RADICAL RETHINK

A new film about Māori academic, activist writer and long-time Listener columnist Ranginui Walker shines a light on the long shadow he cast over Aotearoa - and his family.

- RUSSELL BROWN

'Being Māori is hard, being Mäori 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 Maori 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 producerdirector Bradley Walker. "You say 'Dr Walker' and they all look up."

Walker (Te Whānau-a-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 showoff 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.