Age when entered care: 12 years old
Year of birth: 1952
Hometown: Ōtautahi Christchurch
Time in care: 1962‒1967
Type of care facility: Boys’ homes – Ōwairaka Boys’ Home, Kohitere Boys’ Training Centre; various other placements in foster care and family homes; borstal.
Ethnicity: Samoan
Whānau background: Fa’amoana was born in Samoa and came to Auckland with his family in 1960. His sisters and two of his cousins also went into care.
Currently: Fa’amoana is a playwright, author and musician. He has shared his story and experiences of abuse through creative arts, particularly his plays The White Guitar and A Boy Called Piano, which he performed with his son and grandsons.

Ōwairaka was the place that changed my life. I experienced physical abuse at other placements, but all forms of abuse at Ōwairaka Boys’ Home, and by the time I left, the gun was already loaded. The die had been cast because of what happened to me there.

When I came from Samoa, I couldn’t speak a word of English and that made schooling really hard for me and my siblings, particularly because we weren’t allowed to speak English at home.

Fa’amoana was my grandfather’s name, it’s a beautiful name. But the teachers couldn’t say it, so on my first day at school, I was given the name John. This is how I came to be known as John Luafutu throughout school and it carried on to my time in State care, prison and life after that.

Part of my identity was erased when they gave me a new name. It marked the turning point of dislocation, dispossession, disorientation, disillusion and lost self-esteem experienced by me as a small child. 

I wasn’t behaving at school. I couldn’t understand English or what was going on. My cousins and I, and other people like me, just started playing truant and didn’t go to school. That’s how we first came to the attention of the State – it was deemed that we were out of control. It felt like we were all being tarred with the same ‘trouble’ brush. We got to thinking that if they were going to treat us like animals, we were going to act like that.

I was about 10 years old when I was placed under supervision, my first contact with the State. I was around 12 years old when I was first taken on warrant and spent periods at Ōwairaka. When I arrived there, I thought it was a really flash-looking place with well-kept grounds. As this freshie kid from the Islands, I’d never seen anything like it and thought it would be pretty good. But when I got in there, it was just a nightmare.

The older boys didn’t like me because I was a ‘coconut’. There was stomping, a kind of initiation. You just had to harden up and take it. You learned not to be a tell-tale, not to nark. I soon realised I had to be the tough guy — otherwise you were somebody’s bitch, or you were cleaning somebody’s crap.

On Sunday afternoons the boys would be taken into the lounge, where you would sit around in a ring and the staff would tell you to pick a partner. You would be given boxing gloves, go into the middle of the ring and just smash the shit out of each other. The boxing did not stop until somebody got a bloody nose or couldn’t fight anymore.

We were told to do what the white guys said, and at that time I just accepted it. That’s how it was, do as you’re told, the white guys are clever and all of that. And I remembered my mum saying to me when I got taken into care, “Do exactly what they tell you to do”.

I played up one time and was put into secure. I think I was there for 21 days on one stint. You had a little bucket in the room to go to the toilet. Every morning they would wake you up at 6am and tell you to go empty your bucket out.

Some of the Palagi men were really touchy-feely. When I was in secure, one guy would bring nudist pornography books for the boys to look at. He tried to feel me up in the shower and I swore at him and he said, “I wasn’t trying to do anything to you, little black bugger”. He tried again over the next few days. He would touch me and say things like, “You got a nice tight little black bum”. He wasn’t the only one doing things like that. I ended up acting out because these bad things were happening – it became my defence mechanism to nut out so I would get left alone.

I felt so helpless that I attempted suicide. After all the things that were happening and the way they were running the home, I just wanted to end my life. I have rarely told that part of my story before because it is something I have really tried to bury.

After that incident, I got taken back to the cell. The guards notified the superintendent and they kept me down there for another day. After that I was put out into the garden permanently and didn’t have any more schooling. But I was way past education by then – I was totally lost. Anyone who wet the bed had to get up early and stand at the front of the door with their linen so everyone could see. It was humiliating.

I never got to go home. My mum came to visit me whenever she could but my dad didn’t come to see me, because he was disappointed and ashamed. Dad barely spoke to me and wanted nothing to do with me.

They couldn’t handle me anymore at Ōwairaka so I was sent to Kohitere. By the time I got there I was just like, “bring it on already”. After Ōwairaka I didn’t give a shit. 

At Kohitere there was a hierarchy , and if you were a ‘coconut’ you had to watch your back, although by that time, I was able to defend myself. My mantra was, “When in doubt, nut out,” and if I ever felt that I needed to protect myself that’s what I would do. But that all had consequences, being punished over and over again for bad behaviour, it was just a cycle.

I was one of the first to go in the Kohitere secure unit. I was there for three months. They had ex-army guys there who trained us. They shaved our heads and it was like a detention centre. Our job was to smash concrete foundations all day with sledge hammers and we weren’t allowed to talk to each other.

I was in Kohitere for about 20 months, but it felt like years. I have mixed feelings when I think about it – I made some good friends and those friendships carried on outside Kohitere. Most of the guys I met again later on, in borstals and prisons. I got into guitar and sports. But I also got to know a whole lot of negative things. I was confused and didn’t know myself. That place had no function to meet the needs of a Samoan like me. My family couldn’t afford to come and visit me – it was too far away. I don’t remember a social worker coming to visit me.

After Ōwairaka I was changed. By the time I got to Kohitere, that anger was already built. I just didn’t understand it. By way of surviving, I nursed a deep anger within me, and I ended up with a vicious temper. I’m sorry to say my wife can vouch for that, as can many others. I had nowhere else to put those feelings and became a violent person.

I got out of Kohitere in 1967 and went in and out of prison and lived a life of crime. I ended up running the jail, because you have to be at the top to survive. Like the homes, there is a hierarchy in jail. And if you make yourself vicious enough, the other vicious dogs will leave you alone. That’s how it was.

In prison, I found this book by Samoan writer Albert Wendt, Sons for the Return Home. When reading that book, I suddenly remembered a dream I had of my mum and my dad and why they came to New Zealand in the first place – for a better life. And that just blew me away. And I decided to change then.

I told a psychotherapist and a priest what had happened to me. It saved me. Until I hit recovery, I didn’t know why I had turned out the way I had. And those people, they actually took me right back to the beginning. And that’s when I started to understand.

My parents had to pay maintenance for me when I was in care. We were already poor and struggling. They shouldn’t have had to – when the State took me, they became responsible for what happened to me in care and the pathway my life took. We were put into a system that couldn’t cater for us Pacific kids. The State shouldn’t take you away if your life is going to be worse off.

Source

Witness statement of Fa’amoana Luafatu (5 July 2021).