Barbara Dreaver: I've never defended who I am, why should I?

Barbara Dreaver has interviewed meth dealers, parents of dying children, victims of horrific natural disasters and many a testy king and head of state – but she can still be thrown when an unexpected question comes the other way.

That was the case when fellow TVNZ journalist Indira Stewart asked if she’d had difficulty being accepted as a reporter by the Pacific community, as a Pasifika woman of partly Pākehā descent.

'I shouldn't have to defend who I am' – watch this story on TVNZ+

“No one has ever said that to me before,” says Dreaver, who was born on the remote atoll of Kiribati to a Kiwi dad and Pacific Island mum. “And it’s absolutely true, it is hard.”

She looks pensive for a nano-second before summoning a typically gutsy response. “I don’t defend how I look, who I am or my culture – why should I? – I never will.

“I’m proud of my Kiwi side as well as my Pacific Island side, they’re both truly important. They’re the foundation of me."

"I shouldn’t be having to identify myself [though] I’m more than happy to do so. I’m more than happy to say I’m Kiribati/Cook Island/New Zealand.”

How does she manage the prejudice? “It’s very simple,” says Dreaver. “I just do my job.”

Barbara Dreaver’s job for decades – via print, radio and, for the past 25 years, television – has been to shed light on the issues of the Pacific. As she explains in her new memoir Be Brave, releaesd today, some of her stories are those people desperately want told; others they’d rather keep hidden. Dreaver tells both kinds, making an ever-growing network of contacts and the odd enemy across the world’s biggest ocean and its many complex nations.

Asked which stories, of her hundreds, have changed her, Dreaver remembers Tae Kami – a Tongan teenager with a disfiguring facial cancer who wrote Walk on Strong, a song used to launch a children’s cancer charity. Dreaver was present when the King of Tonga presented Kami with a medal. “She sang her song in this sort of wavering voice. She was very, very sick and he cried.”

Dreaver cried too, crossing all her own professional guidelines. “I have a rule in journalism that it shouldn’t be my tears. This is not my grief.”

And yet, those stories involving the children suffering always linger painfully. Perhaps the worst example was the Samoan measles outbreak of 2019-2020.

Dreaver still remembers the faces of children dying and those of children lying dead in open caskets. “And I remember their parents’ faces, because they were just ravaged by grief.”

For years Dreaver was haunted by an event from that time. She and a cameraman had visited some families who were living in isolated areas of Samoa, without phones or cars. One in particular had two very sick children and Dreaver found a travelling medical team and urged them to attend to that family.

Those children’s lives were saved, but it’s to her ever-lasting regret that she didn’t also stress the needs of a nearby household who also had a child who appeared unwell, though much less so. That child later died. “I sat in guilty agony for quite some time,” says Dreaver.

Did she blame herself? “Absolutely I blamed myself.”

Over the years she’s learned to let the guilt go and come to terms with her role. “You’re there to record it, do the best job you can, tell the truth. You come back and you get on with it quietly because it’s not your job to make a song and dance about how it might impact you.”

But Dreaver’s anger at the US anti-vaccination movement, which spread its message to vulnerable parents in Samoa at that time, remains and may have played a part in another seminal moment in her career. It was 2020, when she made the call to identify the first family in a New Zealand Covid cluster as being Pasifika.

The move drew criticism (and a little unhinged rage) from some members of the community who believed it would be singled out and made a target for public prejudice and paranoia, rife at the time.

Dreaver agrees it was a line call. “I talked about it with a number of people the night before. ‘Do I? Do I?’ A couple said no, but most said yes. In the end I knew it was really up to me, and I decided to go with it because I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t.”

The story sparked her desired outcome among Pasifika, she says. “They stopped having these big family events. And if they hadn’t been vaccinated, they got themselves vaccinated.”

Some people thanked her and credited her for saving lives. Others criticised her harshly and, at the extreme end, sent abuse and death threats.

Many of those in the second group were younger people who didn’t know Dreaver or her work. “And I love that!” says Dreaver, her face lighting up. “I love that we have a young Pacific population here in New Zealand who are prepared to stand up and say ‘I don’t like this!’

“What I didn’t’ like was the abuse and the threats. It was horrendous, but that’s sometimes just par for the course. Do I regret doing it? No is the simple answer.”

Dreaver’s refusal to be intimidated into silence is perhaps what’s sustained her in the complex, hierarchal world of Pacific politics.

Asked how she navigates those relationships she says, “Navigating? Not so much, I just do it.

“One thing I will always do is stand up for freedom of speech. I understand that people don’t like someone coming in and making a fuss. But if you don’t uncover things, if you don’t expose things, [they] will never change.

“And so I will always push, push, push, push to uncover things, to expose things, to give people information. That has sometimes come at the expense of relationships, at the expense of contacts, but what I do find with politicians is that, at the end of the day, they like to get re-elected so most – nearly all – come back. Or sometimes they get pushed out... Leaders change.”

Dreaver's exposed much of the dark side of the Pacific, as well as its heart-breaking vulnerabilities, but her love of her birthplace clearly runs deep, the seeds planted during her childhood on Tarawa in the Kiribati atoll.

It was, she writes in her book, “a mixture of heat, waves crashing on the reef, cycling like crazy on my red bicycle, running around with friends, laughter, the taste of salt on my tongue and the smell of frangipani”.

Fighting to get New Zealand to pay attention to its own ocean and its own neighbours hasn’t been easy, with positions for Pacific reporters in newsrooms generally rare or non-existent and Pacific stories sometimes pushed to the back of the agenda.

“It’s been a pretty lonely ride through the years, she admits. “You learn to fight for the stories that you think are important. Over the years that’s gotten easier because I’ve got a bit more grumpy!”

'I shouldn't have to defend who I am' – watch this story on TVNZ+

For Dreaver, it’s always a fight worth having. “We shouldn’t just be dashing into the Pacific when there’s a cyclone or a disaster,” she says. “The Pacific is worth more than that, and it’s worth more than that to New Zealand.”

Be Brave, by Barbara Dreaver (Awa Press) is released today.