Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 6 March

Whetū Mārama: Bright Star (Mills/O’Sullivan, 2022)

Over the summer I listened to a BBC podcast that featured cosmologist Roberto Trotta talking about his book Starborn: How the Stars Made Us - and Who We Would Be Without Them. In the book – and the conversation – this eminent scientist takes on the cultural component of stars and asks, if we can’t see the stars above us every night, what kind of culture might we have formed?

Imagine if the planet was continuously covered in cloud. How would we understand our place in the cosmos – even our awareness of the cosmos full stop – and how would have our imaginations, and our society, have developed. Where would we have found our gods?

And, listening to that conversation, I was reminded of how it was the stars that first showed us how to navigate this planet, and how the stories of the great Pacific celestial navigators are only recently being rediscovered and now told in films like Whetū Mārama: Bright Star.

It’s a documentary about the late Māori kaumātua (leader) and engineer Hek Busby who died in 2019 at the age of 86.

After a long career as a civil engineer in the Far North – a physical bridge builder as well as a metaphorical bridge builder – in the mid-1970s he became custodian of Ngātokimatawhaorua, our largest ceremonial waka (canoe), and became friends with the Hawaiian navigator Nainoa Thompson and the amazing Micronesian Mau Pialug, who had mentored him.

Inspired by the pair, Busby was determined to prove that Pacific navigators could regularly travel those unimaginable distances and the only way to do that was to build a waka (Te Aurere) and sail it.

This is a film about bravery and vision, but it is also about the renaissance of culture and knowledge. It’s absolutely inspriring and endlessly fascinating.

But the film also – unwittingly, as the filmmakers couldn’t have known about 2024 political reality back in 2022 – shows us that we have another kind of navigation deficit.

When a very frail Busby sits back down after receiving his knighthood at Waitangi in 2018, then-Prime Minister Ardern reaches out to tenderly hold his hand, a gesture one cannot imagine occurring now (arguably, it’s even an honour that one cannot imagine being bestowed now).

It is a pointed and disappointing reminder that, here in New Zealand, we were recently on a path together and that wayfinding us back to that path is likely to be very difficult and painful for a while to come.

---

---

Where to watch Whetu Marama: Bright Star