Tapu Misa: Poignant stories on our own doorstep

Don't leave home till you've seen the country, the old tourism ads used to say. But documentary-maker Juliette Veber left home without even seeing her own city. Auckland, that is.

Veber grew up in Remuera, oblivious to the Auckland she says she discovered while making her first documentary, Trouble Is My Business, about the struggles of kids at a low-decile school in South Auckland.

That Auckland looks and feels nothing like the one that's currently being promoted in the slick new TV advertisement for the "Big Little City" that we're supposed to be (until we grow up to be a proper city like Melbourne or London, I suppose, by virtue, presumably, of having more Gucci and Louis Vuitton stores).

If that Auckland seems blind to our status as the largest Polynesian city in the world or the most diverse city in the country - not to mention the realities of life in that part of Auckland that many of us speed past on our way to or from the airport, or continue to pathologise in the news - well, so was Veber.

She had to go all the way to New York before she realised there were important stories waiting to be told at home. "I was trying to make a film in New York about Chinese garment workers, and one of them asked me what kind of social problems we had in New Zealand. I couldn't answer her."

Back home, Veber began making forays into South Auckland. She volunteered at Women's Refuge in Mangere and at the Monte Cecilia emergency house for homeless families. She got to know the community. It might as well have been a foreign country, rather than 20 minutes from home. "It was quite a new world for me," she says.

Veber got so immersed that she experienced culture shock whenever she went home to Ponsonby, where she was living at the time. "I couldn't cope with all the flash cars. Ponsonby seemed so materialistic and rich and superficial."

At Monte Cecilia, Veber got the chance to interview women who were on the DPB and was struck by how regretful they were about "that wrong choice that had changed everything for them".

In every case, that critical point - dropping out of school at 13 or getting pregnant at 14 - had put an end to their education. They had struggled ever since to get decent jobs and to keep their children from making the same mistakes.

Veber wanted to see why their lives had been derailed at 14 or 15. That led her to a part-time job as the arts co-ordinator at Aorere College in Papatoetoe.

The school had been through difficult times. Truancy was high and achievement low. There were gangs, graffiti, break-ins every weekend and fights every day. No one felt safe; younger students as well as teachers felt intimidated by older students.

As one student said: "I thought 'oh, no, I'll never learn anything here'."

It couldn't have been more different from Diocesan, the private girls' school Veber had attended. At Aorere, she found, you could be extraordinarily talented and still slip through the cracks.

By 2004, when Veber was there, the school was starting to turn around. Its 2006 ERO report noted a "significant transformation". School buildings had been upgraded, fencing had been installed to prevent break-ins, teaching quality had improved, and students felt safer.

Much of that is due to the leadership of the principal, Mike Williams, and the man he brought in to work with the students, assistant principal Gary Peach, who was the focus of the documentary.

"Peachy" was a former builder who was married to a Cook Islander. He was born and bred in Otara and had the accent to prove it. Although a strict disciplinarian with a fondness for his megaphone, it was clear that Peachy understood and cared.

The work took its toll, though. It's heartbreaking enough to watch the kids Peach couldn't save on film. Veber's doco captured Peach in his last six months at Aorere.

You have to be a particular kind of person to teach in these schools: tough yet loving. As Peach said, "It's so hard in these areas. It's so tough if you're coming from the outside and you're coming here to teach. You've got to understand that we value things differently. It's that sense of, are you genuine? Do you really care about my education? Do you really care about me as a person, first and foremost?"

Veber says she just wanted people "to empathise with the kids and understand what they're going through. It's very easy to judge when you don't know the area - to make the kinds of comments that Melissa Lee made recently. Those kinds of comments really hurt people who live there".

"I really wanted to make the point that if you show the kids that you care about them, it just makes a massive difference in terms of their journey. That was what Mr Peach was so great at; he was genuine and he cared. And the kids knew that."

* Trouble Is My Business is currently showing at the Academy in Auckland.