Nat Mara

Nu'utaivava Natapu Mara (1922 - 1986), better known as Nat Mara, was a French Polynesian-New Zealand pilot, musician and band leader.

Mara was born in Rurutu in the Austral Islands in 1922. At the start of World War II he moved to New Zealand with a group of Tahitian volunteers to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force. After training in Canada and the United Kingdom he joined the Free French Air Forces. He later led a Tahitian hula dance troupe that included his daughter Diane, and performed in Auckland and throughout the Pacific in the late 1960s.

Recordings by Nat Mara and His Tahitians are frequently reissued and broadcast. Several of the group's tracks are considered standards within Polynesian music.

He died in Auckland in 1986.

Honours