by Michael King
The most important political and social challenges of the new era would be those surrounding the sustainable use of the country’s primary resources, finding sufficient stable markets abroad for its goods and services to sustain the degree of prosperity most New Zealanders had come to expect, constructing a welfare system that helped the genuinely needy but did not at the same time drain the enterprise of the potentially able, and negotiating a new social contract between Maori and Pakeha. History, as always, offered signposts to suggest ways in which these problematic territories might be negotiated.
In the case of the resource issues, there were the cautionary examples of the ‘future-eating’ activities of early Maori and the reckless extraction of the country’s earliest industries, which had sacrificed long-term security in favour of spectacular short-term profit. There was also the spectacle of the conversion of much of the country into grasslands without a proper accounting of the benefits and deficits of such a strategy. The search for diverse and stable markets would always be conditioned by the twin spectres of the Great Depression and Britain’s decision to join the European Community, both of which had revealed the vulnerability of countries that relied on too few markets for a limited range of products. And reform of the welfare system involved balancing the long-cherished concept of the welfare state against a realistic appraisal of the kinds of incentives that people require in order to contribute to the wealth of their own communities. As for the domain of Maori–Pakeha relationships, that more than any other would be shaped and reshaped by 200 years of shared experience.
‘History,’ wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr, ‘haunts even generations who refuse to [acknowledge it]. Rhythms, patterns, continuities, drift out of time long forgotten to mould the present and to colour the shape of things to come.’ This observation is as profoundly true of New Zealand in the twenty-first century AD as it is of anywhere else in the world where humankind has managed to retain a foothold for any length of time.
Jean Pottier L’Horme of the French India Company, who came ashore with Jean de Surville in Doubtless Bay in December 1769, was the first European to describe a Maori powhiri. ‘[All] the people were scattered here and there on the hills and the shore, and were no doubt doing honour to the new arrivals by waving … branches of grass … to one side, as though to create a breeze … [It] started right from when they first saw the boat, and went on until the captain set foot on land.’ Pottier L’Horme was of the opinion that the Ngati Kahu people who performed this ceremony were ‘barbarians’ and of ‘limited intelligence’. But he speculated that, exposed to the light of true religion and the gifts of European civilisation, they might be persuaded to alter their savage ways.
Were Jean Pottier L’Horme able to re-enter New Zealand more than three centuries after this glimpsed encounter, he would discover much that had changed in the landscape and in the behaviour of the indigenous people he had observed. And he would find it difficult to attach with any credibility the labels ‘barbarian’, ‘savage’ and ‘heathen’ to the appearance and behaviour of contemporary Maori. At the same time, if he returned to a Maori community, and returned with unfeigned interest and genial intentions, he would as likely be welcomed by a powhiri that involved his hosts waving greenery, ‘as though to create a breeze’, as he had been in 1769. As so often in history, elements of continuity in human affairs would be as noticeable and as interesting as elements of change.
There would be other elements of continuity: the strong degree of tribal competitiveness that delayed the distribution of fishing quota by the Waitangi Fisheries Commission; the tenacity with which Maori staked claims for recognition of their rights to the seabed and foreshore; the appetite for martial behaviour that animated urban Maori gangs and made the New Zealand Army a popular Maori career choice; the admiration of people who were cheeky and cunning in the mould of Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga; the continued easy resort to song and story when there were messages of a communal kind to be transmitted; the continuing weight of unwritten tikanga or tradition; the I-am-we ethos of tribal culture in which the corporate self was more important than individual identity. All these elements were part of the ‘rhythms, patterns and continuities’ that emerged from time past to leave an imprint on the Maori present.
What was true of Maori culture was also true of that of the country as a whole. A myriad of echoes of old New Zealand still resonate within the contemporary culture. The notion that the country is special, and has features that the rest of the world could study with profit, lingers in the group memory of Seddon’s characterisation of New Zealand as ‘God’s own’; the ‘man alone’ ideal, the hunting-shooting-fishing ethic and the solitary bachelor, survive from the frontier days when, because of a shortage of women, many men chose to live that way; the bach culture based on a strong desire to live simply on the margin between land and sea, or between tamed and untamed places; the determination to preserve access to rivers, lakes and beaches via Jock McKenzie’s highly valued but insufficiently distributed bequest, the ‘Queen’s chain’; the highly practical do-it-yourself tradition of home maintenance that sets men to work on houses, boats and gardens; the fiercely egalitarian instinct which prefers to see resources spread widely and equitably throughout the community and not, as elsewhere, in massive disproportion between the very rich and the very poor; the reactions of dissenting individuals or groups in the face of authority; the largely informal social attitudes. All these phenomena have a history which can be linked to the attitudes and values formed in the nation’s years of gestation.
