On Being an Otaran….

I’ll bet you don’t know what an Otaran is, do you?

Well, fast forward from Shorncliffe 1940’s to New Zealand some 30 years later.  I came to Auckland in the early 1970s, and I found a good job.  However, I was finally coming to grips with my latent talent of being in business for myself. I always had the urge to do so, and made several disastrous attempts here and there, in Australia.  However, never having had any instructions on how to make money, and being so damned poor, it just never clicked, and I was always a worker, no money, no hope of other than a hand-to-mouth existence and a penniless old age. Not that there is anything wrong in being a worker. Hey, that is how I survived until my early 50’s.    As I work on the ancestry part of my family research, I have found that the families of my maternal grandfather  and also my paternal grandmother, had been quite well off, so the genetic code was imbedded, but the DNA hadn’t kicked in.

After a year or so, I gave up my good job, crazy me, and started off on my new adventure of becoming self employed.  There are some very interesting  parts of this adventure, it isn’t just a one shot wonder. But more on that later.

Getting back to becoming an Otaran.  Otara, in South Auckland, was, in those days, mostly Maori and Polynesian families.  Somewhere along the line, a good idea was hatched to start a proper market in the shopping centre carpark on Saturday mornings, 5am until 12.  And I thought that this would be a good opportunity for me to start a small business.  Little money, no knowledge, but how did I know that. Boots and all, that’s me. As Saturday and Sunday trading were mostly banned in those days, this market, being the only one of its kind in Auckland, filled a really pressing need in the community. Farmers would truck in their produce, wheeler dealers would bring in whatever they could find, little clothing manufacturers turned out cheap clothes and the crowds were astonishing. I made a deal with a pottery manufacturer and sold his factory seconds. My husband sold trinkets and jewellery. We lived like a band of gypsies, except we had our nice Ponsonby house, not a horse drawn caravan.  Other people in the family thought we must be extremely poor, being market people and all.   How wrong they were!

My brother-in-law was particularly miffed when I told his wealthy, upright, uptight friends at the club he had joined, that I was an Otaran.  And so I had to explain in detail what that was!! So there, you toffy nosed lot , who only think of becoming share traders, or horse traders, or house traders. I will bet I made more money, had more time and fun, and was happier than you