Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

‘I could hear the children screaming in the classrooms, I kept calling out ‘turtle turtle’ like we’d practised but they were too scared to remember what to do.

This story by ‘Katie‘ on the QuakeStories.govt.nz website is just one of over a hundred that have been submitted since the site was ‘soft launched’ at the beginning of August. QuakeStories has been developed by Manatū Taonga, the Ministry for Culture and Heritage in partnership with NV Interactive, a Christchurch-based web-design company. The goal is to create a ‘living memorial’ of the earthquakes of 2010–11, which are among the most significant events in New Zealand history.

The stories submitted so far range in length from a couple of sentences to highly detailed 5,000+ word diary-like entries. It is estimated that more than 100,000 words – an average PhD thesis – have been contributed in the first month. Some are light-hearted, many are harrowing – on the site’s Twitter account one person posted, ‘Thank you these are amazing stories, I can only read 1 or 2 at a time’.

They include stories from a lawyer stuck on the 15th floor of the Forsyth Barr building, an ex-nurse who found herself on triage duty in the CBD, an eight-year-old boy who had to quickly escape his classroom, and an amazingly detailed and powerful account of the four hours a man spent with his two pre-schoolers trying to get to his older daughter’s school following the 22 February quake.

While people’s experiences of the main quakes and their aftershocks will inevitably be popular topics, we’re also keen to encourage stories about what is happening to people now and how the ongoing rebuilding of Canterbury continues to affect their lives in the months to come. We also welcome stories from non-Cantabrians who have been impacted by the quakes in different ways.

QuakeStories has a simple design which encourages visitors to browse the stories that have been submitted and makes it easy for them to contribute their own. This is very much phase one of the site and there are big plans for its future. In the coming weeks the contributors will be able to upload images, with provision for adding audio and video further down the track. The collected memories will start to be sorted and arranged by date, location (maps) and topics, giving readers new ways to explore the material.

One model that we looked to when we were setting up the site was the Hurricane Katrina archive. While this is an excellent resource, recent developments in technology mean we can add new dimensions to our record such as harvesting and categorising the #eqnz twitter feed, encouraging people to record video and audio with their smart phones and creating 3-D models of the former cityscape. We can also draw on the rich content in Te Ara and other websites to present contextual information back to the public in accessible ways. Encouraging school teachers and their students to both contribute to the site and use it for projects is definitely on our radar.

If you have memories of the Canterbury earthquakes and their aftermath – whatever your age, whether you’re an individual, part of a community, a business or an organisation, whether you were in Christchurch or involved in other ways – please consider sharing your experiences on QuakeStories. It is history in the making.

Mary Ann Martin

I recently saw the play On the upside-down of the world at Downstage Theatre in Wellington. Written by New Zealand playwright Arthur Meek and featuring Laurel Devenie in an impressive solo performance, it dramatises the life of Mary Ann Martin, an early English settler in New Zealand and wife of the country’s first chief justice, William Martin. It is based on her posthumously published book Our Maoris (1884).

The play charts Mary Ann Martin’s transformation from a genteel English lady conducting awkward, cringe-worthy conversions with Māori on her arrival in 1842 to a hard-working colonial who thrives in her new home. This transformation is represented by her changing attire. She begins fully dressed in hat and crinoline. The hat comes off first, followed by the crinoline, until she’s left wearing a simple, patched dress. Later in the play she wears a woollen rug lined with feather-like fabric in imitation of Māori.

She becomes fluent in the Māori language and gains great respect for the people and their customs. She rails against ignorant English visitors who denigrate the intelligence of Māori and bitterly opposes land laws and post-war confiscations which transfer the land to the hands of settlers, ever-growing in numbers.

Devenie’s performance is powerful and gripping, so we suffer with Mary as she sees control slipping from Māori and the tide turning towards war. We also share in her personal pain when she miscarries during a trip around the Rotorua area, ending her and her husband’s hopes for children.

The end for Mary is bitter – her husband is relieved from his post after complaining about the treatment of Māori, and her beloved Māori foster son, whom she called Sancho after a character in the novel Don Quixote, is killed during the land wars. She laments on receiving this news as she has heard Māori women do.

I was tremendously moved by this play and Mary Ann Martin’s story. But is it history? Well, not entirely.

I read Mary Ann Martin’s Dictionary of New Zealand biography (DNZB) entry before going, so I’d have some notion of her life story. After the play ended and I recovered, I started to think about the gaps between the entry and the play.

The entry didn’t mention a foster son called Sancho and said that William Martin resigned from his post because of ill health, as does William Martin’s DNZB entry. I got Our Maoris out of the library and discovered that Sancho was actually a grown Māori man and seems to have been more like a servant. As my colleague Jock pointed out, religion was entirely absent from the play, yet the DNZB entries and Our Maoris make it quite clear that religion was a central concern in their lives.

