The Men Behind Country Calendar: From Left: Martin Didsbury, Frank Torley, Bill Knight and Tony Trotter photographed out "in the field" at some point during the 1970s. Absent from the iconic series, however, was any hint that prior to the arrival of the farming families Country Calendar regularly featured was half-a-millennium of Maori occupation and agriculture.
IT WAS FIFTY YEARS AGO, last week, that Country Calendar first appeared on New Zealanders’ television
screens. The programme has gone on to earn for itself that most coveted of
descriptions – iconic. Kiwis loved Country
Calendar almost from the first broadcast. It expressed in a very special
way the psychic link that binds even the most urbanised New Zealanders to the
open spaces and rural enterprises that made their country possible.
I have more reason than most to honour Country Calendar because it was my father, Tony Trotter, who played
a critical role in refining the programme’s compass and developing its unique
production style. My teenage years were spent watching my dad as he sat at the
kitchen table finalising, with the aid of a stop-watch, the script for that
week’s episode. (That I have spent the best part of my life slaving away over a
hot keyboard is no accident!)
It was only years later that a highly critical blog-post by
a young Auckland writer, Tim Selwyn, gave me cause to think about Country Calendar in a very different
way. Selwyn’s criticism was based on the undeniable fact that the programme was
a celebration of the achievements of the generations of Pakeha settlers who
built this country’s primary industries. Country
Calendar inevitably dated the history of the particular farm or district
they were covering from the time it was settled by Europeans. That these places
had half-a-millennium of human history prior to European settlement remained
both unspoken and unexamined.
In Selwyn’s scathing description, the typical farming family
featured “will mention they lease a neighbouring Maori block but not think to
mention the circumstances of how their farm became so. ‘The station’s history
goes back over a hundred years…’ is the usual broad brush that covers over the
confiscation, or seizure, or dirty deal typically behind a title that rests on
little more than the white man’s naked land-grabbing. History only goes back to
where the current owner wants it to go back on Country Calendar.”
Maori appeared in Country
Calendar – as shearers and shepherds, fishermen and farmers – but almost
never as the original occupiers, exploiters and owners of the land that has
always been the real hero of the programme. It was an absence that I had simply
failed to notice until Selwyn’s posting drew it to my attention.
Do I blame the original presenter of Country Calendar, the pipe-smoking Fred Barnes, for this crucial
absence? No, of course not. Neither do I blame my father, nor his worthy
successor, the programme’s long-time producer, Frank Torley. Because this
absence has been a feature of New Zealand cultural life since, at least, the
end of the land wars that effectively put an end to the thriving agricultural
communities that Maori had constructed in the twenty years between the signing
of the Treaty of Waitangi and the invasion of the Waikato by the Crown.
After the forcible subjugation of the Maori, what could
Settler New Zealand possibly say about the actual origins of all the thriving
farms and rural towns that sprang up in its wake? By any fair judgement,
Settler New Zealand’s title to the land upon which, and out of which, its
nationhood has been constructed remains, if not actually suspect, then, to put
it very mildly, challengeable. (How challengeable is made clear in just about
every judgement of the Waitangi Tribunal.) Unsurprisingly, the historical
consensus, unspoken for the most part, was that if there was nothing good to
say about the provenance of Pakeha rural property, then by far the best course
of action was to say nothing at all.
In this respect, Country
Calendar is guilty of nothing more than conforming to the cultural
imperatives of its time. The temptation, as the son of the programme’s pivotal
producer, is to say, rather warily: “Ah, but that was then and this is now. New
Zealand has changed hugely since 1966.” (As part of the production team behind Mana Whenua - Natural World of the Maori,
presented by Sir Tipene O’Reagan, my father was part of that change.)
But has it really? In the last fortnight, the head of Te Whakaruruhau, the Maori broadcasters’
association, Willie Jackson, has fronted a full-scale assault on what he
alleges is Radio New Zealand’s dearth of Maori content and coverage. Is the
cultural absence that Selwyn exposed in his 2013 posting about Country Calendar also a feature of the
last real exemplar of public broadcasting in New Zealand? More critically, what
would happen to RNZ’s audience if that absence was made good?
Even more subversively, has the advent of Maori radio
stations and Maori Television, by separating (ghettoising?) the cultural
expression of New Zealand’s original agriculturalists, provided the prime
conveyors of Pakeha iconography – like Country
Calendar and RNZ – with an alibi for absence?
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
1 March 2016.
