Nicola Toki (Photo: TVNZ)

Pop CultureMarch 31, 2025

Nicola Toki wants Aotearoa to fall in love with nature again

Staff writer

Nicola Toki (Photo: TVNZ)

Tara Ward talks to the conservationist and Endangered Species Aotearoa co-presenter about hills, hope and how to save the planet.

Nicola Toki is deep in the Fiordland bush, looking for the heaviest parrot in the world. It’s episode two of the new season of Endangered Species Aotearoa, and the dedicated conservationist trudges beside comedian Pax Assadi through ankle-deep mud and dense forest. After an intrepid tramp through untouched terrain, a Department of Conservation ranger announces that their transmitter has finally located one of the iconic kākāpō – but it’s at the top of a steep hill with the ominous name of “Elevator”.

The news makes Assadi’s mouth drop in horror. Toki looks quietly at her feet. “Please tell me it’s called ‘elevator’ because there’s an actual elevator,” pleads Assadi, but it’s to no avail. Toki and Assadi begin the arduous ascent up the cliff face, but when the ranger finally locates Patawa the kākāpō, the mood instantly lifts. “I can see it!” Assadi whispers. “I”m actually crying,” a visibly emotional Toki replies. Joining the celebration are three rare kākā who suddenly appear in the trees above, called over by the screech of the magnificent kākāpō.

It’s a magical moment, just one of many in the nature documentary series that celebrates and educates about New Zealand’s most vulnerable and threatened creatures. Even months later, in a chat over Zoom, Toki reveals that while she’s seen kākāpo and many other endangered native animals before, the joy and wonder of witnessing these unique creatures in their natural habitat never diminishes. “I’ve seen hundreds of kiwi, and every time I see a kiwi, I’m still going to cry.”

Toki’s love of the natural world began early. As a child growing up in Southland, her parents took her camping and fishing in her Nana’s 1975 Sprite poptop camper, and she spent a lot of time at her grandmother’s farm at Waimahaka. There, she’d play in the native bush that her grandmother refused to clear, swinging on vines and calling the pīwakawaka down. Those formative experiences gave Toki a fierce appreciation for the world around her. “I had the privilege of interacting with nature and a family that wanted to foster that,” she says. “I guess I just never lost it.”

Her family moved around Te Waipounamu after her father – originally a fitter welder at Tiwai Point – decided to follow his dream of becoming a ski plane pilot. They ended up living in Aoraki Mount Cook National Park, and it’s no accident that the first episode of Endangered Species Aotearoa was filmed there. “I fought really hard for that,” Toki reveals, knowing the mountainous landscape would be an incredible character to launch the series. “The team got there, and they were like, ‘whoa’.”

Nicola Toki holds a giant wētā in Endangered Species Aotearoa (Photo: TVNZ)

Returning to Aoraki for a TV show was a full circle moment to Toki, who studied zoology at the University of Otago and later, a postgraduate diploma in natural history, filmmaking and communication. The course was a partnership with Natural History New Zealand, and Toki was taught by the likes of Peter Hayden, Rod Morris and Paul Donovan, all of whom she had watched on homegrown nature TV shows every Sunday night.

Here, she learned the power of storytelling, a skill that would prove invaluable through her career in conservation advocacy. After working as a camera operator at Dunedin’s Channel 9 and as an intern at Tūhura Otago Museum, Toki joined the department of conservation and began talking nature on shows like Good Morning and Meet the Locals. Toki’s Critter of the Week segment on RNZ now attracts 100,000 listeners every week, and inspired the publication of her children’s book Critters of Aotearoa.

Toki says that storytelling is at the heart of Endangered Species Aotearoa too, and she has a knack for communicating facts and information with enthusiasm and warmth. The series doesn’t deny that our natural world is in trouble, but Toki knows from experience that a call to action is far more powerful than doom and despair. “I’ve long believed in telling stories that say, ‘have a look at this thing, it’s really amazing. It’s actually in trouble, but when you do this and this, you can turn it around’,” she says.

That feeling of hope is something Toki was mindful of every time she stepped in front of the camera. “Otherwise, we’d just be making a series about filming animals into extinction, and nobody wants that.”

Looking at Elevator, probably (Photo: TVNZ)

These days, when she’s not clambering up cliffs or sitting in swamps for Endangered Species Aotearoa, Toki lives in Canterbury and works as chief executive of Forest and Bird (or “Twig and Tweet”, as she calls it). Forest and Bird was established a century ago as an independent organisation to act as nature’s voice in New Zealand, with staff and volunteers across the motu working on a variety of community and landscape environmental projects. Regardless of who is in government, Toki says the organisation always wants to work together to find solutions for environmental issues.

