by Barry Barclay

Did John O’Shea do much for Maori filmmaking? Of course, he did. His having fought so hard, side by side with Tama Poata, to get Ngati funded and onto the screen in the spirit in which it was made would alone have been enough to secure him a lasting place on the roll of honour. I remember, as well, a number of much less public milestones. One has to do with the edit in 1974 of the first programme in the Tangata Whenua series, The Spirits and Times Will Teach.

A small East Cape town is the backdrop for writer Tama Poata and director Barry Barclay’s exploration of New Zealand’s cultural divide in Ngati (1987)

There was a tradition at Pacific Films that when rushes were first screened everybody on staff — receptionist, set-builder, accountant, the works — was welcome to come into the theatrette and watch the images with the producer, editor, and the location crew. And with the Tangata Whenua rushes, watch we did. Here were vibrant and articulate Maori speaking so confidently about their own world. Here was keening and waiata and extended conversations in Maori. Something primal had entered the workplace; something people had not encountered, not this way, at least; something unspeakably foreign yet of our own country. Imagine people who had never before heard the ring of the karanga catching that unearthly call coming out through the ‘sound-proofed’ walls of the theatrette to be audible in every corner of the building. John was as swept up as any of us, but as editor Ian John and I headed upstairs for the edit, his words followed us: “Magnificent material — but will it edit?”

	Tangata Whenua director Barry Barclay during the filming of The Neglected Miracle in 1985

For Ian and I, the edit wasn’t a dream run. It’s extraordinary, really, to think that we had, on the one hand, material sitting squarely in the ethnographic documentary tradition (kuia with moko), and, on the other, material in the tradition of left-wing political film making, with footage so explosive it might be labeled ‘terrorist’ in these uneasy times (Eva Rickard on the Raglan golf course). If any of us is any doubt about just how explosive the material was back then, we only have to remind ourselves that the occupations on that golf course began the contemporary Maori land struggle and all that that came to mean over subsequent years. Maori video-maker and Nga Tamatoa foundation member, Eruera Nia, told me years after the first national screening, “We saw that film of yours on tv in Auckland, and a group of us decided on the spot to get ourselves down there to help that old kuia out.” Furthermore, the material was fragmentary, being made up of many apparently random conversation strands skillfully elicited from people by Michael King on location. How to pick patterns amongst all this seemingly inconsequential chat and assemble it into something both rooted in the soil yet serving as epic witness?

Week after week went by, and still we had no first assembly for screening to John and Michael. We had two sections, one on traditional moko, and one set around Herepo Rongo and Eva Rickard in Raglan. There was a third section, one with an aura all on its own, which showed the kuia, Nakahikatea Whirihana of Tainui — “old Nga” they called her, for she was over a hundred years old — in conversation with Dave Manihera. Try as we might, we could not see how the three sections could be imploded into a single linear statement of fifty minutes without distorting the material to the point where we would be in danger, I felt, of breaching the unspoken contract we had made with the Maori participants we had filmed with such care. At that time, Maoridom had not been portrayed on television at all, so there were responsibilities associated with having first material. Also, the television authorities had programme expectations which, although very different in detail, were every bit as rigid and ivory tower in spirit as anything encountered in these days of ‘pitch’ and ‘audience expectation’.

When we came, at last, to walk down the stairs to the viewing theatre, we were carrying not one but three cans. We were screening Ngakahikatea first, then Moko, then the thirty-minute Raglan section, towards the climax of which Eva Rickard says, “The spirits and the times will teach. Not man; not the books; but the times and the spirits of the past.” Our small viewing group was moved to the point of speechlessness. Nobody wanted to destroy the three-chapter format. A day later, John stood in the tearoom and wound himself up to one of his better fulminations. He was not going to allow the images to be sanitized, compressed, and gutted — just to get them on television! If the sycophantic, yellow-bellied minions out at Avalon dared to order a single cut, he’d go to the head of the Board; he’d go to the Minister; if that didn’t work, he’d go to the Prime Minister. This was too important for New Zealanders. None of us listening had the slightest doubt he meant it. As it happened, the Executive Producer for television was Michael-Scott-Smith, one of the most helpful and experienced television executives you could have wished to deal with at that time. No re-cut was ordered. No merging of the three chapters into a single block. “We are not going to be dictated to,” John said.

There is a major policy document on the NZ On Air website called the Rautaki Maori (dated May 2000) in which NZ On Air sets out its objectives for Maori in mainstream television. Eleven goals are listed, and seventeen action points. It is a radical programme, and deserves to be read and re-read. The sort of climate for making programmes in the Maori world for mainstream exhibition which is aspired to in that document is virtually what we enjoyed at Pacific Films under John O’Shea thirty years earlier.

John might not have experienced the Maori world in depth, and in his later years, phrases like tino rangatiratanga might have foxed him, but when it counted, he made the space. He made it at a time when nobody earned any brownie points whatsoever for entering that field. Is there a Maori memorial to him for that contribution? The one dear to me is that seven-minute section which opens the first of the six programmes in the Tangata Whenua series: not a presenter leading us in, not an expert ethnologist or historian, not a radical voice wanting change by that afternoon nor a conservative voice wanting no change at all, but a woman poor in material possessions and over a hundred years old, sitting on the back steps of her house in the sun talking to a Maori minister in her own language, as if the whole of that day was theirs and all of time as well.