Mike Walker Oral History Project Lodged At Library

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For immediate release
8 December 2006

Mike Walker Oral History Project Lodged At Turnbull Library

Friends of well known Levin filmmaker Mike Walker, who died in 2004, gathered at the Alexander Turnbull Library last week with oral historian Pip Oldham to hand over a set of oral history recordings. Originally planned as a series of interviews with Mike Walker and funded by a grant from the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, the recordings, lodged at the Library’s Oral History Centre, are life history interviews with five people close to Mike Walker. As well as biographical material, there is information about Mike Walker’s trilogy of films, Kingi’s Story, Kingpin and Mark II, all filmed in and around Levin in the 1980s.

Ms Oldham says that through the project she wanted to find out about living in Levin and the personal and practical difficulties of being a filmmaker in a provincial centre at a time when few people were making films for a living. The people she recorded were able to describe their own experiences of these and other topics.

Linda Evans, curator of the Oral History Centre, said ‘The Turnbull's oral history collection is all the richer for these interviews with friends of Mike Walker, talking about their own lives and the intersections with his life, his creative work, and his significance in a variety of communities, both in Levin and nationally.’

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