A TIME OF RADICAL CHANGE IN NEW ZEALAND

The 1960s saw a fervent uprising in the United States by the negro civil rights movement, coupled with widespread protest, across America, due to an escalation of the Vietnam War. During this tumultuous period a number of black activist spokespeople like Angela Davis, Rap Brown, Huey Newton, etc., etc., rose to prominence worldwide and achieved cult status … and no more so than amongst the Polynesian community of Auckland, New Zealand where they were revered almost as gods. The Polynesian’s seemingly adored black-American attire, afro hairstyles, the brightly coloured crimson yellow, etc., scarves or overly large sunglasses of the negress women and adopted all things black-American as a fashion statement. They earnestly wanted to identify in solidarity with the black-American struggle, as an equally oppressed people trying to free themselves from the clutches of evil “IMPERIALISM”.

On the 16^th of June 1971, New Zealand born Polynesians formed the Polynesian Panther Party, explicitly influenced by the American Black Panther Party and more-especially Huey Newton’s policy of black unity. But something was lacking with these trendy, fashion-conscious, South Pacific island, brown-bro-in-arms wannabes and that was the fact that they’d never been “SLAVES” like their newly adopted, black American bro. The Polynesians had nothing in common with the black history of America. In fact, when Captain William Hobson was sent to New Zealand in 1839-40 to secure a treaty with Maori chiefs, an estimated 10% of Maori in New Zealand were slaves in subjection to other tribes.

Hobson carried with him a 4000-word brief on how he was to conduct his affairs with Maori should he procure a treaty and form a colony under his governorship. That brief had been written, ostensibly, by the British anti-slave movement and Hobson himself had formerly been a British captain in the Caribbean, charged with stopping the human trafficking of slaves, raiding slave ships and liberating their cargoes. The first major hurdle of his newly formed, fledgling government was in trying to free the slaves of New Zealand. 

Maori initially showed little interest in the goings-on of the of the “Pacific islanders” [whose parents had immigrated to NZ from Samoa, Tonga, etc.] and were slow to warm towards their Polynesian Panther Party version of nonsense. However, in time alliances were formed and some Maori came on board.  

Also, the worker’s unions of New Zealand were, at that time, heavily Marxist, mostly leaning towards Soviet Russian communism. A smaller faction idolised Chinese communism under Mao Tse Tung and trotted out gems of wisdom from Mao’s Little Red Book. The unions seized upon the opportunity to sow discord and discontent to further their cause. They funded activists to be sent to Russia, China or Cuba for indoctrination in destabilising tactics or even Libya for weapons training. This fifth column contingent were to return to New Zealand and cause helter-skelter to our placid, bi-cultural society, with its mostly enduring friendship between Maori and European since early colonial times.

Among the leading, mouthy dissidents was Syd Jackson, ‘a core member of Ngā Tamatoa (the “young warriors”), the pre-eminent Māori pressure group of the time. He undertook comparative studies on race and racism in the United States and New Zealand as part of his Masters in Political Science degree, and was in part inspired in his activism by the books of Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael. For some activists, then, Black Power was seen to be forcing a confrontation of New Zealand society with the reality of white supremacy. As one participant recounted, in an important youth conference, “Black Power is to stop white power ...’ (See: https://robbieshilliam.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/black-power-aotearoa.pdf ).

Another mouthy dissident in the dismal line-up of the time was Donna Awatere, who seemed to adore mass murderer, Che Guevara. She wore the Guevara beret and the slogans that spewed forth from her mouth sounded like they were coming from The Peoples Voice communist newspaper … which calls to mind Bob Dylan’s lyrics, ‘I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now’ … or, a parent’s exasperated retort to their ignorant, over-opinionated brat, ‘why don’t you leave home while you still know everything’.  Awatere went to Cuba in 1979.

Shakespeare probably summed-up individual actors within this sorry pantomime best as, ‘a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’.

As the clamour of this purpose-manufactured but historically inaccurate dissonance rose to a crescendo through the 1970s, the fallout began increasing to infiltrate New Zealand’s institutions of higher learning and government departments, heavily influencing the direction of both. Beyond 1970 the earlier history books were assailed in Marxist-speak as ethnocentric or Eurocentric in an effort to throw their contents into disrepute.  It was a form of book-burning and most of our old titles or former foundation studies about pre-colonial human habitation and interactions (derived from Maori oral traditions and archaeological evidence) began to disappear from the library shelves, only to be replaced by more suitably sterilised, Maori-supremacy based history that promoted the views or long-term goals of the political organs.

