A trip with Aunty Whaea T could turn your life around

She is known by many across the country as Whaea T - the aunty who will teach you how to hunt, fish and gather. But beyond the practical skills, TikTok star and Southlander Terressa Kollat (Ngāti Porou) is helping people turn their lives around with her foraging trips.

With about 200,000 followers, Kollat takes groups of up to six people of all ages, honing their skills to help them gain confidence and achieve their goals.

But she is adamant she's not there to fix problematic kids. They have to be up to it and want to learn.

Related stories:

The popular videos, showing Kollat indulging in fresh kina on the beach and using bull kelp as a pocket to cook seafood, don't quite paint the full picture of what it takes to be on one of her trips.

"It can be deceptive. You can see a five-minute video and I'm not going to show the video where it's hailing and raining. You're going to see a nice video where we've caught something, and I've started cooking it," Kollat tells Nine to Noon.

"But we could've gone to bed about 3 o'clock in the morning after hanging up deer and then because the tide is early, we get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and then we've driven and walked a long way, so it's not a holiday."

But the often-rough adventures give people a chance to bond with each other.

Her Gisborne-based nephew Michael Taniora, who first suggested she post her Facebook videos to TikTok, has been regularly going on trips since the age of 10.

"When there's four of you, lying on the side of a mountain and there's hail hitting your face, you have your little giggles and you never forget who you went out with."

One memorable moment for him was getting to see a pod of Hector's dolphins while swimming out near Bluecliffs.

"It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see and witness that."

Kollat gets so many requests that she has to choose who she thinks would benefit the most from her foraging trips. Her schedule is already half-full with four days working at the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter.

"I'm not judgmental. I'm hard and blunt because you have to have people that are able to listen because it's dangerous. We're hunting, I have a firearm, we're in water, where there can be currents, and it can be hot, cold and we're up at all hours. So I take people where it's safe for them to learn, they don't go deep."

One 14-year-old boy she helped was inspired to pursue a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Another boy from Auckland who got into some trouble turned his life around and found a sense of purpose through diving and hunting, she says.

"A lot of people haven't been brought up or exposed to the environment. Some are scared of it.

"I had a young girl who wanted to do adventure tourism, she came from the university. She came and stayed with me and she just thrived. It's okay learning things from a book but it's a different story when you're out there in the environment.

"I've got people half my age that vape, and they're struggling to walk up a hill and I could tell them beforehand 'don't do it, don't do any of this, don't smoke, don't vape' and it won't mean anything. It's not until they start walking up the hill and they see someone twice their age beating them then they realise what that's doing to their body."

Piper Lovell, from Waikato, has been a fan of Aunty Whaea T since she started her account in 2021 while living off-the-grid in her motorhome. So when she was passing by Invercargill, she sprung at the chance to meet up with her favourite TikTok star.

"The value of what she teaches is pretty immeasurable. It's not even the specific things, it's like a mindset. It's like every time I go there, I feel a little bit more sure of myself and interested in how I could do it this thing more sustainably and how I can could better the environment while benefiting from it.

"I like that she says it how she is. She doesn't dance around little things, she doesn't try to put things in an airy, fairy way to make people feel more comfortable.

"Then in the same step she's also receptive, like you can tell her something and she'll go 'oh I hadn't thought of that'. I think that's what makes her a really good teacher."