In the heart of Wellington sits Tapu Te Ranga Marae. Built from scavenged materials by homeless youth, ex-cons, and gang members, it carved out a space in a city that had little to offer them. Forty years on, the marae faces the threat of closure. This is the story of how one man's dream came to be.

Watch a video segment from the episode here.

Video & Audio: Daniela Maoate-Cox

Words & Photographs: Tess McClure

Bruce Stewart spends his days in this reclining sofa chair, spread low and horizontal to form a bed.

His beard is white and thick, his top-knot is thinning. Every half-hour he eases the chair up or down, seeking the precise angle to ease the pain in his back. He reaches for his pills and knocks them, sending them spinning across the wood floor, reaches for a walking stick to grab them back.

The body has paused, but the work always continues.

Above the chair hang ropes, bungee cords he uses to suspend his computer. A tabletop is crammed with cups of tea, pencils, architectural plans.

"The ropes? For my laptop, so I can work."

He gives a quick, dry laugh. "Or hang myself."

"I got out of jail with $25 and a dream" - The story of Tapu te Ranga

He was a big man, but is now in his 80s. A Hawaiian shirt sits loose around his frame. The pain in his back is palpable.

A twinge interrupts his flow from time to time, but he's told this story over and over and the narrative runs on set grooves.

He isn't fond of interruptions. Ask a question. "I'll tell you that," he fires back. "Just let the story come."

"I got out of jail with $25 and a dream."

Bruce landed in prison young.

Brought up in Wairarapa by his mother, theirs was the only Māori family in a white town. "There were pluses and minuses," he says, "but a lot of minuses.

Growing up, he says he quickly got the sense of where Māori sat in the local hierarchy.

"If a horse played up it was a Māori horse. People would beat their dogs, 'You stupid Māori dog I'll beat the living shit outta you. My mother was brought up on a marae and fluent - but never spoke a word."

The marae is my home. The marae is my place of work. The marae is my church, the marae is my museum, it is where I was born, and where I will be buried. -Bruce Stewart

By the time he was 17, "life had begun to revolve around the closest party", and petty crime to fuel the lifestyle. He found his way to prison on drug charges, and it was only there that he began to discover his roots.

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Even after 100 years, they can't cover over G Kronfeld's name!

By David Steemson

It's exactly one hundred years ago, since German-born Auckland businessman Gustav Kronfeld was interned on Motuihe Island as an alien enemy during World War One. Kronfeld's properties were confiscated, including a substantial warehouse on Auckland's waterfront, now one of the buildings preserved in Auckland's historic Britomart Precinct. These days it's called the Barrington Building but one of Gustav Kronfeld's great granddaughters is calling for it to be renamed after her forebear.

I've taken a walk with Sandy Harrop and her son Joe. The pair arrive bearing a  large  tome  on Gustav, written for the family by cousin Tony Kronfeld. We start at the bottom of Auckland's CBD, and first stop is the rear of the handsome old warehouse that Gustav built in the 1890's.

The building now backs on to Takutai Square, behind the Britomart Railway Station. It's painted in a nice shade of blue along this side, but Sandy has told me if you look carefully you can still see her grandfather's name under the layers.

I have to admit I'm sceptical, but then Joe Kronfeld says

"No it's there! Look! It's still there".

And it's as if scales have fallen from my eyes.

The original big sign "G Kronfeld"  was cast in relief concrete high on the wall. It's been chipped off sometime in the last one hundred years and then painted over numerous times. But with Joe's guidance you can see the letters are still there. Hiding in plain sight!

Gustav Kronfeld was born into a Jewish family in the medieval Prussian town of Thorn in 1856.  The town is now called Toruń and is part of modern Poland. Gustav left his home town for Australia in 1873. He then went to Tonga, and by the early 1900's in Auckland he was a naturalised member of the British Empire, and a man of means with a successful import export business. He and his Samoan born wife Louisa had ten children.

They all lived in a very grand house called "Oli Oola"  he'd built up on Eden Crescent. There were grand views of the harbour, it was grand part of town where many of the early Auckland merchants   had built large houses. Today few of the big houses remain except those taken over by Auckland university. Oli Oola has been replaced by a modern building housing the University's Law School…

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Spectrum producer David Steemson says he has worked at RNZ since "before the coming of mankind". But in July 2016 he's hanging up his headphones and retiring, at about the same time as Spectrum itself will be coming to end. Justin Gregory thought both events should be marked and so he put David in a studio to talk about his career and what it means to tell New Zealand stories.

A look back at some of the more recent of the many memorable stories David has made:

• On the streets asking for money - David goes undercover as a beggar
• Life 101 - David visits prisoners learning life skills at Paremoremo
• Barry Brickell turns 80 - David meets potter, artist, conservationist, visionary and self-proclaimed 'railway crank' Barry Brickell
• The best biryani - David goes in search of the best biryani in Sandringham
• Jockey School - David finds out how to become a jockey
• Love Soup - David visits a Tokoroa soup kitchen with a lot of heart
• Survey the Gulf - David takes to the sky with scientists over Auckland's Hauraki Gulf

This story uses audio from Nga Taonga Sound and Vision.

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Spray can wielding vandals and council cleaners open up about tagging on the streets of Wellington.

On the streets of Wellington a running battle is fought week by week between scrawled names and the blank patchworks of paint that cover them.

On one side of the fence is the council and community scrubbing at walls. On the other, the street bandits who sprawl out into the night covering walls, bins, and lampposts with thick letters attempting to make a name for themselves.

Lucy Smith meets the taggers and cleaners in the middle.

