Tyrone Marks brought his children up in the King Country.
Mary Anne Gill
Tyrone Marks reflects on the seven years he spent raising his four daughters in the King Country as some of the most cherished times of his life.
Appointed a Companion of the King’s Service Order in the King’s Birthday Honours, Marks, 64, was recognised for his advocacy on behalf of survivors of abuse in state care.
Marks, who now lives in Hamilton, is a survivor himself. He has played a key role in bringing to light the abuse and torture endured by 360 children and vulnerable adults between 1972 and 1978. His gruelling testimony many years later to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care and his later work on behalf of other victims were cited as reasons for getting the honour.
Marks (Ngāti Raukawa) was born in Hastings, one of 13 children – seven boys and six girls. He describes himself as the “black sheep” of the family and, like his younger brother, was known for being mischievous.
He was made a ward of the state in 1969 and placed in several institutions around the North Island, but it was in Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital Child and Adolescent Unit where the horrors began. On his first night there, at just 11 years old, he was sexually abused. Over the next two years, he endured electric shocks and further mistreatment.
“When that was happening to me, I kept a clear path in my mind ‘when I have children, I’m never going to do that’. It stopped me.”
After leaving the social welfare system at age 15, he taught himself to read and write. He later graduated from Waikato University with degrees in sociology, psychology, and political science.
He now has seven children. His first four daughters, who he raised in Taumarunui during the 1990s, include 34-year-old twin girls, and daughters aged 31 and 30.
Marks had a shop in the one way section of Manuaute Street right next to the now closed Copper Kettle, the most popular café in town at the time.
He moved to Hamilton to study and to begin his “tireless advocacy”, according to the citation and in 2014 returned to the district, living in Ōwhango and National Park before moving back to Hamilton after Covid.
His second “batch of children”, as he describes them are another daughter, 17 and a son, 14.
Marks has been a member of the Royal Commission of Inquiry’s Survivor Advisory Group of Experts which provided the inquiry with guidance and support to engage with survivors and their representative organisations about their experiences.
