Eyewitness

Basketball has taken Whanganui born and raised, Megan Compain all over the world, including competing in the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games. But she also made history as the youngest player (and the only New Zealander) to be selected for the Women's National Basketball Association or WNBA - the counterpart to the NBA in the United States. It’s 25 years since the WNBA was established and along the way, Megan also had her fair share of interactions with some legendary players...and Kobe Bryant was one of them.

Becoming part of women's sporting history wasn't at the forefront of Megan Compain's mind when she was selected to compete in the inaugural year of the WNBA - the counterpart to the NBA in the United States.

"I should have kept my memorabilia," laughs the former Utah Starzz basketballer.

Listen to: Making WNBA History

But despite leaving her uniform in a cardboard box back in the U.S more than 20 years ago, Compain still remembers what it was like to don the jersey and being handed her own gear.

"You were kitted out from head-to-toe and you didn't have to bring your own socks and sneakers...there was this incredible feeling of pride, pulling on my training jersey with my number, and that WNBA badge on it," she says.

It was 25 years ago, on the 24th of April 1996 that the announcement was made about the formation of a women's basketball league. At the time, there were no other professional opportunities for women in basketball, unless players opted to go to Europe after College, or compete in the Olympic games.

For women, that only became an option from 1976.

The prospect of playing for the WNBA was a chance for women to be recognised in the sport.

There would be eight teams, and twelve players on each roster. The only downside - there were only two spots available per team.

Compain says the top players who were already competing internationally would take a majority of the spots, so the competition for the remaining selection was tough.

At only 5 ft 9" she would find herself competing against much taller athletes, which meant she would be put through her paces in a sea of 300 to 400 girls, all vying for selection by NBA scouts.

"You've got to wrestle your own team mates to showcase what you can do," says Compain of the rigorous weekend trials held around the country.

As with the men's teams in the NBA, players who were competing for the WNBA had their eyes set not only on winning these coveted spots, but also playing for particular teams.

"We all joked that anywhere but Utah would be alright," she laughs.

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Empire Day fell on the 24th of May and was celebrated in New Zealand from 1903 - two years after Queen Victoria passed away on 22 January 1901. The date was The Queen's birthday, but it was also one shared with a 7-year-old boy. Find out what happened on this special day and hear the personal story of a young boy dreaming of reuniting with his Dad who was fighting in the second world war, in the latest episode of Eyewitness.

Holidays allow us to celebrate with family and keep us sane, but also give us a moment to commemorate the past. But one special date that has been long forgotten for many, is Empire Day - once an important day widely celebrated across New Zealand.

Listen to: The Rise and Fall of Empire Day

This special calendar event commemorated Queen Victoria's birthday, May 24th, and became recognised in New Zealand two years after her death in 1903.

Chris Cameron was about 7-years-old and recalls what happened on this public holiday.

"We thought of Britain as the head of the Empire," he says.

For Kiwis, Empire Day consolidated the country's national identity and its close ties with Britain, the mother country.

It was also a half day for school children. Chris had just started at Auckland's Cornwall Park School in 1942 when Empire Day celebrations were held.

"Cornwall Park School in those days had a huge collection of all the flags of the Empire - Australia, Canada, South Africa. I remember I marched at the head of the group with the New Zealand flag because it was my birthday," he says.

The children paraded around the vast school field with marching music blasting from a large gramophone, while families and people from the community came to watch.

But pledging allegiance to the British Empire and the flag was also at the forefront of Kiwi's minds because New Zealand soldiers were away fighting in the second world war.

Conversations about the war were common in the playground, and it was common for children to play with toy guns pretending to be soldiers.

"All the children there were the same...we missed our fathers and mothers who were overseas and tried to keep track of them," he says.

According to Chris, everyone had a heightened awareness about what was happening abroad and who was winning or losing.

"It was very public and the radio was our key means of what was going on in the world."

Chris' father was a former teacher who became a Captain in the 34th Battalion. As an avid letter writer, he kept in touch regularly with his only son, and Chris' mother. But one day, the letters stopped.

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What is it like to be catapulted to overnight stardom? That very scenario happened to five Kiwi girls who became part of all-group Truebliss back in 1999. South African-born Megan Alatini recalls the moment that changed her life and what it meant to be on Popstars - the first music-based reality TV show of its kind to have a world premiere.

