Darfield teacher Nikki Medhurst

To mark Matariki Coen Lammers speaks to Niki Medhurst, Māori Language teacher at Darfield High School on the growing interest in Māori culture in the district.

Niki Medhurst is celebrating Matariki with mixed feelings this year as the popular Matariki in Malvern event will not be part of the annual celebrations, but other events have sprung up around the district.

Medhurst became part of the organising team in 2022 to support Darfield High School teacher Kelly Maude who launched the event back in 2016 when there was limited interest in Matariki or kapa haka in the area.

With the growing population and interest, many Selwyn townships and schools now have their own events to celebrate Māori New Year, often using the successful blueprint created by the Malvern team.

“Many of the people who performed or helped out in Malvern are now busy with events in their own communities, so the resources have become spread too thin,” says Medhurst.

“In a way, we have become the victim of our own success and the growth of Matariki events in the district,” says Medhurst who is excited by the increased awareness around Māori culture in Selwyn, which is a huge contrast to when she was a young girl arriving from the Bay of Plenty with her family in 1998.

Removed from her whānau and thriving Māori culture in Te Puke, Medhurst struggled to settle and was eventually expelled from Darfield High School.

“I just didn’t feel like I belonged, so I played up a lot and ended up getting expelled,” recalls Medhurst who in recent years completed an extraordinary journey from expelled student to being hired by the same school as a teacher.

In 2019, Medhurst moved her family back to Darfield after her husband passed away to be closer to her family, and noticed that her son also struggled to connect with his Māori culture at school, just like she did a generation earlier.

“I saw the exact same gaps and instead of waiting for someone else to do something I took the initiative myself and it just snowballed from there,” says Medhurst who started the school’s first kapa haka group, with some guidance from her father who had been a kapa haka tutor in the past.

“I volunteered for two years, each Wednesday, learning about kapa haka alongside the students, growing their confidence and my own.”

When the school got new management they offered Medhurst a role as a teacher with limited authority and encouraged her to get a teaching degree.

“So now I’m a first year teacher, even though I have worked at the school for five years,” laughs Medhurst about her remarkable career path.

“I'm not shy about telling people about my path, because, you know, things happen and you can't change things, but you can turn your life around.”

Matariki in Malvern celebrations

Medhurst welcomes the increased interest in Māori culture, but says Selwyn still has a long way to go to become genuinely bicultural.

“Even now, walking around, there's no representation of Māori. The other day I took my kids for a walk and the only multi-cultural words we could find were on the rubbish bins, but unfortunately someone had scribbled out the Māori wording, “ says Medhurst, who hopes that increased presence of Te Reo Māori and cultural events will help young Māori to feel more at home.

“And that includes seeing themselves reflected in education. Thankfully, there are a lot more resources in schools these days to teach our tamariki about Māori language, food, but also about Māori gods and science, which is really boosting the interest in Matariki.”

The event may be part of history, but the legacy of Matariki in Malvern lives on through Ngā Puāwai o Tawera, the community-based kapa haka group representing several primary schools around Darfield.

This year, you can find Niki and the rest of the Malvern team cheering on their group at Selwyn Matariki celebrations in Rolleston.

At home, Medhurst will gather with her whānau to celebrate the beginning of the Māori New Year with traditional food cooked in a traditional way.

“We try to cook something from the land, from the sea, from the sky and from the rivers, so there will be fish, chicken, birds, cooked in our own way. It is always a big feast in our household.”

Last modified: 10 Jul 2026 2:59pm