Returning from NZIFF for a nationwide theatrical run, The Haka Party Incident director Katie Wolfe talks to Liam Maguren about the film’s stage origins, gathering her interview subjects, the “willful forgetting” of NZ history, and the commodity of truth.
The Haka Party Incident
“The last New Zealand war happened in 1979. It lasted three minutes.” That’s the tagline of the latest Aotearoa film The Haka Party Incident.
It was a relatively short conflict: He Taua, a group of young Māori and Pasifika activists, clashed with University of Auckland engineering students, who consistently put on a ‘mock’ haka. However, as this documentary lays out, this three-minute “war” came with a long and heavy aftermath—a significant one for a country that would soon protest apartheid with the 1981 Springbok tour.
I caught the film at Whānau Mārama last year, calling it “an incredibly illuminating examination of a moment in time that says so much about Māori-Pākehā relations/tensions over the past 50 years… There’s anger to be felt about the injustice of the situation, but also a significant feeling of hope seeing everyone using this history as a means to learn and grow.”
Director Katie Wolfe, who I talked to over video chat, first told the story in her award-winning verbatim theatre production—a kind of stage documentary where actors perform the interviews using the spoken words of the actual people they’re portraying. What drove her to make the play? Preserving our history.
“People didn’t really know about [the indicent],” Wolfe recalls. “I read about it in Ranginui Walker’s Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: it’s a Māori POV of Aotearoa history. It struck me. It seemed, to me, really significant. I became interested in why it had been forgotten.
“Obviously, for the university, they just wanted to forget it. It was just a subject that no one brought up. Even many years later, if they’d been at a dinner party with an old engineering mate from university and someone might bring it up, that the conversation would get shut down.
“The media played a role in it as well. I don’t think the media really wanted to deal with race relations issues back then [and were] biased in the way it reported it. The Star—which no longer exists—its headline was: Gang Rampage at University. Of course, it wasn’t that.
“We had this idea in the ‘70s that we were this happy-go-lucky country. That we didn’t have to deal with those kinds of issues. I think that played a lot into it as well.
“I call it ‘Willful forgetting.’ I think it is part of our society. The same sort of thing happened in terms of the New Zealand Wars. They were never taught. When we had Anzac Day, those wars were not remembered… another part of our history that we didn’t really want to think about.”
While filming the interviews for the play, Wolfe kept herself open to the possibility that they could be used later on in a movie or TV project. “The [members] of He Taua were the very first ones I did, which was 2017. It took me two years to get the engineers on camera. They were very reticent at first to be interviewed about it.
“Brent was always keen but with Ian, he was really nervous to speak. Would you believe, his wife came into the Auckland Theatre Company. I met her and she said, ‘Look, I really would like my husband to talk about this.’ I met them a few times and slowly won their trust—I wasn’t going portray them as being the baddies and take them down.
With Ian on board, the other engineers in the film came forward. “It was like a leapfrog thing. Once one of them was okay about talking to me, they said: I think It’s okay to talk about it.”
I posit that the film’s strength comes from its ability to present perspectives from all sides of the incident. Wolfe elaborates: “The alchemy of truth is becoming more and more precious every day. Even when I started making it in 2017, I couldn’t have imagined this world of misinformation that we now swim in. The story is from the horse’s mouth. It’s the people who were there in the room. It’s not opinion. It’s not academics analysing it. It’s those that were in the room that day, telling their side of the story. And I think that commodity of truth, verbatim, is becoming more and more potent.”
I ask Wolfe it there’s a current moment from Aotearoa that could get The Haka Party Incident treatment in the years to come. “When Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke performed Ka Mate in Parliament when the Treaty Principles Bill was on the table, the way that the paper got [torn] perfectly in half, when Gerry Brownlee goes, ‘Oh no, don’t do that…’ That was an extraordinary moment.
“Te Rauparaha’s haka is one of the most important haka in New Zealand. All New Zealanders know Ka Mate. It’s known internationally. It’s written by a revered Rangatira Te Rauparaha. It very much was appropriate for it to be performed in parliament.
“Then, an amazing moment after they finished, Brownlee stands up and says, ‘We will adjourn and return with the ringing of the bells.’ Which, of course, is a tradition in the Westminster system of parliament. So there’s a cultural practice there that you [observe] but you can’t observe a cultural practice with your treaty partner?
“I think that’s going to be another event that’ll be indelible in our history.”
THIS INTERVIEW HAS BEEN EDITED FOR BREVITY AND CLARITY
