This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity
Mo: I was born in Whanganui and moved to Kaitaia when I was four and grew up in Kaitaia in the Far North.
Jac: How long did you live in Kaitaia?
Mo: Till I left home at the age of 18.
Jac: What were some of your memories of living up in the Far North?
Mo: The Far North is a beautiful place. I absolutely love it and going back to visit there but by the time I left I was ready to leave. It’s an interesting place because it’s quite a depressed area socially and a difficult place to kind of get ahead in life I guess and I knew that in order to make a life for myself that I needed to get out of there and leave there. So I’m happy to go back and visit and go to the beaches and all the beautiful places because it is absolutely stunning up there but it’s not a place that I want to live.
Jac: Were you living rurally or in town?
Mo: In town, in Kaitaia itself, right on the edge of town though. The house we were in looked out across the paddocks towards 90 Mile Beach so it’s sort of flat from our back fence you could see all the way out to the sanddunes. So you couldn’t see the sea but on quiet nights you could hear the surf from our place.
Jac: Were you one of those kids that made the most of living by the beach?
Mo: Yeh absolutely we spent heaps of time at the beach. My parents were into sailing so we spent lots of time on the water as well. A lot of my mates were out in the country so lots of horsey time and stuff like that.
Jac: Horsey time?
Mo: Horsey time (laughs) horse riding, motorbike riding, mucking about on farms.
Jac: Whose in Kaitaia now in your family?
Mo: My Mum, she lives in Awanui just out of Kaitaia up a long driveway miles from anywhere.
Jac: You get to go back and see her a bit?
Mo: I try to yeh but it’s easier for her to come down here to visit us with the kids and everything than for us to traipse everyone up there.
Jac: How was school for you in terms of enjoying it, friends?
Mo: Because Kaitaia is a small town and your schooling options are limited. I went to Kaitaia Primary and then Kaitaia Intermediate and then Kaitaia College and your whole peer group moves with you. So you might get a few people that come and go, drop in and out, but by and large the group that you start at kindy with is the group that you follow all the way through your schooling so by the time we got to college we had a pretty tight group of friends. From what I could see for most people you had your core group of eight to 10 people and then there were different groups within that. We had a really big third form year. There were three or 400 of us so you just formed your little cliques and those were the friends you then carried on with through secondary school.
Jac: Were you an academic kid or a sporty kid?
Mo: Sporty, yes, definitely sporty. I ended up in the top stream class by accident and for whatever reason the teachers decided that they might as well keep me there and see how I did. My name got mixed up with somebody else in the first week in third form. They brought the other girl back into the class and they left me there. Maybe they thought it would be really demoralising for me to swapped back. So I was in a class that was possibly slightly more academically higher than I was but actually what it did was make me work harder and I’m actually glad that I stayed in that class. My school reports used to say things like ‘Moana is easily distracted’ and ‘could try harder’ and all those sorts of things. School was really just for socialising rather than working. I managed to get through seventh form and in sixth form scrapped through just enough points to get UE but I really did the bare minimum to get through. I don’t think necessarily it’s because I couldn’t do it, I just wasn’t interested in studying so I was far more interested in playing sports and socialising with my mates.
Jac: What sort of sports were you into?
Mo: Soccer mostly, yeh, soccer. Waka Ama for a bit and then phys ed. You do lots of different things in phys ed, but soccer would be my main sport I didn’t play any summer sports
Jac: When you left Kaitaia where did you head?
Mo: I went to Auckland for a year first. When I left school I knew that I wanted to join the Police but I didn’t feel like I was ready to join. I was old enough but I didn’t feel that I was mature enough. I also wasn’t sure that I would get in and I felt that I needed a back up plan. So I went to Auckland for a year and worked, first in a sandwich bar on High Street which runs parallel to Queen Street right in the CBD and then in a screen printing company out in Mount Roskill and was a screen printing hand. They tried to get me to take up an apprenticeship but I knew that I didn’t want to be screenprinting for the rest of my life. What that year enabled me to do was work out what I wanted to do as my back up plan and so at the end of that year I quit my job and I moved to Dunedin and did a phys ed degree.
Jac: How was it moving from Kaitaia to the cities?
Mo: Auckland I hated, it was just too big, too noisy, too busy. I found it really hard to meet people and make friends. I was flatting with my sister and all her cohorts and I sort of became friends with them but they were always her friends and because I was always working out in Mount Roskill in a small screenprinting company it just wasn’t conducive to making friends and socialising so in some ways it was quite a lonely year because I didn’t have my own peer group but moving to Dunedin, I loved it.
Jac: Were you out?
Mo: Not until I moved to Dunedin. I came out to my parents at the beginning of the first year down there.
Jac: Did that involve going back to Kaitaia?
