Ain't nothing like a Dame

How the makers of the biographical feature about Dame Whina Cooper wrestled her complex life story into a big-screen drama.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

The greatest challenge of turning Dame Whina Cooper's life into big-screen drama was always going to be one of overabundance. Her life spanned 98 years. It didn't lack for drama, politically or personally. Throughout, she followed her own script and had her own flair for the dramatic.

Today, she's best remembered as the headscarfed, stooped kuia who led the 1975 Māori Land March. In the film Whina, she is portrayed in that era by Rena Owen, with Miriama McDowell and Tioreore Ngātai-Melbourne playing younger incarnations.

When historian Michael King wrote Whina, his definitive biography in 1983, the hikoi formed but one chapter the 11th of 13 - of her remark an able life of leadership, activism, and Catholicism. It was a lifetime spent, wrote King, in the pursuit of mana and one burdened by it.

"I can't sleep at night, because even at night I'm worrying about things and planning things," she told the NZ Woman's Weekly in 1982.

"It's the mana, you see. If you've got it, it never lets you alone. You have to be thinking about the people and working for them, all the time."

The march cemented Cooper's place as the most recognisable, most decorated Māori leader of the 20th century, one who had first become a national figure as the founding president of the Maori Women's Welfare League in 1951.

When she stepped down from the position in 1957, the organisation anointed her "Te Whaea o te Motu" ("the Mother of the Nation"). Her 1953 MBE was followed by a CBE, DBE, and membership of the Order of New Zealand.