IGNORANCE IS NOT BLIS

My upbringing, like most people’s, was influenced by things beyond my knowledge and understanding at the time. Things like the potato famines in Ireland, the land clearances in Scotland, and the Huguenot persecutions in France all contributed to my parents’ frugality, religious leanings, strictness and hatred of injustice. They probably also help explain much of my nature.

It’s not surprising that I wasn’t greatly aware of my European history as a kid. It was all such a long time ago and a very long way away. But it still amazes me to this day how absolutely ignorant I was of New Zealand history. Truly – I had no idea of what had been done in this country until I left school and began holding conversations and reading books of my own choice. I was enraged. Youthful ignorance in the face of the facts is one thing. Deliberate suppression of those facts is quite another. Can you imagine the impact on adult Germans if German schools did not teach that country’s full history?

Yet that is what was done here in New Zealand and still is. Our kids are barely exposed to the reality of how power and resources were taken from Maori by the Crown. There’s little specific mention of the well-researched histories told to the Waitangi Tribunal. Very few broadcasters, publishers, educators, public services and public figures in this country are informed by the facts of our history.

All this means that informed adults in this country are hugely outnumbered by the woefully ignorant. It’s no wonder, then, that most New Zealanders, renowned for our fair-mindedness, can draw the dotted line between what was done to our Irish, Scots and Huguenot ancestors and their fierce resistance to those injustices – yet fidget like someone farted when faced with this country’s history of colonial and contemporary injustices and the indigenous resistance to them.

The prevailing desire of the ignorant is to romanticise these islands as a haven to which our many different cultures came for a new start and to ignore their human history. Is not ignorance, after all, a form of bliss? Sorry folks – until we face, teach, accept and honour the fact that Aotearoa was not, is not and will never be just a pretty piece of geography with no history, there’s no “new” start. Rather, there’s a nagging sense of dis-comfort – even dis-ease.

Anyway, back to my growing years. As kids we had to be in bed early. Even as teens, we were only allowed out alone after dark to go eeling. Any other night event – a dance, the pictures – and we had one or both parents for company. I think they figured if we were doing something useful we couldn’t get up to tutu. Wrong. The stuff they didn’t want us doing at a dance could be done just as easily (probably more easily actually) on a riverbank. Let me tell you – we enjoyed our nights out eeling. Until the night our dad, suspicious of the lack of eels, checked on us then kicked our butts all the way home. It was about then I learned – ignorance never is bliss. Seriously.

Hei konei. Hei kona.