, cross the road and chat in English, or French as happened once with visitors, then go back to her friends.

The Medicines

Illness cut a wide path in Maori communities in the 1870s. Pakeha started to pour into Hawke's Bay in the years of Premier Julius Vogel’s immigration scheme, and with them and their fast-multiplying families came more epidemics which brought death to Maori. Suzanne was spending most of her time nursing, even vaccinating people in an outbreak of smallpox.

She was also drawing on her strong French tradition of herbal medicines and her interest in chemistry to experiment with native plants and create medicines. People saw her, across the paddocks, up on the hillsides, pushing through the swamps and bush, gathering plants, often with a Maori woman as companion. Ngatikahungnunu knowledge was being added to the Nga Puhi knowledge which Peata had given her in the 1860s.

Two little settler children used to look out for her in the early morning, to watch her coming back with soaked boots in the dew-wet grass, slipping through the fence wires with a flash of red flannel petticoat.[10] The early hour mattered in some of her remedies. One cure for asthma is redolent of her French background. 'Gather snails while the dew is still on the plants in the morning; crush and put equal parts of vinegar and water; stand twenty-four hours, drain off liquid and drink.'[11]

As long as one did not claim the title or degree of doctor, anyone could practise medicine, to some extent, in those years.[12] The Medical Practitioners Registration Act 1869 had imposed state control over the medical profession, but there was no medical training available in New Zealand, and the field was fairly open for all-comers. There were not many doctors. Many skilled amateurs helped out in times of need.

Newspapers, therefore, were full of advertisements for patent medicines, the accessible cure-all in settler households, remote or otherwise. Medicines were also a simple, usually harmless, form of mild addiction for most households.[13] Again, state supervision was light. The government set no standards, and an association of pharmacists was only formed in the 1870s.

But what was happening with Suzanne’s medicines was unusual on two counts. First, they were free. She funded them with her own money although at the outset she had a grant of forty pounds from the Minister of Native Affairs.[14] They were also local, indigenous, and used Maori medicinal ingredients along with Pakeha chemistry and Pakeha wine. (Where she lived at that time went on to become Mission vineyards.) Every day sick Maori came for remedies. She also treated Pakeha. In 1873 she said she treated 1353 people.[15]. Both Maori and Pakeha felt at ease with her remedies.

The 1883 Brett’s Colonists’ Guide noted somee experimental work done in Hawke’s Bay but pointed out that the field of local medicine was still largely unexplored:

A scientific analysis of the properties of New Zealand vegetable products is a tempting field of research still open to the analytic chemist. Except the koromiko (veronica), which is being regularly compounded by a Napier chemist as a diarrhoea mixture, none of the native plants have yet been systematically utilised in medical practice, although some are known to possess valuable properties.[16]

Over the next decade, Suzanne set out to try and change that. By 1890 she, and the priest at Jerusalem on the Whanganui River, had decided to market her medicines, or rongoa as she called them, to fund their Maori mission.

She signed a contract with Kempthorne and Prosser. They, following custom, began to publicise her medicines exhaustively in a wide range of newspapers. One remedy called Karana was advertised for when ‘the digestive organs are out of order’:

How often does a man, too, in meeting an old acquaintance have a merry evening and suffer terrible from the effects the next day.

SISTER MARY JOSEPH AUBERT, in her researches amongst the plants of New Zealand, has discovered there is a very valuable remedy for these complaints in our own vegetation, and, after experimenting for a number of years, has now brought forward the medicine called KARANA.

The range of medicines covered needs of tired heavy-breeding women, with their babies at their skirts in isolated homesteads or village cottages, to those of hard-drinking pioneer blokes described in the advertisements as –‘old people who had ruined their constitutions by the abuse of intoxicating drink and who were debilitated and suffering after turning over a new leaf’.

This was the beginning of an ambitious publicity campaign which would transform her from Mother Mary Joseph to the widely known Mother Aubert, – the ‘New Zealand Vegetatist: her Remedies are the very best’. By 5 January 1892, Marupa was being advertised for its preventative properties against the terror of the new illness, influenza, which was ‘raging with direful effects in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne’.

