The Bay Boys

Television (Full Length) – 1998

In this documentary, presenter, poet and lifelong surfer Gary McCormick reunites the 'Bay Boys'— a gang of Pākehā and Māori surfing buddies who grew up in Titahi Bay and often had "seawater dripping out of their noses". In the early 1960s Porirua was a rapidly growing city with 2,700 state houses and a young population. It also became a city of two halves; in the late 1960s gangs began recruiting in more deprived areas of Porirua East. McCormick meets up with friend George Harris, a "snappy dresser" and hard man who broke a cycle of domestic abuse and pain when he became a husband and a father.

All around us a new city was rising. We were all part of a large, social experiment we didn't even know was going on.
– Presenter Gary McCormick looks back on his childhood in Titahi Bay in the fast growing northern Wellington suburb of Porirua