Uncovering Aotearoa’s magic
It’s NewZealand’s history, sacred places and cultural heritage that inspire filmmaker Kim Webby, inset below, to travel and tell stories, and it began on roadtrips with her grandfather whenshe was little.
Travel is in my DNA. New Zealand born, raised in te ao Pa¯keha¯ and te ao Ma¯ori, with half-Chinese whakapapa, my ancestors arrived in Aotearoa from afar and I walk in many worlds with varying degrees of comfort and discomfort.
My home is po¯tiki in Eastern Bay of Plenty, a picture-perfect small town, with a dark history and fighting spirit. My family moved there from Hokianga when I was 12, and I fell in love with po¯tiki’s beaches, bush and its edginess.
I leave often for work, directing documentaries throughout Aotearoa and overseas – less so overseas now in this Covid world.
As a child, I criss-crossed the North Island, with my grandfather, in his 1970s Commer campervan, quite a novelty back then. I slept in an alcove above the bed, alongside his .22 rifle. Talk about riding shotgun. We visited far-flung relatives in Hawke’s Bay, Taranaki, Manawatu¯, and Waikato.
My grandfather would pull over on a shingle heap when he was tired, cook a can of something on the gas burner, and I’d wash the dishes with sandstone in the river. There was always a river and we’d follow the endless road the next day.
When I was 15 or 16, the old Commer gave up the ghost in kaihau, a small town in Northland. My grandfather played the harmonica as a tractor towed it off the road.
We were bound for Ha¯wera in Taranaki and resumed the journey on a Road Services bus, which disgorged us in New Plymouth at midnight. My grandfather had a resourcefulness borne out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. We hopped on a freight train to Ha¯wera. I’m sure I felt the ghost of Woody Guthrie brush past.
Another Road Services bus brought me to po¯tiki for the first time. My mother had been ill, so I went to boarding school to begin college and this was the first school holidays. Mum was recovering with wha¯nau in po¯tiki that I’d never met.
I imagined a frontier town, wild west on the east coast. I was mad about horses and someone joked that po¯tiki was a one-horse town.
The family had four girls who showed me the sights. We walked along Waiotahe Beach on a typically cold winter’s day with clear blue skies. They pointed out a cloud on the horizon. That’s a volcano they said. ‘‘Yeah, nah,’’ I thought, ‘‘an island volcano, the stuff of Puff the Magic Dragon’’.
But it was Whakaari/White Island. I knew I was home.
Next stop was a pretty colonial church on the main street, Hiona St Stephens.
What I now know about the church is chilling and devastating for our local iwi, Whakato¯hea, because events there resulted in martial law and the confiscation of more than 58,000 hectares of land. It’s a heartache and financial burden Whakato¯hea still bears.
At, the time, no-one talked much about the 1865 killing of German missionary, Reverend¯O Carl Volkner, whose church it was.
As kids, we knew the church became a garrison during our New Zealand Wars, and we searched for bullet holes in its walls. It wasn’t¯untilO decades later that I learnt the full story.
It’s Aotearoa’s hidden history, our sacred places and multi-faceted cultural heritage, that keep me on the road telling stories.
Scenery, good food and quirky, comfortable places to stay are a bonus. But it’s the layers beneath the surface that make us uniquely Kiwi.
I want to tell those stories, beginning in my own backyard, the Bay of Plenty and then journey further, following the backroads and highways of Aotearoa, trod by my ancestors.
Join us each week as Kim Webby, a journalist and documentary film-maker, explores Aotearoa and uncovers the stories behind some of our well-loved tourist attractions.