Recommendations figured in the advertisements, ranging from influential Maori in Hawke’s Bay to the Archbishop, leading actors (for their throats), and the Governor himself, who was reported to have later ‘got a rap over the knuckles from a British medical journal' for supporting a patent medicine.[17] By 13 April 1892, the Evening Post recorded that the ‘demand during the past month shows that they are now fully established as the chief proprietary medicine of New Zealand’. Ten thousand bottles were sold in the first three months in Wellington alone. New Zealand flocked to take its own medicine.

At the orchard farm three miles above Jerusalem, she built a two-storeyed house-cum-barn with shutters allowing air to circulate to dry the vegetation. The Sisters stayed in an earthen-floored shed next to it, rolling out their bedding on a long work table each night, and sleeping amid the boiling, evaporating mixtures in their bricked-in vats. When the liquid had evaporated sufficiently, it was poured into demijohns. They were hauled by sledge down the steep hill to Jerusalem. A Sister would trudge alongside, guiding the horse. Then down the river went the jars of concentrate to Wanganui where Kempthorne and Prosser took delivery of them. They made up the medicines and bottled them.

The advertisements constantly informed the public that her medicines were purely vegetable in origin, ‘ in no way hurtful in [...] action’. The theme of ‘trustworthy’ was important to immigrant households far from extended family knowledge of childcare and medicinal lore, often unable to pay for treatment from the few available doctors. Yet from the 1880s, the reputation of quackery and charlatanism was hanging over the purveyors of many patent medicines and their customers were labelled as gullible.[18] Many patent medicines, even those for children, were known to contain large quantities of narcotics – especially opium and laudanum – and a fear of addiction was growing.[19]

Mother Aubert’s purely vegetable medicines came as a relief; buyers could feel they were handling ‘safe’ products, both for themselves and for their children; they could also feel they were helping in ‘good works’, not merely personal gain, and meanwhile the handy bottle of patent medicine was right there on the shelf. The Weekly Herald of 15 August 1891 recorded a child’s prayer: ‘“Dear Lord”, she lisped, “make me pure,” then she hesitated, and went on with added fervour a moment later, “make me absolutely pure, like Sister Aubert’s medicines.”’

The newspaper columns also reassured the country that in spite of the economic depression of the time, every day saw ‘the resources of this grand country gradually opened up in some respect, great or small’, such as ‘the discovery that certain herbs in the New Zealand flora have health giving and curative properties of the highest order. We allude to the AUBERT REMEDIES, for which we have to thank that grand woman, Mother Mary Joseph Aubert, who, from the depths of the “forest primeval” has culled the plants from which are extracted MARUPA, NATANATA, PARAMO and KARANA ‘.[20]

So the label of ‘local’ was added to that of ‘trustworthy’. ‘Support local industry’, which was one newspaper headline, was beginning to be an important theme. The country had a new, Liberal government heralding changes in social justice and social welfare and it was becoming aware and proud of nationhood. Governor Onslow emphasised in his testimonial that the venture was ‘capable of furthering colonial industry’.[21] The marketing theme for her medicines conveyed three intertwined qualities of the nationalistic image the Liberals were building up of New Zealand – caring, innovative and independent.

She was the one being hailed as ‘discoverer’ and the newspapers did not greatly emphasise the Maoriness of her rongoa. The closest they got to acknowledging indigenous science was an article, not an advertisement, in the New Zealand Times of 18 September 1891, referring to her ‘study of certain medicinal plants, known no doubt to the Maoris. [...] There is among the Maories considerable knowledge of the healing qualities of various plants. That knowledge, in competent hands, ought to prove exceedingly valuable to mankind, and profitable to the Colony.’

In fact, very little was known of traditional Maori medicinal practice in day to day life. Explorers like Cook and Banks had found the Maori very healthy and Banks wrote that ‘such health [...] must make physicians almost useless: indeed I am inclind to think their knowledge of Physick is but small’.[22] Father Catherin Servant, one of the earliest Europeans to live among Maori and to discuss and record their lifestyle with dispassionate observation, thought that ‘[a]lthough New Zealand harbours many plants with medical virtues the natives have a very limited knowledge of herbs’.[23] He listed a few but then went on to refer to the custom of summoning the tohunga. Anthropologists consider that tohunga ‘had some knowledge of the therapeutic value of plants, but the accepted theory of disease limited experimentation’.[24].

