An Eel of a Tale at Wellington Museum

Puppeteer Anna Bailey will be presenting her newest show “Nan and Tuna” for two shows only on Saturday the 11th of February at the Wellington Museum. The show is great for familys and is koha entry.

Anna discovered puppetry in 2008 while working as an au pair for a family of puppeteers in Italy. Since then she has created many shows and she is a regular busker at the Harbourside market and on Cuba street with Enid, her popular portrait painting puppet. With this puppet and a number of other shows she has travelled the world and performed in 13 different countries. It was while performing at a puppet festival in Turkey that she saw a puppet show of the “The little Mermaid” performed in a fishtank and the idea for this show was began to develop.

Anna has long been fascinated with tuna (NZ native eels). As a child, she used to watch them in her local creek and feed them at Nga Manu bird sanctuary. One day after seeing some older boys eeling she and a friend took a whitebait net and a machete and tried to catch one, thankfully unsuccessfully and with no injury to themselves.

Later, when she learnt more about tuna and their incredible journey she wanted to create a puppet show about eels. In 2016 she came together with the Porirua Harbour Trust and the Philipp Family Foundation, who also wanted to raise awareness about the plight of the tuna. With their support, “Nan and Tuna” was created. “Hopefully” she says “stopping other little girls like me from tormenting eels and instead letting people know that they need our care and protection as much as the kiwi”.

In researching tuna for this show she was continually amazed. The endemic female long finned eel can live up to 100 years in our streams before swimming hundreds of kilometres back to their breeding grounds. Young eels (elvers) are great climbers and can wriggle up 20 metres of rock/concrete. Migrating adult eels sometimes knot themselves into “eel balls” and roll over dry stretches of ground. Longfin tuna, like great spotted kiwi and kereru, are listed as “chronically threatened and in gradual decline” but while kereru and kiwi are protected tuna continue to be caught commercially.

Anna says that, “I hope that audiences will not only come away with greater knowledge but will also fall in love with the tuna in the same way I have over the course of this project”
Nan and Tuna
Saturday 11th February
11:30am and 2pm
Wellington Museum
Koha entry

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