Wellington - The author of the New Zealand novel The Whale Rider and the director who made it into an international award-winning movie both made headlines in two controversies shaking the South Pacific island nation's arts scene. Writer Witi Ihimaera - a university professor who became in 1973 the first indigenous Maori to have a novel published and went on to write The Whale Rider - has admitted plagiarism in his latest book, just as he was named a national arts treasure.
Reviewer Jolisa Gracewood outed Ihimaera in the weekly New Zealand Listener, saying that she stopped looking after identifying 16 different passages written by other authors in Ihimaera's historical novel The Trowenna Sea, which was published this month.
At the same time, film director Niki Caro, whose movie of The Whale Rider made 13-year-old star Keisha Castle-Hughes the youngest-ever nominee for an Academy Award for best actress in 2002, was condemned by author Elizabeth Knox for her screen adaptation of her book, The Vintner's Luck.
Knox said she took to her bed and cried for days after seeing how much the movie - which also stars Castle-Hughes - departed from her 19th-century fantasy about the gay romance between an angel and a French peasant winemaker.
Ihimaera, 65, who has had 14 novels and 12 collections of short stories published since his debut 36 years ago, apologized for his "inadvertent copying" in The Trowenna Sea and said he would buy back all unsold copies and produce a second edition acknowledging all sources next year.
His announcement was followed by the revelation that Ihimaera had also plagiarized a book by a fellow professor at Auckland University, Keith Sorrensen, in another historical novel, The Matriarch, published in 1986.
As well as being one of New Zealand's leading authors, Ihimaera is a professor and Distinguished Creative Fellow in Maori Literature at the university, where he is founder and course convenor of the masters in creative writing programme.
A week after Gracewood's revelation about his plagiarism Ihimaera was named a national arts treasure and given a 50,000-New-Zealand-dollar (36,500-US-dollar) award.
The affair - and the award - sparked a storm of protest, including from students who said the university's refusal to censure the professor showed a double standard.
Veteran writer and emeritus professor CK Stead protested, "You reject students' essays for doing this and you fail them in exams for doing it."
Vincent O'Sullivan, author and emeritus professor of English at Wellington's Victoria University, likened plagiarism to drug cheating in sport. "It's a performance-enhancing technique that works at someone else's expense," he said.
The Vintner's Luck is only the second feature film made by Caro, 42, since The Whale Rider, which was nominated for more than 50 international awards.
It has had mixed reviews since opening in New Zealand this month and overseas. The Hollywood Reporter called it an "overblown work of amazing silliness" while Variety said it had "glib supernatural conceit, overstated moral lessons and overall dramatic torpor."
But Knox said she was "shocked and upset" that Caro "took out what the book was actually about" and was a betrayal of the gay relationship between the angel Xas and the winemaker Sobran Jodeau.
She said Caro had reduced the relationship to little more than the angel giving advice about wine.
"The film doesn't do the gay romance," Knox told Wellington's Dominion Post. "It has a vague gay flirtation that amounts to nothing and it has quite a lot of heterosexual sex in it."
She said she had little to do with the film, trusted Caro and had respect for her as an artist.
Knox said she would have been happy if Caro had ignored the tale and created a great new film, but that was not the case. "She's taken her own chance on her own story and it hasn't worked."