The year was 1999 and it was one that Megan Alatini will never forget. The South African born-singer was 23-years-old when she was hand-picked to be part of an all girl group in a new reality TV show called Pop Stars.

Listen to Making Pop Stars - TrueBliss

Every step of the way, singers were filmed by a television crew. And Alatini laughs thinking back to the moment that changed her life.

"That was a wonderful feeling and experience," says the Auckland-based singer.

"I felt like such an idiot because I started crying...I was so elated and I was thanking my family like I was at the Grammy Awards!"

Alatini's tears are forgivable. She was filmed for a show that was the first of its kind in the world - a TV show looking for singing sensations.

Pop Stars was a precursor to the popular X-Factor and Idol shows, but the show that launched Alatini's career became an international franchise.

Everything about the show was new and Alatini agrees that at times it felt more like an experiment. But she has a lot of fond memories associated with the show that ultimately changed television history.

And while being part of a show that was finding its own feet wasn't always easy, she got to share that experience with four other girls in the band: Keri Harper, Jo Cotton, Carly Binding and Erika Takas who she is still friends with today.

For a pop band, establishing an identity can be pivotal to success. And TrueBliss were dead-set on making an impact.  Alatini laughs now, recalling how they resisted the 90s baggy jeans and grunge look of the day, opting instead for glam glitter and sparkly Bindis.

"Usually girls would have one bindi on their forehead and they might have two on the side of their eyes. I decided to go the full haul and had them all above my eyebrows and in the middle..."

Alatini was taking a leaf from some of her drag queen friends, but says she ended up looking pretty tragic.

"We had a really, really great team who looked after us beautifully. And it wasn't actually the choices of the stylist sometimes that were not so wonderful, it was actually us thinking that we knew better," she says. 

But the glamour and over-the-top Bindis weren't to last.

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Tiwai Point is a polarising place, people tend to love it or hate it. 2021 will be its 50th year of operations, it could also be the smelter's last. Eyewitness follows the history of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter.

The first of Tiwai Point's pots were fired up on the 23rd of April, 1971.

But the story of the smelter starts at least a decade earlier.

Tiwai Point opened in April 1971.

In 1960, the New Zealand government signed an agreement with Consolidated Zinc, giving the Australian mining company the go-ahead to build a smelter on Tiwai Point and a hydro-electric power station to fuel it at Lake Manapōuri, in the nearby Fiordland National Park.

Listen to Tiwai Point: Fifty Years in the Furnace

By 1963, the company realised it couldn't afford to build both a smelter and a power plant, so the New Zealand government, led by Sir Keith Holyoake, agreed to build the power station.

It was the start of a partnership that has spanned half a century and has had its ups and downs.

In July 2020, the company, now Rio Tinto, announced it would be terminating its contract with Meridian Energy, the current owners of the Manapōuri power station, and closing down the smelter.

A reduction line at Tiwai Point

Rio Tinto has cited high transmission costs as the reason, but Meridian says it offered the company $60m of savings.

But even back in the 1960s the company, which was then called Comalco, was asking for more than New Zealand wanted to give.

Sir Alan Mark

It wanted to raise the level of Lake Manapōuri, which sits in the protected Fiordland National Park, to increase power production. Initially, the government agreed, but the public wasn't happy. After huge protests - the biggest the country has ever seen - the lakes were saved.

Sir Alan Mark, now an emeritus professor at Otago University, was a young botanist in the late 1960s. He oversaw the research into what raising the lakes might mean for the surrounding area.

"By our assessment the increase in lake levels would only increase the annual generation of electricity by 4.5 percent," said Sir Alan, "(But) the cost ecologically, environmentally and aesthetically would have been major."

Sir Alan went public with his findings. Meetings were held and protests staged. One petition put together by Forest and Bird recorded 250,000 signatures, which equated to about 10 percent of the population of New Zealand.

"It was very obvious that the public of New Zealand was strongly opposed to the lake raising," said Sir Alan.

Amongst all the controversy, Comalco was getting on with building its smelter at Tiwai.

Construction begins at Tiwai Point…

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Prior to 1958 mortality rates for babies born with heart conditions was extremely high. But a groundbreaking open heart surgery performed 62 years ago at Greenlane Hospital by Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes changed medical history forever. Sonia Yee looks at the lead-up to the big day and the innovative machine used in the operation.