By 1974, Minister of Maori Affairs, Matu Rata had managed to have his Treaty of Waitangi Bill accepted by Parliament and it received royal assent into law in 1975. One of Rata’s requirements was that an English-language version of the treaty be introduced to sit alongside the Maori-language version (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) and be co-equal to it … a seemingly very strange request from a Maori leader as, up till that time, Te Tiriti text constituted the solitary wording under New Zealand and international law. Rata and his cohorts forced acceptance of wording from a Formal Royal Style document in English, concocted in 1840 solely for overseas despatch to foreign governments as a pretentious, memorial document … heralding the treaty between Britain and New Zealand to the international community. What Rata was morally obliged to use (but didn’t) was the 1869 back-translation, formally commissioned by the New Zealand government and officially issued by the Native Department, which absolutely mirrored, line-by-line, the content, meaning and intent of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

By consequence, the text of the newly elevated into the limelight, Formal Royal Style document was based upon rough-draft English notes that were obsolete by the 3^rd of February 1840 and had been discarded before the tightly worded and concise, Final English draft was written the next day then translated to become Te Tiriti o Waitangi (New Zealand’s equivalent to the Declaration of Independence or Constitution of the United States). With the layout of sentences, paragraphs or the wording in the Formal Royal Style composite being so different, especially in Article II, a marvellous opportunity, obviously premeditated, for exploitation of the differences could occur. The very vocal argument, over ensuing years, was that Maori had not ceded sovereignty in 1840, that they were pre-eminent and supreme as the indigenous people, that non-Maori were second-class citizens with only the right to be in the country.

Despite reams of documented proof to the contrary, showing sovereignty was most definitely ceded (and gratefully so on the part of beleaguered tribes afflicted with endless inter-tribal warfare), the radical, indigeneity-rights arguments persist to this day. Every attempt is made by the +Maori supremacists to turn a benign and friendly treaty document of unification, which stood unchallenged for 135-years, into a document of apartheid. (See: http://www.celticnz.org/TreatyBook/Precis.htm ).

By the 1980s, international corporations or organisations like the UN had been able to deepen and exploit the disunity, thereby finding in-roads to impose agendas or gobble-up State-Owned Enterprises, formerly owned by the New Zealand public. The protections to New Zealand and its sovereignty inherent in the Treaty of Waitangi, now in tatters, were nullified and a corporate shark’s-feeding frenzy ensued.

In this dismal atmosphere of unprecedent change, a rather obvious campaign of amnesia was imposed in an effort to have New Zealanders forget their true history and, for political-expediency in the years ahead, to accept a more limited, sanitised, dumb-down, exploitable version. Our government-funded universities increasingly fell prey to the new, required interpretation of events and, over time, dutifully discarded the older, out-of-vogue books, replacing them with the nouveau, cultural-Marxist versions of socially engineered history that promoted Maori as the victims of imperialism. Beyond that time, any dissenting historian who adhered to the older, comprehensive and reliable works of yesteryear was labelled a “revisionist” or “racist” and faced academic-obscurity and career suicide if they didn’t abandon their heresy and embrace the new wisdom. Moral-coward leaders, academics or functionaries in government began to turn-aside, shirk their responsibility to the public and shamelessly compromise their integrity, thus leaving the populace open to fraud emanating from the very people they looked to for guidance and truth. 

One benchmark, unchallengeable concept imposed, never-to-be questioned, was that Maori were the first and only inhabitants of New Zealand. To say otherwise was tantamount to the worst form of insult … which led Maori-supremacist Willy Jackson to state on TV words to the effect that: ‘The existence of Moriori (in the context of pre-Maori inhabitants) is a Pakeha (white man) myth designed to steal mana (pride, prestige) from the Maori’.

