Barrie Davis: “Becoming Aotearoa” - a Book Review

We sometimes read that the history of New Zealand is being rewritten. The title of Michael Belgrave’s 2024 book Becoming Aotearoa: A New History of New Zealand leaves no doubt that is the case.

The first sentence of the Preface reads:

 

“This history of Aotearoa New Zealand is a response to crisis: the massacre of 51 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch on 15 March 2019 and the ongoing uncertainty which has followed it.”

 

He goes on to tell us that “Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern cast out the perpetrator,” and I recall we were forbidden to mention Brenton Tarrant’s name. Actually, I had forgotten both his name and the shooting until I started reading Becoming Aotearoa.

 

Belgrave points to white supremacy and colonialism as the reason for the shooting, supported by two persons of note (p. 8):

 

“Dame Anne Salmond argued that the killer’s brand of white supremacy was simply an extreme version of something deeply ingrained in New Zealand’s past.”

 

Brenton Tarrant is Australian.

 

“Lawyer Moana Jackson was another to make the link between the Christchurch killer and New Zealand’s colonial experience. For him, the attack was ‘a manifestation of the particular history of colonisation and its founding presumption that the so-called white people in Europe were inherently superior to everyone else’. The killer ‘drew upon the shared ideas and history that still lurk in the shadows of every country that has been colonised’.”

 

Now, that is conjecture and, in my view, unlikely. If Tarrant was motivated by white supremacy and colonization, why did he target Muslims rather than Maoris, Islanders or Asians? These are serious accusations which, if true, are likely to increase racial tension in New Zealand.

 

In any case it serves to identify the theme for the book.

 

Perhaps because of the Prime Minister’s ban on the topic, we need to turn to media coverage from other countries to find an answer.

 

When Tarrant killed 51 Muslims at Christchurch on the Ides of March, he had written “for Rotherham” on his ammunition (here). Sammy Woodhouse spoke out to condemn the attack, saying that it was “not done in our name.” Woodhouse had been raped aged 15 by Arshid Hussain, aka ‘Mad Ash’, leader of the men convicted in a Rotherham child sexual exploitation (CSE) case. Woodhouse told her story to Andrew Norfolk (The Times, 23 August 2013, here) which in turn led to the Alexis Jay enquiry.

 

The seminal report by Professor Alexis Jay published in August 2014 says at least 1,400 British children were raped, trafficked and groomed by organized groups of Muslims in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Also in 2013 the Mirror claimed that there were “child sex slave gangs in every city in Britain” (here), after seven Pakistani Muslim men were convicted of rape, child prostitution and trafficking of six girls aged between 11 and 15 in Oxford (here). I have read newspaper reports of cases in 32 cities and major trials in 16 cities.

 

In 2014, Home Secretary Theresa May blamed the failure of the authorities in Rotherham on “institutionalised political correctness” (here). The Police and the councils had known of the child sexual exploitation by Pakistani Muslim men for decades and in 2020 a Chief Inspector reportedly claimed it had been “going on” for 30 years, saying “With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.” (here) So the rape gangs continued to operate. (See my article here.)

 

It seems that Tarrant’s behaviour was at least in part due to indignation at the Rotherham scandal. Perhaps he had taken the time to search the relevant news sources, which apparently Belgrave had not. It is difficult to conclude that Tarrant’s behaviour was due to white supremacism and colonialism, as Belgrave, Salmond and Jackson claim; yet that dubious claim is bolstering a belief that is shaping the direction of New Zealand today.

 

Belgrave returns to the topic in “Chapter 35 Becoming Aotearoa” under the head “Demonising the Other” (p. 517):

 

“However, those affected by the killings at Al Noor Mosque and at the Linwood Islamic Centre told the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Terrorist Attack on Christchurch Masjidain of the daily abuse they received from passers-by. Muslim women and girls were particular targets because they wear the hijab, the ‘visible demonstration of their faith’.”

 

However, Dr. Mark Durie says in “The Grim Truth Behind the Grooming Gangs” (here), that the girls who were being raped in Britain were victims of a religiously motivated hate crime. The girls were told they were filthy infidels and inferior and they were dehumanized in the eyes of the men.

 

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but the abuse in New Zealand is minor compared to that in Britain. Anyone who has read of what has and is still happening in Britain will see that Belgrave’s account is biased.

