Flippin ‘eck, we’ve found the films!

Flippin ‘eck, we’ve found the films!

Fishing fleets talking with pigeons, politicians visiting Stonehenge, Chinese bakers on strike, Tahiti sinking and ‘The Maoris’ smashing Somerset – stone the crows, that’s a lot of weird happenings going on! And they also happen to be true.

Each of those events and other slices of New Zealand’s history on film are part of the latest Traveling Film Show presentation called /Lost and Found/ at the New Zealand Film Archive in Wellington, showing for three nights only Thursday June 16 to Saturday 18.

The latest chapter of the popular Traveling Film Show series features 27 short films that were discovered in Australia and the United Kingdom that have been repatriated back to New Zealand by the Film Archive over the past 15 years.

The 70 minute programme begins 7pm June 16-18 and features old-timey piano accompaniment by Susan Alexander.

Some of the films were set in New Zealand while others show kiwis abroad, most were released in British and Australian newsreels and found in archived collections around the world before heading back home.

Among the treats on screen: a film on a Napier trawling fleet shows how they used to use pigeons to communicate c. 1913; official footage of politicians visiting Stonehenge, soldiers returning Gallipoli and an early ANZAC Day ceremony.

News clips chronicle the 1929 Murchison Earthquake, the 1934 down under visit by George Bernard Shaw, the 1965 Beatlemania that swept New Zealand and something puzzlingly described as The Chinese Bakers Strike, which depicts a Labour Day demonstration in Auckland 1910.

For those of a sporting appreciation, the annual World Sculling Contest competition on the Whanganui River 1909 was discovered in Australia – perhaps because the victorious Dick Arnst toured Australia afterwards to screen his successful sculling prowess.

And then there are the fascinating longer-length clips of the adventurous exploits of Hector MacQuarrie and Richard B Matthews who voyaged around the world in the late 1920s armed with a camera and a trusty Austin Seven.

They flirted with disaster in 1930 when travelling to San Francisco on the USSC Tahiti when the ship’s starboard tailshaft broke, puncturing the hull and sinking the ship two days later. It was all captured on film and is on show with other gems in the June Traveling Film Show at the Film Archive.

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