Sound and a clear vision of heritage

Sandy Wakefield (Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Tahu, Pākehā) has made a career in sound for broadcast television and film, this year coming close to fulfilling her Oscar dream when The Power Of The Dog was nominated for the Best Achievement
in Sound category.
Kaituhi Ila Couch talks to Sandy about her pathway to sound, the early days of working at Māori Television and the importance of kaupapa Māori values in her mahi as a storyteller.

Above: Sandy Wakefield grew up making short films with her cousins before starting her career in sound.

“I love listening. Think of our oral tradition – we don’t just say rongo, we say ‘to whakarongo’, to create the state where we are able to listen.”

The dogs at the Queenstown home where Sandy Wakefield is staying only understand Italian. This makes Sandy very happy. Italian is the first foreign language she learned at age 17 during her time as an exchange student in the province of Udine, northeastern Italy. It was at the end of that year abroad that Sandy says she knew what she wanted to do in life. “I was determined to work in film.”

Having spent some time in Central Otago on Jane Campion’s feature film The Power Of The Dog, Sandy is currently in Tāhuna for a few months working as a boom-op on a television drama. She describes the job of a boom-op as a bit like being a vacuum cleaner for sound. “I’m supposed to be invisible, but there is an art to it. I have to gain the trust of an actor who is trying to do a natural performance while I’m standing there waving a stick above them.” Husband Thom will be joining her, but at the moment he is busy packing up their belongings in Kirikiroa, which has been home for three years while Sandy completed her Masters Degree in Māori Studies at Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato.

Sandy is Ngāpuhi. “I say that first because I was raised in Whangārei, but my Dad’s father is Ngāi Tahu. Our tupuna are from Rakiura. My Dad’s grandmother is Whakatōhea. And on my mother’s side, she was raised by a Russian father. His family came out after World War Two to Australia and ended up in New Zealand when he met my grandmother. I have European whakapapa, there’s Scottish, there’s Irish. This is all part of my identity, as well as being tangata whenua.”

The oldest of three sisters, Sandy grew up in rural Whangārei in an intergenerational household full of noise and children. “We lived with my Dad’s sister and her family. She had four kids that were older than me. We knew our neighbours and neighbourhood really well and adults either worked at the Portland cement works or at the quarry. It was a largely Māori community then.”

Despite being part of a Māori whānau living within a wider Māori community, Sandy says her taha Māori was neither acknowledged or encouraged at school. “I was twelve and all I wanted to do was be in the bilingual unit. I wanted to do kapa haka. I wanted to do it all, butI got teased and laughed at. Whether it was subtle or was as full onas I remember it to be, it made an impression on me, ‘I’m not enough’. I’m not trying to be too tragic here, but I am talking about the experience of being a white-facing wāhine Māori.”

In her teenage years her parents bought a bush block and the whānau spent their summers chopping firewood and clearing scrub. It was a job she hated at the time.

Sandy, who describes herself back then as bored, rebellious and sick of rural living, would make movies with her siblings and cousins. “I would dress my cousins up, my sister was the camera operator and I would direct everyone. I don’t know how we got the video camera, but when we weren’t stacking or splitting wood in the bush we would come up with these really horrific storylines inspired by this old veteran in our community. He kind of captivated my imagination. I would think ‘He’s an axe murderer’, you know, because he would just pop out of the bush.”

Sandy interned on Barry Barclay’s documentary The Kaipara Affair and worked with director of photography Fred Renata and sound op Dick Reade. It was like being thrust into work with proper adults. “Barry Barclay was into legacy building and he would talk to us young people about filmmaking, storytelling and being Māori. It was the first time I experienced what Māori politics can be in this film-making space, which was pretty special.”

In her high school years, Sandy went to live with an aunt and uncle in town, which gave her an early sense of her own independence. Studies in art history sparked an interest in a world beyond Whangārei. “I was sick of everything. Whangārei sucked, being at home sucked, so I guess I romanticised Europe. You start thinking about Dadaism and Surrealism, these European ideas of creativity that have shaped the contemporary art world, and I was like ‘I want to experience that’.”

Manifesting that experience was a bit of a culture shock, and not just for Sandy who arrived in Italy for her year as an exchange student with fluorescent orange hair. “I was listening to punk rock music and stuff like that. I didn’t look anything like my photos.”

In that year Sandy took guitar lessons from a teacher who couldn’t speak English well, was introduced to interesting people, and spent a lot of time walking the city. “It took me about five months to become fluent in Italian.”

On her return home Sandy enrolled at Unitec in Auckland and it was during her studies for a BA in Performing and Screen Arts that she started discovering Māori filmmakers and documentarians. “I was really interested in Merata Mita and Barry Barclay. The other exciting thing that was happening while I was at film school was the creation of Māori Television. I was like, ‘Wow, there is going to be a television station just for Māori content’.”

