Tēnā koutou katoa

Ko Ingarangi, ko Aerana te whakapaparanga mai,

Engari, ko Brockenhurst te whenua tupu,

Kei Whakatū au e noho ana

He kaitohu au i Maranga Ltd.

Ko Jon Lasenby au,

Tēnā tātou katoa.

Greetings!

I grew up in the South of England, in a small village, Brockenhurst.

My ancestry is English and Irish.

I have lived in New Zealand since 2002. Nelson is now very much my home. I run Maranga Ltd. from here.

A warm greeting to all who read these pages.

I am a husband and a dad.

I grew up in the South of England. My father was born in Fermoy in Ireland in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising, and my mother in Manchester in the 1930’s.

I came to Aotearoa in 2002, and became a citizen in 2012.

I understood nothing of Aotearoa’s colonial history when I arrived. I came here because I liked the people and it seemed a bit like Australia.

Now I know a bit more, and I am actively working to become tangata Tiriti, to learn to be culturally agile around the different spaces I find myself in professionally and personally. I want to learn to move comfortably around the wide deck, or papa noho that links the two hulls of the waka, Māori and non-Māori together.