Helen Harris (nee Arnold) was about 10 or 11-years-old when she underwent New Zealand's first open heart surgery performed by Sir Brian Barratt-Boyes at Greenlane Hospital in September 1958.

"I was a blue baby," says Christchurch-based Harris who was born with a large hole between her right and left ventricles.

Listen: "I was a blue baby"- New Zealand's First Open Heart Surgery 

Her surgical procedure was a progressive, groundbreaking event using new surgical techniques that drew attention from the international medical fraternity. An important innovation used in that procedure was a piece of equipment called 'The Melrose Machine'.

"They'd been working for two years to get the heart-lung machine up and running - they'd done 17 sheep before me," Harris says. 

One out of 100 babies are born with some form of heart defect, and prior to Harris' operation, there was no effective treatment.

"Congenital heart disease is much more common than people realise," says Dr Alan Kerr - a cardiologist who spent much of his career working alongside Sir Brian.

"Many of those  die in early infancy... some survive to be disabled and die prematurely, and some actually recover spontaneously," Dr Kerr says.

But the first open heart surgery required a lot of preparation and was an incredibly risky procedure. There were a number of factors that had to be taken into consideration.

From a medical perspective, Harris' age at the time made her an ideal candidate - she was the eldest among six other children of varying ages being considered for the operation.

Kerr says the risk of performing the surgery using the heart-lung bypass machine on babies could cause blood poisoning.

"Most of the first operations were done on older children because it was technically easier to do the surgery on someone who was bigger, rather than a baby," Dr Kerr says.

A bigger team was also brought on board, including engineers and technicians, to get the machine up and running, and to ensure that the operation was a success.

And clearly it was.

Today Harris is in her 70s and has undergone five procedures to-date, including four pacemakers, which help keep her heart beating…

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In the 1940s, Marie Storey was part of the third intake of women to join the police force in New Zealand. She speaks to Sonia Yee about being used as a decoy to catch a pervert; segregated training and why women were working as plain clothed officers.

In 1943, while many New Zealanders were away fighting in the war, 18-year-old Marie Storey (nee Nixon) made the decision to join the police force and she was part of the third intake of women to do so.

But the police force was nothing new to Storey. Her father was a Senior Sergeant and editor of the Police Gazette. He had witnessed the very first intake of women to join the force.

"He came home one evening in 1941 and said he'd seen history made in New Zealand - the first ten police women sworn into the police force," Storey recalls.

Listen to The First Female Police Recruits

Her father remarked, "They were a fine bunch of young women."

In that very moment, Storey also made her mind up - she wanted to join the force.

A year later, she saw an advertisement in the paper calling for new recruits. She had no real expectations of what the job would entail, only, she knew she wanted an outdoor job where she also had the opportunity to contribute to the community.

Her application was accepted, and she was placed in a three-month female-only training programme which was held over the summer.

Storey was posted to Wellington and she says back then, roles for women in the force weren't the same as they are today.

Much of her time was spent patrolling parks and community areas where groups of people congregated, and also on jobs that concerned women and children.

Female officers were also used as decoys to catch male predators.

One evening Storey was sent out to Mount Victoria in Wellington where she had to confront one of her biggest fears - she was scared of the dark - an obstacle she would have to quickly overcome.

"There had been women living nearby complaining of a male molesting them," she says.

This particular night was pitch black and deadly quiet. And Storey says all she could see was the city lights below.

The lack of visibility was one obstacle. The second obstacle was that she was alone on the job. A detective had been assigned to accompany her, but on this occasion he was nowhere to be seen.

So Storey set off up an uneven, dirt track in total darkness, making her way back-and-forth at least half a dozen times. What's more, she had to do it clambering in a skirt, blouse, hat, gloves and a handbag  - appropriate attire for women in the day.

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Rebuilding the iconic Mount Cook Road was both a challenge and a privilege. Find out more in this episode of Eyewitness.

Drive inland from Tekapo and in under an hour, you'll hit a road like no other.

Just 55 kilometers long, it follows Lake Pukaki - one of our largest southern lakes - to our longest glacier and to our highest mountain, Aoraki/Mount Cook.

