One of the bloodiest and most contested periods in Aotearoa New Zealand history is explored in He Riri Awatea: Filming the New Zealand Wars, a new exhibition at the Canterbury Museum Pop-Up. 

The exhibition offers a fresh take on how stories about Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa (the New Zealand Wars) have been told on film. It includes clips from films, television and music videos telling stories from the war that raged from 1845 to 1872. Scenes from classic Kiwi films like Utu and River Queen play alongside clips from groundbreaking television shows like The Governor and music videos by artists such as Ria Hall. Props, costumes and posters from New Zealand film history also star in the exhibition, including a carved pou and period costumes from River Queen and a film camera used by 1920s Kiwi filmmaker Rudall Hayward.

The exhibition’s title, He Riri Awatea, means a battle in the daylight. This refers to cinema’s primary element—light—but also to the ways that the exhibition casts fresh light on the New Zealand Wars.

Co-curator Annabel Cooper says the film clips offer an insight into how Kiwis have reckoned with the conflict over generations: “The films enable you to see shifts in understandings of those wars, and the dramatic changes in how we think about them, that unfolded from the 1920s to now. This history has been put on screen over the course of almost a century, changing ideas about the New Zealand Wars.”

Co-curator Ariana Tikao (Kāi Tahu) said Māori were involved as actors, advisors and crew from the 1920s onwards and later directed and produced films. “For the Maori involved it was quite a serious undertaking, and a lot of the descendants are very proud of that involvement. As more Māori became involved with different aspects of film making the stories became richer and different perspectives were explored.”

The earliest film in the exhibition is The Te Kooti Trail from 1927, which was promoted with the strapline: “Wild history from New Zealand’s scarlet past”. Māori rangitira (leader) Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki was played in the film by Ngāi Tūhoe rangatira Te Pairi Tūterangi who knew the real Te Kooti. He’d been with him right through the war,” Cooper says. “He was very emphatic about certain aspects and details of his portrayal in the film. When people saw him in costume they were really shocked at how much he resembled Te Kooti. I believe it was a memorial act ensuring that he was protecting Te Kooti’s reputation and making sure it was a faithful portrayal.”

As New Zealand culture changed, so did the way the wars were portrayed on screen. The 1983 film Utu is influenced by contemporary Māori activism and the Springbok tour protests of 1981. According to Cooper, “In Utu, there is a reflection on New Zealand’s colonial past. The racial politics of the time were in a process of extraordinary change. Most of the people that worked on the film had an activist background.”

Tikao has a personal connection to one of the clips from the exhibition. At the 2017 APRA Silver Scroll Awards, she performed a version of thrash metal band Alien Weaponry’s song Raupatu using taonga puoro (traditional Māori musical instruments). The music video for the song appears in the exhibition. “It felt like a crazy task to be trying to do thrash metal with taonga puoro. But we decided to give an emotional response to that song. When we performed it, Alien Weaponry were sitting in the front row and they stood and performed a haka to us and then we were responding to them. It was powerful.”