Ketty shakes a can and starts spraying a "throw up"- a simple outline of her letters that she tags on the streets.

"I usually choose a route and then I just hit up tags everywhere as I walk. I first got into graffiti when I was 15 and properly started tagging when I was 16."

Art doesn't matter. It's the thrill of crossing the law and earning notoriety amongst other vandals that interests Ketty.

Not everyone is as keen on a criminal record as Ketty so she's splattering a canvas (and part of my laundry) with paint on a damp Wellington evening.

She's a prolific tagger who has stamped her name all over the city. Usually there's a little love heart wrapped around the last letter - a pretty little bruise on a wall.

"I know that I'm not meant to be doing this, but I don't actually care," she says. "Graffiti is a way to escape what is going on in my everyday life and put all my effort into painting a wall"

Ketty's been arrested and fined, and threatened by other taggers for writing on their tags.

"The ultimate point of tagging is to build your own ego. It's about building your own name or street cred. For some people that's all they have," says Ketty.

"I never feel bad about it because that defeats the purpose of graffiti. I know what I'm doing so why would I do it if I feel bad?"

But the law says otherwise. Under the Summary of Offences tagging and graffiti vandalism is punishable by:

A fine of up to two thousand dollars.

A prison sentence of up to three months.

A community based sentence.

Or both a fine and community sentence.

Under the Crimes Act a person charged with willful damage can face up to seven years in prison.

The cost to remove the damage is high. Councils across New Zealand spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year cleaning up tagging. In the 2015 financial year Christchurch spent $800,000, Wellington $600,000 and in Auckland around four million dollars was spent on cleaning up tags and investing in preventative measures such as commissioned graffiti street art…

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The loss of a child affects hundreds of families around New Zealand each year. In this episode Katy Gosset talks to South Island parents about how they coped with this most difficult of grief.

By Katy Gosset

For every new parent, the birth of a baby is a day of firsts: the first glimpse of their child, the first cuddle, the first photo.

But, for some parents, their baby's first day is also the last.

In 2013, there were 60,039 babies born in New Zealand. 307 of them were stillbirths. Another 152 died in their first month of life.

In the second part of our series on stillbirth, Katy Gosset talks to South Island parents who have lost a child.

Nicola Devine:

"I'm sure I was in shock. He actually died while I was hooked up to the trace machine ...so we lost his heart beat. Actually you don't believe it when you're in the hospital and you've watched all these other women and their partners going on to have children ... it's surreal."

For Nicola Devine, the stillbirth of her son, Tanner, at 40 weeks of pregnancy, was all the more devastating as her first child, Gabriel, was also stillborn.

After a sleepless night, she and her partner, Noel Keenan, returned to the hospital the following day to deliver Tanner.

"I can't remember being hugely emotional about it at the time, apart from the fact that I was having to give birth, a second time, to a dead baby."

Noel Keenan:

"It was the best day and the worst day of my life really. I really enjoyed that day but it was a bit of a double-edged sword."

Noel recalls a sense of disbelief that this could happen to Nicola twice. But he said the pair approached the birth determined to take anything positive they could from the experience.

"I wanted to enjoy holding my son" and "whilst I really enjoyed it, the sadness, the real sadness was that it was the only opportunity."

Later Noel struggled to have to explain the couple's loss to friends and acquaintances.

"It's difficult having to face the world and relive the fact that your son or child has passed away and have that grief and pain be visible. More often than not it's in a public space and you're sharing something that is incredibly private."

Nicola found she was constantly asked how the baby was and how she was coping with the lack of sleep. 

"You have to keep telling people the terrible news."

Karlena Kelliher:

"The initial time of shock is a little like an out-of-body experience, I think. Looking down on yourselves and everything goes slow and quiet."…

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Four parents share their first-hand experience of losing a baby and some volunteers who assist with the process of creating memories.

The grief when someone passes away is raw and angry - in that moment the world has swallowed you whole. When it's triggered again you're taken back to the memories and time shared with a person who is no longer here. But what about when it's a child whose life was cut short before they took their first breath? Sonia Sly spoke to four parents coping with the loss of a baby.

Hamilton-based Nathan Thompson was an excited father to be. His wife Andrea was expecting her first baby Amber.

But things changed when they discovered their daughter had Turner's syndrome - a chromosomal condition that affects females and impacts their mental and physical development.

Despite the news, they decided to forego termination with the hopes of making it to full term.

"It was at 19 weeks so devastating to find out that news. Everyone deals with it a bit differently. We just took time away from people, talked to each other. It was hard to talk about but it was easier once it was off our chest."

Nathan says they were happy to discuss it but found it was awkward for other people who didn't know how to deal with it or tried not to say anything upsetting.

"Some people will be happy to talk about it and other people will listen, try to help, but also change  subject to try make us think of something happy or different."

"There's just no heartbeat" - Four parents talk about losing a child

For Andrea it left a void. She needed something tangible, something to hold on to in order to deal with her loss.

"The first thing she got made was a little doll. Something she could have on her desk.

Amber was 10 centimeters and weighed 100 grams when born so the doll was made to match.

"Andrea carried it around so she felt like she still had Amber with her," Nathan says. "That helped a bit with her grief."

Nathan's grieving came later.

"I was standing up taking over, doing all the organising to help Andrea. Once she was ok then it hit me. Men's grief tends to hit a lot later. It's easier to let a bit out at a time than let it all ball up and blow. Usually it's when you're alone, it'll get you more."

I think it takes about two years to heal after losing a baby, and I'm going through that for the second time. - Nicola Devine

As a subject matter, losing an infant is very rarely talked about but for many parents the area needs greater understanding.

…

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