On the southern flank is the towering Ben Ohau range. In summer, lupins paint the land a dazzling purple. In winter, the cold is so intense it freezes cars to the ground. Above is a night sky filled with stars and officially designated a Dark Sky Reserve.

We call this remarkable road State Highway 80, or the Mount Cook Road.

David Chamberlain used to call it his place of work.

He built this road and calls the four years he spent here the highlight of his career.

"Just looking straight up the lake at Mount Cook. Yeah, you don't get any better than that," he says.

Listen to The Most Beautiful Road in the World

Geographically, this area is called the Mackenzie Basin. Politically, it's referred to as the Mackenzie District. These days its commonly known as the Mackenzie Country after the Scot who may (or may not) have rustled cattle here and forms part of the region of South Canterbury.

Ngai Tahu, who call the land here Te Manahuna, came to tend their mahinga kai and to be with their ancestor, Aoraki, but in 1848 a dodgy bit of business called Kemp's Purchase meant the area was sold to the Crown. Tourism began in the late 19th century and a gravel road was built from the end of Lake Pukaki to the village further up the valley. By the 1950s thousands of people travelled this road every year.

But the road had its challenges. Wide rivers and streams slowed down vehicles and dust blown up by the summer nor' wester ruined clothes and choked motorists as well as obscuring the view. Winter conditions were a real adventure, with freezing fog, snow and ice.

In the 1960s the Mackenzie Basin became the setting for a massive hydroelectric power project. The plan called for the raising of the level of Lake Pukaki by 37 metres to feed the dams which meant drowning sections of the old gravel road. A new (and better) road was now a priority.

David Chamberlain was a 26-year-old engineering associate for the Ministry of Works. In 1972 he was shoulder-tapped to lead the project.

"I sort of jumped at it, really," says David. "I actually didn't have a job title. I was just the boss."…

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Forty years ago the Māori language was on the brink of dying out. Only 5% of Māori spoke it fluently. A massive push to save it was underway and at the heart of that movement was a little school at the foothills of the Urewera Ranges...

In 1978, a little district school at the foothills of Te Urewera in the Bay of Plenty became an anchor for the Māori language, one that caught deep and held strong.

Ruatoki School was founded in 1896, a small school for the children of Tūhoe to learn the mainstream curriculum.

Nearly a century later, as the language spoken in the homes and marae of these students was decimated, it became a place of refuge for te reo Māori

Listen to the story of Te Wharekura o Ruatoki: The Leap of Faith To Save a Language

By the 1970s, the first generation of Māori born after the urban migration began arriving at University. Their parents and grandparents had come to the city and abandoned their language.

John Rangihau, 1984

And now this generation was feeling the loss.

They became the catalyst for change and we began to see a concerted push to have more te reo everywhere, but especially in schools.

In Ruatoki, the lobbying began to have tamariki taught in their language.

In this 2018 interview with John Campbell for RNZ's Checkpoint, Turuhira Hare described the many, many meetings held through 1977 as the Tūhoe people fought to make their school bilingual.

Dr Richard Benton worked for the New Zealand Council of Educational Research at the time. In 1973 he had written a booking raising the idea of having bilingual schools. But he said the Department of Education would only agree to "consider without commitment".

Benton said the breakthrough came when the outgoing Education Minister Les Gandar asked John Rangihau what he could do for Māori.

Rangihau asked for a bilingual school at Ruatoki and the decree went out. The Department had to comply. The school got the go-ahead to become bilingual. A new principal, Tawhirimatea Williams, was brought in.

Tawhirimatea Williams spent 19 years as principal of New Zealand's first bilingual school. His wife Kaa, worked as a teacher alongside him.

"I was jumping into the unknown," said Williams, "What the heck was bilingual education? What's Māori medium education? Even the (Education) Department didn't know what it meant really at that time."

Tawhiri Williams describes some of the challenges he faced in this interview with RNZ.

He was always very aware of his responsibilities to the Tūhoe people and the trust they had put in him to teach their tamariki…

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How culturally diverse is New Zealand television and when did things start to shift? Sonia Yee explores the making of character Dr Grace Kwan - the first Asian character to become part of mainstream TV on New Zealand's most loved soap opera, Shortland Street.

