Still from the documentary "The Haka Party Incident" Photo: supplied
It's been nearly 46 years since a capping week stunt turned into a flashpoint for race relations in Aotearoa.
Each year Auckland University's engineering students - many of them drunk - dressed up in grass skirts and performed a parody haka around various parts of the campus and wider city.
But in 1979 a group of Māori and Pasifika students - later named He Taua - confronted those in the engineering Haka Party - leading to a number of the activists being arrested by police.
It was a little-known piece of history until it became of the subject of a play called The Haka Party Incident by writer and filmmaker Katie Wolfe.
She's now directed a documentary of the same name - where former members of both the Haka Party and He Taua discuss what happened that day.
Ben Dalton, now chief executive of Waitangi, the operating company of the Waitangi National Trust, said it was Hilda Halkyard-Harawira who made him aware of the situation at Auckland University.
"She was the person in the famous photos, and it was quite a big issue that she was holding on to.
"The Auckland University Māori Students' Association had been trying to raise awareness around it for some time, and she brought it up with us.
"We were part of the Waitangi Action Committee at that time, which was running the marches up to Waitangi to raise issues around the Treaty, and we'd all come out of Bastion Point."
While the engineering students' actions would not have resonated throughout the "Māori universe," it was significant for Māori students at the university, Dalton said.
"The Māori who were at university at that time, it wasn't like today, where there's like quite considerable numbers. If you went to university around that time, you probably knew the name of nearly every Māori who was attending.
"So, those who'd been there before were highly likely to have become leaders in their communities. So, it did offend those people."
The plan to disrupt the haka was for Halkyard-Harawira to go in and read a statement, Dalton said.
"We would be requesting that they cease and desist basically. It didn't go that way.
"The first person through the door got into a fracas with the first person they encountered, and that was pretty much it."
Dalton bears no animosity to the engineering students, he said.
"If I'd have been brought up in the world that they'd have been brought up in at that time, it's understandable where they were at.
"And having met them a number of times, now, I don't have any animosity towards any of them for how the world was at that time."
Ben Dalton (left) and Brent Meekan (right). Photo: Supplied: The Public Good
Brent Meekan was a member of the Haka Party in 1979 and is now business director, civil infrastructure for engineering company Beca.
He told RNZ's Nine to Noon he was initially angry that his fellow students were being assaulted for what he saw as harmless fun.
"At the time I felt aggrieved that people would come in and beat up my fellow students. How did they find out where we were, who led them, what was going on there?"
But he decided to attend the subsequent court case for members of He Taua who had been arrested.
"I went down for the very first day of the court hearing in the Magistrates Court… this very Victorian building and sitting in the back row of the court there was a person who really caught my eye, and it was a guy called Ben Dalton.
"He was there, and he was well-dressed, and had a top knot, he had a feather in his head. And I thought, oh my God, I've never seen Māori people dressed like that, apart from drawings that you saw from Sydney Parkinson, from Captain Cook.
"This is going back to the real, authentic Māori view of the world."
It was, he said, a turning point for him.
"I couldn't believe that people would feel so deeply about something, and it made me question what was I doing? Why was I involved in it? Where was this going to go to?
"It made me really question the whole business of the Haka Party, and was it really the right thing to do?"
The confrontation was a necessary "physical shock to wake you up," Meekan said.
"Certainly, the engineering society after that really had to rethink what we were doing. Was it appropriate to go around disrupting people? Was it appropriate to behave like that during capping week? Basically, all that stuff stopped."
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