Does this flexibility with the ‘facts’ really matter? In a blog post on the Auckland Theatre Company (ATC) website Arthur Meek is quoted as saying ‘It’s not a history play. It’s a play about who we are and how we’ve come to be like we are.’

I’m not sure what he means by that first sentence, because the play is about a real woman and is based on her writings. Perhaps it’s a way of saying that he’s employed some artistic licence with respect to historical facts. Many writers working with historical subjects do this – it’s a valid technique, but I think the audience needs to know it has been employed.

I’m not so sure that the play’s audience will realise this, unless they have prior knowledge of Mary Ann Martin’s life. A review on Kiwiblog says ‘the play is based on the actual history of that period,’ which suggests the reviewer thinks that everything in it is true.

The ATC has described the play thus: ‘suppressed for 150 years, ATC’s latest work uncovers the words of a woman who dared to challenge colonial injustice.’

This suggests some ‘truths’ have been uncovered, whereas it’s fair to say that some of them, as portrayed in the play, are in fact fictional.

I’m not sure we can really say that Mary Anne Martin ‘challenge(d) colonial justice’ – she was critical of colonial policy and deplored the land wars, but after going through Our Maoris, I have trouble seeing her as a radical crusader for justice. Her mission was to convert Māori from heathenism to Christianity and for me this complicates her character – Christianity was just another form of colonialism.

Despite my qualms about historical accuracy, I rate this play highly. I was transported back the mid-19th century New Zealand by the writing and Laurel Devenie’s performance. It’s on at Downstage until 10 September. If you are interested in New Zealand history (however it is portrayed!) and Māori-Pākehā relations, you really should go.

This post is part of a series remembering the 1981 Springbok Tour.

Poster for a 'Women against the tour' march

In the summer of 1981, when unemployment was high and public sympathy for the unemployed was also high, the Labour Department paid for 14 students to work with staff in the Victoria University History Department, collecting oral histories and other research material on the just-completed Springbok Tour.

I was one of the staff involved, and I put my energies into working with one of the students, Peter King, to try and find out just who those who had protested against the Springbok Tour were.

We issued a questionnaire to protestors at the last Wellington march of the tour; and we wrote to everyone on the mailing list of the local anti-tour organisation COST (Coalition to Oppose the Springbok Tour) and asked them to complete a form. We also checked up the whole list against the electoral rolls.

Of course, Wellington is an unusual town, with a higher number of middle-class people than elsewhere, and those who bothered to fill in a form may not be entirely typical. But the results were revealing.

What did we find? The results can be briefly summarised:

• The protestors were not overwhelmingly young people. Fewer than a quarter of those marching were under 25, and they made up under 15% of those on the mailing list. The largest number came from those aged 30 to 34, and close to half of those on the mailing list were between 30 and 49. In other words, many of those participating were people who had come to political consciousness in the 1960s and were veterans of other protests, such as marches against the Vietnam War.

• The protestors were very middle class in occupation. But it was not the whole middle class – there were very few from professions such as lawyers, doctors, accountants, and there were few involved in business activities. Overwhelmingly the marchers came from the educationally based ‘caring’ professions, normally on a government salary. They were teachers, researchers, librarians, public servants or social workers.

• More than half of the whole group had university degrees – and this excludes the students yet to obtain a degree. This is not entirely surprising; these were people who had learned in classes about the realities of apartheid, and had developed habits of reading about foreign regimes.

• Everyone who answered the surveys indicated that they had marched against the tour because of opposition to apartheid. But there were also other interesting motivations – one was a hostility to rugby and its culture, especially among women. ‘Bugger Rugger,’ wrote one survey respondent. Another motivation was an intense dislike for Prime Minister Robert Muldoon. A third motivation was a concern about New Zealand’s world reputation.

It has to be emphasised that this was a selective survey, the results of which were not necessarily true of the whole country. Very few Māori were represented in this survey, although we know from photographs that many Māori protested in Auckland against the tour. But our results did suggest that the liberal middle class, educated in universities and coming into activism through the protests against the Vietnam War and then on into other movements such as the ‘Save Manapōuri‘ campaign, were crucial. It was that group who made a big contribution to changing the value system of New Zealand between the 1960s and the 2000s.

This post is part of a series remembering the 1981 Springbok Tour.

Masked protestors lead an anti-tour protest in 1981

‘July 22nd, Day of Shame, Rugby Union is to blame!’ The old chant still pops into my head every now and then when this date comes around on the calendar. Through the 30 years since the Springbok Tour I have read and heard a variety of accounts, with the emphasis generally on the national trauma our country went through during that season of chaos. I feel compelled to write as someone who was energised rather than traumatised by their involvement in the anti-tour protests.

