The Feathers of Peace

Barry Barclay’s The Feathers of Peace reveals the guilty secret that Maori and Pakeha have shared for more than two centuries – the destruction of a race.

The Feathers of Peace, New Zealand, 2000

Director/screenplay: Barry Barclay
Producer: Ruth Kaupua-Panapa
Executive producer: Don Selwyn
Production co: He Taonga Films
DOP: Michael O’Conner
Stills photography: John Miller
Editor: Bella Erikson
Production designer: Guy Moana
Legal advisor: Karen Soich
Mahi Tikanga: Pineaha Murray
Moriori consultant: Maui Solomon
Moriori dialogue translation: Dr Ross Clark

With: Sonny Kirikiri (Riwai), Calvin Tuteao (Hiriwanu Tapu), John Callen (Freeman), Michael Lawrence (Broughton), Star Gossage (Waiteka), Alan de Malmanche (Judge Rogan/Interviewer), Lawrence Makoare (Pemako), David Stott (Johnstone), William Davis (Pomare), Patrick Wilson (Johannes Engst), Ray Bishop (Meremere), Graeme Moran (Henry Halse), Eryn Wilson (Cooper Maines), Michael Holt (Bishop Selwyn), Mick Innes (Captain Harewood), Roimata Taimana (Koche), Lionel Waaka (Catechist Tamihana), Peter Tait (Will Sanders), John Paekau (Practical Farmer), Max Auld (Ewing), Ngamaru Raerino (Rakatau Katike), Rakai Karaitiana (Young Assistant), David Mercer (Surgeon’s Assistant), Prince Davis (Eel Worker), Herena Wood (Moemoe), Gina Emery (Farming Wife), Tama Davis (Pumipi), Pineaha Murray (Horomona), Piri Davis (Pohatu), Piripi Daniels (Te Wetini), Manu Korewha (Toenga Te Poki), Jason Greenwood (Surgeon), Antonio Maioha (Ngati Tama Warrior), Steven Smith (Tamakaroro)

Interviewers: Michael Morissey, John Brazier
Voice Over Commentary: Joanna Paul

Awards: Media Peace Award 2000

DV, PG, 82 minutes

Barry Barclay’s The Feathers of Peace reveals the guilty secret that Maori and Pakeha have shared for more than two centuries – the destruction of a race. This remarkable film traces the final impact which both races had on the indigenous Moriori of the Chatham Islands. Moriori were a peaceful people who, at the behest of their chief Nunuku, vowed never to take up arms against another human being. The title refers to the white feathers Moriori men wore in their beards to denote their peaceful intent. Drawing inspiration from Michael King’s seminal book, Moriori, The Feathers of Peace brings the truth about what happened on the Chathams to an even wider audience. To that the film uses modern television news techniques and dramatized documentary.

“Among the shooting stars who stud our film industry, Barry Barclay burns with a clear steady light. For nearly 30 years, he has quietly fashioned memorable films for cinema and television about the way Maori and pakeha brush up against each other. Some, such as Ngati, have been lyrical and approachable; others, like Te Rua, have trembled with barely suppressed indignation and an almost preternatural energy and have been less widely accessible for that. Others, such as the Tangata Whenua series, are landmarks. This feature-length documentary which confronts, 165 years after the event, the ruthlessly efficient extermination of the Chatham Islands’ first inhabitants, the Moriori, by invading Taranaki Maori, played to a packed house in the recent festival. A mainstream release is a rare distinction for a documentary but the film sits comfortably in the company of War Stories or Patu! He adapts the quasi-newsreel form pioneered by Peter Watkins’ excellent Culloden, made for British TV in the 60s, “interviewing” actors whose works are drawn from the contemporary record. But while that film pitched us into the middle of a single battle, this takes us slowly and inexorably in the heart of our nation’s most shameful forgotten stories. Interrogating the past to illuminate the present, the film takes us from the first European landfall in 1791, through the 1835 Maori invasions to the 1870 Land Court decisions which gave more than 97 per cent of the islands to the invaders and not to the resolutely pacifist people they displaced. Along the way, and almost incidentally, it disposes of the reactionary fiction that Maori displaced Moriori from mainland Aotearoa and therefore have no claim on this land. It’s an intensely absorbing work which brings history alive and should be seen by everyone who claims the name New Zealander.” — Peter Calder, NZ Herald, 5 August 2000

“In New Zealand, where film culture is dominated by industry-conscious craftspeople and increasingly commercially minded funding bodies, there’s few filmmakers who deserve to be called mavericks, or who produce work that stands out as being worthy of the title. One who does both is Barry Barclay, whose previous films include one of the best New Zealand features, Ngati, and a very underrated, prescient doco from the early 80s about the ownership of genetic materials, The Neglected Miracle. His new documentary The Feathers of Peace is the kind of rich, provocative and uncompromising film about New Zealand history we should be seeing and almost never do. The film charts the history of the Moriori people in the Chatham Islands, as recounted in Michael King’s book Moriori... It’s a great story – and great revisionist history. As Barclay himself is quick to point out, this is not the prevailing understanding of the situation. “I knew nothing about Moriori and what I did know was wrong”, he says. “The typical New Zealand idea is that they were a vanished people and they’d been overrun by more energetic Maori invasions or settlements.” But King’s book is several years old now – apart from anything, it took 7 years to get the film funded, through a combination of NZ on Air and Film Commission funding – and the film takes the historical documentation with in the book, and uses it as the basis for a very striking use of an unusual documentary approach – almost the entirety of the film is told through dramatised reconstruction, and fictionalised interviews with actors playing the roles of historical figures. It’s an approach which raises a lot of questions of its own – for instance about the way modern news techniques are accepted unambivalently as ‘documentary’ by audiences – but its also one that presents the varied and complex perspectives in an understandable and vivid way. “I wanted to know, how do people react in these situations?”, Barclay told me. “You couldn’t sit on the fence, people are under enormous stress… These people are 100, 200 years in the past but they could still be people on the street. These human qualities intrigued me.” This film is very good at articulating these human qualities… it doesn’t shy away from expressing the way that everybody has their reasons, and that some of them are harder to understand than others.” — C Walker, City Voice, 20 July 2000

Screenings: The Feathers of Peace screened on 18 June 2009; on 17 September 2008 in a series of feature films by the late Barry Barclay; and on 13 June 2007 as part of the Arts Foundation Laureates season