56 pages • 1 hour read
Alan DuffOnce Were Warriors
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “A Woman on Pine Block”
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses alcohol addiction, drug abuse, violence, domestic abuse, rape, suicide, and racist language.
Beth Heke gives an overview of her life as she observes the Trambert estate from her kitchen window. She muses over how she sometimes feels like a spy, watching over people—her own family and the Tramberts, a rich, white family who seem to have so much more luck than the Māori in the state-controlled neighborhood of Pine Block where Beth and her family live. She comments on how she feels old at the young age of 34 and recalls having dreams for herself and her husband, Jake, when she was young, including having their own home for their family outside of Pine Block. These dreams were quickly dashed away by “a few hidings – from the man sposed to be part of the dream” (2). She deems her life to have been hell for the better part of the last 16 years while married to Jake.
As she wonders at what kind of life the Americans on TV have, her thoughts catch on the idea of books: how she and everyone in her community are without them, and what effect being bookless might have on her, her children, and her people. All she finds in her children’s rooms are comics and magazines—in her eldest son Nig’s case, a pornographic magazine by the name of Penthouse, while her daughters Grace and Polly read “teenage mags with pages and pages of pictures of prissy white girls dolled up or in skimpy swimming outfits” (5).
Beth surveys the neighborhood for the adults who do nothing and leave their cars to rust in car parks. She watches the children play in these rusted vehicles and the collection of trash in the community, and she knows that some of them call such a place home because their parents abandoned them and would rather drink. She feels sympathy for those kids who join gangs like the Brown Fist, but then she remembers that Nig is thinking of joining them because he doesn’t believe that he can have a future since he’s Māori.
The narrator explains that a place like Pine Block is cyclical and predictable; its people function entirely around the disbursement of the unemployment dole and then use that money mostly for booze and the odd Chinese takeout, despite their racist perspective toward Chinese people.
That day, Jake comes home with a bounty of shellfish, which he shares with Beth. While they eat, Jake tells Beth that he’s been fired from his laborer job at the quarry and celebrates the fact that he’s now on the unemployment dole.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Two Kids on a Bench”
Mark, also known as Boogie, and Grace Heke are sitting together in the Two Lakes Courthouse, waiting for Boogie to be called in for a magistrate to assess his petty theft case. As they wait for 10:00 to strike, Boogie worries about his reputation and whether his friends at school will make fun of him, which they often did for being a so-called “sook” (a cowardly or timid person) despite being the son of Jake Heke, the toughest man in the town. Though many of the other children in court are also from Pine Block and some say hello to Grace, all of them ignore Boogie. When Boogie asks the officer for the time again, the officer is especially hostile to him and Māori in general, a hatred that Grace believes is learned young. Soon after, the welfare officer, Mr. Bennett, arrives, greets them, and enters the courtroom.
While they wait, Grace recalls the events of the night before, and the narrative shifts back to the fight that occurs between Jake and Beth during a party at their house. A man at the party provokes Jake, and Jake immediately hits him. Other inebriated partygoers begin yelling, and soon, all Grace can hear are shouts and things being broken. She checks on her younger siblings, Hatua (the youngest) and Polly (her only other sister), and tries to comfort them. Polly prefers staying with her doll, Sweetie, instead of joining her sister in bed. Hatua, meanwhile, wets the bed in fear of the sounds from downstairs. Although she drenches herself by lying down next to him, Grace still joins him and comforts the boy until he falls asleep. The partygoers downstairs reconcile quickly, patting each other on the back and calling each other family, and eventually Jake asks Beth to sing “Tennessee Waltz” to the group. Grace drifts back to sleep and thinks that she’s dreaming when she hears someone asking Beth for eggs. Beth takes offense at this request, and in her angry retort, she questions the group about their identity when someone brings up “the Maori way” (22). When Beth refuses to apologize for her comments, the partygoers leave. Jake beats Beth violently well into the night while Grace listens on, terrified and pitying her mother. When the children wake up the next morning, they clean the downstairs area where the party was, like a well-rehearsed routine.
Back in the present, Grace and Boogie are still waiting to enter the courtroom. Mr. Bennett asks why their parents aren’t accompanying them. Grace and Boogie are embarrassed but tell him that their parents are still asleep. As Mr. Bennett goes back to speak with the judge about another case, Grace wonders about the expression “Lost Tribe” as she looks at the Māori in the room: the Brown Fist hopefuls, the “wild-looking” and “fat” mothers, the small children running about the courtroom, and a specific mother, Mrs. Renata, who hits her own child and threatens Mr. Bennett as they leave the room. Mr. Bennett does not rise to the threat and instead informs Boogie that he is being called next.
Chapter 3 Summary: “They Who Have History”
Mr. Bennett brings Grace and Boogie into the quiet courtroom before the five court officials, who sit and whisper to each other. Boogie is especially nervous because the prospect of being sent to a state-run Boys Home hangs dangerously above him. Grace promises to herself that, if it comes to it, she will find a job at the grocery market so that she can visit him. A magistrate begins the session by asking after Boogie’s parents, and Mr. Bennett fumbles with his confirmation that neither Beth nor Jake will appear in court for their son.
The magistrate then reads out Boogie’s troubled history at and outside of school that led to his current situation. The magistrate announces that he has no choice but to declare Boogie a ward of the state. He wishes him luck at the Boys Home and calls for the next case.
Chapter 4 Summary: “…And Those with Another”
Boogie and Grace are escorted out of the room. On the walk out of the courtroom, the prospective Brown Fist and the mothers waiting their turn taunt Boogie; they make fun of his tears and the fact that Grace is there to support him. Only one woman gives her approval for Grace’s presence and love for her brother.
