Robin – Oratia
“Well one learns that children have a very flexible brain and they can appreciate much more than you think, particularly young children.
Many adults seem to think because they can’t talk effectively they’re not really responding to them around them, but in fact they are. I think children can teach us to have an open mind because you know, they’re full of questions – where, why, how and so forth and they don’t have a blinken concept of life. Everything is open to them. I was born in Putaruru and grew up on a dairy farm, but then became a teacher of biology and science. I taught in Tanzania for five years, Fiji for five, for a couple of years but most the time in Auckland here in various schools. I believe that one should always accept people as they are.
Many people, like when they travel they have preconceived ideas of other races and other nationalities, but one finds that people generally are kind everywhere, and hospitable and one has to be very accepting of that. In Europe when Tanzania became independent, and I just happened to write to the Minister of Education there and say, well I’ve got a degree in botany and I am also, you know, a qualified teacher; do you need teachers? And they responded by sending me an air ticket, so I flew into Dar es Salaam. It was a great experience. This was 1962, the beginning of ’62 and that was why I stayed there five years, and then when it came to teaching in Fiji, well I was in Kelston Boys’ and I saw this job advertised just when Fiji was about to become independent in 1970, and the New Zealand Government had set up a scheme of cooperation, sending experienced teachers to Fiji, and I just joined that group.
I enjoyed teaching but I retired early, because I have many other interests and have been travelling a lot since then, and been collecting antique weavings, and that’s been my real interest and still is.
No-one ever retires.
Oh, I spend much of my time restoring textiles so I find that very therapeutic and I go to the extent of spinning and dyeing my own wool to match the textile. So at present I’m restoring a very old one. I’ve had it for years. It was in a very sorry state. It’s getting onto 200 years old, but it’s a large one, and I’m slowing working on that and ah, trying to get it back to its original state. So that, I find that very ah, interesting and ah, you know it’s, it’s quite an art form.
Art is extremely important and when it comes to these textiles, I mean, they’ve been around for a few thousand years. I mean the culture and the traditions of weaving. I mean the earliest extant weavings are 3500 years old, and ah they’ve got designs and the colours similar to what was used until recently. I’m talking about of course natural colours, as opposed to modern synthetic dyes that can’t match the natural colours. But the weavings they probably were precursor to much of architectural design as well and so they have an important part.
I think art is very important in different cultures. In Fiji where I was teaching they were still teaching the children there their sort of traditional weavings using tapa, if you know tapa material, and they were dyeing them with the traditional dyes, and I thought it was great, just to keep this alive. You know? Because these old traditions are dying out in many cultures.
Stop being absorbed by the small screens all the time, including TV, because I think, you know, a lot of people, they spend so much time on that. If I think back, you know, in the past there was much more activity and different art forms and people with interest in antiques and that, and um also in rugs and that. That’s just my speciality, you know in antique rugs and other textiles. But today that has largely gone by the by. I meet when I travel collectors and dealers from overseas, like from Europe and United States and they decry the fact now that people are not interested in these antique and traditional weavings, which are, I mean they’re an expression of their culture, which goes back so, so far back and so some dealers from New York have said to me, you know, today we are just colour designers.
In the past we could sell, you know, good pieces that people wanted to study and keep and pass onto their younger generations, but today people just buy something, and they keep it for a short while, throw it away and buy something new. We’re sort of in a throw-away society and I think this is affecting art very much as well. So I think there has to be a change in attitude, and I suppose the only way this can be brought about is through influencing the younger generations. I think that would be an important aspect. Well there are a lot of people out there who have an interest in different things and I think they should be encouraged to you know, give talks or whatever, pass on their knowledge to others and I’m sure, you know, people would be interested if they knew of these things, but I think you know, this library now and again has talks. I used to give a lot of talks to different societies around Auckland, and ah, but that’s gone. The people’s interest seems to have died out, you know.”