The continuing popularity of attendance at Anzac Day services, the country’s first example of non-Maori indigenous ceremonial, indicated a persistent and widespread belief that something of enormous significance to New Zealanders occurred on that distant peninsula in the Aegean Sea – not a ‘baptism of blood’, perhaps, but a degree of sacrifice for an ideal that gave New Zealanders a shared nationwide experience and was still a source of admiration when the ideal itself had evaporated. And with that belief went a growing admiration for all New Zealanders who had gone to fight wars in distant lands, an admiration that was only increased by the knowledge that such gestures on such a scale would never be made again. Some went so far as to suggest that the degree of unanimity generated by Anzac Day ought to be harnessed by making it the country’s national day in preference to 6 February, Waitangi Day, which would always involve marking the score-card on race relations and a less than perfect verdict.
The criteria by which New Zealanders identified their own brand of heroes or persons of repute also had deep roots in shared memories and experience. To some extent, what New Zealanders admired could be deduced from what they disliked. Writing in 1951, the civil servant Reuel Lochore had attempted to define what it was about Continental immigrants that made Anglo-Saxon New Zealanders recoil. ‘They lack discretion and tact. They revel in displays of emotionalism and self-pity, and fail to realise how we despise such lack of self-control. On social occasions … they talk loudly and untiringly about their own affairs. Being bad listeners they cannot take a hint, nor sense an attitude, from what we leave unsaid.’
While these comments had about them the odour of old-fashioned New Zealand xenophobia, it could be noted that no one exhibited the converse of the attitudes and habits described more than Edmund Percival Hillary. Hillary, formerly a beekeeper from Tuakau, had by the turn of the twenty-first century earned the uncontested title of ‘greatest New Zealander’. His route to fame had been reaching the summit of Everest for the first time with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay in May 1953. Although that was the achievement for which he was knighted, he preferred to be known and to introduce himself by the very Kiwi name of ‘Ed Hillary’. This was but one of many chords in his appearance and behaviour that had resonance for his compatriots.
For one thing, Hillary looked the part of an ‘ordinary’ New Zealand bloke, of the kind with which Wellingtonians were familiar from Neville Lodge cartoons: tall, gangling, raw-boned, with protruding ears
and an unruly mop of hair, usually (when not climbing) standing in a decidedly ‘at ease’ posture. He had done several highly practical things New Zealanders admired, and had done them well. He had pitted himself against the natural world and won (‘We knocked the bastard off’, he said to his fellow countryman George Lowe as he and Tenzing descended Everest). He had led the first land crossing to the South Pole since those of Amundsen and Scott. He did not say a great deal, and what he did say was laconic and modest, and often eloquent in its stark simplicity. These things alone, combined with his climbing success, were sufficient to make him a hero at home for the rest of his life and beyond.
But Hillary did more than that. He used the almost accidental fame that Everest conferred on him to do a power of practical good in the world: to support humanitarian and conservation causes at home, both categories dear to the hearts of most New Zealanders; and to build schools and hospitals in Nepal. He did a stint as New Zealand High Commissioner in India. Through all this he remained reticent, strong, dependable, unboastful, good-humoured, a man who accepted with patience and grace the relationship his country had forged with him and the responsibilities and burdens that accompanied it.
A few other men approached Hillary’s stature in the public mind but did not match or excel it. Colin Meads, All Black and farmer, shared some of Hillary’s characteristics, including the inclination to do good by stealth, but not his palpable humanitarianism and spare eloquence. Charles Upham, farmer, soldier and twice winner of the Victoria Cross, was a man of immense courage and matching reticence. Howard Kippenberger (‘Kip’) was far and away the most liked and trusted of the New Zealand Division’s senior officers in World War II, whose personal qualities reflected those of another civilian-into-soldier hero from World War I, William Malone, who had taken the peak of Chunuk Bair at Gallipoli in August 1915 but lost his life trying to hold it.
Yachtsman Peter Blake nudged Meads’s stature in the sporting world and beyond after his round-the-world sailing exploits and winning the America’s Cup for New Zealand in 1995. Blake’s mana was enlarged by the circumstances of his murder in Brazil in 2001 when he was leading an environmental awareness expedition on the Amazon River. Peter Snell justifiably won a sportsman of the century award for his middle-distance running achievements, including winning medals at the Rome and Tokyo Olympics and setting world records, and was also much admired for his genial modesty. Wilson Whineray made the rare transition from captain of the All Blacks to captain of industry, working at the same time for community and charitable organisations. Jonah Lomu, the gargantuan New Zealand Tongan winger, gained heroic status among rugby followers at the height of his sporting career in the 1990s but did not seem to have any message of inspiration for his compatriots beyond that of sporting prowess and a good nature.
New Zealand had no Ned Kelly, and the smaller number of Irish and convict settlers in the nineteenth century ensured a narrower band of larrikinism in the population at large than that enjoyed by Australia (it is no surprise, therefore, that the nearest hero the country had to a Ned Kelly figure, fiery West Coast Red Fed Patrick Hickey, chose to end his days in Australia rather than in the land of his birth, which had become rather too respectable for his liking). But when George Wilder, convicted of breaking and entering shops and car conversion, escaped from prison in 1962 and 1963, and evaded capture for 65 days on the first occasion and 170 on the second, newspaper readers followed his exploits with the excitement and admiration normally associated with sports spectatorship. In appearance Wilder was a ‘short-arsed’ version of Hillary with similarly ‘ordinary bloke’ features. He too was a man of few words, and perhaps the popularity of his efforts to evade the law said something about New Zealanders’ attitudes towards those who pit themselves against both the elements and authority.
