So there’s a ship, the General Grant, which sank off the Auckland Islands in 1866, and has thus far eluded 29 different search teams. It carried 2576 ounces of gold and is, according to one determined searcher, the wreck to find in the sub-Antarctic. Then there are two kina divers, Dean and Steve Savage, who, with their friend Terry the tractor driver, decided to have a hunt for the General Grant in October 2000. They had a boat, a 130ft Japanese diesel electric with holes and without handrails. Terry became chief engineer, although he has one leg and can’t swim.
They took along a documentary team, led by a TVNZ sound engineer who’d never made a movie before. None of them were licensed to go more than 200km offshore, so in a pub in Bluff the night before they set off they found someone, but he didn’t want his identity revealed, so he turns up in the documentary with a great blue X over his head. Their DOC-approved representative, needed as a chaperone because the Auckland Islands are a World Heritage site, never showed at the wharf, so they left without him. And then, after barely four days of searching – and nothing to show for it – DOC revoked their permits and called the whole thing off.
Some – sane, sensible woofterish types – would describe this escapade as bloody-minded idiocy. Samuel Richards, the leader of the film crew, agrees about the idiocy, but describes it as a “f--- it, let’s do it anyway kind of attitude”. “It was beautiful. I fell in love with that kind of tenacity.” So did the judges of Holly-wood’s first digital video festival, who recently gave Richards’s film The General Grant – and where it isn’t the prize for best documentary. Critics called it “refreshing”; Richards called his win “bizarre”. “That was a room of people who know what they were doing. They were directors who had made several films. They had budgets. But they were thinking, look at these f---ing nutcase Kiwis, they know it’s futile, but they’re smiling anyway.”
If Richards’s film is a tribute to the tenacity of the treasure hunters, its very existence is proof of his dogged obstinacy. “We all put so much effort into the trip – everything I had, physically, mentally, emotionally, all the favours I could possibly muster. Every f---ing ounce of anything I had I threw into that expedition. And when it ended, for nothing, I didn’t know what the f--- it was about. If we’d found gold, or fame – or if something happened! But nothing happened! But I started looking over the tapes, and the only thing that made me feel positive was all of us doing it anyway. So I had to finish it.”
The expedition lasted a few days; making the documentary took Richards three years. “I was so over it, I wanted to burn it and erase it from my life.” He didn’t, of course. He sent his copy – his only copy – to the biggest festival he could find. Such imprudence. Three years of sitting up late at TVNZ, using the studios when no one else was around, learning how to edit from the manual in his lap – losing the edited version twice and the audio once – and he still refused to make a backup.
But then, his modus operandi is improvisation. He persuaded the head of Sony to lend him cameras by bribing him with kina. When a deal over tape stock fell through two days before they left, he begged all the production companies in town and ended up with 350 rolls. He’s not averse to a bit of bluffing, either. Once his flatmate taught him cardiology over a weekend and got him into hospital operating theatres by Monday. He is an eloquent chap, wild-haired and more than a little wild-eyed as he reels off the traumatic list of disasters and desperate remedies that made up the “No 8-wire treasure hunt”. And the documentary, which opens when the film crew drive off a Kaikoura cliff on their way down to Bluff, shows barely half the story. Though there is plenty that conveys the peculiar Kiwi sensibility of stubborn optimism in the face of failure.
Amanda the production assistant: “I’ve done Jackson’s Wharf and I thought that was pretty cutting edge, but I feel that I’ve found my place in the film industry here.” Gavin the diver, while they watch the towtruck take off with the ruined car: “It’s cheaper to carry on than go back to Auckland.” The Savages, both staunch in shades and short of sentence: “If there’s gold, we’ll find it and take it home.” Terry the tractor driver sums up their mixture of pragmatism and faith. “I’m not saying anyone’s wasting their time. At home a lot of people take Lotto, and sometimes they strike it.”
The treasure hunters had, naturally, a new theory on how to find the wreck. Beaches are formed by predominating currents, the currents would direct the bits of boat, which, being wooden and buoyant, would wash up on the nearest beach, where the Savages could pick it up. “The theory works fine,” says Richards, “but the nearest beach is 35km away from where the boat sank.” And even I can work out that the gold wouldn’t float. Richards: “I know. I know! When I met these guys in Bluff, I’d already been researching it for six months, so I knew they didn’t know what the hell they were doing. But we went anyway. Because they just might have done it. And we had the gear, the time off work – we were ready to go. F---ed if we were going to turn around just ’cause they didn’t know what they were doing.”
By the time DOC pulled the plug, the treasure hunters had exhausted their plan and were simply looking anywhere. “I’ve filmed them on the beaches, looking for the boat. As if they’re going to find this chest of gold that’s floated down the coast, through this little gap into the harbour and beached itself.”
So, no shots of treasure. Instead, hairy boys in beanies, jokes about shrinkage, Amanda cooking meat and broccoli for the men. The Auckland Islands look spectacular and surprisingly serene, given that the usual conditions are not so much inhospitable as downright hostile – gales, rain 27 days a month, freezing cold. Seals flop about in the sunset and figures in drysuits scuttle along the shore.
Will New Zealanders ever see it? Award-winning charter-fulfilling programming created by an employee – naturally, TVNZ has expressed no interest. Richards, having got over his wish to burn the thing, has become as fussy as an auteur, so he doesn’t want anyone to view it until he has tidied up the end. “Then I’ll be happy to have it shown. I can see now it’s all right. And the fact that it looks like it’s been made by someone who’s never made a film before – that works because we’re talking about people who’ve never been treasure hunting before.”
He says he never wants to do it again, and certainly his current projects – skit comedy, a cheap cooking show – are comparatively staid. But a 1600km bike race in Africa appealed, until he found out that another film-maker had got there first. So he is casting about for another extreme, painful, hopeless situation. “In order to be bothered, I need someone to tell me I can’t do it.”