KEY POINTS:
Television documentaries that come heralded by promos promising answers to unsolved mysteries so often prove to be windy and overblown affairs.
But last night's re-examination of the Wahine interisland ferry sinking in April 1968 (Inside Story: The Wahine Disaster, TV One, 9.30) navigated its way solidly around the sensationalist reefs on which so many of the lightweights run aground.
I have to admit to taking those promo boasts of answering "40 years of questions" and revealing "major new footage" as a warning this might deliver only endlessly repeated melodramatics and those annoying, false climaxes in the narrative built in for the ad breaks. And, I couldn't help wondering whether, four decades on, anyone, except those directly involved, remembered what the questions ought to be?
But The Wahine Disaster delivered exactly what was called for as the 40th anniversary approaches, a well-researched anatomy of a national tragedy and, more powerfully, in its reassessment of the official rescue effort and subsequent inquiry, a stark reminder that the past is indeed another country. The programme began with a small lurch towards the dramatics, with the inevitable, Titanic-like comparisons, as we learned the boat was the pride of the fleet, big, strong, gleaming and a paragon of modernity. But this documentary turned out to be a model of restraint, with a sensible script avoiding hyperbole. The makers wisely gave most of the airtime to the talking heads, letting the survivors, crew and eyewitnesses tell the story in their own words. The interviews were admirably edited into a seamless, almost blow-by-blow account of the ill-fated journey.
The survivors' stories were all the more powerful for verging, in typical Kiwi style, on the understated. What we got was a real sense of what it was like to be caught up in such an event, from the initial excitement of the journey to the camaraderie and sense of adventure as the ship faltered and the crew brought out the tea and sandwiches. Then there was the long frustration of not knowing what was going on and the terrible point where it finally came home to the passengers that they were in real trouble.
Forty years later, computer graphics can give a sense of the kinds of seas the ferry was battling and the power of the storm. Shots of waves pounding the jagged shorelines of Wellington Harbour were chilling images of what the passengers were up against.
The re-examination of the rescue efforts showed the country woefully ill-prepared for such a tragedy. In the age of litigation, therapy and sense of entitlement, it is shocking to realise that the survivors got no compensation and no counselling. In this programme, at least, those caught up in the catastrophe have a dignified commemoration of the event.
But there's a sense of emptiness, too, in such hand-wringing so long after the event. As was all too evident in one mother's story of losing her son, and her ongoing nightmare of never knowing how he died, the most pressing and personal questions from the tragedy probably have no answers.