Cook and some observers noticed the use of herbs by women in steam treatments and external applications but most others thought Maori traditionally did not take medicine internally. With only gourds and wooden receptacles as containers, it would not have been easy to make medicines which needed boiling. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century the list of native medicinal plants known to be used by Maori was full enough to suggest that it could not have been developed in less than half a century. Since the missionaries for their part still seemed generally to be treating Maori with European remedies or placebos, much of the knowledge was undoubtedly there in Maori life all along.[25]

Most likely Suzanne was using several native plants in her 1860s experimentations. From 1862 she was largely in the company of Maori women, and she had Peata and others to advise her. In Hawke’s Bay she was regularly seen with Maori women, gathering roots, barks, leaves and plants across the hills and swamps. Women could be recognised as tohunga makutu in their areas of specialised knowledge and gifts, and healing would be one of these.[26] Suzanne’s rongoa were the culmination of years of shared expertise, bicultural expertise.

Exactly what plants went into Suzanne’s medicines, and in what proportions, is not known. The Sisters later indicated she tended to guard a couple of notebooks with a certain dramatic secrecy. Ultimately they disappeared – lost or most likely, as in the traditional stories, destroyed by Suzanne. Yet the very nature of the practice of Maori rongoa could suggest there weren’t closely prescribed recipes in the first place. Dr Wendy Pond’s recent report to the Waitangi Tribunal on Flora and Fauna supports this:

Plant properties are not used as a recipe book. A substance may occur in different amounts in different parts of the plant, so that an extract prepared from the root would be toxic while an extract prepared from the leaf tops would be restorative; new leaves may contain different quantities from old leaves; a plant-form growing in one location may be more potent than the same plant-form growing in other places; plants harvested in the early morning may be more potent than plant parts harvested in the heat of the day. Experienced practitioners develop a practice which integrates inherited knowledge, new observations, new materials, and new knowledge.[27]

Suzanne and her Maori informants would have had the long experience to be able to assess, select, mix appropriately plants they knew had come from certain places, at certain times, and so on. The Sisters would not have this knowledge. It was right that Suzanne, and not they, did the expert steps in the preparation.

Suzanne had largely stopped making medicine by the turn of the century, for several reasons. The publicity got out of hand. Kempthorne and Prosser had supplied a photograph of ‘the Rev. Lady’ to chemist shops. A newspaper reported that ‘Even in her passage along the streets persons thronged upon her’.[28] Secondly, the work involved was enormous and must have taken the Sisters and her away from other mission activities. The rate of bushfelling would also threaten production, making it more difficult to get certain species.

But it was the sheer demand for the medicines, coming from the exuberant advertising and the public who had been ‘so universally satisfied’ which overwhelmed the venture.[29] The operation became too big too fast. Kempthorne and Prosser even had agents in Australia. At the beginning, in August 1891, an article referred to ‘this lady's face beaming with smiles’. A year later, 38,472 bottles were certified sold,[30] but in the photo alongside this announcement, in spite of the freshly goffered frills softening her square, plain little face, Suzanne looks worn and harassed.

Suddenly the contents of some bottles of Marupa and Paramo began fermenting and complaints came in. Friends quietly arranged for the medicines to be analysed. In May 1893, the Colonial Analyst reported that the bottled mixtures were much weaker than her samples and therefore prone to fermentation.[31] A court case in February 1894 was settled in her favour. Kempthorne and Prosser had tried to meet the demand by diluting their stock.

The case was initiated by her lawyer without her instructing him to do so. As well as protecting her reputation, it may have been a way to free her from a contract and an enterprise which could have been fast diverting and draining her energies. A busy commercial venture was not the best expression of faith for a tiny, foundling Sisterhood, even with the best of mission intentions.

Her growing involvement with the medical world in Wellington after the turn of the century led her away from patent medicines. By 1908 the Quackery Prevention Act had tightened up on them. The British Medical Association and its New Zealand associates would have nothing to do with the purveyors of patent medicines. Suzanne was fiercely proud of her integrity in medicine and wanted to be associated with professionalism. In addition, the official tenor of the times was turning hostile to indigenous knowledge. The Tohunga Suppression Act was passed in 1907.