That said, Toki adds that the current government’s focus on growth at any cost has been challenging to work with. The coalition government has introduced the Fast Track Approval Bill, announced unambitious climate targets, proposed new mines on conservation land, refused to ban deep sea trawling and cut funding to a myriad of climate-related programmes. It’s a destructive approach that makes no sense to Toki. “It feels like nature is cancelled,” she says. “We have an asset that delivers income to New Zealand, and that’s our natural world. People aren’t coming here to see shopping malls.”

She knows better than most how critical things are, rattling off fact after fact about the perilous state of our natural environment. New Zealand currently has 4,000 threatened species, with 900 of those “on the edge of a cliff”. We also have the highest extinction rate of any country, and the highest proportion of threatened species anywhere on the planet. She adds that the Department of Conservation is expected to protect all of our native creatures, while also eradicating pests and maintaining a visitor network of thousands of kilometres – all on a “disgraceful” budget that’s “significantly less” than that of the Christchurch City Council.

Toki says she wants a different “prosperity mindset” from the government, one that prioritises and protects our natural environment for centuries to come. “Short term, irreversible destruction of things that belong to New Zealanders who might not come for another few generations, is theft, right?” she says. “We’re stealing from our grandkids, and I don’t believe that governments have the right or the mandate to do that.”

Toki and Pax Assadi enjoy nature (Photo: TVNZ)

That’s where Endangered Species Aotearoa comes in. The documentary series uses humour and heart to make New Zealand fall in love with nature, with enthusiastic “bird nerd” Toki providing the perfect foil to Assadi’s reluctant city boy adventurer. Despite not knowing each other before the show, Toki says she and Assadi quickly hit it off – although they fought “like brother and sister” through season one. “We’re on more of an even keel now,” she says. “Pax gets it, he’s fallen in love with nature.”

Whether they’re being chased by fur seals on the Kaikōura coast or searching for black coral in Fiordland, the logistics of filming in some of New Zealand’s most remote places isn’t easy. Shoot days are long and tiring, with the crew lugging 30 kilos of camera gear across oceans, up mountains and through forests. After climbing up Mount Heale and Mount Hobson in the Hauraki Gulf episode, Toki suffered achilles problems for months, while an upcoming episode captures her sitting in a state of exhaustion after wading through a swamp in search of some elusive Australasian bitterns – “the hardest thing any of us filmed, ever”.

Like those tricky little bitterns, endangered creatures don’t give two hoots about the production schedule of a TV show, and the unpredictability of locating these animals can be challenging. In season one, Toki and the team spent several days on Rakiura looking for hoihō, and were filming their sad goodbyes when two penguins simply waddled up on the beach in front of them. This season, a trip to Fiji in search of mantra rays proved fruitless until the moment Toki’s bags were packed. “We were waiting for the boat to collect us, and they saw one,” she recalls. “Next thing it was like, ‘right, tools down, cameras out, let’s go!’”

Nicola Toki and Pax Assadi stand together in front of a wooden fence. Behind them is a vast tropical landscape of sea and forest — Nicola Toki and Pax Assadi (Photo: TVNZ)

Toki hopes the series will help to “flip the switch” and encourage New Zealanders to connect with and protect their local natural wildlife. She’s a firm believer that if we don’t know what we’re at risk of losing, it’s hard to care, and Endangered Species Aotearoa is a timely reminder that New Zealand’s identity is built on its relationship with nature. “New Zealanders have this intrinsic connection to our natural world that is unlike any other country,” she says. “For New Zealanders, nature is our church. It’s our sense of spiritual connection, our sense of self.”

Toki is hopeful for a third season of Endangered Species Aotearoa – though next time, she reckons she’ll try to be a little fitter to conquer those never-ending hills. As she wraps up our Zoom call to collect flies for her son’s pet frog, she says it’s a privilege to tell the stories of New Zealand’s endangered creatures, and she’s proud of the way the show has pushed her out of her comfort zone. “It is not easy to be in togs or a wetsuit at this age and stage of my life on primetime television, or sweating my way up a hill somewhere,” she says.

“But I’ll do it for the nature, and I’ll do it for the people who love the nature.”

Endangered Species Aotearoa screens on Mondays at 7.30pm on TVNZ1 and streams on TVNZ+.

Keep going!

A man peers through a small square opening in a wall, his face framed by the window. The black-and-white image has red X marks scattered across the surface.

The Stolen Children of Aotearoa is essential watching for every New Zealander. (Image: Supplied. Additional design: The Spinoff).

