November 19, 2021
Māori presence through radio’s century
It’s now 100 years since the first radio broadcast in New Zealand.
Broadcaster and one of the founders of Wellington station Te Upoko o Te Ika, Piripi Walker, says Māori have been there from the beginning.
He interviewed many kaumatua and kuia who had taken part in broadcasts as far back as the 1920s when Māori culture was seen as something to be collected and preserved.
“When we got to have experimental Māori radio stations we wanted, Huirangi (Waikerepuru) and I and others in Poneke, wanted to have a morning show that sounded like English radio but the voice the native-speaking Māori community in Wellington, the freezing workers, I was working at the freezing works, those who worked on the wharves, what they were doing on a daily basis with their kuia and koroua, what they were talking about at breakfast, but the radio would be in Māori,” he says.
Piripi Walker says his own development as a broadcaster and a speaker came from working alongside the likes of Wiremu Parker, Bill Kerekere, Purewa Biddle and Hamuera Mitchell who built up valuable libraries of interviews with native speakers.