The return of TVNZ’s Origins sees the nation’s favourite cartwheeling newsreader follow in the footsteps of his ancestors.
Scotty Morrison (Ngāti Whakaue) doesn’t know how that infamous Te Karere cartwheel happened. One day he was pretending to speed type through the final seconds of the reo Māori news bulletin, the next he was tumbling upside down across the TVNZ studio desperately hoping he wouldn’t crash into the expensive screens behind him. “I remember Pio Terei saying to me, ‘what’s this typing at the end of Te Karere? You’re going a million miles an hour, there’s smoke coming off your keyboard!’” Morrison tells The Spinoff. “It was just a bit of a joke, but then it started to grow organically.”
Morrison’s feet are firmly on the ground in the new season of local documentary series Origins, which returns to TVNZ this week. Season three sees the broadcaster, author, reo Māori expert and 2025 screen personality of the year follow in the footsteps of his ancestors as he discovers the history and legacies of early Māori in Aotearoa. In seasons one and two, Morrison traced the journey of his tūpuna back to Hawaiki and followed the voyage of kūmara from South America across the Polynesian Triangle to Aotearoa. This season, however, sees Morrison stay mostly in Aotearoa. He travels the motu to find out about the first humans who arrived here from Hawaiki, why they stayed and how they adapted to survive in a new and unfamiliar land.
Making Origins was a deeply personal experience for Morrison, who says this latest season is filled with “so much wow factor”. The opening moments of the first episode see him brought to tears holding the toki that was used to carve his ancestral waka. He travels to Tahiti Nui to learn about the ancestors who departed for Aotearoa, and sails into the Pacific ocean to find out what it was like for his tūpuna on their long sea voyage to their new whenua.
Morrison spent three months filming the latest season, and says it was an immense privilege to spend that time experiencing how his ancestors lived during their first 100 years in Aotearoa.
“You realise that there’s strong connections on a whole lot of different levels with people, especially into eastern Polynesia,” he says. “To be able to physically go and see the areas that are in our oral traditions, to stand in places where our really illustrious ancestors were and talk to the people there – that’s really enriched my knowledge of who I am and what our origin story is.”
Enriching knowledge is exactly what Morrison hopes Origins will do for those watching the show from the comfort of their own homes. The series uses a mix of Western science, archeology, mātauranga and kōrero tuku iho to explain what Aotearoa was like 1000 years ago, and the success of the first two seasons proved to Morrison that many New Zealanders are interested in Māori history and want to know more. It’s important that New Zealanders connect to the history of the country they live in, says Morrison, and he wants Origins to open the door for non-Māori viewers to access Māori culture and better understand the ways indigenous people interpret the world around them.
Morrison hopes New Zealanders will be entertained by Origins, but more than anything else, he wants them to understand how extraordinary those early Māori ancestors were. In episode two, the Origins team travelled to Rēkohu Chatham Islands, where a recent storm had washed out pieces of a historic buried waka. “The local Moriori recited their whakapapa and said this is our oral tradition that supports this being the Moriori waka that arrived,” he recalls. Carbon dating on the waka supported the accuracy of that oral history, passed down from generation to generation across many centuries. “They said, ‘yep, it’s exactly the date, they sync up’. It all synergises together.”
As Origins prepares to delve into our fascinating past, cartwheel fans can be assured that Morrison intends to continue his unpredictable Te Karere signoffs long into the future. While he won’t perform a trick at the end of every bulletin (“if we do it every day, the people will expect it”), Morrison confirms he’s taking requests. “The camera people are bringing in props – wigs and balls and all sorts of stuff,” he laughs. But even he draws the line at a handstand – that’s too dangerous for live television.
“I don’t want to be that fella,” he says. “I tried to do a backspin the other day, and it was horrendous.”
Origins returns to TVNZ1 on February 3 at 7.30pm and streams on TVNZ+.
