Maris O’Rourke: writer and walker

Real talk: I now walk more because I’ve met Dr Maris O’Rourke. Charming and lively, she’s had a glittering career in educational reform (University lecturer in Education 1974–1989, New Zealand Secretary of Education 1989–1995, first World Bank Director of Education for six years, focused on reducing poverty), but she is not resting on her laurels – nor on anything else.

In her current life as “poet and peregrina”/writer and walker, she walks seven to ten kilometres a day from her avocado-coloured Balmoral villa – to Onehunga if the wind blows her east, and to Waterview if the wind blows her west (she gets the bus back). She walks up several local maunga. By the time you read this, she will have walked from Lucca (near Pisa) to Rome with her partner Greg, completing up to 20 kilometres a day.

“I especially like walking across a country,” she says with relish. For Maris, walking is about dropping into life, not dropping out. “You smell the chamomile under your feet and feel as if you’re walking during the Middle Ages. I find it totally rewarding.”

Maris is 84.

She participated in two significant hīkoi last year: over the Auckland Harbour Bridge all the way to Okahu Bay in support of te Tiriti o Waitangi (“Oh my God it was amazing!” she says. “So positive, so full of energy and everybody was smiling and laughing and all the cars are going past, tooting.”) The other hīkoi carried taonga of Tūtahi Tonu, the University’s first marae, from Epsom to the new City Campus wharenui. Maris was surprised and honoured to be asked to carry the photograph of her revered and departed colleague Tarutaru Rankin (Ngāpuhi, head of Māori Studies).

Maris is also planning a walk in Japan next year with her grandson, who has suggested they write haiku along the way, in homage to 17th century wandering poet Bashō. “I thought, ‘oh crikey, I’d better get into that then’. Haiku is probably the most difficult thing in poetry … But anyway, I like difficult things.”

Indeed, for the last quarter of a century, she’s been tirelessly pursuing creative challenges. “Since 2001, when I left the World Bank, it’s just been the most amazing time of my life ever. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been,” she says.

Taking a University Continuing Education course with poet Siobhan Harvey was an ‘a-ha’ moment. Since 2012, Maris has written 12 books including award-winning poetry, and a trilogy about Lillibutt the Kunekune pig, whose adventures closely follow Maris’s own walks.

A reo Māori edition of Lillibutt’s story of Te Araroa (translated by Ani Wainui) was a finalist in New Zealand’s children’s book awards. Maris and her friend and illustrator Claudia Pond Eyley sent thousands of copies to Kōhanga Reo and Kura Kaupapa Māori as a koha.

Maris and Greg are publishers, too, via GTM Press. She encourages writers younger than herself: “You need to publish before you die!”

On the day we meet, she’s brightly resplendent in a bougainvillea-crimson shirt – a person clearly living life to the full. She’s a long way from her difficult upbringing in the UK, and even from her years as a housewife in isolated Māhoenui (her fascinating memoir, Zigzags and Leapfrogs, outlines at least nine lives). As she writes:

I left school at 16 and went to work
(it was what you did then). Years later
in Grafton I found a university
at the bottom of the garden.
I entered the labyrinth […] I came out a Warlock.

Being a ‘Warlock’ means “I found my own power”, explains Maris. “University changed my life, it really did. I understood I was able to do stuff myself. I didn’t have to listen to other people if I didn’t want to. I could assess what they said, I could fact-check it, and I was given power.”

And her wielding of that intellectual power – taking things in her (literal) stride – continues, graceful and extraordinary.