PROGRAMNR 51585 /ra6 Road Trip New Zealand Close View Script, words and questions Script: Speaker: Hi and welcome to Close View. Today we’re going to three different places on the North Island of New Zealand. We start in the north, on K Road in Auckland, where we visit a new and different kind of art gallery. Deirdre: My name is Deirdre Dawson. I’m the managing director of Disruptiv Limited. We’re New Zealand’s only four element hip hop company. We specialize in graffiti art and we have this gallery here on K Road. We also manage the Disruptiv All-star Breakers which are some of New Zealand’s most talented break dancers. We’ve got MC:s and DJ:s and we also publish a magazine, Disrupt Magazine, which is distributed all around the world. Music: MC Loki from Disruptiv Magazine mixtape no. 3 “New Zealand hip hop all exclusive from the north to the south. Yeah, Disruptiv, listen up, listen up, listen up…” Deirdre: I think hip hop’s at a pretty… very healthy state in New Zealand. Our graffiti is, like, is really strong, comparatively to the rest of the world, our break dancers are some of the finest in the world. Yeah, we’re just representing really well for a country of such a small size. I’d like to say we definitely have a, sort of, Maori/Polynesian flavour within our hip hop but it’s still influenced a lot by American culture, obviously, as all hip hop is. Music: Wanderers from Disruptiv Magazine mixtape no. 3 “D-I-S-R-U-P-T-I-V motherfucker D-I-S-R-U-P-T-I-V Wanderers D-I-S-R-U-P-T-I-V gonna fuck with me D-I-S-R-U-P-T-I-V I am the MC” 1 Deirdre: Yeah, so we registered the company three and a half years ago. We opened up this gallery about a year and a half ago. Since then we’ve probably had about 20 exhibitions. This current show is a t-shirt exhibition of nine Auckland designers that have designed about four or five t-shirts each so it’s a really interesting show. We like to try and keep it interesting and fresh all the time. We’ll never just be a sole…, sorry, just a graffiti art space because just graffiti gets boring as well and New Zealand is still a very small country so obviously the market will demand more than just graffiti. Our ultimate goal is to travel the world doing what we love like taking a four element showcase around the world; hopefully you’ll see us in Sweden one day. Speaker: The Disruptiv gallery is a big white room and on the walls hang about 40 or 50 different t- shirts – just like paintings would in an ordinary art gallery. Huge windows on one side of the room let the visitors look down on the always busy K Road. While Deirdre is busy on the phone we take a look around the rest of Disruptiv. In a side room we find the local guys from DMN practicing some rhymes for an upcoming gig. Music: DMN Speaker: Surrounding us in the room are hundreds of graffiti paintings of all sizes, colours and styles. Music: DMN DMN: Dirty Mac Nasty crushes uppers 2005, my man boss 1, Michael Pipes, got my boss Dresda coming here, up in Disruptiv chilling out, Auckland central styles, K road baby, uptown life, uptown. All original stuff. Reporter: So, is it released, or? DMN: Not yet, but it will probably end up getting released some time next year I’d hope, or we’d all hope I’d say, but don’t quote me on that. Reporter: But here at Disruptiv, or? DMN: I’m not sure, it’s all in the works; let’s just say that and it is a bit of a mystery. We’re gonna get back to practicing now. Deirdre: Disruptiv, we’re the only company in New Zealand that specializes in all four elements of hip hop and we feel that is really important because often hip hop is just assumed to be, like, rap music and the other elements are overlooked. So, we’re really proud to represent all four elements of hip hop within Disruptiv. We’re probably the strongest in graffiti, because that’s how we started. I think we’re pretty unique. We’ve done a bit of research around the world and it doesn’t really seem to be any other company doing what we do, I think, in such a large scale. Speaker: We leave Deirdre and the Disruptiv gallery and hit the road out of Auckland. Music: The Phoenix Foundation – Sea World Speaker: The New Zealand landscape is green and hilly. On the curvy and narrow roads we pass a dead possum every two minutes. Almost everywhere we see cows and sheep roaming the hills. And 2 there are a lot of sheep in the country! More than 40 million, about ten times as many as there are people. We stop at a sheep farm in Mamaku about two hours south of Auckland and half an hour north of Rotorua, where we find 19-year old Kane Fredrickson busy shearing one of the farm’s sheep. Noise: Sheep shearing Reporter: Kane, that was pretty fast! Kane: Yeah! Reporter: So, how long does it take normally to shear a sheep? Kane: About two to three minutes depending on the… how good my gear is going and how good the sheep cuts, I suppose. Reporter: How many can you do a day? Kane: Between 200 and 220. This year I’ll try and go for 250. Reporter: So, what’s the world record? Kane: 856, I think. Yeah, nine hour day. It’s a lot of sheep. I think it’s two marathons, I reckon, running two marathons, yeah… Reporter: Is that something you’re aiming for yourself? Kane: Well yeah, I’d like to do that many sheep but I’d like to do, I’d probably do 500… I’d like to do the 500 mark, yeah. Good money… Good money, shearing. Reporter: How long have you been doing this for? Kane: Well I started when I was fifteen, but I sort of haven’t gone out and shore for proper shearing gang before, I’ve just sort of done a bit here and a bit there and do… shear the sheep on the farm and that’s about it, yeah. Reporter: So, when did you start working at this farm? Kane: When I was fifteen I started working on the farm here. Reporter: Full time? Kane: Yeah! Left school. Left school and… didn’t like it, didn’t get on with some of the teachers. My dad said well, if you left school now you got to get out and get a job, so… You can’t sit around home doing nothing. Reporter: Farmer; was that something that you wanted to be or was it just the solution at hand? 3 Kane: No, I wanted to be on the farm because I can’t stand being cooped up in an office all day, staying inside all day. I’m an outdoor person and, yep… Reporter: Are there a lot of young people here in New Zealand doing like you, leaving school and going farming? Kane: Yeah, but probably not so young. Yeah, there’s a lot of people that are going into farming and it’s good lifestyle. Reporter: But normally they don’t leave school for that? Kane: No, they sort of like to stick around school so that they don’t have to work, I think. Yeah… Speaker: Kane has to go back to the shearing so we get back in the car and drive down to Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. On our way we pass towns and places with names such as Taupo, Waitomo and Wanganui, all reminding us of the country’s Maori heritage. The Maori ancestors came from Polynesia about a thousand years ago. By the end of the 18th century the Europeans, the Pakeha, started to colonize the land. In central Wellington we find two young people relaxing and hanging out and we discuss life in the city and how the Maori and European culture mix. David: My name is David, David Kohai. I’m from Newtown, we’re in Wellington and I’m seventeen. Robert: I’m Robert Miller, originally from Australia and I’m sixteen. Reporter: What are you guys doing here right now? David: We’re pretty much… you know, it’s a pretty really really nice day, we’ve got a guitar, pretty just relaxing, you know, chilling out, pretty much hanging out. Yeah… that’s pretty much it, eh? Robert: Yeah, we just finished exams, so we’re just chilling at the moment and we’ve got sports and stuff, so… Reporter: What’s life like here, being young in Wellington, New Zealand? David: I’d say, you know, there’s not really any other places I think I’d rather live, you know, I think it’s a pretty nice place. I’d say it’s pretty fun, you know, really good socially and a lot of opportunities, you know, around here. It’s really culturally diverse, you know, there’s a lot of different cultures, particularly in Newtown. You know there’s Somali African, African, you know, African American, Polynesian, and you know, just… Maori, I suppose, tradition and Pakeha, you know, European, a mix of a lot of cultures and you can see the Chinese influence and stuff.