Rose was in her Wellington flat one Sunday afternoon when the phone rang.
It was her journalist friend Sue Masters, who had just finished interviewing a visiting rock band.
The band members wanted to meet some local women. Would Rose and her two flatmates like to come down and hang out with them for the evening?
It was June 1964. The band was called The Beatles.
John, Paul, George and Ringo had landed in Wellington that afternoon. They were greeted by a Māori kapa haka group who presented them with very unusual hei tiki.
A hei tiki is a small carved pendant made of pounamu (greenstone) that is highly prized in Māori culture. Hei means worn around the neck in te reo Māori and tiki means human form. They are commonly referred to as tiki.
But The Beatles tiki were different. They were much larger than usual and made from thin moulded plastic. The front was shiny and bright green, but the back was hollow and looked like the pale inside of a moulded plastic mask.
One photograph captures this odd moment in New Zealand pop culture history.
John Lennon looks out to his right. In his raised right hand he is swinging a poi. The plastic tiki is hanging around his neck on a length of plaited green flax.
In the distance, a thick crowd of people are gathered against a chain-link fence. Seven thousand fans had turned out for a glimpse of their new favourite band. It is the height of Beatlemania. The Beatles look young, cheerful and beautiful.
And now Rose was being asked if she wanted to meet them.
She said 'yes' and was soon chatting and eating food with them at their hotel. Later that night, John Lennon handed her his tiki.
She took it home and, almost accidentally, became the guardian of a curious cultural object. The tiki captured a moment in time, but resonated into the past and the future.
It was probably made for the government by a master carver born in the Cook Islands, placed around John Lennon's neck by a Māori woman who found it grotesque and then gifted to a South Island woman.
And she still has it.
Somehow, this large plastic tiki endured. It became a family heirloom that eventually guided Rose's son to a new life as a stone carver.
This object, now wrapped in tissue paper and stored in a cardboard box in suburbia, tells a story about New Zealand's relationship to global pop culture and how Māori identity was exploited to sell the country as a global tourist destination.
It is the story of John Lennon's hei tiki.
WHO CREATED THE TIKI?
Iotua (Charlie) Tuarau lived a full life.
He emigrated to New Zealand from the Cook Islands in 1934, helped carve a wharenui (meeting house) at the Waitangi treaty grounds, and fought in World War II as part of the Māori Battalion.
He may also be the man who made John Lennon's plastic tiki.
Tuarau was born in 1912 in Aitutaki on the Cook Islands. He first came to New Zealand in his early twenties as part of a musical group, performing with 15 others in a "scarlet grass skirt" and a flower behind his left ear.
He accompanied a group of Cook Island arikis, or chiefs, in January 1934 for the opening of a new wharenui in Tokomaru Bay in the North Island.
Tuarau must have impressed Māori advocate and MP Āpirana Ngata, who had invited the Cook Island chiefs to the opening of the meeting house.
Ngata recommended that Tuarau remain in New Zealand to learn wood carving at the Māori Arts and Crafts School in Rotorua and work on a prestigious new project – a carved wharenui at the Waitangi treaty grounds.
Ngata had established the school in 1926 to teach young Māori men traditional wood-carving skills. Rotorua was also a longstanding centre for a particular brand of tourism that used traditional Māori culture as a drawcard.
Anthropologist John Taylor wrote in 1998 that "a particular definition of Māori 'culture'" had by then become "the staple of tourism advertising".
The tiki was part of that promotion machine.
In the 1910s, a postcard for Rotorua featured a painting of a tiki with the tag line "Rotorua, N.Z. has a 'charm' all of its own".
By 1960, the Government's Tourist and Publicity Department was creating posters featuring a Pākehā woman in contemporary clothing admiring a tiki worn by a Māori woman in traditional dress.
Government-owned airline Tasman Empire Airways Limited (TEAL) would hand out mass-produced plastic tiki to passengers, a practice continued into the 1970s by its successor, Air New Zealand.
The cheap plastic trinkets were at odds with the importance of tiki in Māori culture.
Te Papa hei tiki expert Dougal Austin said they were highly prized and gained their mana from generations of ancestral use.
"They are the most complex and highest achievement in pounamu carving and the pounamu itself was the most highly valued material."
Austin said tiki had many uses and beliefs associated with them. They were ancestral heirlooms, symbols of rank, a focus of grief, a burial good, a talisman of fertility, and offered protection from misfortune. Notably, there is no evidence to suggest tiki were commonly used as a greeting gift.
