This feature-length docu-drama, with a mix of drama, interviews, archival footage and retro music that recreates story of the Hauraki Radio pirates.
Auckland Viaduct, October 1966: a group of determined young men defy the police and government and, to the cheering of their fans, launch a coastal ship that has been converted to a pirate radio station which they intend to use to broadcast from the Hauraki Gulf.
It is the birth of commercial radio in New Zealand. Crazy as it seems, this is what it took to break the stronghold the Broadcasting Corporation had on national broadcasting at the time, despite a growing youth audience clamouring for radio that was in touch with their generation. Radio Hauraki, as the pirate station was known, broadcast their popular mix of music and chat from the so-called ‘safe’ international waters 50 miles from Auckland beyond the reach of government legislation, on and off from 1966-1970.
They weren’t the first. Radio Caroline in Britain was trying to broadcast from the English Channel, the story of which was the basis for the comedy film The Boat that Rocked. But the Hauraki endeavor, unlike all other international attempts, succeeded.
And it was no joke. Enduring political interference, harassment, court cases, crippling financial woes and shipwrecks along the way, the endeavour cost them more than they could ever have known
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