Barrie Davis: Our Colonial Heritage

There have recently been a number of pundits anguishing about the state and direction of the New Zealand economy; for example, Dr Peter Winsley (here). Furthermore, there have been a number of punters, including myself, who reckon it is only a matter of time before we are a third world country. I doubt it will last the rest of this century, which is a problem for those with children. The better informed have offered specific actions which they believe are necessary to rescue New Zealand from decline, for example Shane Jones (here).

However, it seems to me that, while these points should perhaps be addressed, they are more in the nature of symptoms than the cause of our decline. If we want to turn New Zealand around we need to address the fundamental problem.

Dr Winsley says the economy has not always been an issue for New Zealand:

“New Zealand was one of the wealthiest countries in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1950, New Zealand ranked third in the OECD for GDP per capita. However, New Zealand’s economic growth slowed after the mid-20th century and by the early 2000s, its GDP per capita was in the bottom half of developed countries.”

Back then, New Zealand was only a century old. That is to say, within merely one hundred years the colonists had created New Zealand out of nothing to become one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Here is how it started.

Even before the Treaty was signed, Colonel William Wakefield of the New Zealand Company purchased 20 million acres in central New Zealand, having arrived on the Tory in September 1839. There were already a few Europeans here in Wellington; Richard ‘Dicky’ Barrett had a prefabricated hotel on Lambton Quay which doubled as the courthouse. In 1828 he had married Wakaiwa Rawina, the granddaughter of Tautara, niece of Te Puni, and sister of Te Wharepouri, and with Jacky Love took the chiefs on the Adventure to Sydney on a trading trip. Tiki Parete, as he was known to the Ati Awa, subsequently served as the interpreter between Wakefield and the chiefs regarding the purchase of one third of New Zealand for English colonists. Angela Caughey’s biography of Barrett is interesting reading.

Imagine what it would have been like for the first colonists getting off the Aurora in Wellington on 22 January 1840. They were mostly farmers from the shires and they were immediately aware of the task that lay before them. Yet they rose to the challenge and built New Zealand from nothing.

However, around the middle of the last century everything changed. The good keen man somehow morphed into an office boy. Today farmers, tradesmen and labourers are disparaged in favour of deluded public servants, teachers and academics reading huffy little titles like Imagining Decolonisation and Decolonizing Methodologies by pseudo-intellectuals masquerading as Maori fantasists. Never in the history of human humbuggery has so much twaddle been written by so few and believed by even fewer. I don’t see how they could even believe it themselves.

And you say nothing.

You are standing by while a faction of aggressive Maoris and their deranged supporters take over your country. They couldn’t govern a nation, manage an economy, or run a bath. They are in the process of trashing New Zealand so that now one in three New Zealand voters, including Maoris, are considering moving to Australia. It is obvious to everyone what the outcome will be and yet you do nothing.

I believe you still have a choice. You can go with the flow for a bit of convenience and accept that you belong to a culture that has somehow deprived a faction of our population that incongruously appears to be thriving. And you can continue to pay and apologize for alleged transgressions even though you have not been offered a plausible explanation for specifically what they are. And you can continue to have your children conditioned at school to believe that they are the spawn of people who must perpetually atone for the construed evil of their progenitors.

Or you can no longer tolerate the lies that have been told about your forebears and by extension yourself. And you can ensure that you are properly informed and refuse to deal with anyone who denigrates your culture until their insult has been resolved to your satisfaction. And you can reclaim your colonial heritage and insist that it is genuinely celebrated officially and popularly to your contentment.

The fact of the matter is that the colonists – your ancestors – were remarkable people. If you could recapture what motivated them, you could continue what they started. But first, you need to restore them to the status to which they are long overdue. Then remind yourself, and everyone else, that you are the inheritors of a staunch and noble tradition, which you fully intend to continue. You need to assertively, unapologetically and consistently communicate that in every endeavour you undertake.

New Zealand is there for the taking. So take it. It is rightfully yours. Your ancestors built it. But you will need to assert yourself to reclaim it. You need a purpose, you need an attitude, and you need to act. Go for it.

Merry Christmas

Barrie Davis is a retired telecommunications engineer, holds a PhD in the psychology of Christian beliefs, and can often be found gnashing his teeth reading The Post outside Floyd’s cafe at Island Bay.

Reference

Angela Caughey, The Interpreter: The Biography of Richard ‘Dicky’ Barrett, 1998.