Award-winning law teacher follows in family footsteps

As a girl, Suliana Mone would wait outside her late father’s classroom, watching him teach students in their homeland of Tonga, unaware she was staring at her future.

The law lecturer – who hails from the villages of Folaha, Fuaamotu, Nukunuku (Tongatapu), Holonga, Houma (Vava’u), Pukotala, Ha’ano and Muitoa (Ha’apai) – won Auckland Law School’s Student Choice Teaching Excellence Award last semester.

“I won – little old me at Auckland Law School. I couldn’t believe it when they told me,” she says.

Suliana, who is now a mother of two sons, comes from a long line of educators. She was born in Fiji, while both of her parents were studying at the University of the South Pacific. The family later shifted back to Tonga, where Suliana and her siblings were raised.

She recalls the Wesleyan schools in Tonga where her father, Reverend Dr Fisi’ihoi Finau Mone, worked. Despite having limited teaching equipment, pay and other resources, he was passionately committed to his work and determined to prepare his students for the world’s challenges.

In 2000, when Suliana was a teenager, her family moved again, this time to Aotearoa, where her father completed a doctorate in education at the University of Waikato. Suliana later followed in her father’s footsteps, gaining bachelors and masters degrees at the University of Waikato’s Te Piringa, Faculty of Law, before spreading her wings to live in Europe.

She returned to New Zealand to pursue her doctorate at Te Piringa. However, her beloved father passed away several years before she graduated, and she says it’s still painful that she couldn’t share the milestone with him. The loss led her to realise that the many years she spent watching and waiting for her father to finish work had provided her a teaching masterclass.

“He didn’t get to see me become a lecturer. My father was everything to me. Everything I know about being an educator, I learned from watching him,” she says.

Understanding that she is also descended from other educators and academics has made all the difference when lecturing hundreds of students.

“When I’m extremely anxious in front of a class I remind myself that my father and generations of educators, ministers and a great lawyer in my family are with me. I have brought them and their prayers across the ocean with me here, and I find strength in that.

“My father showed me that to educate was a privilege; that teaching had the capacity to change lives and required an absolute commitment and the very best of all your capabilities.”

She also acknowledges support from other family members, including her sons, Leon and Alex; sister Sialetafa; mother Nunia; and her brothers, Mone, Leti, Sama, Sii, Nau and Sina.

Suliana took up her role two years ago at Auckland Law School, where she is also Assistant Associate Dean Moana Oceania. Her research focuses on international law, human rights, women’s rights and Pacific law. She is especially focused on exploring the resistance to adopting the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in the Kingdom of Tonga.

The early-career academic’s mentors have included former Labour MP and Attorney General Emeritus Professor Margaret Wilson and Professor Claire Breen of Waikato University’s law faculty.

“I’ve been very blessed with a number of opportunities and doors opening to me in the span of my short career,” she says.

“Professor Wilson was especially helpful and gave me invaluable advice on how to navigate a law faculty and teaching. There have been so many of my wonderful colleagues here at Auckland Law School who have given me so much support.”

As a Pacific woman, she says the academic space has been fulfilling but challenging. Getting to grips with the finer points of teaching, she says, was a baptism by fire.

“I was giving lectures and I hadn’t taught before. And at the same time, I was writing up my PhD. It hasn’t been easy; I’ve had many sleepless nights and long hours.”

However, she has drawn on encouragement and experience from colleagues.

“I found forming relationships with good people within the faculties was most helpful.

“There are very few Pacific female faces in the law faculty. I have had many young, brown females tell me in person, or who have written to me, about how encouraging and inspiring it was for them to see me as a lecturer, at the front of the class.

“They see themselves in me; the likelihood of a girl from one of the smallest Pacific Islands lecturing at the number-one law school in New Zealand is miniscule,” she says.

“If I could beat the odds against me, it gives others like me the motivation and belief that they could overcome their own challenges and go even further than me.”

Kim Meredith