Tim Worrall: My story as told to Elisabeth Easther

Tim Worrall (Ngāi Tūhoe) is an artist who has earned acclaim for tā moko, graphic design and painting. Tim also writes and directs for television and film including his latest project Head High, THREE’s high school rugby drama. Mondays on THREE at 8.30pm and OnDemand.

We lived in a cool house in Devonport on Stanley Point. The property had been in our father’s family for three generations and we spent lots of time outdoors at Stanley Bay Park and swimming at our secret cove. Devonport definitely had a real village feel at that time. Less gentrified and with lots of liberal, hippy families. My parents were pretty connected to the artistic, socially progressive movements. We also grew up close to my mother’s whānau from the Bay of Plenty, where we spent most of our holidays. Culturally there was no reo, and very little tikanga but, on the flipside, we still had a strong emotional connection to our Tūhoe identity.

One Christmas holidays, between third and fourth form, we were hanging out at my cousins’. My Aunt Janice has always been a keen amateur painter and had a good range of art books including one about German Expressionist Painting. As a child, I had been decent at drawing, but I hadn’t really fallen in love with art until I saw this book. I started painting that summer, completely fell in love with it and from that moment on I knew I was going to be an artist. It was a really lucky happenstance and so exciting to have a strong feeling of what I wanted to do.

When I started at Takapuna Grammar in the third form, it was still a reasonably conservative grammar school where it was a given the head boy would be the captain of the First XV. But that culture changed pretty rapidly while I was there and by the time I got to seventh form, I was head boy – a long-haired kid who identified primarily as an artist, and who played mainly hockey. During that time, our nation also went through big formative stuff, with some seismic cultural changes. There was the Springbok tour with the Māori cultural renaissance kicking off around the same time, and the establishment of the Waitangi tribunal. I was informed by all of that.

After school, I took a couple of years off and went overseas. I worked in a supermarket and as a baker, a builder’s labourer and a landscape gardener. Then I mucked around in London and travelled around Europe before coming home to more odd jobs – including working for Swenson’s as an ice cream manufacturer – so by the time I applied to Elam, I was really hungry for university life.

Art school was pretty wild, with lots of great provocative behaviour and wild outfits. The emphasis was on originality and pushing boundaries but the overwhelming experience for me was the forming of really close friendships and having maximum freedom to explore not only in our work, but ourselves. It was a real privilege to be with a group of like-minded people at that age when you’re a sponge and completely throwing yourself into something you love.

I quickly became interested in creating work that provided social commentary, and that was based within my whakapapa Māori. I had entered art school assuming I would continue to be a painter, but I found the work was primarily consumed within gallery settings which didn’t always fit with the ethos of the pieces themselves. At that same time, Elam purchased some reasonably decent VHS video and editing gear. They already had an old Bolex film camera, and a couple of us got excited by the possibility of screen arts. In my last year, I made a short film called Savage Rites and I really fell in love with film.

At art school it became clear to me that my taha Māori and Tūhoe whakapapa were central points of inspiration, but I didn’t have the cultural toolkit to feel empowered so when I graduated, I moved back to the Eastern Bay of Plenty, and spent time in my haukainga of Waimana. Some of my extended whānau were still ahi kā there, holding the fort on the marae, and a couple of uncles were really crucial in opening the door for me to find my place – because being a pale artist from Devonport, plonked down in the middle of Waimana, I stuck out like the proverbial. I also fell in love with playing rugby while I was there. My Tūhoe family, the Boyntons, are deeply associated with Waimana Rugby Club, going back generations and lots of my family still play there, so rugby was a great way for me to connect.

I also studied at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, the Māori university in Whakatāne. This was critical in empowering me with knowledge and language. A lot of my generation of urban Māori have had to undertake the journey of reclaiming our taha Māori – with all the layers of whakamā that entails. Not understanding tikanga, not having our reo, always worrying about making mistakes, it can be pretty challenging. There’s also a phase you go through, when reclaiming your taha Māori, where you can become very pro-Māori. But now I feel very balanced and grateful for being both Pākehā and Māori.

For most of my 20s and 30s, my artistic life was primarily about tā moko, carving, painting and graphic work and I worked out of the Tūhoe Embassy in Taneatua. But I got excited about screen work again about the same time Niki Caro made Whale Rider. She was a close mate from art school and I got to be a small part of that journey for her. Obviously, in the Eastern Bay of Plenty, there’s not a lot of opportunity to explore big-screen ambitions, so the big leap forward for my film career was doing the Masters screenwriting course at the Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington.

We live in Rotorua now, where I’m part of a Māori film collective called Steambox. We’re developing a slate of projects, trying to build a sustainable screen industry down here in the Bay. One of the projects we’ve been involved with is Vegas. It has been an interesting and, at times, challenging project, navigating the stormy seas of controversial Māori content made with mainstream money and non-Māori partners. Ultimately the debates over Māori representation, Māori story sovereignty, creative freedom, popular demand and cultural responsibility have been good ones to have. That said, given how hard it is to make television with its tight budgets, an abundance of stakeholders, gatekeepers and production hurdles, it can really sting when you’re getting it in the neck from your own. Positive things are happening though, even if we’re not quite there yet, and I look forward to a time, not so far away, when Māori are in control of our own stories and choosing our own partnerships and making content that speaks to the dynamic and varied nature of what it is to be Māori, and to be human, in the 21st century.

Strong women have played a big role in my life. My love of writing, storytelling and art is through my mother’s influence. She’s really intelligent astute and well-read, a lover of literature. She imbued that in me and I grew up with a sense of her unwavering love and support. The support and partnership of my wife Taria has also been massive. She’s from a really hard-working, high-achieving Te Arawa family. Her ambition for and devotion to Te Ao Māori and making a difference constantly inspire me and remind to get my shit together and keep striving to fulfill my own potential.

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