In 1984, a telephone toll operator in Auckland was demoted for answering calls with "kia ora". Four decades on, Dame Naida Glavish — now 80 and better known as the Kia Ora Lady — has turned the whole affair into a memoir, The Kia Ora Lady, written with Lorraine McLeod and published by Potton & Burton on 3 November for $45.
At the time, long-distance calls still had to go through the Post Office exchange, and when Glavish's bosses told her to stop greeting callers in te reo Māori, she refused. The standoff made international news and even reached Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, who famously returned from abroad to deadpan that she could say "key aura" as long as she didn't say "G'day Blue" — a nod to the Australian cricket team's underarm incident three years earlier. The ban was dropped, and three years later Māori became an official language of New Zealand. Glavish frames it simply: she won a battle for the reo, but the country won the war.
Her story goes deeper than the famous greeting. Born in 1946 on the front seat of her father's Studebaker, she was raised by her grandmother Ngāpeka in a nīkau whare on the Kaipara Harbour, speaking Māori and Croatian before English. At 12 she was taken into state care over a trivial clothesline theft — a episode she recounts with anger but, remarkably, without bitterness.
She's had an equally striking second act. Since the late 1980s, Glavish has led tikanga Māori work across Auckland's Waitematā, North Shore and Auckland hospitals, where her team now reaches every Māori patient admitted. Her practical wins include whānau rooms in every ward, a dedicated lift for families accompanying loved ones to the mortuary, and off-site accommodation for out-of-town relatives — a need she knew firsthand after her mother's stroke left family sleeping in their cars.
Why should travellers care? Because a lot of what makes New Zealand feel distinctly bicultural — the kia ora you'll hear arriving at the airport, te reo signage, the welcome at a marae — traces back to moments like this one. Auckland Museum even keeps a permanent exhibit where you can pick up an old telephone and hear Glavish herself deliver the greeting that caused the fuss. If you're heading to Tāmaki Makaurau, it's a five-minute stop that turns a phrase you'll use every day into a real story. Her memoir doubles as a personal history of Ngāti Whātua and the Kaipara, a part of the country many visitors skim past on the drive north.
