Margaret Orbell "the literary historian" talks about her work in the"Māori World".
Margaret is a literary scholar and an author who has worked hard to bring this
wealth of Māori poetry and prose, which she calls Aotearoa's hidden heritage,
to a wider audience.
Margaret edited the Māori Affairs Department magazine, "Te Ao Hou" from 1962
to 1966 and went on to publish a number of books about Māori culture. These
included one of the first collections of contemporary writing. She taught at the
UIniversity of Canterbury where she became associate professor in Māori studies,
retiring in the mid 1990s to write full time. Margaret Orbell's interest in the Māori world
was triggered when she explored Auckland's dormant volcanoes with her parents.
Māori waiata have been an absorbing interest for Margaret, and her doctoral thesis
was based on the texts of waiata aroha-love poems composed by women. She
worked with the ethnomusicologist, Mervyn McLean, on the 1975 book Traditional
Songs of the Māori. This was the first to include both the words and music of
traditional waiata.
Like other Pakeha working in the Māori world, Margaret Orbell faced challenges as
the Māori cultural revival gathered momentum. The critic Keith Stewart said that "once
a champion of Māori in a white world, she now suffers from being white in an
increasingly precious brown one.
Margaret Orbell's career is echoed in the work of her late husband, Gordon Walters.
He was one of this country's best known abstract painters, blending European and
Polynesian artistic traditions in a series of works which set the koru motif in a new
framework.