Sandy was told by an influential Māori sound tutor, Victor Gribric, she would need to learn a technical skill. So when an opening for a sound internship came up with He Taonga Films, her name was put forward. “I came into Don Selwyn’s office, a busy and vibrant tin shack in Grey Lynn where he was producing films, and had this sit-down interview. He was terrifying but also cool; I just related to him like one of the kaumātua on the marae. It was the first time I was surrounded by Māori artists and film-makers and I was totally into it.”

Above: Sandy booms actor Benedict Cumberbatch on the set of The Power Of The Dog, filmed in the Maniototo Plain.

Sandy interned on Barry Barclay’s documentary The Kaipara Affair and worked with director of photography Fred Renata and sound op Dick Reade. It was like being thrust into work with proper adults. “Barry Barclay was into legacy building and he would talk to us young people about filmmaking, storytelling and being Māori. It was the first time I experienced what Māori politics can be in this film-making space, which was pretty special.”

From there Sandy picked up freelance work before being encouraged to apply for a fulltime job at Whakaata Māori. “I was this bright-eyed innocent young person and when they asked what my future in sound would be, I told them it was to win an Oscar.” Given they were working in what Sandy calls grassroots broadcasting, their response was to laugh. “As a staff member at Whakaata Māori we had to have a broad knowledge base of audio engineering. You have to know how to mix live television, you needed to know how to mic up a drum kit for the entertainment shows. You had to know your way around rural New Zealand without Google maps, and you had to learn to be a good manuhiri, even if you were on a tight deadline. It was a great training ground where we were working with our people and we were making things happen.”

“These actors were coming to Aotearoa,to the Māniatoto Plains, to play First Nations characters in Montana that had their land taken off them. The main character, a cowboy, is going to kick them off their land and then they fly back home to Canada after that …
I don’t care if you say ‘smoke and mirrors’, this is an indigenous thing. It became apparent for me to not only welcome them but acknowledge what was being represented and the importance of that happening on Ngāi Tahu soil where people had their land bought from beneath them. It suddenly became this really powerful thing.”

In those early years there was plenty of travel as Māori Television made an effort to collect as many stories as they could. “I would go to Samoa one week and the next week, down to Te Teko. I got to work on lots of current affairs and documentary projects.”

In an industry that encourages working to time and a tight budget, Sandy experienced what a kaupapa Māori model of broadcasting looked like. “There’s all this important stuff that happens before and after you turn the camera on. You’re going to someone’s whare and they are going to host you. You have to eat their kai. It was about learning how to be Māori in making content and, ultimately, being with our people. Even though it was a job, it was this daily practice, it helped me with my confidence.”

Today when she is working outside those ‘safe spaces’, Sandy says she finds the experience lacking. “It’s a little sterile because the heart, the wairua, and the aroha are not there. New Zealand productions need to make space for Māori input if projects centre Māori characters, concepts and mythology. I work on productions that appropriate and tokenise our cultural values and art forms under the guise of ‘good intentions’. Working on projects that are not kaupapa Māori have been critical to my own creative process. I now double down and make sure the integrity of the story and production ‘feels right in the puku’.”

Above: First Nations actors are given a mihi whakatau, led by Sandy and supported by the crew of The Power Of The Dog.

While working on The Power Of The Dog, Sandy took part in a mihi whakatau to welcome First Nations cast. “These actors were coming to Aotearoa, to the Māniatoto Plains, to play First Nations characters in Montana that had their land taken off them. The main character, a cowboy, is going to kick them off their land and then they fly back home to Canada after that.

“I don’t care if you say ‘smoke and mirrors’, this is an indigenous thing. It became apparent for me to not only welcome them but acknowledge what was being represented and the importance of that happening on Ngāi Tahu soil where people had their land bought from beneath them. It suddenly became this really powerful thing.”

The response from cast and crew was overwhelmingly positive as Sandy took the time to explain what she had said in te reo Māori. “I said ‘You may not be safe in the storyland but you are safe here; this place will look after you. As an indigenous person, the experience of intergenerational trauma of land loss and language loss is still felt today and the actors felt that. I think the rest of the cast and crew felt that. My job isn’t that massive within the crew, but those are the moments where you feel you do make a difference.”

When Sandy is finished with her work in Te Waipounamu the plan is to return to the far north. “I’ve definitely enjoyed coming here. There is a feminine strength I feel here. Maybe it was my tūpuna kuia from Murihiku that I channeled that day. I’m a descendant of some very strong and practical wāhine from Rakiura. Maybe that is what made me do that mean-as mihi whakatau.”