Black Hearted Barney Blackfoot

Black Hearted Barney Blackfoot was funded by TVNZ and the Department of Education, and screened in New Zealand schools as well as on television. Jack Body's musical score tied in with the primary school music curriculum. It was especially designed so that after one screening, it could be shown a second time without the percussion section of the soundtrack; children were then encouraged to use or make instruments to create percussion sounds to the film.

– Annie Murray writer about Black Hearted Barney Blackfoot (see 'Background' tab).

He was right about kids being smarter than adults assume — there are few books I’ve read as an adult that imprinted as vividly on my psyche as his did when I was a 10-year-old! Jack will always be in dingy tramping huts, in the swampy smell of gully mud, when I pick up a hard acorn, on wild backcountry ridges and in the shadowy bushline above Lake Waikaremoana.

– Writer Isobel Ewing pays tribute to writer Jack Lasenby, The Spinoff, 29 September 2019

I’m a great believer in the power of young people, especially young women, to overcome great odds even when no one else seems to believe in them. This is a trope I’ve kept throughout my career.

– Director Yvonne Mackay, in a December 2012 interview with website Spectacular Optical