Mo: My mother, I came out to over the phone. When I was living in Auckland at the end of the year before I went to Dunedin I came out to my mother. My father, when I went to Dunedin I came out to him.
Jac: What was their reaction?
Mo: My Dad was really funny and I came out to him in a really weird way. I had a tshirt that said Dyke but it was written in the Nike style with the swoosh tick underneath it. He was out the back crushing beer cans, I put it on and went out there and I said to him ‘I need to tell you something really personal about myself’ and I just showed him the tshirt and he just went ‘Ah dyke(y) one of the guys at the squash club has got one of them and it says something else’ I can’t remember, and that’s the only conversation we’ve ever had about it, we’ve never talked about it since. I’m out to him and he’s met most of my girlfriends and there’s never been an issue or a question but it was a weird awkward moment (laughs). Yeh it was just that’s done, we don’t need to talk about that anymore.
Jac: Has he always been supportive of you?
Mo: Yeh absolutely, my parents have been Quakers when I was growing up. My Dad is Buddhist now. We were raised to be open-minded and they were very open-minded. One of the values of our family is acceptance of all people and that there is good in all people and you don’t judge people by their race, or religion or whatever.
Jac: When you were growing up in Kaitaia did you know gay people?
Mo: No I think I was the only gay in the village, oh, and my girlfriend at the time, she was obviously gay as well.
Jac: You had a girlfriend at high school?
Mo: So we were really good friends, best mates, and we met in third form. So she’d come over from one of the other schools and started at Kaitaia College. We started out as friends by default. I had a good friend and she had a good friend and our good friends became friends and we were left without friends. It was a really bizarre situation. Anyway we just hit it off and we were really good mates and over the years our friendship just got closer and closer and closer and it morphed into a relationship in our sixth form year.
Jac: When you moved to Auckland did you keep the relationship going?
Mo: Yes, she had gone to Dunedin and that was one of motivating factors to go to Dunedin so we had a long distance relationship that year I was in Auckland. But it didn’t last once I got down there.
Jac: Did you stay friends?
Mo: Yep we’re still friends.
Jac: And your Mum about you being out?
Mo: Yeh she’s fantastic. She just did what mothers do I guess you know ‘so long as you’re happy, it’s not going to be easy for you, I’ll always support you no matter what’. She wrote me a really lovely letter that I’ve still got but I was never concerned about how she might react or respond. It was my Dad that I wasn’t sure. I had absolutely no idea how he would react.
Jac: What about other people? Your siblings?
Mo: My sister, she said it’s never been an issue for her.
Jac: They never had any idea before then?
Mo: Oh that’s probably one of the reasons it wasn’t an issue. Because I think they all knew you know because we spent every minute together out of school and in school as well. It wouldn’t have surprised them at all. I don’t think they knew as such but it was more that I was just confirming it for them.
Jac: So people at school weren’t giving you heaps about it? They weren’t seeing that you guys were together?
Mo: No we didn’t think so but then again would people have questioned it, I don’t know? We thought we were pretty good at keeping it under the radar but whether we did or not I don’t know. I’ve never had any retrospective conversations with my peer group at school. I’m still Facebook friends with a few people from that time but we’ve all gone to different parts of the country and world as well so we don’t remain in close contact.
Jac: Tell us about some of things that happened for you in Dunedin.
Mo: Dunedin was great time, I loved it. So I spent four years down there. I was a baby dyke and I’d hang out in the women’s room at lunch time and go on Reclaim the Night marches and all of that stuff. I didn’t go into a hall of residence. I went straight into a flat and I was flatting with two other lesbians and then met lots of people through their social circle and we’d go to women’s dances and gay and lesbian balls. I just totally immersed myself in it because I hadn’t been able to come out when I was living in small town Kaitaia and didn’t really have a peer group in Auckland so I just threw myself in it boots and all, overalls and purple tshirts. Although I never had a pair of Docs. I never owned a pair of Doc boots.
Jac: Just swapped them for Police boots. So that was the ‘90s?
Mo: I was in Dunedin ’94 to ’97.
Jac: After Dunedin what happened?
