Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 15 July

The Haka Party Incident (Wolfe, 2024)

While we are on the subject of RNZ, I notice that one of the best recent local documentaries was now streaming on the RNZ website.

When I reviewed the film earlier this year, I was surprised that the national radio broadcaster would be given such a prominent credit but now it makes much more sense. RNZ has spent much of the last ten years trying to work out how to become more than just a radio service with a website attached and investing in productions like The Haka Party Incident is a natural follow-up to award-winning documentaries like NZ Wars: The Story of Ruapekapeka.

The RNZ website has had a “Video” tab in the navigation for months but I’ve never investigated it properly until now. To my surprise – and my chagrin as a supposed member of the RNZ whānau – I realise that there is a lot of content sitting behind that link.

The Auckland University Engineering Society had been indulging in drunken buffoonery to celebrate Capping Week for decades but by 1979 the practice of dressing up in plastic grass skirts and painting offensive slogans on their bodies before going on a downtown Auckland pub crawl had tested the patience of Māori and the ‘“radical” group He Taua decided that something had to be done.

My review is only eight minutes long and is a decent introduction to the subject but, to be honest, you could just as easily jump right in:

The response post-fracas was interesting. Most pākehā couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. New Zealand had been making fun of Māori culture for decades – there are some contemporary television clips featuring beloved Kiwi comedians in this documentary that will make your hair curl – and that was just how we expressed our affection at the time, by being patronising and dismissive.

The state – already leaning towards authoritarianism under Muldoon – had to take action and did. He Taua were charged with the highly politicised crime of riot.

He Taua weren’t part of the university community. Evidently, Māori at Auckland University had been approached to take action against the engineers’ haka but had chosen not to rock the boat so it was left to so-called radical outsiders.

At the open meeting in the quad, senior Māori leaders (including people from the Race Relations Conciliator’s office), urged calm and reconciliation.

The engineers didn’t know what they had done wrong and – as Wolfe’s documentary demonstrates so depressingly – many of them still don’t.