The gentle, keep-cool-'til-after-school guy we all felt we knew growing up, is on a mission to rehabilitate hardened criminals and help everyone create the life they want. Olly Ohlson, now living in Dunedin, tells BRUCE MUNRO his surprising story and shares his passionate vision.
''There was a core group of six of them, all lifers, who never missed a session.''
Olly Ohlson is speaking of the serious offenders he worked with in Paparua Prison, west of Christchurch. They were the guinea pigs, giving his Mauri Hauora behavioural change programme its first fully fledged test flight.
Among the small group of inmates, was one who was so feared that he could walk among any of the gang members locked up in the men's prison.
''He had been inside for a total of 26 years. The guard told me he was going to be trouble,'' Mr Ohlson recalls. ''But I could see that he was intelligent. He shouldn't even have been in there.''
Weeks passed. Then one day, coming into the prison to take a session, Mr Ohlson was told the man was already in the meeting room.
''He was sitting there with his back to me,'' Mr Ohlson recalls. I shut the door. He said, `It's your f***ing fault I've been crying all week'. 'The emotions had caught up with him, because he had suddenly connected the fact that the guy he had killed had a brother, had a father, had a mother.''
That was more than 15 years ago; an incident from just one chapter of Mr Ohlson's extraordinarily varied life. A life that has taken him from a small village in the heavily forested Urewera to television stardom and back to an indigenous model of personal growth which he wants to see used in prisons, schools ... everywhere.
The central North Island home of Ngai Tuhoe, the mountainous, mysterious Urewera, was not part of the Pakeha world when Te Hata (Olly) Ohlson was born in 1944. He was the youngest of 19 children, the grandson of a Norwegian lumberjack and a full-blooded Maori woman from the village of Te Whaiti, hidden in forest southeast of Rotorua. Here, time was marked by seasons not hours, horses trumped cars and te reo Maori was the lingua franca.
''Our parents struggled to keep us, but they did their best,'' he says.
A number of his siblings were adopted by relatives. ''I never met some of my brothers and sisters until later on, into adulthood. You know, someone would turn up on the bus and Mum would say, `That's your brother' or `That's your sister'.''
His mother Merepeka was raised a strict Presbyterian. His father Tapui was drawn to pre-European beliefs.
''The teachings of Io were based on our connection to the planet, to mother earth and sky father.
"When we used to log, my father would go into the forest and I would have the paint. He would say, `No, no, no, don't do that one, no, we won't take that one, we'll have this one'. I was to mark it. Because he was asking Tane, the god of the forest. That was how we would chop timber for building homes, corrals for the horses and so on.
''So I got exposed early to these things. And he allowed me to quiz him.''
Mr Ohlson's formal schooling began when he was collected by a truant officer, at about the age of 6. It was also when he began to learn English.
Learning to read was a struggle. Not because Mr Ohlson was not bright; he was, but because the words would not stay still on the page. Today, he would have been diagnosed as having dyslexia.
''One day, [in art class] some blue cellophane fell on a page. I looked at the words through it and they didn't jump. So I stole it and used it when I was on my own to try to read.''
It was not until he was 15, attending St Stephen's Maori boarding school, in South Auckland, that his inability to read was recognised.
To that point, he had convinced teachers he could read by rote learning and then reciting whole passages of text. But one day, he was handed a book upside down and proceeded to ''read'' the entire page.
''When the teacher saw that and realised what was going on, he cried.''
That teacher began working intensively with him.
When Mr Ohlson entered teachers' training college, in Auckland, in 1963, he was still a couple of years short of being a strong reader. ''I was struggling, but there was pressure on to get more Maori teachers.''
An event during those teacher training years became a life lens; bringing into focus his experiences to date and offering a glimpse of the thread that would run through all his future endeavours.
''A group of us visited Mt Eden [prison] to observe human behaviour. I thought `Crickey, I know some of these guys' backgrounds'. Because growing up, as well as the spiritual side, alcohol had a huge effect on the community. Something hit me and I couldn't let it go. I couldn't stop going to prisons.''
He was also concerned by the high percentage of inmates who were Maori.
''I wondered why they had clever bloody psychologists, yet these guys were still reoffending. There was no change in the status quo.''
Religion, in different guises, played a lead role as Mr Ohlson sorted out his own world-view and continued to mull on how best to help those who struggled to lay hold of a healthy life.
His father was an animist, his mother a Protestant. Syncretic Ringatu was the predominant faith of the region. As a child, he also attended Sunday school at the Catholic Church ''because they had better biscuits''. At teachers' training college he joined the Young Christian Students Movement and owned a dozen different bibles. After graduating, he taught at two schools on the West Coast, followed by Kaitangata and Balclutha. While in Otago, he studied theology part-time through Dunedin's Presbyterian ministry training institution, Knox College.
''That was in the early 1970s, under Professor Lloyd Geering. A lot of us used to meet in the Cook and discuss religion . . . and Jesus over jugs of beer.''
A better salary beckoned after six years in the classroom. Mr Ohlson became a successful salesman for a building society and for insurance companies. By the late 1970s, he was in Timaru, with a young family, doing part-time youth work and training for ministry in the Anglican Church.
He had still been visiting prisons, sometimes as part of the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship, sometimes with Alcoholics Anonymous, sometimes on his own. But he was becoming increasingly convinced the answer he was seeking for himself, and others, did not lie in religion.