Mo: I joined the Police and in the last year or so of my phys ed degree I started the application process for the Police. So I was recruited in Dunedin and I was accepted into the Police six months after I finished my phys ed degree. I stayed in Dunedin while I was waiting for a place in the Police. I guess I couch hopped around my friends' places. I didn’t know when I was going to get the call up and I was literally waiting just doing little odd jobs around the place. Then when I got the call up and came up to the Police College in Porirua I packed everything up into boxes, brought it up with me and put it all in storage. I had to find somewhere to live once I graduated. The recruiting officer had said to me ‘if you want to come back to the South Island you might as well not bother applying because there’s a four year waiting list’. So it was quite clear that I wasn’t going to get a position back in Dunedin. At that stage that would have been my preference to have stayed in Dunedin cos I loved living in Dunedin so then I had to think ‘well where do I want to live?’. I had heard that Wellington was quite a similar city to Dunedin in lots of ways just bigger and I knew that I didn’t want to go back to the Far North and I knew I didn’t want to go back to Auckland. So I said I’d work in Wellington so that’s why I had to wait a little bit longer, I had to wait for a vacancy to come up in Wellington. I got the call up and at that stage I didn’t know which station I’d be working at. I didn’t know until two weeks before I graduated. All my stuff was in storage, I had nowhere to live but I couldn’t look for a flat and I didn’t know where I was going to be stationed. I put my first preference down as Porirua. There were a couple of women who I played soccer with who worked there as Police Officers and they said that Porirua was a pretty good place to work so I put that down as my first preference and that’s the station that I got.
Jac: Given that you were probably hanging out with quite a few feminist lesbians in Dunedin and they would’ve known about you wanting to apply for the Police, did anyone given you a hard time about that?
Mo: Once at a lesbian party, get-together. There was one woman who bailed me up in the kitchen when she found out that I was joining the Police. She gave me a really hard time. It turned out that her Dad was in the Police and she said that it had changed him and that he was an asshole basically. In hindsight I think that was just about her relationship with her Dad. But she was worried that was going to happen to me. I think I have changed but I don’t think I’ve necessarily changed for the worse. I’m just a different person for my experiences in the job that I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t joined the Police.
Jac: On joining the Police were there any issues about your sexuality?
Mo: It was interesting because when I joined I was living with my partner at the time and I put her name down on the application form and listed her as my partner. She had an obviously female name and the recruiting officer picked up on it and during the initial interview he said to me ‘ah, I see that you’ve listed your partner as a female’. It hadn’t even occurred to me that might be an issue in my own naivety because I’d been living in a little queer bubble. I just said ‘ah, is there a problem with that?’. And he said ‘well you know there’s some people that join and we just need to make sure that people who apply are joining for the right reason, that you’re not just pushing your own band wagon’. Yeh, and that floored me. I just said ‘look I knew that I wanted to join the Police before I knew that I was gay. Being gay is just part of who I am, I can assure you that I want to join the job because I want to be a Police officer’. He said ‘ok, ok’ and then about a minute later he said ‘look I just need to check that you’re joining for the right reasons because women when they join they have a habit of joining up and they’re on the job for about a year and then they get pregnant and they leave’. This is the recruiting officer. I don’t know where his head was at. Interestingly enough a few years ago I was on a course at the Police College with a woman with the same surname as him and she was from down that way and I asked her if she was related and she said that he was her father. Looking at her length of service I worked out that she would have been joining around about the same time as me and I wonder if all those questions were about him, his issues with his own daughter joining up. That’s just me making up a story that that’s what it was about. It seems quite coincidental. But yeh he was really just old school.
Jac: Have you been a Diversity Liaison Officer? You’ve seen those positions come through in the Police?
Mo: I’m a Diversity Liaison Officer and I have been since 2004. Eleven years this year. I went through in the first Diversity Liaison Officer qualifying course, in the inaugural course. So it’s a voluntary portfolio role. The Diversity Liaison Officers are a conduit between the GLBTI community and the Police, that’s one strong to our bow. The other side of the role is more internally focussed around changing culture in the organisation, supporting staff, supporting GLBTI staff and also being a liaison between staff who are investigating crime and the GLBTI community so it kind of goes both ways in that respect as well. We’ve got contacts and networks a lot of staff don’t have, so that’s how that role, I’m still a DLO.
Jac: This year was pretty interesting for the Police in taking part in the Pride marches in Wellington and Auckland, can you talk about your role in that?
Mo: So I went up to Auckland. I’m currently working at the Police College as a Tactical Operations Supervisor in the gym. My staff and I do a lot of the graduation ceremonies and provide a colour party which is carrying the flag basically. You have one person carrying the flag, three people, one person carrying the flag and two escorts, and a colour commander who tells the other three what to do. So when we were given the go ahead to march in the parade. I contacted the organisers, some of who were DLOs and some who weren’t, and just said ‘hey look, we’d like to provide a colour party’ to go with the parade. If we’re going to do it properly let’s do it properly. If we’re going to march let’s have the colours up there. Then I sought support from my supervisor and he put it through the commandant at the college, so the superintendent who’s the national manager training and he endorsed it. He absolutely thought it was the right thing to do. Gave us the go ahead and yeh, we took the colours up and marched in the parade with everyone else.
Jac: What was the significance for you in the Police taking part in the parade?
