Stan Walker - Impossible: My Story

CONTENTS

Akiaki te t o te tangata

Nurture the indescribable light in a person

CONTENTS

Ko au t maunga, t tonu

Ko te moana pari mai koe

Ko koe te awa i taku remu, ko tua an tua

N te one i Kurawaka, hei tiaki i te whenua nei

I am the mountain, you are the sea flowing toward me

You are the river that runs through me, I am her, she is me

Created from dust and sand, born to lead this land

Aotearoa

I AM EIGHT YEARS OLD, ALL SKINNY AND WILD, DRESSED in yesterdays clothes. My body bruised, my feet bare. Its early morning and Im by myself on the top of my mountain, Mangatawa, the hill that rises behind my home at Tamapahore Marae in Tauranga Moana. From where I stand, I see all of this sacred land spreading below me. I see across the blue of Te Thuna o Rangataua, the blue that fills up the whole world. I know that down there in the early morning haze are the other nearby marae Im also connected to Matapihi, Maungatapu, Te Whet o te Rangi and I can see right across it all to the distant, rounded cone of Mauao.

Ive dreamed of this place, this moment, ever since my whnau left to live in Australia four years earlier. Four years, half my lifetime.

Ive missed this hill. Ive missed breathing this air. Ive missed my home. I dream of it constantly. Away from it, I feel empty and lost and out of place.

Its early winter and the grass is chilly, wet with dew, and my feet feel this ground in the same way that the trees around me put their roots down into it. My people have lived here for hundreds of years, and my spirit knows it. There I am, just a little kid, reconnecting with home, my trangawaewae, my standing ground. Smelling, breathing, dreaming.

I remember that morning so well. I woke up really early, went outside and stood in the middle of the narrow gravel road that runs between our house and the marae, looking up at that hill. No one else up yet, the marae itself peaceful deserted and yet filled with the presence of the world thats beyond our senses. It was all right there, as it had been in my dreams.

I easily made my way up past the wharekai, dining area, past the old club building, round towards the urup, the burial ground, so peaceful, overlooked by the hill and the trees. Its a place I always feel very safe; us kids love to play in there, lying on sun-warmed graves and talking to our beloved dead. But this morning, I didnt go in. I jumped over the fence and walked straight up the hill.

I always had this yearning for home, just to smell it and breathe it and be in it. Its hard to articulate and explain what it is for indigenous people, for tangata whenua, the people of the land this ultimate connection. Maybe its like when babies smell their mothers milk and they know where they come from. Theyve been connected for nine months and they aint going to just disconnect. They know their source.

Its like that for me this morning. Nothing has changed. In this moment, at the top of the hill, I delete Australia from my mind. Even the burden Ive told no one about but which is waiting for me like a snake for when I get back there, and which Ill carry as a dark, disgusting self-loathing for years to come in this moment it vanishes into the early morning air. All the other usual stuff the violence that means my body is always a palette of bruises, new purple ones, old yellow ones, the fear that soaks into every aspect of my life is nothing to worry about now. Those things are lost in the birdsong, in the familiar trees still standing where I last saw them, in the taste of the feijoas that I pick and eat as I walk, in my little-boy dreams that I dream as I wander along.

I am alive.

I look around at the enormous world expanding on all sides, and my head fills with the thought that I am on a stage. The world is green and blue and grey, only a few cows chomping nearby, but in my mind there are thousands of people, a massive stage. The spotlight is on me. And I sing. Sing my heart out. Its like freedom. Its the expression of everything thats in me. And in my imagination, the crowd roars out my name and cheers and claps.

That little eight-year-old kid. Me. My daydream, nobody elses and nobody can touch it. Nobody can take it.

On my way back down the hill, I find me a cool stick to have an adventure with, whacking at bushes and trees, pretending its a gun, maybe a taiaha, a spear. When I get home, my dad takes the stick and says hell use it on me later. I know that he will. But he cant take my dream.

In reality, the chances of anything good happening in my life are virtually nil. I am already a statistic. What is the likely outcome for a kid whose parents have both been in jail? My world from my earliest being has been filled with drugs and violence and sex things no kid should even know about. Our kitchen cupboards never have enough in them. My chances in life are not pointing in the direction of any hope at all.

But I am the impossible made possible.

My whnau is the impossible made possible.

Im ready to tell my story.

Theres a little black box, yeah

Somewhere in the ocean

Holding all the truth about us

Its a little black box

A record of emotion

Everything that ever was

Black Box

AND THE WINNER... OF AUSTRALIAN IDOL... IS...

Its you, I mouthed to the other finalist, Hayley Warner. Its you, she mouthed back at me. We were clinging to each other as the wait went on and on nearly ten seconds. A lifetime.

I was waiting for Hayleys name to be called out.

Stan Walker!

My name. It was me! The programme host Andrew Gnsberg actually said my name. I was stunned. I can see it when I watch the video footage I jolted as if Id been zapped with electricity. Everyone else was screaming and jumping, but I stood there in a daze.

This is it, Stan, Andrew kept saying. This is it!

We were on a huge stage set up outside the Sydney Opera House on a sticky-hot night, the sky shifting from pink to purple to dark. The Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge were silhouetted behind us, and in front of us were 6000 people, just like Id imagined all those years before when I was singing on my hill. Filling the air was the high-pitched screaming and cheering of our supporters those who wanted me to win, and those who wanted the prize to go to the other finalist, the awesome Hayley Warner. From the stage, I could just see caught in the lights, arms raised, hands waving signs that said my name over and over, and I could hear that people were yelling my name.

How can you go in the space of just a few weeks from being a nobody a guy who left school at sixteen and who worked part-time in a mens clothing store to being someone more than a million people are watching and screaming for?

My whnau was there, my parents yes, even my dad seated in honour near the front. Three hundred other family members had travelled from all around Australia and New Zealand to support me.

It was the beginning of everything. It was the moment, as Andrew keep saying. It. The big pivotal moment in my life. There was before, and there is after, but it all hinged on that moment when the doors opened for me. I entered the music industry, like going through the wardrobe into Narnia, or through the looking glass into Wonderland, and everything changed.

Get ready, I want to say to that boy now. Get ready. Arm yourself.

Look at me then. I was so young. So little. I dont even look like me. For most of the competition, I was eighteen years old, but I had turned nineteen less than a month before that final night. I was a little bit chubby. For the first few auditions, I even had a rats tail. It used to be really long but I bleached it until a lot of it broke off. It was my pride and joy, but everyone on the programme thought it was disgusting so in the end I had to cut it off. It was a fashion statement, or maybe a cultural statement, that whispered of a different kind of life, the life I had come from. It was totally out of place in the world that was now embracing me.