We began to see the rise and implementation of the “experts-about-everything”, who could be trotted-out and consulted when public rejection-controversy arose. These lack-lustre, hand-picked, useful idiots were lauded and applauded as the final authority, but were, in fact, simply “trolls-at-the-gate”, whose purpose was to win over public opinion that such-or-such was true and the only thing to believe, or rational/moral course to follow towards enlightenment or a dignified future. Thus, was ushered in the era of the “rent-a-prick” … individuals who could be relied upon to do the dirty work of discounting, with guile and deceit, unwanted truths. At best they would be equivalent to politically aligned ideologues or at worst something akin to commissars and propaganda ministers.

It was also the era of manufactured guilt, where European New Zealanders had to be burdened down with guilt for sins that had never been committed by their ancestors, sins that required heavy financial compensation for aggrieved Maori in order to expiate. We well remember the obligatory indoctrination sessions in many workplaces, where staff were, as a condition of employment, subjected to a rant by a Maori political officer, recounting his or her nouveau, recently concocted version of what the Treaty of Waitangi truly said and meant. Anyone answering back with contrary, documented facts was considered racist and, having displayed an attitude of “cultural insensitivity”, could be considered unsuitable for that upcoming promotion or accreditation. This seriously affected student nurses, who had to spend up to 25% of their training studying the revised meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi and its far-reaching implications in health services. A number of student nurses ended up having to go to Australia to finish their studies and get their diploma offshore as a consequence of their temerity in having answered back. 

Distorted, undocumented, wishful-thinking, Ronald MacDonald PlastiC history was running badly amok under the flawed syllogism, Potuit, docuit, ergo fuit (It could be so, it ought to be so, therefore it is so).

Increasingly, in academic circles, there was to be no mention of any people occupying New Zealand prior to 1300 AD and any evidence to the contrary was to be censored and buried. All such mention was a conspiracy theory and deemed racist to utter. In a long telephone conversation farmer Bill Buddo had with a leading New Zealand scientist, of proven integrity, Bill gave an outpouring of his exasperation concerning the grossly unfair dismissal and marginalisation of the archaeological work undertaken by Price, in conjunction with aligned leading scientists, on the Buddo family farms at Poukawa. The scientist, who shall go unnamed, stated that New Zealanders will only gain access to their true, long-term history of human occupation when the old school of controllers die off. This brings to mind the all-so-true, amusing quote: ‘I never wanted to see anyone die, but there are a few obituary notices I have read with pleasure’ … Clarence Darrow.    

Dynamic evidence of long-term, pre-Maori occupation of New Zealand, such as that which Treaton Russell Price had proven beyond reasonable doubt, became a definite “no-no”! New Zealand archaeology was quickly reduced to a farce, with unwanted results subject to embargo by Maori intervention, resulting in sites or finds being locked down, shrouded in secrecy and unwanted discoveries literally destroyed.

An example of an attempted embargo of information, this one related to the decade-long or so of archaeological investigations in the Waipoua Forest, Northland, New Zealand.

Although the embargo was partially lifted by a legal challenge after 8-years, and some handwritten rough notes, type-written or sketch-plan information belatedly became available, no known or modestly significant dossier of photos has ever been released to the public. Also, the very ancient C14 dates of occupation seen by Noel Hilliam, curator of the Dargaville Maritime Museum in the 1970s, have never surfaced. The very expensive, multi-discipline, scientific investigations overseen by archaeologist Ian Lawlor are, arguably, still largely under embargo. Throughout the forest, ancient inhabitants had lived in small, stone, beehive house domes, about 10-feet in diameter, culturally like what one would find on the Dingle Peninsula of Ireland and stemming from the Megalithic Age. Remnants of these houses dot the forest floor in their hundreds, perhaps thousands, along with stacked stone walls, hearths, stone-lined waterways, altars, etc., etc.  

WELCOME TO THE AGE OF CONTROL-FREAK BUNKUM

By 1978 or so, Treaton Russell Price, 17-years into his retirement but still very active, had certainly earned the right to rest on his laurels, happy with the results of his hard-slog archaeological achievements spanning 2½ decades of his life. This effort he’d provided freely and unpaid, with no expectation of remuneration for any of his accrued costs. It was his life’s gift to the people of New Zealand and should have accorded him a legacy of gratitude. However, in certain circles Price’s well-proven findings constituted a severe threat to the political status-quo and had to be squelched at all cost.