Talking to the Listener last June about the success of his jovial te ao Māori explainer series From Hongi to Hāngī, Tāmati Rīmene-Sproat mentioned a planned episode on the Treaty of Waitangi.
“That one’s going to be really difficult,” he worried. “We’re going to need to spend a lot of time crafting how we tell that … It will need to be challenging to the audience and some of their thinking, while not trying to scare them away. We need to keep them engaged in the conversations that we need to have when it comes to the treaty.”
Since then, that conversation has (re)turned to a shouting match, due to the anti-treaty moves of the Act Party. And, since then, it seems, Rīmene-Sproat’s planned treaty show has changed tack.
It’s not actually about te tiriti, but Waitangi Day itself. Or that’s how it’s been packaged. “This isn’t about the articles or the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi,” Rīmene-Sproat (Rangitāne, Ngāti Kahungunu) says in the opening, in a move designed to stop middle Aotearoa reaching for the remote. “It’s about Waitangi Day – a day when all of us can express exactly who we are, and we all do it differently.”
He says it with such cheery conviction, it almost stops you going: “Huh! Do we? Really?”
Despite the re-angling and rebranding, the episode is actually a very good primer on the document, a decent overview of the day’s changing significance in the past 183 years and its history of protest and politics. Cue replays of Don Brash getting pelted and Steven Joyce walloped by the dildo. Interestingly, as one of the show’s interviewees points out, treaty architect James Busby was also subject to a phallic insult by the locals in his day. Ah, tradition.
It is padded with some well-known, mostly TVNZ, faces offering mild-mannered reckons. Rīmene-Sproat’s vox pops, some done at Waitangi at last year’s celebrations, are amusing and sometimes surprisingly affecting. So, here’s to you unnamed National Library staff member who works every Waitangi Day when visitors flock to see the documents, and to you, Scottish-born Pākehā woman and fluent te reo speaker whose beautifully articulated thoughts about te tiriti leave the voluble Rīmene-Sproat speechless.
Some of the most interesting personal stories are about how some activists of yore are the Treaty Grounds gatekeepers of today. It’s a fairly soft, don’t-scare-the-horses show, but near the end, you have to wonder if its sunny host has thrown in some subtext about his own thoughts on te tiriti. There’s a curious shot of him in the Treaty House silently tapping a cardboard notice on one of Busby’s antique bedspreads. It says: “Do not touch.”
A personal footnote: This writer doesn’t mind a show about the day rather than the document. I grew up in Northland in the 1970s and was dragged along to many Treaty Ground commemorations, including in 1973 when Norman Kirk famously walked hand in hand with a kid from the kapa haka group. And I was there the following year, when Kirk hosted the Queen, fresh from her sterling performance in the ribbon-cutting marathon at the Christchurch Commonwealth Games.
During the evening, we and HRH were subjected to a strange pageant of colonial history, the likes of which has thankfully never been repeated. During the day, she got a ride in Waitangi’s own royal waka, Ngātokimatawhaorua. We took photos. You can almost see her in them.
The show briefly mentions that the 36m canoe had first to be manhandled “by the uncles” and log-rolled down the steep hill from the Treaty Grounds, where it had been since the 1940 centennial.
My father, who had shifted a few smaller boats in his time, went along and helped. I watched with the other kids. As a small, middle-aged Scotsman, he stood out among those guiding the waka’s six tonnes down the hill to the sea in an exercise involving a lot of muscle and very little health and safety.
It was awesome. Best Waitangi memory ever. Seeing history up close is like that. Watching it being replayed on shows like this isn’t bad, either.
Hongi to Hāngī: And Everything In Between: Waitangi Day, Tuesday, February 6, TVNZ 1, 7.30pm.
