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Heart and soul

July 15 2003

Actress Keisha Castle-Hughes who played the film’s heroine, Pai.

To get to Whangara, you take a plane from Auckland to Gisborne, a palm-fringed provincial town on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island. From there, the coastal highway snakes past empty beaches, looping briefly inland, before an unmarked turn-off brings you back through loose, velvety folds of pastureland down to the sea.

Crest one last little hill and you are there, looking over an elaborately carved ceremonial Maori meeting place, or marae, six single-storey weatherboard houses, each in its own neat garden, the turquoise sheet of the Pacific and, in the further distance, the international dateline.

On a mild mid-winter's June morning, Whangara is the picture of tranquillity. But, over the past few months, this blip on the edge of the map has seen a stream of sightseers - a stream that could soon become a deluge. One house bears a sign of the times: No Unauthorised Visitors.

"They are saying we'll be invaded," muses Hone Taumaunu, 73, the village elder, who resembles a stern but benign headmaster. "There are strong indications that people will come."

He is not basing his prophecy on some ancient tribal lore, but on the impact of a film set and shot in Whangara, which has become an international sensation. An American group is already booked in to visit in April next year.

"I could see that they were money people," Taumaunu says, not unkindly. "Filthy rich. Been round the world a hundred times and want to see the odd new thing."

The film, Whale Rider, is inspired by the legend that local Maori were guided to New Zealand by the ancestral figure of Paikea, who swam there on the back of a whale (his carved figure still perches atop the Whangara's marae). The story takes place in the present day where Pai, a confident 11-year-old tomboy, believes she is destined to follow in her namesake's footsteps. She passes all the initiation rites with flying colours. But the chief is her grandfather, Koro, a stubborn man who maintains that leadership is handed down from father to eldest son, and though he loves Pai, he cannot accept her as his heir.

On paper, Whale Rider sounds like small fry; naive, ethnic, worthy and avoidable. Or, worse, a cute save-the-whale kids' adventure.

"That haunted me while we were making the film," says Witi Ihimaera, one of New Zealand's most prominent writers, author of the original novel and an associate producer of the movie. "I kept thinking, Oh my God, it will be just awful if people call it, Free Willy, the Maori Version'."

In fact, nobody thought that at all. At its world premiere in September last year in Toronto, North America's leading film festival, Whale Rider surged from nowhere to win the People's Choice Award. And that was just the beginning of an unbroken festival run: more standing ovations, more audience awards and mountains of soggy handkerchiefs.

"A lot of people cried and said, Thank you for bringing a bit of therapy to New York'," says Taumaunu, who, as the film's cultural adviser, went to the US when it opened there last month.

But Whale Rider was not only a cast-iron crowd-pleaser. From coast to coast, the heavy-hitting American critics chimed in with a chorus of superlatives. They reached for words such as "transcendent", "spellbinding" and "overwhelming" to describe the film's captivating characters, its emotional story and the skill with which, in the final sequence, a thoroughly ordinary, everyday world tips magically into myth.

Another of the film's champions is New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, also the minister of arts, culture and heritage. "It's about indigenous peoples and it has a gender component where it's the girl what does it'," says Clark during a meeting at the Beehive, the centre of the country's parliamentary complex in Wellington. "It's a simple story with universal appeal. In what culture do girls not have to fight for their rights?"

Ihimaera's family on his mother's side comes from Whangara, but he wrote Whale Rider in New York in 1987, prompted partly by the surreal sight of a whale beached on the Hudson River and partly by his two daughters' exasperation with American movies, where boys still made the running and girls did the screaming.

"Whale Rider is subversive within the Maori tradition, even if it doesn't seem so from a Western perspective," says Ihimaera, in the little book-lined study at the University of Auckland, where he teaches English and creative writing.

"The whole idea of a girl on a canoe giving instructions, fighting with the taiaha (a long fighting stick), might be normalised in films like The Matrix, but it is not normal for tribal cultures. There have been tremendous debates. People have asked me, Why did you let this happen?' And I answered them, Because I am in the business of cultural transformation'."

On the other side of Auckland, Whale Rider's director, Niki Caro, manoeuvres gingerly around her office-apartment: she is about to give birth to her first child. "People were very blase in Whangara about the success of the film. But when they found out I was pregnant, that really got their attention," she says, laughing.

"When I was researching the film, I spent a lot of time at schools and saw so much damage in girls of that age. My heart broke for them - they were all so closed in on themselves. If I can put something up there that shows they are important, it would be a good thing. I hope we will see some change and growth in the kids who see it."

Caro had to obtain a special dispensation for Keisha Castle-Hughes, the newcomer who plays Pai, to learn the exclusively male art of fighting with the taiaha stick. Castle-Hughes says she identified with Pai: "We're both very strong-willed and independent."

But she says she will not continue training with the taiaha: "I don't feel comfortable doing it because I'm a girl."

