Once Were Warriors opened my eyes to New Zealand's real problems

Friday, 7 June 2019

Stuff reporter Imogen Neale revisits some of the themes raised in the groundbreaking film Once Were Warriors and asks what, if anything, has changed since its release.

OPINION: Of the 18 charges sheets at Auckland's Manukau District Court one Monday morning, 11 were related to family violence.

Some of the men had threatened to kill their partner - one with a kitchen knife, one with a hammer, one with a frozen chicken - and some had tried to strangle them.

One of the men was a truck driver, several were unemployed, one was a mechanic.

Other than their charge sheets, they didn't have that much in common: not addresses, not ages - 46 to18 years old, not ethnicities.

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* Author Alan Duff wouldn't write Once Were Warriors again

Rate of violence in New Zealand are still high.

* Once Were Warriors 25 years on: Youth suicide rate flat - what needs to change?**

Flicking through them at court morning after morning like this, can be a surreal experience.

Excess breath alcohol, breaches of bail, possession of methamphetamine or some other objectionable material, and assaults on children.

They're there in abundance, day after day.

And yet, when I started looking at crime data for Stuff's Once Were Warriors project, I expected to be pleasantly surprised.

Surely, things would be better now?

I was 14 years old when the film came out and I remember being both horrified and mesmerised.

My family and I had just returned from living in Singapore, where people seemed to treat Kiwis as the people most likely to be everybody's best, most chill, friend.

I was proud when the Kiwi Club had performed the haka, and grinned stupidly when I busted out the little te reo I knew for my classmates.

Coming home was a massive adjustment and it didn't go well.

Family harm incidents are high on the agenda for police call outs.

I went to a public school and was horrified one of my friends was sleeping in an aunty's garage with his siblings, having Weetbix for dinner.

Others were heavily into graffiti, substance abuse and petty theft.

One guy was expelled for chewing psychoactive peyote leaves, a friend was pregnant and another had his head slammed into a wall by a classmate, knocking out his teeth.

At 15 years old I sometimes just couldn't face school.

I transferred to a private school and the problems were the same but different; alcohol came out of a glass cabinet not a box, and police were asked to turn off their sirens and use the back entrance.

In the years since, I have done a master's degree in sociology and become a journalist - lately, one focused on police and crime.

I absolutely attribute Once Were Warriors and trying to readjust to life in New Zealand, with setting me on this path.

New Zealand is such an oxymoron and I don't get it.

In my job, I have been so fortunate to spend hours in the back of a police car, driving around with frontline cops in south and central Auckland.

The first night I went out I wandered into a bedroom and found a baby sound asleep with a watchful dog curled up next to him on either side.

As he slept, police questioned his father about assaulting his mother at a table covered in plastic bags and small squares of tin foil.

Another time, I held a bag of frozen peas to a woman's forehead as her ex-partner, bleeding profusely after being attacked by her loyal dog, yelled out how much he loved her. He was sorry.

She was an educated woman with an important job and her face was an absolute mess.

One night we went to a lifestyle block and inside the renovated villa, the family shook their heads when trying to explain the hell they were locked in, living with a son hooked on methamphetamine.

All the people I have spoken to with regards to the key themes in Once Were Warriors, are passionate, tireless people, and I feel as though they have to grapple with this oxymoron every day; the violence behind the benign facade.

They draw hope from the small things - the slight shifts in behaviour and the promise of change.

They all agree there are no hard and fast figures to rely on to tell the true picture of whether things are better or worse than they were 25 years ago. Statisticians keep changing what they measure and how they measure it.

So they go with their gut feeling, and that is that while some things have changed, such as methamphetamine overtaking glue as many people's drug of choice, Once Were Warriors is still as relevant as the day it hit the screens and shocked the nation.