Documentary shines light on profound impact Dr Ranginui Walker had on New Zealand

“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.”