Hana Pera Aoake's (Ngāti Hinerangi, Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Haua, Tainui/Waikato, Ngāti Waewae, Waitaha, Kāi Tahu) filmic practice juxtaposes handheld moving images with poetic text. Their works are personal, historical and often politically charged, and address the tensions between industry and sacred whenua, the presence of deep time and new parenthood. I saw the mountain erupt is a lyrical reflection on the Bay of Plenty town of Kawerau's history of forestry and milling, with logging seen from the historical perspective of colonial occupation, in which new settler homes made of timber sit on top of Māori pā sites. Previously one of the wealthiest towns in Aotearoa, Kawerau's primary infrastructure was built to accommodate the pulp and paper mills that provided the town's economic industry for a finite period of time.
The work comprises handheld footage of mountains, new growth in the bush, and images of pīwhakawhaka and local tuna (eels) slowed down, rewound and repeated. We see industrial sites, smokestacks and the local sawmill that has since wreaked ecological havoc upon the whenua and awa. Silent, the film's narrative structure is provided by a series of inter-titles of text upon a black screen, drawn from Morgan Godfery's 2017 personal essay, I saw the mountain erupt: a Kawerau childhood. In the text, Godfery writes on growing up in what is now one of the motu's poorest towns, and the negative stereotypes that are projected onto the place and its people. Bringing together an evocative consideration of the deep histories embedded in the whenua, Aoake's work unearths the other stories of this place that are transmitted via waiata and other oral traditions.
