Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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by the Government, which pays lip-service to the importance of films, but places
financial roadblocks in its way. There’s only enough money for low budget
films which makes it actually worse than it used to be. The Government’s
failure to give proper resources is inviting the best people in the industry to
leave New Zealand and that’s a tragedy. 974
At the same time, however, he felt that it was a great shame that it was so difficult for
experienced film makers to come back to New Zealand and make films that are New
Zealand stories, and that if the government made it impossible to do so, New Zealand
would be in the position of being “a country without a voice, a country that can’t look at
itself in the mirror”. 975
He has spent years developing a script set in New Zealand in the colonial era, about a
Pakeha woman living in a Maori community. What occasioned the change of heart?
Ward explains it in terms of his strong but conflicted sense of national identity: “I hate
to say this – I loathe it in myself – but [New Zealand] stories are the stories I identify
with more. But also, this is a very distinctive country. I think in many ways, Australia
is a lot more bland”. 976 (This is an interesting comment as Australian public opinion
tends to assume the reverse.) Ward became interested in the notion of “would-be
colonists ‘going native’, which was a common story in nineteenth-century New
Zealand, but one seldom told or heard”. He explains that:
Some terrible things happened to Maori in that century, a lot of
disenfranchisement, but I had the feeling also that, compared to other parts of
the world where they would poison grain crops and shoot people for sport, it was
nowhere near as extreme. I kept wondering why that was, why New Zealand is
unique and how that worked. Why there was a treaty here and not, for example,
in Australia or South Africa. They say there were no full-blooded Maori left by
the 1930s: that suggests a very high level of engagement. We know who the
chiefs and generals were, the people who took strong positions, left and right.
But how did the people in between behave in everyday engagement between the
two cultures? Those must have been the people who effected a lot of change,
974 Brent Lewis, "Mapping the Dreams," Sunday Star Times 1 November 1998: F1.
975 Sam Gaoa, unpublished interview with Vincent Ward, 17 October 1998.
976 Butcher, "What Films May Come," 85.