Story of retribution

Press, 10 February 1983, Page 14

Story of retribution

While leading a small group of New Zealand colonial troops through his country, a Maori military scout, Te Wheke (Anzac Wallace), finds a burning village of which the inhabitants have been massacred.

It was a military blunder, the village was “friendly,” the dead were Te Wheke’s people — many of them old, women and children. The senseless horror of the massacre drives Te Wheke to turn on his European employers, take up his warrior chieftain past and seek a bloody retribution. For many of the Maoris seemingly subdued after nearly 30 years of Land War against the colonial forces, he may be the last chance they have to throw the foreign invader back into the sea.

Te Wheke, himself, is a strange mixture: both bloodthirsty and literate, with the savagery of his warrior race is combined a knowledge of the Bible and a taste for Shakespeare.

What makes him such a dangerous enemy is the fact that he is fighting in the mountains and the bush of his own country and with a flair for guerrilla warfare few regular army officers would have encountered.

For Jonathan Williamson (Bruno Lawrence) and his wife, Emily (Ilona Rodgers), the confrontation will create a compulsion for vengeance almost as strong as the rebels own demand for “utu.” For Colonel Elliot (Tim Elliot), the motives to seek out and destroy the rebel deserter are simpler, and he is incapable of grasping the subtleties of a despised enemy. To this English aristocrat, Te Wheke is no more than a savage animal. Though even Elliot can not totally dismiss Wiremu (Wi Kuki Kaa), one of the Maori

scouts who, for some strange reason of his own, has found himself fighting alongside the white man. For one thing, however mysterious, Wiremu is probably more intelligent than the colonel.