Kai Pūrākau - The Storyteller

I can think of several of my characters I wouldn’t like to meet walking down the street.

– Keri Hulme

I’m not quite sure that I’m actually telling stories, or simply being the medium through which the story is passed.

– Keri Hulme

I'm always very polite to the nuts.

– Keri Hulme, on the fan mail she's received after winning her Booker Prize

I would spend about 20 percent of my life looking out this window. "Watching the sea": that's what I'd say I was doing. But really I'm watching [the] theatre inside the head as much as anything ...

– Keri Hulme on looking out her window at the West Coast

Keri Hulme says, in a film I made called Kai Pūrākau, that there's a melding of two cultures going on here. It's not happening fast enough and it's only a small group of people, but the arts are leading the way. Though there's been a huge amount of subjugation of one culture by another, there's still an edge where there's something bloody exciting happening.

– Gaylene Preston in 1996 book Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, page 171

Other women in the series included Nadine Gordimer, Barbara Taylor Bradford, Sue Townsend and PD James.

– Deborah Shepard on the other writers featured in the series, in her 2000 book Reframing Women: A History of New Zealand Film, page 124

In a style reminscent of Robin Morrison's classic photographs of the West Coast, the film creates a strong sense of Keri's connection with the landscape of Ōkārito.

– Deborah Shepard on this documentary, in her 2000 book Reframing Women: A History of New Zealand Film, page 124

...Gaylene [Preston] has said that she and Keri 'cooked the film up together' and that the film gave Keri a voice with which to explain some important aspects of Māori culture to the British audience . . . Gaylene's participatory approach and the fact that she was a [West] Coaster contributed to a sensitive and enlighting documentary portrait.

– Author Deborah Shepard in her 2000 book Reframing Women: A History of New Zealand Film, page 124

I think of myself as a fantasist: somebody who’s drawing on very old myths.

– Keri Hulme, at the start of this documentary

I was astounded to find when I was growing up, particularly when I first went to university, that people didn’t necessarily think of the land as alive, and as being a person in her own right — the person.

– Keri Hulme, early in this documentary

I think I started life being a very ancient child, and I’m getting younger.

– Keri Hulme, near the end of this documentary