Andrew Moore and Prime Minister Rob Muldoon at the opening of Skatopia in 1978. Photo / NZ Herald archives
Andrew Moore and Prime Minister Rob Muldoon at the opening of Skatopia in 1978. Photo / NZ Herald archives
The photograph on the front page of the New Zealand Herald for July 24, 1978, depicts a skinny, blond kid with one foot on a skateboard. A man crouches next to him, with a distinctive lopsided grin: it’s the Prime Minister, Robert Muldoon, who has come to open Skatopia, a stunning new skate park in Manukau, where Rainbow’s End stands now.
Muldoon is all over the day’s lead story too, which is about the Government’s plans for how many cars the local motor vehicle industry will produce in the coming year. History records what happened there, but has far less to say about the great skateboard boom of the late 1970s, which formed itself just as much around the socioeconomic contours of New Zealand at the time.
American magazines heralded a technical revolution that had turned skateboards from toys to the basis of a new youth culture — but the old import restrictions made gear hard to get, so local companies sprang up to fill the gap. The expansion of Auckland’s North Shore suburbs opened up smooth, curving, temporarily-empty asphalt streets. Supermarkets were appearing, but couldn’t trade on weekends, so their big carparks became informal gathering places for crowds of kids on wheels.
Skate boarding was huge part of Kiwi youth culture in the late-1970s
It’s a story that might not have been told were it not for Andrew Moore, whose 2006 feature documentary No More Heroes, hard to find for years, has been added to the NZ On Screen visual archive.
“It’s an unseen part of history,” says the director. “I think the thing about the film is that there are no other documentaries that cover what young people were doing in the 70s like that.”
It’s a history of which Moore himself is a part. He’s the skinny kid in the photo, aged 9. He’d joined the team operated by Edwards, one of the two local companies (the other was Trax) that fed the boom. In the year that followed, still at primary school, he’d win the national skateboarding champs, junior section, and make the pilgrimage to America. No More Heroes is about that endless summer.
More particularly, it’s about the teenage heroes he looked up to: Peter Boronski, another sun-bleached kid from the Shore, with the compact physique of a surfer; Victor Viskovich, who was born in Samoa and grew up poor in the old Mt Eden; Grant Macredie, a hyper-ambitious kid from Papatoetoe who practised meditation; and the impossibly lithe Elroy Ainsley, Ngāti Porou East Coast, who wore his hair like Jimi Hendrix and skated that way too.
Elroy Ainsley at New Lynn Bowl. Photo / Kerry Brown
There are many other characters in the film, not the least of them Moore’s father Dave, who didn’t just encourage his sons’ pursuits, but drove them to the parks, built boards and ramps for them and, after Andrew joined Team Edwards, became the team’s road manager and MC for their demonstrations around the country.
“He was really into everything the kids were doing,” Moore recalls. “And he was just really good on the mic. He couldn’t help himself on the mic!”
The memories might have stayed memories, but in the mid-90s Moore discovered that Colin Hallam (the father of another skater, Tony Hallam) had captured Super-8 film of the action at Skatopia. A pitch for funding to make a short film from the footage was turned down, but Moore and his co-producer Daren King tried again in 2000 and spent the next five years looking for more film and photographs.
Andrew Moore at the Hamilton skate bowl in 1979. Photo / Colin Hallam
Moore searched microfiche archives of the North Shore Times and found that its photographer, Tony Mallett, had boxes of photographs. He also found more pristine Super 8 footage of the halcyon days at Glenfield Mall. Finding the original skaters was also a job, pre-Facebook — Ainsley was tracked down a long way from Whakatāne, in Alaska. The crucial news film of Muldoon opening Skatopia basically fell out of sky — for reasons no one could remember, it was sitting at the office of the television show Primo Freerider, where Moore got a job.
Moore recalls the opening day — and the Prime Minister — well.
“They just pulled me aside and said, ‘Hey, we want you to take a photo with Rob Muldoon.’
“I sort of knew who he was and I remember standing with him and just all these photographers starting to click and then saying, ‘Just point at something and look like you’re talking,’ so I just did this weird point and opened my mouth. It doesn’t look like I’m talking. I’ve sort of got my eyes closed and I’m just pointing.
Andrew Moore and Prime Minister Rob Muldoon at the opening of Skatopia in 1978. photo / NZ Herald archives
“I remember him saying to me, ‘Ah these bloody photographers make you do some stupid stuff don’t they?’ He was kind of cool, you know? He was taking the piss a bit. And he ended up doing a really good speech about skateboarding and what a good thing it was for young people and stuff.”
Moore and King got a grant for an iMac, worked every weekend on editing and offered veteran rocker Graham Brazier all they could afford, $250, to narrate it. Brazier was a dream on the day, Moore says, and when he discovered they’d used every dollar they had on his fee, proceeded to spend it buying them drinks well into the night.
Peter Boronski at Skatopia. Photo / Kerry Brown
Eventually, No More Heroes was accepted for the 2006 New Zealand Film Festivals. The premiere sold out SkyCity and stormed down the country. And then it all went quiet. They’d been able to come up with the money to license their soundtrack — songs from Dragon, Golden Harvest and others — for five festival screenings, but a license for general release was far beyond their means. Moore, by this time working at a DVD replication company, ran off some copies for under-the-counter sales at a skate shop, but otherwise the film went unseen for a decade.
In 2016, Flying Nun Records, newly returned to its original ownership, came to the rescue and offered to license a new soundtrack from its catalogue for whatever Moore could afford. The recut film had another premiere — and a new life. Moore later had an offer from an Australian website that would have given the company exclusive rights for five years. “That just didn’t seem right,” he says. So last year, he approached NZ On Screen to see if they’d be interested in it for free. They were.
