Sharon Hawke:

In Memoriam

Sharon Hawke

1962 – 10 April 2026

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.

There are people who witness history, and there are people who carry it. Sharon Hawke was the latter but she was also so much more than that. She was a loyal friend. She was a woman who filled a room with waiata and aroha. She was a fierce champion of wāhine Māori, a proud takatāpui, and a person whose whānau was everything to her. Born in 1962 in Tāmaki Makaurau, the only daughter of Joe and Rene Hawke, she grew up in a whānau where the love of land and the love of people were the same thing — inseparable, non-negotiable, worth everything. She passed away on 10 April 2026, at the age of 64, in Samoa. She is gone too soon, and the silence she leaves is felt in many places at once.

She Stood There

Sharon was thirteen years old when she walked in the 1975 Land March alongside Dame Whina Cooper. Just a girl — her father's daughter, but already she understood in her bones what was at stake. Two years later, that understanding was tested in the most personal way imaginable.

Takaparawhau, the land that had always belonged to Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei had been wrongfully confiscated by the Crown and the Muldoon government was moving to subdivide and sell it off to wealthy private buyers. It was theft dressed up in paperwork. So on 5 January 1977, Joe Hawke and the Ōrākei Māori Action Committee walked onto that land in the dark and stayed. Sharon, fifteen years old, was with them.

For 506 days, her whānau lived on that hillside through winter cold, through grief, through the death of her young niece in an accidental fire that nearly broke the occupation entirely, Sharon was there. When the police and army finally moved in on 25 May 1978, she was among the 222 people arrested. The occupation ended that day but the fight did not.

What her family lost in those years is not easily tallied. But Sharon never heard her parents frame that as a regret. The land mattered more. The people mattered more.

She Lived Fully

Sharon was someone who showed up fully, warmly, without reservation. She was the kind of friend people held onto for life, someone whose loyalty ran deep and whose door was always open. Her whānau were the foundation of everything she did and everything she was. She carried her identity as a takatāpui wāhine with pride and openness, and she understood from lived experience that the liberation of Māori people had to include every one of them, that you could not fight for the land while leaving some of your people behind.

She was a passionate advocate for wāhine Māori rights, their voices and their rightful place at every table. This was not a political position for Sharon so much as a personal one. She had watched her mother Rene be the quiet backbone of an occupation that history often tells through the men who led it. She knew what wāhine carried and what they were owed. She spent her life making sure they got it.

And through all of it, the activism, the governance, the long years of fighting there was waiata. Song was breath to Sharon. It was the thing that connected her to her close network of friends, her people and to the hillside at Takaparawhau where a community had once kept itself warm and whole through music in the dark.

She Told the Truth

Sharon understood something that many people in power hoped her people would forget: that if you control the story, you control the memory, and if you control the memory, you control the future and she was going to tell their story.

She became a filmmaker and television producer — not because it was a comfortable career, but because the camera was a tool she could use. Inspired by the pioneering Merata Mita, the only filmmaker authorised by tangata whenua to document the occupation itself, Sharon took that baton and ran with it. In 1998 she edited and produced Takaparawhau – The People's Story, a commemoration book that preserved the voices of those who had been there. The following year she produced the documentary Bastion Point — The Untold Story, ensuring that the occupation's history was told from the inside — not through the lens of the government, or the police, or the newspapers that had largely looked away, but through the eyes of Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei.

Through Ngā Aho Whakaari she worked to open doors for wāhine Māori in the screen industry not just telling stories herself, but making sure others could too. She showed up to mark every anniversary of the occupation, most recently organising the 45 Years of Resilience commemorations in 2023.

She Never Stopped

Sharon served as an elected member of the Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei Trust Board, helping to navigate two Treaty claims — one in her twenties, one in her forties — that slowly, painstakingly began to right some of what had been wronged. She saw the land come back in stages. She saw her iwi grow into a post-settlement governance entity with strength, assets, and autonomy. She had helped build that, quietly and persistently, from the inside.

She once reflected that the hapū had come a long way, that they had land returned, had purchased more, had rebuilt economic power. But she also knew that none of it was a gift. Every hectare, every right, every recognition had been fought for by real people who had paid real costs. She never let that be forgotten.

Returned to the Whenua

Sharon passed away in Samoa on 10 April 2026. She was brought home to Takaparawhau, the land she had stood on as a teenager, been arrested on as a young woman, and given so much of her life to reclaim. She was farewelled at Ōrākei Marae and laid to rest at the iwi urupā at Ōkahu Bay, beside the water, on the whenua of her tīpuna.

The grief felt across Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and across te ao Māori is the measure of what she meant.

She was a girl who marched. A teenager who stood her ground on stolen land. A woman who pointed the camera at the truth. A loyal friend. A proud takatāpui. A champion of wāhine. A daughter who honoured her parents not just in words, but in every day's work. Someone who knew that waiata could hold a people together when everything else was failing.

Sharon Hawke did not simply inherit a legacy, she lived it, deepened it, and passed it on with both hands. Her whānau were her world, and her people were her purpose. May she rest now on the whenua she loved so well.

Haere, e hoa. Haere ki ōu mātua, ki ōu tīpuna.

Go, friend. Go to your parents, to your ancestors.