I was a teenager in the era when most families had one shared computer, and it lived in a room you called ‘the computer room’. When cell phones weighed as much as a paperback edition of Ulysses, and had a long antenna you had to fully extend in order to get your mother to pick you up from ‘the club’. When it took twenty minutes to pirate a single Muse song on Soulseek. I mention this, because I feel like it’s impossible to explain the long-running television show The Tribe without understanding the cultural vacuum that allowed it to flourish. We were terminally offline, cut off from civilization. It was twilight in the Garden of Eden.

The Tribe is one of the defining artefacts of an early-2000s New Zealand adolescence. Everyone was on it. Nobody watched it, apart from the Germans, who for culturally obscure reasons were absolutely rabid for it. It was the kind of show that could only have been produced in a time that didn’t have unlimited broadband, in the same way that nobody would have bothered with the Bayeux Tapestry if they’d had easy access to Grand Theft Auto. The premise of the show was simple. In a world where a mysterious virus kills everyone over the age of eighteen, roving bands of steampunk teenagers form tribes to survive, living together in an abandoned shopping mall, having a lot of unprotected sex and speaking in unconvincing American accents. In a staggeringly apt description, one of the former actresses, Vanessa Stacey, likened it to “a cross between Mad Max and Home and Away.”

The most iconic thing about the show was the fashion. No face was left unpainted. No strand of hair undreadlocked. There were more decorative zippers, steampunk goggles and hodge-podge cultural appropriation than a decade’s worth of Burning Man festivals. The whole thing was, to put it mildly, extremely dank. I lived in Wellington around the time it was filmed and knew a few actors on the show, who all had cult followings in Eastern European countries with low GDPs. Better yet, our high school would occasionally loan the production studio spare teenagers for background scenes. This meant waking up at 5.30 in the morning, catching the train to Lower Hutt and pretending to peel potatoes in fingerless fishnet gloves. I once caught the train back to Johnsonville in such aggressive face paint I was forced to comfort a distressed elderly woman who was convinced I’d invented a new kind of cyber-satanism.

There are many great and iconic works of New Zealand art. But sometimes, when it comes to understanding a time and place, it’s just as useful to look at the cultural B-roll. The self-tanning infomercials. The Trade Me parenting message boards. The shockingly violent ACC safety ads. The Tribe is a rare and beautiful artefact, which shows what the world was like, for one golden moment, before we crossed the Rubicon and declared war on the angels. Power and Chaos, All Hail Zoot!