Mo: For me personally it was an opportunity to push my own bandwagon (laughs). I’ve never forgotten those comments from that recruiting officer and to a certain degree it did feel a little bit like that, perhaps two fingers up to him. I can be a Police Officer, and be out and support the queer community from within the Police as well, and that’s something that I’ve been doing as a DLO for 10 years. It just really felt like it was a really big step in the right direction for the organisation as far as recognising and supporting our GLBTI staff. To me it wasn’t even about the Police and our work with the community, it was actually more about how the Police support our own staff and recognition and breaking down of stereotypes and any of that workplace stuff that may or may not have been going on in the past. So it was a really big step. We were given the go ahead to march in uniform but we were not given permission to do it in work time. It was basically get yourself up there. The Police didn’t pay for any transport or accommodation and it was it in your own time and there were some GLBTI staff who didn’t march because they didn’t agree with that stance. But my thoughts on it was ‘well it’s a step int eh right direction, you can’t expect massive change overnight’. Last year we marched but we didn’t march in uniform. This year we marched in uniform. Maybe next year or the following year the Police will say ‘OK, we recognise that this is needed and important for our GLBTI staff’.
Jac: This was a bit of controversy this year in Auckland anyway around it eh? You weren’t involved in that?
Mo: I wasn’t involved but it happened right in front of me. What you’re talking about is the protest action. There was a group of three protesters who were actually protesting the conditions of trans* prisoners. Everybody has the right to protest. The rules of the parade are if you’re being disruptive and getting in front of the people marching then you are going to be removed. We were given clear instructions before the march because there’s always the possibility of protest. One of the reasons why the year before the commissioner had said ‘I don’t want you marching in uniform’, he was concerned if something like that happened and we were in uniform we’d be expected to act and it would all just get messy and untidy. So our directions were, ‘you are here to march, there are operational Police staff working with the parade who will deal with any of that, focus on the march and just march’ and that’s exactly what we did. So the protesters attempted to disrupt us and the security guards removed them and managed to keep them out of the way. I was really proud of the way the Police staff literally just kept their focus, stayed in step and kept marching. Actually that showed huge professionalism because every one of us in uniform there would have been wanting to step out of line and deal with it because that’s what we do, that’s what we are employed to do. To not step out of line and do anything about it was really difficult so yeh, I was really proud of the way that we reacted to that and yep, OK, just trust that security and operational staff that are working they’ll deal with that. Unfortunately, the woman who was protesting was injured and there was a lot of flow on and comment about that afterwards.
Jac: So that was at the Auckland Pride, and then you were taking part in the Wellington Out in the CarPark parade as well?
Mo: We would have liked to have walked as DLOs in the parade but we didn’t have enough staff and it was just really about timing. For the original date we had a group that were going to be walking in the parade but we just didn’t have the staff there on that particular day to be able to so I felt that we were better served to assist the parade to move along in a policing role rather than to be walking in it. So we were there for the parade and the DLOs always have a stall at Out in the Park so that’s what we did again this year.
Jac: So you’ve had a big birthday this year?
Mo: So have you! It was last year.
Jac: Time flies. So now you’ve entered the forties, what’s that mean for you?
Mo: It’s interesting turning 40. A lot of people said ‘oh when you turn 40 things you know a lot of things change and fall into place’ and I didn’t think that would be the case but actually yes, I feel more comfortable in my own skin and actually less concerned about what other people think, and more concerned about making life the way I want it to be.
Jac: You live in a small village outside of Wellington, and that’s got a lot of your friends living here. How does that feel for you living in this sort of community?
Mo: I love it, I had never envisaged living here. Yeh, it just kind of happened and I’ve got no regrets whatsoever. So we’ve been living here coming up three years this year, and have just bought the house we’ve been renting so I guess we’re permanent villagers now. What I love about this village is it’s just a little green bubble in lots of ways and it works. It’s a community and I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a place that has such a close community feeling to it. You’re half an hour out of Wellington but you don’t feel like you are, you could be semirural.
Jac: How was it for you being part of the Butch on Butch photo exhibition and why did you decide to be part of it?
Mo: I just think ‘yeh well that’s me’ and I wanted to support you in your venture. It was interesting in the question of photos I thought a lot about if I should do it in my uniform and in the end I decided that actually that’s just one part of me and there’s lots of other parts to me. I would have had to ask for permission from my supervisors in order to do that because it was a public exhibition and I just didn’t want to explain it and have to justify it. Maybe if you do another one we could and I’d be braver next time but I think the way that we did it was absolutely fine. If I had had my motorbike we probably would have done something with my bike. We took the photo at soccer which was great because that’s my other passion and I was filthy and muddy and knackered and it was just like, yeh, this is me on a Sunday and that was nice.