 

Belgrave goes on to say in the Preface (p. 11):

 

“A new history curriculum, another Ardern initiative, was developed during 2021 and 2022, when consensus prevailed. It provided for all children in their first 10 years of schooling to tackle, head-on, New Zealand’s colonial past, Maori history and the way that different groups of immigrants have been welcomed or shunned.”

 

I am not going to read his book and let’s hope they do not use it for history in schools. But I will dip into it from time to time for examples of the present perspective of New Zealand history writers.

 

A topic that interests me is the claim that the Treaty includes provision for a partnership when that is clearly not the case. The relationship of the Crown and the chiefs is analogous to that of King John and his barons in the Magna Carta. The chiefs accepted Crown sovereignty, but retained their rangatiratanga after they signed the Treaty, and returned to their traditional tribal environments in what we now call the countryside. The colonists went about the enormous task of building New Zealand; the towns and interconnecting roads, and the farms that supported them financially. That situation remained for a century.

 

Here is what Belgrave has to say about the end of that period under the head “An Urban Revolution” (p. 401):

 

“For Maori in the 1950s, jobs in the city replaced rural unemployment or under-employment as Maori sought higher wages, better housing (even urban slums were better than rural homes) and greater economic opportunities. The government managed the urbanisation, which it saw as a way of assimilating or integrating Maori into the wider community without threatening it.”

 

During this period about 80 per cent of the total Maori population moved from their traditional tribal way of life to the civilization of the European colonists. Belgrave continues:

 

“For Maori, these decades of the 1950s and 1960s meant not just the movement from turangawaewae to towns and cities, but also a major change in health, life expectancy, family size, housing, education and employment. Not all these changes were for the better, but in socio-economic terms there was considerable improvement. There needed to be. Maori living conditions in the 1920s and 1930s were appalling – extremely bad housing, crippling infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, measles and whooping cough, and poor sanitation.”

 

Belgrave does not say which changes were not for the better in the towns, but somehow, although the chiefs had previously been responsible for their tribes, the Maori people were now the responsibility of the European colonists. Belgrave does not account for that, but he continues:

 

“Initially, government funded housing had been second rate compared with that provided for non-Maori in towns. By the late 1950s, though, state housing, in both rural and urban settings led to dramatic improvements in Maori health standards, although rural poverty persisted.”

 

Approximately 80% of the Maori population of their own volition had moved out of a traditional Maori environment to more fully participate the pakeha taonga in a European environment, run and paid for by local and national European funded government. The Maoris willingly deserted the chiefly authority of rangatiratanga so that the chiefs became redundant.

 

After that process had been completed the Government legislated the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975 and subsequently placed a modern reincarnation of part-Maori ‘chiefs’ in a co-governance arrangement with our now multicultural democratic government. Yet our Parliament comprises about one third of Maori MPs, including seven exclusive Maori seats, for around one sixth of Maori in the general population.

 

So, by Belgrave’s own account, when the British arrived in New Zealand as colonists they built their own towns and left the Maoris to their traditional way of life. When the Maoris realized the European way was superior to theirs, they moved into the towns where the Europeans built entire new suburbs to house them. Belgrave used ‘white supremacism’ as a pejorative term, but the introduction of superior European culture – including technology, economics and knowledge – is a fact of New Zealand history that should be freely expressed and acknowledged, not suppressed with disapproval if not contempt.

 

Nevertheless, Belgrave returns to the implausible theory of the Ides of March killings by Brenton Tarrant in the Epilogue (p. 528): “In the wake of the killings, the white supremacist hatred that had prompted the murders was connected by some commentators to New Zealand’s history, to the nature of its colonization and to deep-seated racism and xenophobia. … As this book has shown, it is not very difficult to find, in the country’s history, echoes of the current language of white supremacy … which treated Maori as socially and economically inferior, and sometimes as racially inferior.”

 

Michael Belgrave’s book is at best the pot calling the kettle black; its author despises in others that which he has reason to fear in himself. What could be worse is that it is a part of the current zeitgeist of self-reinforcing narratives of hatred towards Europeans. Belgrave is a professor of history who has written several New Zealand history books, including Historical Frictions and Dancing with the King, and provided research and reports for the Waitangi Tribunal. To the extent that his writings are misleading he is contributing to a false narrative and bolstering the discourse of racial friction in New Zealand.

 

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.