Hone Tuwhare is, along with James K. Baxter and C.K. Stead, one of New Zealand's best known poets, and a life-long socialist. Much of his poetry is written in straightforward, everyday language. The serious and the high-and-mighty are treated with irreverent good humour - in his last collection, not even his own approaching death is sacred.

But Tuwhare’s playfulness was a world removed from the navel-gazing irrelevance of the “post-modern” poetry of the 1980s and 90s. It was always connected to the everyday lives and political struggles of his people – Maori land rights, workers’ rights, environmental protests, and internationally, against racism and imperialism. His poetry was never an end in itself.
Born in 1922 in Northland, of Nga Puhi descent, Tuwhare’s mother died when he was five years old. He was raised in Auckland by his father, a labourer. His father was an accomplished orator in Maori and encouraged his son’s interest in language. Tuwhare spoke Maori until he was about 9. As there was no money for Tuwhare to go to high school, he did an apprenticeship as a boilermaker in the Otahuhu Railway Workshops. Unlike nowadays, an apprenticeship did not mean narrow specialisation and intellectual stagnation.
For Tuwhare, it was an awakening.
"I was taught everything there,” Tuwhare said in a 1987 Landfall interview.
“My eyes were opened to all sorts of things political influences. And political reading. There was the Left Book Club library in Darby Street [in Auckland's CBD] and the Railway Workshop library, where there was a much more sophisticated choice of books than I had known. I read Marx and Engels, Russian novelists. And American novelists Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe. They say he's a second-rate novelist, Thomas Wolfe but, you know, his words sang to me. And I was a voracious reader. I was still building my word stock."
In 1942, the 20-year-old Tuwhare joined the New Zealand Communist Party and met the poet R.A.K. Mason, who edited the Communist newspaper In Print.
"Once a week, I'd go and collect about five dozen copies of the paper for the workshop and I'd meet Mason and we'd go to the boozer. But he was a major writer, a major New Zealand writer, and I didn't know this. When I found out, I thought, God, what a humble guy. I liked that; I liked the way he didn't give a stuff, really, whether he was a major writer or not. He was more concerned about workers' problems and things like that as I came to be."
In the late ‘40s, he joined the Maori Battalion and served in Japan. The aftermath of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima was the subject of the title poem of his first collection, No Ordinary Sun.
But although Tuwhare was always political – participating in the Land Marches which were led by Whina Cooper, in anti-Springbok tour protests, and organizing a 5000-strong march in Dunedin against the extension of the surveillance powers of New Zealand’s secret police, the SIS – his politics were limited by the domination of Stalinism in the New Zealand left. In 1956, Tuwhare left the Communist Party in protest at the Russian invasion of Hungary, but rejoined in the 70s, after the Party had switched support to China, before being expelled as it switched once again to support the false utopia of Stalinist Albania.
Towards the end of his life, Tuwhare was embraced by the establishment as a New Zealand ‘Icon’ – a far cry from the days when his writing was banned from Maori Affairs Ministry-funded publications. Such a lively writer would no doubt hate the thought of being turned into another pillar of the literary establishment  - much as his Maori figure cast in bronze outside the Chief Post Office, Auckland hated his fate.
Tuwhare’s own eulogy for great friend Mason suggests the way we should remember him: "A red libation to your good memory, friend. There's work yet, for the living."

For Hone Tuwhare: