January 01, 2022
Tohu for Tane Mahuta protector
Services to Māori and the arts are what it says on Alex Nathan’s citation to become an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, but it’s his work in conservation that’s a source of greater pride.
Nathan chairs the Waipoua Forest Trust, the bicultural organisation he formed in 1998 with fellow conservationist Stephen King to protect the home of Tane Mahuta and other kauri giants.
So far it has planted more than 1.5 million trees on the previously-cleared land on the forest borders in an attempt to restore the kauri ecosystem to landscape scale.
The trust is set up so that if it is ever wound down, responsibility shifts back to Te Roroa, the small northernmost iwi within the Ngati Whatua confederation, whose claims Nathan brought to the Waitangi Tribunal and then negotiated to settlement.
That took more than a dozen years of his life, time away for his other passion of making art, mainly jewellery and sculpture in silver.
With a younger brother, the late clay artist Manos Nathan, he hosted many art, Māori culture, natural history and conservation programmes at Matatina, the marae they built in the middle of the forest, and collaborated with indigenous artists globally including from the United States, Canada, Japan and various Pacific Island nations.
Nathan was born in the north to Ned Nathan and his Cretan war bride Katana, but the family moved to the Wellington region in 1955.
When Ned and Katina retired back to Dargaville, Alex came under the sway of Anglican priest and tohunga Maori Marsden, who urged him to move back to stand next to his father.
“When we moved back, Alison and I and our three children (of an eventual seven) lived with Maori and Jane at Te Kopuru at the old hospital,” he says.
From his father and Marsden he learned much of the whakapapa and history that was so critical in pursuing the claim, which he took over when his father started to become unwell.
“Maarire Goodall, who was running the tribunal administration at the time, told me I needed to step up because if Ned died before the claim proceeded, it might fall off the rails.”
The claim eventually became WAI 38, a minnow among some of the larger claims around it but which garnered widespread attention because of the antics of Allan Titford, whose farm to the south of the forest included wahi tapu which the iwi had tried to exclude from sale.
Nathan says it is a life filled by things that needed doing.
He says inclusion in the New Year’s Honours List is as much for the iwi and his family who stood behind him through the struggles.