Back in Rotorua, Tuarau's carving education was interrupted by World War II. He enlisted with the Māori Battalion and saw battle in Italy. He took his carving skills with him, making swagger sticks and a carved wooden frame for his battalion.
He returned from war with an injury, a Luger pistol, and a photograph of him sharing a smoke with a German prisoner of war.
On return, he got a job as a wood carver at the National Museum in Wellington, now Te Papa, as part of a government rehabilitation scheme.
He would work there for the next 30 years, carving a variety of objects for the museum and various government departments.
He was a master carver, responsible for creating prestigious gifts for heads of state. But he was also commissioned to carve more frivolous pieces.
He carved a papahou (treasure box) gifted to Princess Diana in the Bay of Islands during her 1983 visit and a miniature waka for the Queen. But he also carved some buttons for a Miss New Zealand outfit and carvings presented to the South African Springbok rugby team in the 1970s.
And then there were The Beatles' tiki. It is hard to find definite proof that Tuarau, who died in 1996, made the large tiki.
They appear to be based on large aluminium tiki used by TEAL to promote the airline in the 1950s and 60s, which Tuarau may also have designed.
One of his friends from the 1960s said Tuarau was commissioned by the Tourist and Publicity Department to make the tiki. Bill Nathan remembers Tuarau making other plastic items for the department, like moulds from a carved poupou (wall carvings) and maihi (gables) for use at promotional functions.
An Archives New Zealand researcher could find no trace of The Beatles' tiki in government records.
Son Roger Tuarau remembered seeing images of The Beatles with their tiki in his father's archive of papers and newspaper clippings, but was unable to locate them.
When he saw the plaited flax cords hung around The Beatles' necks, he remembered plaiting endless lengths of cord at home for his father. But he found it difficult to square his father's status as a master carver with the tiki worn by The Beatles.
"They are so large. I don't know whether or not dad would have done them that big, but he may have just been contracted to do them at the size they wanted."
"They are quite gaudy, aren't they?"
The kapa haka group employed to greet The Beatles at the airport were equally unimpressed.
THE BEATLES - WHO?
"Within a few days the fabulous Beatles will be in New Zealand," 1960s music magazine Count Down declared on June 12, 1964.
"The boys who have captured the imagination of the whole world, who have taken more airtime and press space than any other quartet in history, will be right here."
"It will be the time of your life."
In the 15 months following the release of their first album, Please Please Me, in March 1963, The Beatles had aggressively pursued their explosive success. Everywhere they performed, throngs of frenzied fans would crowd around them, screaming and trying to storm the stage. In November 1963, the British press coined a phrase for the phenomenon; Beatlemania.
A month later a deal was signed for The Beatles to tour Australia and New Zealand. The contract stipulated that each week they would perform no more than 12 times and work no more than six days. They would be paid the modern equivalent of about $90,000 Kiwi dollars a week.
And since the tour contract had been signed in December, Beatlemania had only intensified. In February, The Beatles had conquered America, appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show to an audience of 70 million people.
In March and April, they spent seven weeks shooting their first film, A Hard Day's Night. They had finished recording a new album of the same name just a few weeks earlier. It was being mixed as they toured New Zealand.
The tour started in Copenhagen on June 4 and took them through Europe, Hong Kong, and Australia. In every country they visited, the flame of Beatlemania had caught alight, with fans lining the streets and crowding airports to greet their arrival.
And now they were coming to New Zealand, a country where they had already enjoyed five number ones in just the first six months of 1964.
But none of this hype had reached Nancye Lewis.
She was 24, lived in Wellington and was a member of the Ngāti Pōneke Young Māori Club. The group had been staging kapa haka concert parties around Wellington since the 1930s, when Māori had started moving to the cities in large numbers.
She also moonlighted for a kapa haka group that had been completely manufactured by the government.
'PLAYING MĀORIS'
Te Pataka Māori Concert Party was formed by the Tourist and Publicity Department in the late 1950s to promote New Zealand around the world as a tourist destination. Lewis would be called on to perform for tourists arriving by boat in Wellington port, the Bolshoi Ballet when they came to Wellington, and on tourist promotional tours to Australia, England, America and Holland.
Lewis had more complex feelings about the government work. She felt the same way as her friends that danced in traditional costume for tourists in Rotorua.
"My girlfriends in Rotorua would say to me they are going to play Māoris now," she said.
"It was like acting. We would just go and do our thing and that was it."
And then she got a call from the government for another job. She was to greet The Beatles at Wellington Airport on Sunday, June 21, 1964.