Perhaps her decision to stop was also influenced by her links with Maori who felt they were sharing their taonga with someone they respected. Maori had been involved all along. Probably several hapu had helped gather the plant stocks needed. Some people I interviewed remember their grandparents and great-grandparents talking about those who used to ‘help nga none ki te kimikimi i nga rakau e mahi, make up medicines for healing. There were quite a few of them; I know Tamakehu was one of them. I heard my grandmother saying that they used to get up and go on their horses and help nga none, to help them get the medicines together and sell them’.[32]

The interference with the medicines, the court case, the unwelcome publicity could have had a sense of defilement for her and for them. Who knows what may have been said in the korero upriver. She may even have been reprimanded at one point. It’s not unreasonable to imagine a rahui, or temporary tapu, being placed on certain plant stocks or areas, if there was a danger of exhaustion. Or the spiritual dimension, such as karakia, might have seemed missing to Maori in the period of intensive gathering at the height of the venture. And by the 1890s, her attention was also beginning to be claimed by the needs of Pakeha children coming to live at Hiruharama. It was no longer only to the Maori mission that funds might be going. It is significant that in a river version of the disappearance of the recipes, she returned them to the waters of the Whanganui.

Did Maori give to Meri’s skill in medicine the status of a spiritually powerful and mystically gifted healer? In my interviews two learned kaumatua and tohunga referred to ‘held her in high admiration because of her healing’. When they spoke of her, they did not talk about preparation and bottling but about the cure used and its effect. They seemed to relate to her as a developer of Maori medicine, even though she was not Maori. When they got together, they used to speak about her as a ‘healer’.[33]

In Hawke's Bay in the early to mid-1880s, influential Ngatikahungunu chiefs such as Paora Kaiwhata and Renata Kawepo had sent notes to her in gratitude for her healing. These could have been partly solicited as testimonials since the medicines project had already been conceived by then, but nevertheless their statements stand. In 1894 a Pakeha farmer wrote:

When, a few years ago, I was listening to some Maoris speaking about 'Mary' I enquired, 'Who is Mary?' I got the answer – 'The woman who is raising the dead to life.' ….[34]

Yet the general feeling among Maori and from the documentation is that Meri, as Suzanne was known to them, was not regarded so much as a mystical healer but as a skilful ‘doctor’ who used, respected and added to the knowledge of the vegetation they knew, and brought to her cures and to her nursing all the power of her own faith and prayer. Her gift was to combine good medicine, commonsense, laughter, friendship and love in a holistic view of life and health where spirituality was all around. That is the positive context that led me to choose her own bilingual phrase as a title for this talk – ‘Ka mätütü taku mate: I am quite recovering’.

Bicultural significance today

The story of her rongoa is very relevant right now. We could look more closely at the reference to Maori knowledge that did make it into the newspaper.

The first sentence was: ‘There is among the Maories considerable knowledge of the healing qualities of various plants.’ One hundred years later, this is being acknowledged and partly revalidated. Even if the concept of rongoa Maori is still marginalised, there is a growing interest in traditional healing, in indigenous medical science. A National Body for Maori Traditional Healing has been formed, (Nga Ringa Whakahaere O Te Iwi Maori). In his latest book, Te Mana, Te Kawanatanga: The Politics of Maori Self-Determination, Professor Mason Durie has written:

The health sector has also recognized the valuable input of Maori into the delivery of health services and, consistent with government guidelines, regional health authorities have entered into a wide range of contracts with Maori providers to supply a range of health services, including traditional healing. But, in addition, regional health authorities have required mainstream providers to address Maori health needs and to consult with Maori in order to develop services that are culturally acceptable.[35]

A recent Mana magazine article on kidney disease among Maori mentions the Orakei Health and Medical Centre as one model for such services. The article supports a bicultural approach to healing.[36]

In bicultural terms, many Pakeha are learning from this renaissance of rongoa Maori. Maori healers have also incorporated Pakeha importations and are also conferring with herbalists of other traditions, Chinese, for example. Alternative systems of medical practice and medicines are increasingly sought after nowadays. With information networking globally, this can only increase. Herbalism, alone or in combination with conventional Western medicine, is being used more and more.

