★★★★ - THE POST
- The Haka Party Incident is a ripper of a story, perfectly told -
From the 1950s and into the 1970s, Auckland University engineering students had a capping week ritual they called the Haka Party.
Students would dress in grass skirts, drink a load of beer and charge around the campus and the inner city, performing progressively messier parodies of a traditional haka, I guess until exhaustion set in or the police showed up.
Early on, the haka parties were passed off as a bit of fun, and that's surely all the students were thinking too. But from the 1960s at least, and definitely after the 1975 hikoi from Northland to Wellington and the 1977 eviction of the community at Auckland's Bastion Point, there can't have been many people who couldn't understand that the haka parties were looking less like a harmless ritual, and more like a calculated mockery of Māori culture and aspiration.
That was definitely how it was being viewed by the members of He Taua, and in 1979, they decided to do something about it.
He Taua were a group of young activists who had met in the previous couple of years. They were aware that letters had been written to the university for years, asking them to intervene and put an end to the haka parties, and that nothing had happened.
So on April 30, 1979, a dozen He Taua members turned up at the offices of the engineering students and told them to take off the grass skirts and to call off the party. There were 30 or 40 students present, and they declined. There was a dust up that lasted about three minutes, and the matter was settled. The haka party was cancelled forever.
The newspapers had a field day, with headlines screaming that a gang had rampaged through campus - they meant He Taua of course, not the students. The police picked up the people they considered the ring-leaders, and they meted out beatings to a couple of them that were considerably more violent than anything that had happened to the students.
Katie Wolfe's film about these events is a little ripper - and it deserves to be watched by anyone who cares about the recent history of our country.
The Haka Party Incident first found an audience as a play that debuted at the Auckland Arts Festival in 2023. After selling out there, and at other venues around the motu, director Katie Wolfe (Ngāti Tama, Ngāti Mutunga, Ngāti Toa Rangatira) and her team have adapted the show into a documentary. And it works bloody well.
Wolfe does a fine job of setting up the story and of introducing us to the surviving players. The events are relived in contemporary interviews with people who were there on the day, and on both sides. There is plenty of laughter and conciliation, but also timely reminders that what was going on 40 and 50 years ago is still happening today. Footage of Hone Harawira's blistering address at Waitangi last year is sharply deployed - and it packs a more telling punch than any right-hook did in 1979.
Towards the end of the film, we travel to Auckland University and the offices of today's engineering students. They are a great-looking mob, and a genuinely diverse collection of people - especially compared to the nearly all-male and exclusively Pākeha crew from 1979.
We watch as they practise their own haka - Me Hoki Whakamuri Kia Anga Whakamua. Acknowledge The Past And Move Boldly Into The Future - which the school has performed since 2005.
And maybe that's the greatest strength of The Haka Party Incident: it reminds us that there is still a long way to go, and that te ao Māori and te reo Māori are still routinely threatened, denigrated and side-lined. But also that a lot has been achieved, and that living in this country - especially for a migrant kid like me - is an unbelievable privilege that makes me grin and give thanks every day.
The Haka Party Incident is a terrific addition to our roster of essential New Zealand docos. Go and have a look.
- Graeme Tuckett, THE POST
The Haka Party Incident is now playing at Light House Cinema!