A new film about Māori academic, activist writer and long-time Listener columnist Ranginui Walker shines a light on the long shadow he cast over Aotearoa – and his family.
“Being Māori is hard, being Māori is sad, being Māori is to laugh, being Māori is to cry, being Māori is forever,” wrote Dr Ranginui Walker in these pages 45 years ago, in one of the columns that represented, for much of the New Zealand mainstream, an introduction to the radical idea of a distinct Māori worldview.
It’s a line he wrote more than once, meditated over, amended to suit the context. It lives again in the title of Being Māori: The Dr Ranginui Walker Story, a feature-length documentary for Whakaata Māori. The film is as much a family history as it is a biography, and interviews with his children and grandchildren suggest Walker cast a long shadow. They are subject to his expectations even now.
“There’s so many doctors in the family,” laughs producer-director Bradley Walker. “You say ‘Dr Walker’ and they all look up.”
Walker (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui, Te Whakatōhea) himself did not meet Ranginui Walker until he went to his office at the University of Auckland as a teenager to have his whakapapa signed off so he could get a grant.
“He goes, ‘Well, you need to go to one of your elders for your iwi.’ I said, ‘That’s why I’m here – you’re one of my elders.’ ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Bradley Walker.’ ‘Oh, my gosh, and whose son?’ ‘Eru Walker.’ They were first cousins, and it was a complex relationship – Ranginui was handpicked by the family to go to university and boarding school. Dad wasn’t, failed English at school and went a different route. So, sending me there was a bit of a show-off from Dad, saying, ‘My son can now get into university as well.’”
But the young man and Walker became close in ways that go to the heart of the film.
“I had dreams about him. And I spoke to my dad about a particular Māori phrase that came to me. I didn’t even understand it at that time. And he says, ‘You need to go see your uncle.’ So, I go see him on the Saturday prior to the week that he died. I didn’t even know he was sick, and I go see him at his house and he’s sitting in shorts on his bed, because he’s hot and he’s tired. I spoke with him for about two hours. And he laid down for me what he had wanted me to carry on with, in the iwi sense and also in the family sense.”
In the few months between Ranginui Walker’s death in 2016 and that of Deirdre, his wife of 63 years, Walker visited her regularly, “just talking, really”. He dreamed about her, too, on the night she died. By then, Deirdre had told him he would be receiving the contents of her husband’s library, “‘all these boxes and boxes of books of all those papers from the library’ – and I’m going, why me?”
Walker, whose portfolio encompasses the screen production company Adrenalin Group, a Māori employment agency and board roles with the Whakatōhea Māori Trust and related agencies, where he effectively succeeded Ranginui Walker, also asked for her consent to make a documentary. “Deirdre said yes, which gave me a good standing with the family.”
Among the library’s contents was an unpublished autobiography – one Ranginui Walker had to rewrite twice from memory after his grandson Curtis deleted it twice while mucking about on his computer as a kid. The adult Curtis narrates the doco.
The book, which may soon finally be published, sets the structure of the film, but also left Walker with a problem. It was in English, and, for various reasons, including the stipulations of Te Māngai Pāho funding, he needed his subject to tell his story in te reo Māori.
There turned out to be such an account, captured several years before Ranginui Walker’s death by another documentarian, Ngahuia Wade, for the then Māori Television series E tū Kahikatea. Walker stumbled on the entire two-and-a-half-hour interview and asked Wade if he could use it. Wary at first, she agreed after meeting him. The footage, most of it previously unseen, has the unmistakeable tone of a valedictory.
“In the interview, he’s reflecting on his time and his importance and what he wants to leave behind. I was so fortunate to have the permission from Ngahuia. Without that, it would have been just a shadow of itself. And I was really, really struggling, with the production and creatively – and psychologically, really – to finish it.”
This story also touches on a key thesis of the documentary: that Ranginui Walker achieved what he did, and reached the audience he did, because he recognised the power of education. His most influential prose – sometimes austere, sometimes poetic, invariably authoritatively argued – was in English.
Yet, in achieving this authority in the European world, he became separated from his roots in Ōpōtiki, where he was born in 1932. He lost te reo Māori because he was forbidden to speak it at school, and had to relearn it as an adult.
“His daughter touched on that in the doco, where she talks about how they went through a really standard education system: go to school, go to university. We weren’t given the opportunity of going into that whole Māori space – kōhanga or kura or wānanga. We were told, that’s the space we need to go through, that whole European schooling space.
“If you have the academic background, that gives you more authority – he’s quite clear on that as being a way forward. And I think he’s right. If you look at Māori society, we’re starting to get people who are educated across those different spaces – academics, lawyers. That’s when we start to get some strength in terms of influencing decisions.”
The film also argues that Deirdre, who was Pākehā, played a key part in the representation of Māori experience that is Walker’s legacy. “The relationship with Deirdre was important, because everyone talks about him being the man – but it was really a duo that made all that stuff. All the books that he wrote, and all his papers, the Listener and stuff, a lot of it came from her as well. People don’t realise that, and I wanted to make that clear. It was a unique partnership.”
Ranginui Walker certainly seemed to know it. He famously quipped that New Zealand race relations problems would ultimately be resolved “in the bedrooms of the nation”.
It wasn’t always that easy: the couple battled prejudice simply for being who they were, and Walker himself was once described by Auckland mayor Sir Dove-Myer Robinson as “the most dangerous man in New Zealand”.
The younger Walker is acutely aware that his story is being told at a time when race relations – and Māori aspirations and solutions – are again a matter of political controversy.
“I look at New Zealand society, and we’ve made a lot of progress, but yet we’re almost taking two steps back again now with the rise of right-wing political parties. You’re seeing that sort of rhetoric coming through, and it’s rhetoric that fires up a certain part of society that wants to respond like that.
“It’s been a struggle to get here, you know, and while he’s initiated that, the struggle is never over. He’s quite clear about that. I think there’s a lot in it that’s timely.”
Being Māori: The Dr Ranginui Walker Story, Whakaata Māori, Monday, September 11, 8.30pm.
