Votes For Women - What Really Happened?: Sunday Theatre - The Audi New Zealand Season

8:30pm Sunday, June 24 on TV One

TV ONE’s Sunday Theatre – The Audi New Zealand Season continues with Votes for Women – What Really Happened?, a behind the scenes look at New Zealand’s suffrage movement and its key characters.

It’s October 1892, and a time travelling observer has arrived at Kate Sheppard’s (Sara Wiseman, The Cult) house to seek the story of her involvement in the suffrage campaign. A petition with over 20,000 signatures has recently been presented to Parliament and it’s expected by many that women will finally be enfranchised after seven years of intense campaigning.

However, there is a last minute betrayal by the government and the bill is defeated in the Legislative Council. So the Documentary Maker continues to cover the campaign for nearly a year, through all the highs and lows, travelling also to Wellington, Dunedin and Auckland, until September 1893, when the women of New Zealand finally gain the vote.

Key figures in the campaign are interviewed and observed – from Kate Sheppard’s home in Christchurch, to Parliament House in Wellington, to the sweat shops of Dunedin.

The end result is a ‘fly on the wall’ style documentary film, dramatising some of the key moments in the final year of the campaign for women’s suffrage in New Zealand.