Grace is left with Boogie for 10 minutes before he is sent to the Boys Home. They hug as Boogie continues to sob over his fate. Though she pities her soft-hearted brother, she cannot bring herself to cry as she holds him.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
In the first four chapters of Once Were Warriors, Alan Duff introduces his readers to one of the central themes of the novel, The Effects of Socio-Economic Inequities in a Māori suburban community, through the perspectives of two of the main characters, Beth and Grace. Using these two characters as introductory focal points highlights the difference in perspectives about social issues between age groups. Both are disillusioned by their living circumstances, but Beth has an anger that Grace has yet to cultivate about the differences in means and resources that Māori have compared to Pākeha families like the Tramberts. From the very first line of the story, Beth curses them for their luck: “Bastard, she’d think, looking out her back kitchen window. Lucky white bastard, at that glimpse of two-storey house through its surround of big old trees” (1). Duff repeats a word that begins with voiced plosives, “bastard,” to emphasize Beth’s anger. Although it’s not simply luck of the draw that has given the Tramberts their wealth—as the socio-historical context of Māori in New Zealand indicates it is by design—Beth sees the fate of being born into the riches and livelihoods of white men as “luck”: “Good luck to you, white man, for being born into your sweet world, and bad luck to you, Beth Heke” (1). The physical description of Pine Block’s setting also intimates this divide. Whereas the Tramberts’ estate is a house with “its oh so secure greater surround of rolling green pastureland” (1), Pine Block is “a mile-long picture of the same thing: all the same, just two-storey, side-by-side misery boxes” (1), a neighborhood that is “neglected, run-down, abused” (5). The Tramberts have space and expand their wealth, and their land reflects that. Beth, her family, and the other Māori of Pine Block are allocated a restricted space, one that is fast falling apart and neglected by the city council: “And when the rain’d stopped and the lawns’d dried out and the council’d come (late, as usual) the [overflowing] drains, the mud patches became deserts” (8). This visible inequity sets the tone for the rest of the narrative and often becomes a point of pressure that leads to hostility, aggression, violence, and abuse.
Grace’s perspective in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 provides, in comparison, insight into the direct impacts felt by children from this social inequity. Duff blends both limited third-person and first-person narration in the novel; characters both observe from their own perspective and are observed by a narrator. Grace is an astute child and often finds herself grappling with the reasons behind her circumstances and those of her “Lost Tribe”—a comparison to the ancient and supernatural Tūrehu clan who eventually faded away into the forests and mountains. Unlike her mother, who’s become passive to the difficulties in her domestic life, Grace remains active and witnesses the social decline of her own people—specifically, her mother’s and father’s. The flashback scene and Boogie’s sentence to the Boys Home in Chapter 2 highlight the fractures in their family unit. Told from Grace’s perspective, Duff translates to his audience the terror of routine domestic abuse:
So Grace calling to Huata the same invitation [of hopping in bed with her] and getting sobbing in reply. God, she’d heard it so many times before, and she knew it went on all over this place, the kids, always the kids, suffering most. Poor Huata (19).
In the limited third-person narrative here, Duff uses free indirect discourse to report the event but imbues the narrative with Grace’s emotions: the repetition of “the kids, always the kids” and the pronouncement of “[p]oor Huata” adopts Grace’s thoughts and feelings. Grace does not consider herself one of “the kids, suffering most” (19), despite only being 13 years old. She, like many other of the children in Pine Block, has had to take on parenting roles: For her youngest siblings, Grace has had to become a motherly figure and a guardian, and for Boogie, she is the only family member who shows her support and attends his court appearance. Both of her parents are too drunk and—in Beth’s case—too beaten up to vouch for Boogie’s good behavior. Nig and Abe are nowhere to be seen, and the narrative implies that Polly and Hatua are too young to come along. Grace’s presence does little to sway the magistrates, emphasizing the realities of her age despite her adultification. Although one adult, Mr. Bennett, attempts to help the boy, Boogie effectively has no one to defend him and is sent away.
Duff establishes Jake as the novel’s antagonist in this section. Grace doubts whether Jake would defend Boogie in court, “thinking that their father’d do no such thing, not whacking someone on Boog’s behalf. He didn’t like Boog. Hated him in fact” (17). The word “whacking” reflects Jake’s violence even in the context of legal proceedings. Nevertheless, while Duff presents Jake as the antagonistic, he explores wider forces related to Distorted History and Disconnection from Cultural Identity that impact Boogie’s fate. Even if Jake and Beth had made the effort to be there, Grace intimates that there are structural issues in the justice system that would not allow them to refute the magistrate:
Not here in this precious damn room with all his mates [fellow magistrates] up around the walls supporting him, giving him not only the law on his side but them, the ones up on the walls in their big fancy frames, the education they must’ve had, the head starts. History. (He’s got history, Grace and Boogie Heke, and you ain’t.) (29).
Duff implies that there are two things that the Heke family lacks: an impartial law and a connection to their political and cultural history. The history that they have in its stead is distorted by white-dominated narratives and replaced with a narrative dictated by a governing system that has actively played a part in dispossessing Māori of their lands and rights. Duff represents this with the sentence of a single word, “[h]istory,” to suggest the power and seeming immutability of this narrative. While Grace and Boogie cannot rely on their parents, they also lack the support of an intergenerational Māori infrastructure that would assure them the same presumed impartiality that other children have in the New Zealand judicial system.
