Rob Kipa-Williams has been candid about life since leaving Home and Away.
Before his character was killed off last year, the actor notably portrayed Ari Parata on the Australian soap opera for three years.
After leaving Summer Bay, Rob disclosed that he has been re-establishing ties to his Mori heritage by acquiring a property in the Kaipara region of Aotearoa (New Zealand) and pursuing Mori language proficiency.
He admitted to Yahoo! Lifestyle that “[there] was certainly a part of me that was calling to come back [to Aotearoa]. Learning te reo has always felt like a calling, but I don’t believe it really surfaced until the past two years, at which point I decided to take the plunge.
Rob said that “it takes one generation to lose a language, and three generations to get it back” in reference to the language’s revival in recent decades, particularly since New Zealand recognized it as an official language in 1987.
He said, “My grandfather… and grandma were in that time when they were punished at school for speaking Mori. “And [Mori] was the only language he knew when he was younger, according to my grandfather’s older brother.”
Rob went on to explain that his grandfather could no longer speak the language by the time he grew older, though passed it down the generations, and he himself wants to represent his culture “without having to prepare something”.
It’s a really crucial aspect of the next stage of my existence, the celebrity continued.
Rob has been working on an app called HAAAA, which combines Polynesian meditation sounds with cinematic music, in addition to returning to his origins. It has songs in the dialects of the Cook Islands, Tahiti, Samoa, Tonga, Hawaii, and New Zealand.
Regardless of language, we all produce the sound “HAAAA” when we exhale, he said. I would die a very content person if I did nothing else in my life but compose music for meditation. I wished to produce some new, possibly unheard-of Polynesian meditation music.
Additionally, he collaborated with Moana composer Opetaia Foa’i, saying, “One of the things that interests [Opetaia Foa’i] the most is that I want to specialize in or work toward assisting kids, particularly Polynesian and Mori kids, with their mental health.
Then I returned to New Zealand and began recording noises… Putting these tracks together was a really cool, imaginative exercise.