Clyde Graf - Coromandel

Clyde Graf grew up in and around the Te Urewera National Park, where his father Egon was a commercial deer hunter spanning more than 30 years. This exposure to one of New Zealand's most beautiful national parks made a lasting impression and proved to be a great training ground. 

Completing secondary school by correspondence, Clyde then moved to Australia and eventually trained in ceramic tiling. Clyde returned to New Zealand in 1995.

In 1997 Clyde and his brother Steve began filming and producing hunting DVDs. By 2005 they had released 5 DVD titles, including an instructional DVD for NZ Police and NZ Mountain Safety Council.

In 2006, concerned members of the public approached the brothers, requesting a documentary be made on the use of 1080 poison in New Zealand. The result was A Shadow of Doubt (2007). This was a soft introduction to the indiscriminate use of the deadly poison 1080; it played twice on Maori Television.

However, the naive approach was largely ignored by the poison users, and later in 2007 the ERMA review into 1080 returned a decision that shocked many of the rural communities around New Zealand.

While filming in the Kahurangi National Park in 2008, Clyde and Steve filmed and photographed an endemic (found nowhere else in the world) weka feeding on a possum carcass. This incident precipitated the making of the informative, and disturbing documentary, Poisoning Paradise - Ecocide New Zealand.

To date, Poisoning Paradise has won 3 international film awards, and is in the pipeline to win more. However, due to the impact of the film, national TV stations in New Zealand have refused to broadcast it.

With his brother Steve, Clyde is now working on a 10 episode outdoors series called Wild Weekend Adventures. The show is family viewing, combining New Zealand wildlife with the great outdoors and is scheduled for broadcast on TV3, early next year.

Clyde Graf is running for UnitedFuture because he believes UnitedFuture may be able to make a difference in regard to the use of 1080 poison in New Zealand, which is a matter of urgent attention.