Hamish Keith

Hamish Keith’s long career as an arts writer and administrator also includes important contributions to New Zealand television. Credited with the first TV documentary on New Zealand art, 1962's Waterfall to Waterfall, he went on to arts shows Profiles (1982) and Qantas award-winner The Big Picture (2007). As a writer on iconic drama series Pukemanu, he demonstrated his belief that New Zealanders must see themselves on-screen.

...it was not a series about art at all, but a series about us. I was given the marvellous gift of climbing that metaphorical range of hills and looking back across my life and beyond, and reporting on the culture to which I belonged. And those hills were sunny, for apart from a dark gully or two nothing I saw made me think that this was a country for pessimists. It gave me the enduring image of our culture as a marvellously braided river. Hamish Keith on arts show The Big Picture, in his 2008 book Native Wit, page 361