Play revisits the Chinese tragedy on the Hokianga

“The Bone Feeder” by Renee Liang
TAPAC, 100 Motions Rd, Western Springs, Auckland
Thursday 10 November – Sunday 20 November

“The Bone Feeder” is a contemporary reworking of the historical sinking of the SS Ventnor. In 1902 the coffins of 499 Chinese sojourners from Otago and Wellington, being repatriated to their home towns in China, were lost near the Hokianga Harbour.

The play follows the trials of a young man called Ben who seeks to find the lost bones of his great great grandfather and to bring them home, and of Kwan, a man who emigrates to NZ in the 1800s and has to decide where he belongs.

Combining theatre with aerial stunts and martial arts, live music, shadow play and dance, the play is a fictional exploration of what is for many Chinese New Zealanders a very real and significant piece of their history. The play also explores one of the first occasions of contact between Maori and Chinese.

“The Bone Feeder” is a New Zealand play with a difference. It's a contemporary Western theatre piece which draws on the traditions of Asian storytelling recounting how a grieving and then-insular Chinese community raised money to send its loved ones ‘home’; how those promises to family sank to the bottom of the ocean in an unknown harbour; and how the remains were found and honoured by the people of that land, is a history that should be more widely known in New Zealand. But then, the history of the Chinese in New Zealand is one that is absent from our history books and literature up until now.

What is even more poignant is that this history is still being written. In early 2009, some of the descendants of the men lost on the Ventnor visited the Hokianga for the first time, to meet with the local Maori community and discuss how best to honour those lost.
This work, though entirely fictional, is dedicated to the families of those lost on the Ventnor, and to the people of the Hokianga who made those spirits welcome all these years.

The play was first written and performed in 2009 as a University of Auckland production and went on to a short touring season in 2010 as part of the Hamilton Garden Arts Festival and the Palmerston North Festival of Cultures.

Renee Liang has written three other plays; Lantern, Mask and The first Asian AB.