There were many others who acquired heroic or role-model status for particular groups of New Zealanders: those who typified the No. 8 fencing-wire ability to improvise successfully, such as would-be aviator Richard (‘Mad’) Pearse of Waitohi, who may have achieved airborne if not controlled flight months before the Wright brothers in North Carolina, and Christchurch motorcycle designer John Britten. There were those who enlarged New Zealand’s sense of itself on the international stage – Peter Fraser at the United Nations, Rewi Alley in China, athletes Snell, Murray Halberg and John Walker at a succession of Olympics, Kiri Te Kanawa in the great opera houses of the world. Scientists and scholars acted as exemplars for those who followed similar paths rather than for the wider public: Nobel prize-winners Maurice Wilkins (DNA research) and Alan MacDiarmid (development of plastic conductors), the pioneer plastic surgeons Sir Harold Gillies and Sir Archibald McIndoe, the space scientist William Pickering, the Pacific and Cook scholar John Beaglehole, awarded the rare Order of Merit, the astrophysicist Beatrice Tinsley, who died just years short of the Nobel Prize her closest colleagues were convinced she would earn. As prone to boosterism as ever, New Zealanders derived satisfaction from seeing their sons and daughters – but most often their sons – take on the best the world had to offer and perform creditably with what John Mulgan called ‘the versatility of practical men’.
Other figures held heroic stature more specifically for women. Among them were Kate Sheppard, who had promoted women’s suffrage from the ranks of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; Suzanne Aubert, who founded the only religious order to persist in New Zealand (the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion) and, as Mother Mary Aubert, dispensed aid to the old, the poor, the sick and the illegitimate without concern for their religious affiliation; the aviator Jean Batten, of the ‘girls can do anything’ mould; and Janet Frame, whose self-rescue from psychiatric hospitals and eventual international recognition as a writer had resonance for people everywhere.
The Maori world too had its heroes and heroines, some – such as Te Puea Herangi and Whina Cooper (‘the Mother of the Nation’) – known and admired nationally. Others, such as Sir James Henare of Ngati Hine, John Rangihau of Tuhoe and Irihapeti Ramsden of Ngai Tahu, were far better known and better understood in Maori circles than non-Maori. There was also in this context a continuing admiration for the ‘Maui’ figure, the trickster or lovable rascal who bluffed and charmed his or her way through life and was perhaps best represented in the late twentieth century by the comedian Billy T. James, whose popularity was nationwide, as was the sense of loss at his early death in 1991.
That Maori and Pakeha, in addition to what they shared, should still have some separate heroes and heroines at the beginning of the twenty-first century was yet another indication that the habits, values and attitudes of both cultures retained sufficient force to be identified as separate traditions. And both continued to give New Zealand an ongoing bicultural character over and above the forces which, in other contexts, made the country multicultural. Multiculturalism was a reality too, for Maori culture was still predominantly tribal rather than nationally homogeneous, and Pakeha culture was made up of many strands, some of which – the Scottish, the Irish, the Jews, the Chinese – may wish to retain active links with their cultures of origin. In that sense, the quality of being a Maori, a Pacific Island, a Gujarati or a Jewish New Zealander may differ markedly in some contexts.
The dominant realities of New Zealand life, however, are still those of a mainstream Pakeha culture, in which almost every citizen has to participate in order to be educated, secure employment, play sport and engage in most other forms of recreation; and of a tangata whenua culture, in which the language, rituals of encounter and ways of farewelling the dead are still markedly different from those of the Pakeha majority and more visible and pervasive than those of other minority cultures. In addition, Maori is the foundation human culture of the land, the first repository of its namings and its histories and its songs; and it is the culture of the people who have, for as long as they want it, a special relationship with the government of New Zealand via the Treaty of Waitangi – a relationship which other peoples and cultures, including the Pa
keha majority, lack. Whether other cultures need or want or deserve such a relationship is another matter. The fact is that the Treaty of Waitangi is still unmistakably there after more than 160 years, and its significance and relevance are ensured by both the Maori insistence that the document mediates a living relationship between Maori and the Crown, and by the majority Pakeha view that this constitutes an appropriate stance for the country to take. Should either of those views change, then the significance and the potential power of the Treaty too would change, because they depend for their force on the consent of those two constituent peoples.
Having passed through an era, up until the 1970s, in which the Treaty was not observed or honoured, however, and into one in which that deficit was being rectified, the country became aware of a strong Pakeha aspiration for the values and imperatives of their culture too to be recognised and taken as seriously by the government and the country as a whole as that of the tangata whenua. This impulse came from a growing conviction among Pakeha that their culture, like that of Maori, is no longer the same as the cultures of origin from which it sprang – that it has become, in fact, a second indigenous culture by the same processes by which East Polynesian people developed Maori culture: transplanting imported concepts and values from one place to another, observing them change over time in a new land and new circumstances, and eventually focusing attention away from the ancestral home and fully on the contemporary homeland.