“O New Zealand” Gives Maori View Of History

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30686, 27 February 1965, Page 17

“O New Zealand” Gives Maori View Of History

A Maori view of New Zealand history will be presented to the people of Christchurch and visitors to the Pan Pacific Arts Festival when “O, New Zealand: Where the Maori Speaks” opens in the Repertory Theatre on March 6.

Compiled by' John Caselberg in 1961 during his tenure of the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago, “O New Zealand" is a selection of outspoken and neglected New Zealand writings from early European times to the present day.

The material used includes

letters and speeches of famous Maori chiefs, highlighted by chants, haka and songs.

“O New Zealand” will be presented by the Kohatu Players, an all-New Zealand group which is centred in the small Maori community at Kohatu, Nelson. The Maori elder of the group is Pipiwharauroa Pene, who will welcome the audiences to the two performances (the second is on Sunday, March 7), and who also welcomed Lord Freyberg to Picton in 1947. In “O New Zealand” her son, Reipa Pene, plays a humorous Maori historian, Kowhai Ngutu Kaka, and another senior Kohatu Player, Cyril Snowden, plays the warlike Hone Heke.

The 12 Kohatu Players include the Dunedin author, actor and producer, Michael Noonan, the young Dunedin actress, Jean Stewart, the Auckland playwright and comic actor, Alexander Guyan, the East Coast and Auckland orator and university lecturer, Koro Dewes. The Northland soprano, Liza Mahuta, sings an authentic age-old waiata aroha, described as “a hauntingly beautiful lament.”

Mr Caselberg will be the narrator. Originally from Nelson, he has been publishing both prose and verse since 1952. In 1957 he was co-winner of the Landfall prose award. Recently he has written two five-act verse plays whose themes are related to the material he has collected in “O New Zealand.”