Ensuring a balanced view
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Transcript
- Greymouth High School student
- How do you decide what goes on the series, for example there’s a lot of Māori history that spans further than Pākehā history?
- Vincent Burke
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It was in fact a very difficult and painstaking process, deciding on how you are going to balance the story. We clearly wanted to make sure this truly reflected New Zealand history, and that it wasn’t just a Pākehā version of New Zealand history or just a Māori version of New Zealand history; that it actually told our story in as honest and clear a way as possible, and as fair a way as possible. As we’ve explained, it is a balancing act, trying to condense the history into 13 hours/chapters [episodes] – quite difficult. I guess we made the decision about how the chapters should be spread, and we made that in conjunction with the historians – with all our historians – way back five years ago when we first sat down and talked about it. There’s been a bit of change since then as we’ve shifted and worked through the realities of it.
- David Filer
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One of the issues with telling the stories of Māori history versus telling, say, the stories of the history after Pākehā arrived, is that, Māori history before the Europeans came is not a written history. So, we really…that second episode – well on the first night there were two episodes – and the second episode, which covered the Māori world from 1250 to say the arrival of Captain Cook, it’s difficult to tell that in a truly historical way because you do not have a written chronology; you do not have the detail that you have after the Europeans arrived when they start writing down their history, so that second episode is more like an anthropology than a history. After that, Episode 3 and onwards become much more historical, and there’s still a balancing act of the Māori side of the story versus the Pākehā side. As much as we’ve been able to, we’ve put in Māori history or the Māori view of New Zealand history alongside the Pākehā.
- Vincent Burke
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We had four historians that we relied on very heavily to guide us; there were 14 historians in all. But we had four historians, they were: Ranginui Walker, Manuka Henare (two Māori historians) and Claudia Orange and Jock Phillips (two Pākehā historians). They were our college of historians, and we lent heavily on them; and of course they appear quite a lot on-screen as well.