Arapera Blank

Blank was born in Rangitukia on New Zealand's East Cape on 7 June 1932. She was affiliated with the iwi (tribes) of Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungungu, Rongowhakaata and Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki. She married Swiss-born Pius Blank at St John’s Church, Rangitukia, in 1958. They had two children, Marino and Anton. ==Career==

Blank was educated at Queen Victoria School for Māori Girls and studied anthropology at the University of Auckland. Her short stories often dealt with aspects of Māori life and culture. She was a member of the Maori Artists and Writers Society. In 1959 Blank was awarded a special Katherine Mansfield Memorial Award for her essay Ko Taku Kumara Hei Wai-u Mo Tama which had been published the previous year in Te Ao Hou / The New World. In 1986 her poetry collection Nga Kokako Huataratara: The Notched Plumes of the Kokako was published, and she had poems and short stories published in Witi Ihimaera's bilingual anthology Te Ao Marama: Contemporary Māori Writing in the 1990s. Barbara Brookes, author of A History of New Zealand Women (2016), describes Blank's work as offering "insights into Māori culture, feminism, and the dual Māori-Pakeha world she lived in". ==Legacy==

On her death in 2002, Ihimaera described her as one of three women he considered his elders in the Māori writing tradition, together with Kāterina Mataira and Jacquie Sturm, and said "the whaia, the mother of the Maori writing tradition as we today practise it in that lowlier language called English, has died". A review in Landfall said Blank "is very well-served by this loving compilation and she should be accorded much more attribution in Aotearoa literary circles". Tina Makereti for the New Zealand Review of Books noted her "ability to fluently engage two different world views via language" and that the collection is also of historical interest as an insight into the years between 1958 and 1990. == References ==