MOBIL RADIO AWARDS ENTRY: Best Community and Access Programme
Best Spoken Programmes, Best Documentary or Feature Programme "Ruatepupuke" - produced by the New Zealand Broadcasting School.
Narrator, Donna Beatson explains the history and genealogy of the carved ancestral house Ruatepupuke. Ruatepupuke is credited with bringing the art of whakairo (carving) from Tangaroa (the god of the sea) to the people of Tokomaru Bay. Ruatepupuke was dismantled during the early 1800's during tribal unrest. He was soaked in whale oil and hidden in the soil of Papatuanuku (Earth Mother) in the bed of a river.
The carvings were lost, but the people of Tokomaru Bay set about rebuilding another carved house to honour Ruatepupuke. The carved house was sold by Mokena Romio Babbington (the son of the first white settler in Tokomaru Bay) to Mr Hindmarsh for an undisclosed price. Mr Hindmarsh was a collector of curios and artefacts. This act split the families of Tokomaru Bay.
In the late 1880's Ruatepupuke was dismantled and shipped from Dunedin to England and then Germany. Here Ruatepupuke was cut and restructured to fit in the exhibition space by J F G Umlauf, a German collector of artefacts from Hamburg. The house was sold for 20,000 German deutsche marks (NZ$5,000 approx) in 1905 and ended up at the Chicago Field Museum in storage for 20 years.
In 1961 the window and doorway were glassed in with life-size mannequins added. When the Te Māori exhibition went to New York, a delegation which included families from Tokomaru Bay accompanied the exhibition and while there in New York, they heard of the carved house stored in Chicago and went immediately to view Ruatepupuke in the Chicago Field Museum basement.
Arapata Hakiwai, Hone Ngata, Hinemoa Hilliard were chosen to restore Ruatepupuke to his original splendor. This programme traces the reunion of Ruatepupuke with the people of Te Whānau a Ruataupare.