When Lewis arrived at the airport it was clear that Beatlemania had spread to New Zealand.
Fans pressed against the chain-link fence, shaking it, screaming and waving banners with handwritten slogans like "The Beatles - I love you".
"It was the first time I had seen our crowd go mad," said Lewis.
"We don't really go mad. But these kids out at the airport were screaming. It was absolutely packed."
She was joined by the other members of the dance group – Aida Rangiaho, Josephine Smiler, Donas Nathan, Millie Hiroti and Mei Thompson. The only two surviving members are Lewis and Nathan.
Nathan, who still performs with Ngāti Pōneke, was also surprised by the hysteria.
"When I saw the crowd I thought: 'Wow, The Beatles must be quite something."
"I wasn't a big fan, but after that I followed The Beatles."
Once the plane landed, the door slowly opened and The Beatles emerged. First Ringo, then John, then Paul clutching an outsized plush Kiwi bird and finally George.
They came down the steps and were greeted in turn by a different member of the dance group. They were each given a tiki, poi and a hongi.
Donas Nathan struggled to teach Ringo how to perform a hongi. He rubbed his nose across her's from side to side. John and Paul did the same.
"He tried to do what I told him," she said.
Only George got the hang of it when he was greeted by Lewis.
"I thought George was lovely. He was nice-looking," she said.
After the greeting, The Beatles were paraded past their fans while standing on the back of a Holden ute. A film camera mounted on the car in front captured the staged spectacle for the world's newsreels.
The dance group were left behind on the tarmac. Lewis was not happy with the tiki.
"They were awful. Horrible big tikis. Plastic things," she said.
"They were exploiting Māoridom, but none of that mattered at the time."
Nathan's husband and fellow Ngāti Pōneke member, Bill Nathan, said the group did not like the tiki.
"They were so big and somewhat hideous. A tiki of that size around your neck just seemed inappropriate.
"I guess it was their idea of making an impact on the media, knowing there would be international attention.
"It was not culturally appropriate. At the time you might have had those thoughts, but now you can express those thoughts."
"These days, we wouldn't want to do it."
Te Papa's tiki expert Dougal Austin said the plastic tiki were well-proportioned, but their size and the plastic material made them tacky.
"If you miniaturised that, it would look about right.
"But the use of the tiki image in this way is kind of a tacky thing to do. They are a real oddity."
The Beatles did not treat the plastic tiki with much respect.
Ringo reportedly joked that he nicknamed his tiki Fred and buried it at the airport for luck. Lennon was equally disrespectful at a later press conference.
"Whatever happened to the real ones? You never seem to get the real ones, only the cheap Japanese models."
MEET THE BEATLES
It was later that Sunday afternoon when Rose got an invite to meet The Beatles from her journalist friend Sue Masters.
Rose was 21 and had moved from Invercargill to Wellington earlier that year. She was enjoying the freedom and adventure of living in a big city for the first time. She worked in a bank and would party with the neighbours in their little flat just off Courtenay Place.
So Rose, along with two of her flatmates, made the 10-minute walk down Manners St to the St George Hotel on the corner of Willis and Boulcott St.
When she arrived the hotel was surrounded by thousands of screaming fans.
They had gathered earlier to see The Beatles arrive at the hotel from the airport. At its peak, the crowd reached 4000 people and filled the street. Two people sat on top of a red telephone box to get a better view.
About 20 police officers struggled to hold back the jostling crowd and linked arms to clear a gangway at the hotel's main entrance. A newspaper reported that "one girl fainted in the crush" and "policemen's helmets went flying when a barrier cracked under the strain of the crowd."
The Beatles were bundled into a side entrance. Ringo was the only Beatle who was still wearing his tiki when he got to the hotel.
The band later appeared on the third floor balcony of the hotel to greet the crowd. They stood on chairs so they could be seen over the balcony edge. Across the street, people stood in windows and on balconies to get a better view and take photos.
Five girls climbed up the front of the hotel to the balcony and were taken away by police officers.
Beatlemania meant the band could not leave their hotel rooms.
"It's too dangerous and we don't want to cause trouble," George Harrison told a Kiwi journalist.
But 1960s New Zealand left them frustrated and bored.
"In those days we were looking for some action, and there was absolutely nothing happening," Harrison said years later.
When Rose arrived she found it hard to get into the hotel.
"We had to try and force our way to the doors. It was pretty difficult, because there were people everywhere.
"If you didn't know who to ask for, you had no chance of getting through. Fans were stampeding to get into the place."