Twenty-five years ago, actor Lynette Forday was a pioneer on our screens, playing Dr Grace Kwan - the first Asian face to appear on mainstream New Zealand television.

And we still have a long way to go to improve how people of colour are represented in the media and on our screens, Forday says.

A graduate of the National institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney, Forday played Dr Grace Kwan on Shortland Street between 1994 and 1997.

Listen to The Making of Grace Kwan

Forday was sent some episodes of the show before her audition, and found the cultural diversity of Shortland Street appealing. And when she landed the role, she was more than happy to leap across the ditch, and onto our screens.

"She was such a well rounded character...she was fun, loved shopping...she loved food. She was very three dimensional," Forday says of playing the feisty, fun-loving, Dr Grace Kwan.

Forday was 28 when she made her first appearance on Shortland Street, joining the popular soap two years after it launched.

The show initially received mixed reviews - Kiwis could barely stomach hearing their own accents played by an array of young actors who were learning the tricks of fast-turn-around TV on the job.

The format of the show was new for New Zealand, and much of it came across as trial and error.

On top of that, introducing an Asian character onto the show came with some obstacles. Back then, there were not enough Asian actors in New Zealand who were suitable to play the role of Kwan. So the casting directors had to look further afield in Australia to find Forday.

Forday says Australian TV wasn't exactly multicultural in the mid-nineties either, but she grew up watching shows on channels such as SBS, which were always culturally inclusive.

"I didn't imagine that the colour of my skin would ever be an issue," she says.

At the time, Forday was to become the first Asian face to be on mainstream television in New Zealand. But being part of a show that was breaking new ground was as eye opening for Forday as it was for viewers.

After appearing on the show for only a couple of weeks, the biggest shock came when she opened the weekend newspaper and saw an article written by a well known journalist.

"It was the very first bit of prejudice I received...on the cover it said 'Grace Kwan must go'."

And if that wasn't eye-opening enough, the headline that followed read "Asian Invasion"…

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New Zealand is the third largest producer of kiwifruit in the world. But in November 2010, that looked to change when kiwifruit vines across the country became ravaged by the bacterial disease PSA. It spread like wildfire and wiped out the Zespri Gold breed at the time. Sonia Yee speaks to award-winning researcher, Professor Russell Lowe and New Zealand's leading organic kiwifruit breeder, Jeff Roderick, to find out how PSA affected the wider industry and what it took to fight a disease that was destroying one of New Zealand's most precious export products.

New Zealand is the third largest producer of kiwifruit in the world behind China and Italy, and despite the global pandemic, kiwifruit exports have shown no sign of slowing.

In 2019, 149 million trays of green kiwifruit were produced for export. And the gold variety on supermarket shelves known as Zespri Sun Gold rose from 67 million trays to 75 million in 2020, proving popular with its smooth skin and perfect oval appearance.

But the road to the success of the Zespri Sun Gold variety has been bumpy.

Listen to the podcast

In November 2010, the HORT 16A gold variety, was ravaged by the bacterial disease PSA. This variety of gold kiwifruit was smaller in size and had a flat, almost woody beak.

The disease spread like wildfire.

"The general consensus is that PSA was imported on pollen," says award-winning scientist at Plant and Food Research professor Russell Lowe, who this year was awarded the Plant Raiser's Award by The Royal New Zealand Institute of Horticulture.

Very little was known about the disease in 2010, including how it behaved or travelled, and how fast it could spread.

"It was pretty nerve-racking at the time," says Lowe.

The news of PSA hit media headlines almost as quickly as the bacteria spread across the country.

"Once PSA spread from the original site across the Bay of Plenty and arrived on the Te Puke Orchard, visible signs of infection were seen right throughout the plants," he says.

"One of our researchers did some forecasting based on the number of plants that were dying over a short period and estimated that within a year or two there wouldn't be a single kiwifruit plant left," says Lowe.

PSA spreads rapidly, especially during rain and the symptoms include wilting young shoots and visible die back in the canopy. And as the bacteria begins to multiply, red ooze begins flowing from mature branches.

Kiwifruit growers across the country were sent into a state of panic. And with approximately 100 scientists across the country working on ways to eliminate the disease, the only way to contain the spread of the bacteria was to eradicate any plants showing signs of disease…

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