Māori news programme Te Karere celebrates its 40th anniversary on Monday.
Derek Fox. Photo: Supplied
What started out as a four-minute news segment on TVNZ has grown into an indelible part of New Zealand broadcasting, at the vanguard of a reo Māori renaissance.
Derek Fox was the pioneer of Te Karere, first taking it to air in 1982 alongside Whai Ngata.
It was a coalescence of various movements of the time, recalled Fox, describing it as a sort of supernova where various Māori movements in the 1970s grew into each other, where a build-up of pressure on mainstream broadcasters could no longer be ignored.
"Maybe to relieve some of the pressure, the controller for news and television asked me if I would be willing to do a two-minute broadcast for seven nights during Māori language week," Fox recalled.
"I think the idea was that I was simply to grab hold of some of the Pākehā news, translate it into Māori, and broadcast it live down the camera.
"I said, 'no, I'm not going to do that. That's news in Māori, that's not Māori news'.
"The then-minister of broadcasting, a fella called Ian Shearer, sometime later he asked me to go visit him at parliament, [he said] 'the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand wants an injection of funds' ... he said I've made a condition that they start a Māori news programme.
"That's how Te Karere started."
And Te Karere was born in humble beginnings, having to scrap for resource and presence.
"When Te Karere began it was on Channel 2, they weren't going to allow it on Channel 1. But up on the East Coast, they didn't receive Channel 2, so we had another big debate about that," Fox said.
But what it did bring was Māori faces, voices and issues to the fore. It gave Māori a space to debate, to celebrate, to educate in their own reo, from their own perspective. It also helped to normalise te reo after decades of attempted assimilation.
It proved an instant hit.
"At Ruatoria, you couldn't buy a beer between five-to-six and six o'clock because my uncle, who was the barman, was watching Te Karere," recalled Fox. "And there's no way he was going to serve anybody while Te Karere was on."
In the decades since, the programme became a training ground for some of the top Māori broadcasters, and has taken a lead role in the normalisation of te reo Māori. But Fox said that took a lot of mahi.
"We had to design things from the ground up. We were developing a Māori media as we went along. There wasn't one prior to the 1980s," Fox said.
"We're getting closer .. [to] the normalisation of Māori language in prime time."
But it has always been the battler in the world of broadcasting, said Rereata Makiha, who worked as a journalist for Te Karere for more than 20 years.
"We used to be slotted just before six o'clock, but when it came to really important news stories we were shifted to behind the news, so we were moved around a fair bit.
"There were times where we broke stories before the mainstream news," he chuckled. "I don't think they liked that very much."