NZ history series crosses frontier into compulsive viewing

It may be the last place on Earth but many people have found New Zealand a desirable place to move to, displaying remarkable courage and skill in doing so.

Saturday night's double episode debut of ambitious local history series Frontier of Dreams (TV One, 7.30) caught that enterprising and epic spirit.

The story of our country is one of newcomers, and this show is a welcome reminder of just how recent our past is and how fast and dramatic the human impact on the landscape has been.

Roughly 800 years ago, the country was almost completely covered in dense forest, teeming with birds and devoid of people. Only 500 years or so separate the major migrations of Polynesians and Europeans.

Less than 200 years after Maori and European started sharing the land in earnest, we have a major TV series about that meeting. It couldn't be better timed in terms of a country in post-election handwringing mode over society's divisions and pondering the effects of a new political force, the Maori Party.

That one of the programme's experts, Pita Sharples, is also now a member of Parliament for that party shows just how opportune this history series is.

If Saturday's episode is a standard sample, Frontiers of Dream looks set to be a candidate for taonga status, a wide-ranging and comprehensive look at who we are and where we live, one that will dispel myths and broaden understanding.

It began with what made the landscape, its flora and fauna unique: a country shaped by isolation, a major fault line, an unusual lack of land mammals.

This was followed by a survey of the origins of the Polynesian peoples and their migrations, an incredible story of marine and navigational skills.

The second half was devoted to the arrival of the Maori, using sources from archaeological evidence to DNA.

I have to admit to trepidation about telly history using re-enactments.

But with one or two exceptions - for example, a touching of hands between a Lapita explorer and Bismarck Islander symbolising a great cultural-melting-pot-moment was awfully cheesy - most were convincing.

Scenes of pre-European Maori life were particularly illuminating. Despite traditional Maori warrior dress being deeply unforgiving, the obviously 21st-century body shapes and skin hues weren't too much of a distraction.

Happily, a lot of the "re-enactments" were in a sense laid on, with the revival of Maori interest in traditional skills such as adze-grinding, carving, trap-making and, most spectacularly, Stanley Conrad's traditional canoe voyages resurrecting the art of navigation by stars and knowledge of winds and ocean currents.

The programme thankfully went light on the usual soundtrack of flutey whistles for traditional Maori scenes and for the most part the narrated script fired the imagination, with only occasional overindulgent lapses such as: "The new arrivals found the land beyond their wildest dreams."

This statement was not only presumptuous but contradicted the assertion that the first Polynesians to arrive were probably deliberate colonists with some idea of where they were headed.

This is a minor niggle, however, in what is promising to be the best excuse to stay home in front of the box that we've had from Saturday night telly since Kupe was a boy.