But the next sentence of that old newspaper cutting offers another message that is also very relevant now: ‘That knowledge [i.e. Maori knowledge], in competent hands, ought to prove exceedingly valuable to mankind, and profitable to the Colony.’ A century later we could ask: Whose hands? What defines competent? Who defines what is valuable to mankind? Who decides what is profitable to Aotearoa-New Zealand?

This is an immensely controversial subject. The Waitangi Tribunal is grappling with it; it is being debated in the United Nations; it is a major aspect of discussion over the Uruguay GATT agreement. It is the current debate on the genetic manipulation of plants, the future of biodiversity; the intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples over medicinal plants.

In 1992, after the Convention on Biodiversity, the United Nations included flora and fauna (biodiversity) and knowledge of medicinal plants in definitions of indigenous intellectual property which has been subject to expropriation by western commercial and scientific enterprises. Under GATT legislation, which New Zealand ratified in 1995, indigenous resources, and knowledge of their uses, are treated as ‘public domain’ and are appropriated without recompense to indigenous peoples. Yet once the resources are commodified (in this case made into drugs) they become subject to patent laws and commercially valuable. But not to the original indigenous knowledge holders. The GATT Agreement, in standardising intellectual property law, bypassed bicultural acknowledgement of the Treaty of Waitangi and has no statement protecting Maori interests.

Article II of the Treaty of Waitangi says, in Professor Hugh Kawharu’s translation, that in ‘exchange for formalising the “governance” by the Crown of the country, hapü and iwi were to receive: “the full chieftainship (rangatiratanga) of their lands, their villages and all their possessions (taonga, – everything that is held precious).”’[37]

Medicinal flora and associated knowledge are considered taonga. In 1991, Wai 262 Flora and Fauna Claim was lodged with the Waitangi Tribunal by six iwi. The claim notified the government of Maori concern at the release of genetically modified indigenous flora and fauna ‘without Maori sanction or input’.[38] Part of the concern was that extinction of wild species could mean the loss of the original medicinal property of certain plants.

But, as Mason Durie explains, ‘There was also the question of patents and the rights of indigenous peoples to ownership over indigenous resources, such as flora and fauna. Del Wihongi successfully fought for the return of an original kumara plant from Japan, one of the few which had not been hybridised. She also played a key role in the establishment of an ethnobotanical garden in Auckland, where native flora could be both protected and propagated in a safe manner. Seeking to have those rights recognised, Te Rarawa and others lodged a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal. The claim objects to the exploitation of plant genotypes, the sale and export of native species, the extinction of rare and endangered species, the extraction and sale of plant extracts and products, and patenting of plant varieties. It is also concerned about the management and control of native animals, traditional harvesting, the collection and export of native fauna, and the ethics of scientific research. Hearings for the claim, Wai 262, commenced in September 1997.’[39]

The 1993 Mätaatua Declaration, signed by all member iwi of Maori Congress as well as other Maori organisations, resulted from the First International Conference on the Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights of Indigenous People. It has been signed by indigenous people worldwide and presented to the UN. It encapsulates similar concerns and advocates the development of protection mechanisms for indigenous communities. It addresses research and commercialisation issues.[40]

These are very real issues for Maori now, including the iwi Suzanne Aubert lived among for the longest time, te Atihaunui a Paparangi of the Whanganui River. These issues are only part of the wider Maori healthcare scene, with its vast overlay of socioeconomic factors. But they are of concern to all New Zealanders – the rising line of Maori on the population graph implies a higher percentage of Maori health care issues to face as a bicultural society. As Brenda Tahi put it so succinctly, ‘Maori are not going to go away (nor are Pakeha) and we have to live together.’ The story of Suzanne Aubert’s healing and her rongoa flows into this current debate. Her great gift was comprehension, empathy. She believed in consulting, listening, co-operating, being friendly (as much as possible), understanding, sharing access and sharing justice. To close the gap is assimilation but to comprehend the gap is biculturalism.

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[1]Andrew Sharp, ‘Why be bicultural?’ in Margaret Wilson and Anna Yeatman (eds), Justice and Identity: Antipodean Practices, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 1995, p 130-131