For his part, Taumaunu found the book "absolutely controversial. I disagree entirely with it. Leadership roles on the marae will never change, until I die. Then they can do what they like. I'm like the old man. I'm the epitome of that guy. Hah! But in a film, anything goes. And it makes a lovely story."

Even Clark has found herself at the sharp end of these entrenched attitudes. In 1998, she was visiting a marae as leader of the Labour Party when a female Maori activist disputed her right to make a formal speech there while it was still denied to Maori women. Clark's tears made front page headlines.

"In this country, we have an indigenous culture that lives parallel to the dominant culture," Clark says. "Those are issues which it really has to work out for itself. In a sense, we're bystanders. But I didn't like being caught in the middle of it."

However, many Maori women, such as the National Party MP Georgina te Heuheu, see the situation as more ambiguous.

"Traditional Maori culture is a lot more matriarchal than people give it credit for," says te Heuheu. "Women and men play equal and complementary roles. One thing that surprised British settlers was that Maori women always owned their own land interests. When titles were being clarified in the courts in the 1880s, a lot of the pictures of applicants waiting outside the courthouses are of women. You show me where that existed then in England."

Caro recalls that, once accepted by the Whangara community, they cared nothing that she was a woman and, moreover, a non-Maori, a fact that attracted sniping elsewhere.

"It was very, very hurtful how personal it became. But I realised that what I was going through in a small way was what Pai was going through. I took heart from that. Hone will tell you that he is exactly like Koro. Yet he supported me every single moment. That's part of the complexity of the culture, much as we want it to be black and white."

Whale Rider looks poised to be New Zealand's biggest movie export since Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. But ask Kiwi film people about that uber-blockbuster, and the responses are equivocal. Government campaigns after Rings' Oscar success flagged New Zealand as "Best Supporting Country" and the "home of Middle Earth", against competing claims from various British regions and disapproval from both the Tolkien estate and the Tolkien Society.

"There has been lots of ra-ra about how many people were going to come here after that," Caro says. "But so much of those films was created in the computer. There's nothing to see now."

Her own film had one key special effect - its fibreglass and latex whales. "With Whale Rider you go to Whangara and there it is. We even left a canoe and a couple of whales behind there."

Others query the strategy of courting foreign-backed epics such as Rings or the forthcoming Tom Cruise drama, The Last Samurai (in which NZ stands in for Japan), by selling fabulous scenery, big tax breaks, non-union labour and a cheap NZ dollar.

"Ideally you want more of your own stories told through film," Clark admits. "Through the success of a film such as Whale Rider it's clear that there is commercial potential for them."

Today, Whangara radiates a quiet well-being. Unlike many Maori, who ceded land and fishing rights to the British in the mid-19th century (a bitter issue for which reparations are still in progress), the local tribe owns swathes of property. "All that is ours," says Taumaunu, waving vaguely at the horizon. "We could sell off million-dollar sections all along the beach. We've had a lot of developers interested. We've just turned them all down."

But Whangara has not escaped the postwar urban drift that emptied villages as young people left in search of jobs. (Lee Tamahori's 1993 hit film, Once Were Warriors, was a bleak portrait of how these city Maoris had lost their heritage.) When he wrote Whale Rider, Ihimaera wanted to capture an economic malaise, he says.

"The old man is looking to the whales and the new chief for deliverance to return prosperity to the community."

Today, fewer than 30 people are permanently based in Whangara.

"My heart is in the marae," says Heni Nikora, 85. "But the doctors are in Gisborne."

And now there is the new sprinkler system to pay for, and an upgrade of the lavatories, and, Taumaunu adds, somewhat less approvingly, dimmer lighting in the marae. The money tourists could help foot the bills, with the right marketing.

"They will want an interactive, get-to-know-the-culture thing, where they can talk to real people," says Taumaunu, although he also doubts that his customers' thirst for an authentic experience will extend to dossing down on a mattress in the marae's communal dormitory.

"They will expect to be mollycoddled. Good restaurants. Good hotels. The usual thing: go and rough it for five minutes, out here and walk the beach and back to a bit of comfort."

Ihimaera has always believed, he says, that the Maori are a people who can absorb change. Certainly the elders of Whangara seem sanguine and pragmatic about the prospect of invasion.

"I have a funny idea we haven't even started yet," Taumaunu says. "We can't avoid it. It is a compliment to the place; it will raise the image and mana (spiritual authority) of the East Coast."

Another elder, Tutekohi Nikora, believes it will enhance employment prospects and "help people be self-sufficient".

But there is more at stake than that. As he leaves, Taumaunu speaks of fears that the marae could become a white elephant, its fabulous carvings a shrine to dusty, long-forgotten genealogies that few know how to read or care about. But now his ancestor has "gone round the world, having a bit of a swim", and he rather likes the idea of Paikea bringing some new blood back with him.

"The point is not just to make money. It's to unify. To say, 'Hey, here we are. Come and see us'. It's a beautiful little place. They call us the most remote spot in the most remote country in the world. But we're not all that primitive, are we?"





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