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Seacliff Wellington trailer

251 views · Published 30 June 2017 · 1:57 · Indexed 20 October 2026

Channel: Renee Maurice · 2017 · Entertainment

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Trailer for my Wellington production of Seacliff: Demise of Ward 5! 

Hi, I'm Renee Maurice. You may know me as the winner of New Zealand's Got Talent 2013. I've had a big interest in music for many years and in 2006, I decided to write a musical. I did some research, looking for interesting stories and ideas and I stumbled across the story of the Seacliff Mental Hospital fire that changed my life.

Now I'm inviting anyone who has a personal interest, or involvement with mental and psychiatric health, or anyone who would be interested in getting behind a historical and exciting musical production, to donate.

On the 8th of December, 1942, a fire took place at Seacliff Mental Hospital in Dunedin. 39 women were locked inside the ward which burned to the ground - 37 of those women perished. At the time, it was the worst fire disaster in New Zealand, until the Ballantynes Fire in 1947 which killed four more people.

I continued my research into the Seacliff fire, and became more and more appalled at the circumstances around it. I went to school the day after first reading about it and asked my history teacher if he knew anything about it - he had never heard of it. I asked several other people who'd "been around a while", and they too had never heard of the tragedy. What began as a desire to tell a story through drama and music became a crusade to expose a terrible and tragic event in our Nation's history.

In 2015, Seacliff: Demise of Ward 5 was produced in Dunedin, aided financially with a successful Boosted campaign for $15,000. The production received favourable reviews and had over 1000 attendees across our short 4-show season. Now, I am once again calling for the support of my friends and other generous New Zealanders who want to support this production as I bring it to stage on the event's 75th anniversary year.

The purpose of Seacliff: Demise of Ward 5 is to educate the general public about this long subdued tragedy, by at the same time, entertaining them.

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