Maera Sisifa recalls growing up in Mourea, a Māori settlement near Rotorua, between Lakes Rotorua and Rotoiti.
Maera now works for the Ministry of Education as a school journal editor but grew up in Mourea in the 1950s in an open 'whangai' adoption. Maera explains how the whangai situation worked and explains how she referred to her parents as koro and kuia. Her adopted parents, who were originally childless, also raised three of her siblings from her parents' twenty-two children.
Her adopted parents were shearers and wool-classers but her father eventually gave up shearing and worked with the Ministry of Works. She says Mourea was a communal pā settlement with everybody working together during planting and harvest-time.
She recalls spending many days as a child swimming in the Ōhau channel, which was very fast-moving at the time. The children used to tie rourou (flax baskets) to their heads which kept their clothes dry when swimming across the river and dive for pennies thrown in by tourists off the road bridge. She says sometimes they would take the tourists home and get their photos taken or put on a concert for them.
At school the children were inspected daily for clean nails, teeth and hanky. If teeth weren't clean salt was given out to clean them. Maera explains a lot of the children had glue ear which was never treated. An Anglican minister and a Catholic priest would come and visit the school once a week.
She describes going eeling with her father, the children had to catch and kill the eels when the men threw them on the bank, a job she hated.
Christmas was the favourite meal, with ice-cream and strawberries and fruit salad. Christmas was a big event at the Mourea Pā, with children getting new clothes and shoes and drinking as much soft drink as they liked. The children used to go carolling from house to house in the town at New Year, not Christmas.
Her mother's remedy for sicknesses was a drink made from the juice of boiled snails. When her father was still shearing, the children used to have to help sweeping up and cleaning dags and jumping in the wool-press otherwise they just helped peel potatoes for meals. If they didn't have shoes in winter they would put their feet in fresh cow-pats (tiko) for warmth.