She was allowed in and caught the lift to the sixth floor where she passed four security guards assigned to the band and entered The Beatles' suite.
The Beatles had two rooms and two large lounges. John and Ringo shared one room, while Paul and George shared the other.
They did not have a gig that night so were free to hang out.
"We went into this huge lounge area. They had all this food spread out like an enormous smorgasbord.
"We just sat down and talked to them. I don't remember them playing any music at all.
"I liked John best by far. Paul was very nice too."
Rose could hear the "enormous sound" of fans chanting in the street below.
But she didn't like the way The Beatles behaved. She was particularly put out when one band member stubbed out a cigarette in his food.
"That disgusted me. I couldn't understand people being so wasteful.
"To me, it was quite a show-off and childish thing to do."
At some point in the afternoon, Rose was sitting on a sofa with John Lennon when he gave her his plastic tiki.
"He just said, you can take this home."
Rose didn't stay late because she had work in the morning.
"We weren't into mucking around on a work night.
"We were quite responsible sort of girls."
So she walked home holding the plastic tiki.
"It was one of those fortunate moments, I suppose. We got a call and had this opportunity.
"But, to be quite honest, I was always an Elvis fan. To me, there wasn't anyone else but Elvis."
WHAT TO DO WITH A PLASTIC TIKI?
Later that year, Rose had family over to stay from Australia. Her brother-in-law, Tony, was 9 years old and a Beatles fan. So Rose gave him the tiki.
He took it home to Adelaide and hung it from a gun rack in his bedroom that held a .22 rifle and a didgeridoo.
Rose and her husband moved to Australia in the late 1960s and started a family.
Her son, Rhys Hall, loved looking at The Beatles' tiki in his Uncle Tony's room. It helped plant a seed that would bloom in later life.
He had a growing childhood fascination with Pacific carving that was fed by Uncle Tony's souvenir, Air New Zealand's plastic tiki, and his local museum in Adelaide.
He started collecting airline tiki on his trips back to New Zealand to see family. He still has them in a collection of kitsch Pacific objects that has slowly grown over the years.
"I just thought they were magical little things," he said.
When he was 7 he would cycle to the South Australia Museum and head straight to the Pacific collections room.
"I loved monster movies and vampires and Godzilla.
"As a child, this room to me was full of spectacular, intricate monsters and beasts and fantastic creatures. It always blew my mind."
The family moved back to New Zealand in 1984. Tony Hall gave the tiki back to Rose. It was wrapped in tissue paper and stored in a chest of drawers. At some point it found its way into a toy box. During a house move the head was snapped clean off.
Rhys made friends with a Māori family in Birdlings Flat outside Christchurch and was introduced to carving.
He enjoyed carving, but the calling was deferred. He drifted in his 20s, partying and signing on the dole.
"I was just thinking there must be something out there for me. I felt like I wasn't doing anything that was satisfying my soul."
When he turned 30 he moved to the West Coast and enrolled in a carving course at Tai Poutini. He started researching and collecting carved Pacifica objects again. He spent a brief period in Tauranga where he was sometimes mentored by master carvers like Charlie Wilson. At around this time he carved his first pounamu hei tiki.
He now has a successful carving studio in Westport.
"I'm glad I found carving because I could have gone down a very different path."
He has since turned his carver's eye to The Beatles' tiki that helped guide him to a new life.
"It is cultural appropriation and not looked on favourably these days. You can't get any cheaper than making a plastic version of something that is made out of jade.
"But I kind of like the kitsch aspect of that older stuff. It is all part of our history."
TREASURING HISTORY
As a collector himself, he has also come to realise the value of John Lennon's tiki.
"Nobody thought of it as a great cultural artefact. It was just a novelty thing that mum ended up with.
"But this is an important object and probably pretty damn valuable as well."
He spoke to an expert at Christie's auction house in about 2002 who said it could be worth several thousand dollars.
"She said it was something that collectors would go nuts for."
Te Papa's tiki expert, Dougal Austin, said it was an object that could potentially be considered for the national collection.
"It represents some interesting issues and speaks to the 1960s and how things have changed.
"It was very much a sign of the times."
But what would Rose like to do with the tiki?
Rose, who did not want her real name used because she worries the tiki may be stolen, looks at the cardboard box on the table in the corner of her front room. Inside, the object she has looked after for over four decades is carefully wrapped in tissue paper. She thinks for a moment.
"I think it deserves to be on display, really," she says.
"It's a treasure that needs to be looked after."