Ngamaru Raerino

Encouraged to stand and speak on the marae in his teens, Te Teko raised Ngamaru Raerino later spent time as a policeman and a musician. After joining supernatural series Mataku as a Māori consultant, he was a Maori advisor for Shortland Street, one of a run of South Pacific Pictures shows on which he provided advice about tikanga. In 2002, Raerino and his friend Bradford Haami co-wrote and directed romance He Pōraruraru, for te reo series Aroha. Alongside work as a Māori advisor and actor, Raerino translated Dr Seuss' The Cat in the Hat into te reo, and established a Māori media degree at AUT. He died on 12 March 2023. 

I remember something my dad once said to me. 'Son, there is no livelihood for you in the Māori language. You won't fill your cupboards to feed your children . . . So pursue instead the English language.' Now, if my father was still alive I would tell him, 'Dad, you're wrong, because my livelihood is in the Māori language. The things that I have achieved have been through the language.' And that is what I carry as I walk through life. Ngamaru Raerino, in a 15 September 2013 interview for TV series Waka Huia