Pop CultureMarch 31, 2025

Review: The Stolen Children of Aotearoa is confronting but essential viewing

Liam Rātana

Ātea editor

The Stolen Children of Aotearoa is essential watching for every New Zealander. (Image: Supplied. Additional design: The Spinoff).

A new documentary from investigative journalist Aaron Smale details the abuse of hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders in care, and the long shadow it casts over our nation.

In July 2023, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care released its final report, confirming what survivors had long known: that more than 200,000 people – many of them children – were abused, tortured, or neglected while in the care of the state or faith-based institutions in Aotearoa. It was a historic milestone in a decades-long fight for truth and justice.

But how do you begin to tell the story of that abuse? How do you capture the scale of a system that chewed through generations?

Journalist Aaron Smale, producer of The Stolen Children of Aotearoa, likens the task to “putting your hand into a silo of grain and pulling out a handful”. His 106-minute documentary, produced in partnership with Awa Films, does not attempt to offer a neat or complete summary. Instead, it provides a confronting and emotionally wrenching platform for those who lived through it.

‘He mea tautoko nā ngā mema atawhai. Supported by our generous members.’

Liam Rātana
— Ātea editor

The documentary opens with survivors sharing tender, early memories – snapshots of childhood before the system intervened. While some speak of hardship, there’s a shared sense that being taken into care was not only unnecessary, but deeply damaging.

The disproportionate numbers of those taken being Māori was no accident. Smale traces this violence back to its roots – not in the formation of social welfare departments, but in colonisation itself. He uses the 1994 film Once Were Warriors as a provocation: how did Māori go from living in rural, functioning communities to the trauma and dislocation depicted in that film?

To answer that, The Stolen Children moves through history. The British arrival. The wars. The land loss. Māori participation in the second world war and the effects of postwar dislocation. The late Bom Gillies, the last member of the Māori Battalion, recalls comrades returning home from Europe to a country that no longer felt like theirs – “a lot of them turned to grog”, he says.

And then came the policies. Urbanisation. Child welfare interventions. Institutionalisation. Abuse.

Two men are outside in a parking lot, focused on using a professional video camera mounted on a tripod. One is adjusting the camera while the other looks on. A tree and some buildings are visible in the background. — Investigative journalist Aaron Smale (left) is the producer of The Stolen Children of Aotearoa. (Image: Supplied)

What emerges is a clear connection: colonisation never ended. It simply changed form.

One of the most compelling features of the documentary is how it traces the path of state control – from care, to youth justice, to adult prison, to the mental health system. Archival footage underscores the attitudes that allowed this system to flourish, but it’s the testimonies of survivors that hit hardest.

We follow a handful of them closely: taken into state care as children, shunted between homes, locked up, medicated, beaten, sexually assaulted. For many, it ended in gangs – not always out of a sense of belonging, but often out of pain.

“I never joined the gang for brotherhood or family,” says Milton, one of the film’s most compelling voices. “I joined for nothing else but the chaos and the anarchy. Because now, it was payback time.”

It’s a pattern repeated throughout the film: state-sanctioned trauma leads to criminalisation, which leads to further punishment.

Among the most disturbing chapters is the film’s treatment of Lake Alice psychiatric hospital. Survivors describe being subjected to electroconvulsive therapy by Selwyn Leeks, who oversaw the adolescent unit in the 1970s. It is described as torture. Leeks died before he could be held to account.

What’s most troubling is how normalised this abuse was, how many people looked away.

The final section of the film centres on the long, exhausting fight for justice. It covers the Royal Commission, the Crown’s eventual apology, and survivors’ frustration with the lack of tangible outcomes.

For many, the apology rings hollow. Thousands of survivors have since passed on, their whānau unlikely to ever receive acknowledgement or compensation.

What justice means in this context is not always clear – but it clearly isn’t what’s currently on offer.

The Stolen Children of Aotearoa is raw, unflinching, and necessary. Smale centres survivors without sanitising their stories, and weaves together history, testimony, and systemic critique in a way that honours the complexity without losing coherence.

There are moments where the number of voices and historical layers can feel overwhelming – but perhaps that’s the point. This was overwhelming. It still is.

By the end, I was shaken, angry, and grateful. Grateful to those who told their stories. Grateful for the upbringing I had – flawed as it was, it was nothing like this.

This is not an easy watch. But it’s an essential one.

The Stolen Children of Aotearoa premieres tonight at 8.30pm on Whakaata Māori and will be available to view on Māori+.

This is Public Interest Journalism funded by NZ On Air.