Two of the best known women in New Zealand music and broadcasting have marked forty years of friendship in the most permanent way available to them. Dame Hinewehi Mohi and Māori broadcaster Erana Reedy gathered friends and family and received their moko together, and they told the story to Taioro News reporter Mātai Smith in an interview screened on Te Karere and published by 1News on Friday morning.
The marking they received is a moko kauae, the design worn on the chin by Māori women, which is applied by a tā moko artist and carries the wearer’s whakapapa, or family lineage. Both women had wanted one for years. What made this occasion different was that they did it at the same time, in the same room, with the same artist.
The friendship goes back to St Joseph’s Māori Girls’ College in Napier in the mid 1980s. It carried on at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, and then survived four decades of two very different careers, one built in recording studios and the other in newsrooms.
“He wahine ngahau, he wahine hātakēhi, i katakata māua i ngā wā katoa. Heoi anō, he tino hoa, he tino hoa piripono,” Mohi told Taioro News, which 1News translated as “[Erana] is funny, she’s hardcase. We laughed all the time. So we’re best friends, the best of friends.”
Mohi is a household name for reasons that go well beyond her records. In 1999 she sang the New Zealand national anthem in te reo Māori alone before an All Blacks Rugby World Cup match at Twickenham, a decision that drew loud criticism at the time and then, over the following years, quietly became the norm. Every bilingual rendition of God Defend New Zealand sung at a test match since traces back to that afternoon in London.
Her debut album Oceania, released the same year, went double platinum in New Zealand and put taonga pūoro, the traditional Māori instruments, alongside contemporary production. She later established the Raukatauri Music Therapy Centre with her husband George Bradfield after their daughter was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and the centre now works with children and adults across several centres. In 2019 she curated and produced the Waiata Anthems project, which persuaded some of the country’s biggest pop acts to re record their own hits in te reo Māori and went to number one on the New Zealand album chart.
She was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2008, a Dame Companion in 2021 for services to Māori, music and television, and was inducted into the New Zealand Music Hall of Fame in 2024. She continues to produce te reo Māori music and content with a long list of New Zealand musicians.
Reedy has spent the same forty years on the other side of the camera and microphone, producing te reo Māori content for radio, television and online audiences. She is chief operating officer of Radio Ngāti Porou, deputy chair of Te Whakaruruhau o Ngā Reo Irirangi Māori, the national Māori radio network, and a board member of the Māori broadcasting funding agency Te Māngai Pāho. Her work is the kind that rarely carries a byline but keeps a language audible on air every day.
The moko were applied by Sir Derek Lardelli, one of the most widely respected tā moko artists working in New Zealand. Reedy said the experience was not what she had braced for.
“Ka whakahaeretia te karakia, ka tau ki tērā wāhi ā wairua nei, i rongo anō hoki ahau ki taku pāpā, me aku tīpuna, taku māmā,” she said. In the translation published with the interview, “Once the karakia was done I went to that spiritual place, I felt the presence of my dad, my ancestors, my mum.” She said they were all there supporting her as she lay on the table.
“Nō reira, he ngāwari, me kī, me te ohorere anō hoki he ngāwari! A kua mutu, a kua pai. Ki ahau, kua tau te wairua,” Reedy said, translated as “So, you could say it was pleasant, which was surprising! And it’s done, it’s good. For me, I feel settled.”
For Mohi, the timing was tied to her grandmother Joan. She wanted her grandmother’s blessing before going ahead and sought it while she was still alive. Her grandmother has since died.
“Tino harikoa ahau ki te mau moko mō te maumaharatanga o tōku kuia,” Mohi said, translated as “I’m very happy to wear moko in memory of my grandmother.”
Reedy said sharing the day was the whole point. “Kia mahia ngātahi ai anō hoki tāua i te wā kotahi, i te wāhi kotahi. Kāore ōku tuahine, nō reira anei taku tuahine and me mahi tahi ka tika,” she said, translated as “I have no sisters so [Hinewehi] is my sister, and it’s only right we do it together.”
Lardelli, who affiliates to the Ngāti Konohi hapū of Ngāti Porou and Ngāi Te Aweawe of Rongowhakaata, has been central to the revival of tā moko as a living practice rather than a museum subject. He composed the All Blacks haka Kapa o Pango in 2005 and was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to Māori art. Accepting it at the time, he told RNZ the honour belonged to the wider field of Māori arts rather than to him alone.
Moko kauae has become a far more ordinary sight in New Zealand public life over the past decade than it was when these two women were at school together. Nanaia Mahuta received hers in 2016 while serving as a member of Parliament, and moko kauae has since been worn by presenters reading the evening news on mainstream television. What was once a subject of newspaper letters pages is now, more often than not, simply part of the picture.
That shift is part of what makes this particular story land the way it does. Neither woman framed the day as a statement. They framed it as two friends of forty years, who met as teenagers in a Napier boarding school, deciding to do something together that they had each thought about for most of their adult lives, and finding that it felt less like an ordeal than a homecoming.
Do you have a friendship that has lasted four decades, or a story about a moment you and a friend chose to mark together? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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