As a young man, Mr Ohlson had started writing down the ancient Maori knowledge he was given. He did this despite warnings by brothers that he should not, ''because that is tapu stuff''.
''But I'd go away and write it down because I knew I'd forget the damn stuff. This was things my father and grandfather had told me, and things from other koro and kuia [elders] from other tribes. They'd say something and I'd connect it with other things I'd been told. So, I had boxes of bits of paper.''
When he began talking about his ideas in the late 1960s, he found some support and a lot of opposition. One man threatened to take Mr Ohlson to court for breaking the Tohunga Suppression Act. The 1907 Act, which was designed to replace tohunga, traditional Maori healers, with Western doctors, was repealed in 1962.
''I'd been observing and realising a lot of these 40-something-year-olds [in prison] are only six or seven years old emotionally.''
He tried telling the prison psychologists, but that did not seem to go anywhere.
''So I saw the challenge as being: we have to grow the young fulla inside that man's body, because there's a conflict here. I wondered, `How do I do this?' ''I started looking back at the things I'd learnt and started piecing things together. I ended up being asked by a Maori development guy at Paparua Prison to put a programme together which he would present to the head of psychological services at the prison.''
The programme, which Mr Ohlson named Mauri Hauora, would draw on the meaning behind the Maori myths, stories, songs, carvings and whakatauki, proverbs, to help people see their lives in fresh ways and gain new skills to take responsibility for their futures. He saw traditional Maori concepts such as Papatuanuku, Ranginui, taniwha and kaitiaki, not as spiritual beings, but as thoughts and feelings personified in oral tradition.
Asked which inmates he wanted to work with, Mr Ohlson replied ''Give me your worst fullas, give me your murderers''.
''So, I ended up in the notorious East Wing where they had gangs mixed up together, all in the one space. That gave me an opportunity to try this thing out.''
Using the concept of taniwha, Mr Ohlson gives an example of how it works.
''I have what I call a taniwha analysis sheet. It has phrases I've heard repeatedly from the men and women in prison: I'm not good enough, life sucks, you can't trust anybody, nobody believed in me, there's not enough, nobody loves me . . . ''I ask him [the inmate], `Which is your taniwha?' and he circles `There's not enough'. You tell them, `Well this is your taniwha, and your taniwha looks after you'. And they go, `How does it look after me?' ''And this is what objectifies the issue, and this is where the strength is. I say, `The first thing you have to do is congratulate your taniwha because it's brought s*** in your life. It's been bloody successful'.
''When they come back we get into a discussion about: `There must have been moments when there was enough in your life. Let's recover them'.
''So there would have been times when the taniwha was saying, `Crikey, he's starting to experience plenty in his life. My job is to make sure he hasn't got enough'. His life would go well, then boom, go well, boom. The taniwha is doing its job, see?''And now you've got to flip it, because it only listens to you and no-one else. You're in charge.
''You are going to give a new instruction to your taniwha. I want you to think about it as much as you can, every day, until you start seeing results.''
It is a culturally appropriate way of helping someone to take personal responsibility; an approach that is about empowerment and self-talk without judgement, Mr Ohlson says. He believes the programme, while specifically designed for Maori, can be used by anyone.
''It's evidence-based. The evidence is in the baggage. The more baggage they've got, the more evidence they have that this stuff works. And it is the engaging them that is really important, because they have to come to the conclusions for themselves.''
Television star
The prison work went on the back burner in 1980 as Mr Ohlson's television career took off. Television New Zealand executives were heeding the call for an afternoon programme host who would be a positive role model for an increasing number of children in solo-parent households. With a little bit of television experience and a growing reputation as a youth worker, he was invited to audition. Mistaking it for a job offer, he moved his family to Christchurch.
The opportunity almost slipped through his fingers, until he threw away the script, allowing his natural enthusiasm and humour to win the day.
Mr Ohlson says what really attracted him to the job was not the role of After School host, for which he became so well known, but the opportunity to also host a parenting show. As the After School show's popularity snowballed, however, particularly when he introduced sign language, it was given more room at the expense of the parenting programme.
The television years were not a distraction nor an interruption, he says. ''It was part of the process, because I lacked confidence in personal interactions. This boosted my confidence in being who I wanted to be.''
New start in Otakau
Who that is, is a tohunga Mauri Hauora, Mr Ohlson says. He and his wife Theraze have been forced by the Christchurch earthquakes, in which they lost about $600,000, to plant new roots at Otakou, on Otago Peninsula.
''We have been thrown into paradise,'' he says of the local community and wild, beautiful landscape.
He is now working with A3Kaitiaki Ltd (A3K), a subsidiary of the Otakou Runaka, as a consultant on its personal change and whanau wellbeing programmes.
Last week, Mr Ohlson gave a presentation on Mauri Hauora at an international symposium on indigenous substance abuse, in Hamilton. He encouraged delegates to search for parallels in their own cultures.
An ongoing campaign is to see Mauri Hauora made widely available without having to turn it into NZQA modules that anyone can buy and sell. In that, Mr Ohlson has the support of Te Tai Tokerau Labour MP Kelvin Davis. This week Mr Davis told Mr Ohlson ''I agree totally that Maori knowledge and intellectual property rights should not be a commodity that the system allows others to break down into units and sell off''.
''I'm still teaching Mauri Hauora to whoever wants to learn it and I will continue to do so until I leave this world,'' Mr Ohlson says.
''This is home-based and unique to New Zealand. I believe it should be a part of every educational institution, beginning in primary schools right through to universities and polytechnics.''