A true provincial, I grew up in the blandness of suburban Stoke, Nelson, among a family of mechanics. I remember the joy of watching the 1974 Commonwealth Games, with its brilliant array of athletes from newly independent Africa and the Caribbean. Following on from the ‘friendly games’, we had the rise of Muldoon. Soon we had the All Black Tour to South Africa in 1976, playing rugby while kids were shot in the streets of Soweto. That tour lead to New Zealand’s international shame as the cause of the African boycott of the Montreal Olympics. The generation who watched these events as teenagers were the ones who stood on either side of the lines in 1981.

In 1981 I was a 19-year-old lad in his first year studying zoology at Canterbury University. I traded sunny Nelson for the excitement of the big city of Christchurch and the big world of tertiary education. Before leaving Nelson I had become involved with a group of environmental and peace activists, who also began to organise anti-tour activities. On arrival at Canterbury University everything went up a notch. There was a strong and quite militant anti-tour movement on campus. There was also a strong and vocal, but smaller, pro-tour group, centred around the Engineering School. Student meetings were lively and well-attended; abuse flowed freely. Despite the volatile situation, I still had plenty of mates in the opposing camp.

In town itself the feud crossed over into other realms. The boot boys and rastas, who had regular punch ups at this time, also took sides on the tour. We knew to always remove our HART badges before going into a pub if we wanted to walk out unscathed. It was a time of many narrow escapes from violence, including my own dash out of a dairy to a waiting car, pursued by several rather angry rugby-heads with pro-Tour badges.

Once the tour actually started, there was a march on the day of every game; that was every Wednesday and every Saturday. The Saturday marches were always followed by a do at varsity, put on by the anti-tour club, where invariably the songs played included ‘Police on my back’, ‘I fought the law’, and ‘No depression in New Zealand.’

The first march, 22nd of July – the day of the Gisborne game – was designated the Day of Shame. The sequence was wrapped up with the final game, the Auckland test, held on the anniversary of Steve Biko’s death: 12th September, the Day of Rage. While we took the whole business very seriously, marches were also, in the early days at least, great social occasions.

Even with the events at Hamilton and the batoning at Molesworth Street, many of us in Christchurch had yet to comprehend the scale of the violence going on. That all changed two nights before the Christchurch test, when the Red Squad appeared, blocking a night march. There were no batons drawn that evening, but the sight of the faceless storm troopers blocking the street brought home the reality of events to the crowd. The response was anger rather than intimidation, though that night ended peacefully.

It was a different story that Saturday, with merry mayhem all around Lancaster Park, followed by night raids to try and wake the Springboks. Days of running on adrenalin and working with large groups of people in a common cause were a heady experience for a young provincial hick. Where else could you quickly learn the optimum number of people needed to tear down a security fence, or how to manufacture paint bombs from hollowed-out eggs?

In Christchurch the umbrella group, Coalition Against the Tour, had a lot of students and varied lefties involved in it, but the most significant organisers were from the churches. Catholics were particularly strongly represented, with the organiser being Mary Baker, a staunch Catholic activist and mother of the later-to-be-famous athletes Erin and Phillipa Baker. Speaking of Catholics, I also remember sitting with a couple of nuns watching the news coverage of the riots in Auckland at the third test. As the crowd drove the police away with flying missiles, both nuns broke let loose cheers of triumph.

At the end of it all the ‘boks went home and we were left with a feeling of anti-climax. Yet I do not remember anyone in the anti-apartheid movement at that time seeing the tour as a defeat.

On reflection, there was a lot of naivety to our approach. Most of us had only a vague idea of the racism within New Zealand itself. And young tearaways such as myself had little idea of the trauma faced by people whose jobs or lives were threatened due to their role in the movement. For those who made a stand outside the main centres, the odds were even more stacked against them. These people were some of the real heroes of the movement.

I continue to believe that disrupting the rugby, the national religion of New Zealand and apartheid South Africa, was the most direct way we show support for the South African struggle. I think this even though, while living in Otago I rejoined the faith and now watch rugby on a semi-regular basis.

It is clear now that the tour was as much about a culture clash within New Zealand as it was about racism overseas. Yet, while it may have been a long dark night of the soul for the nation, for some of us young activists it was an exhilarating experience. For me, that time was one of purpose, where I saw things that changed forever the way I view power in this country.

This post is part of a series remembering the 1981 Springbok Tour.

Poetry Day 2011

Today is National Poetry Day in New Zealand. Today is also the 30th anniversary of the first game of the 1981 Springbok Tour. That first game in Gisborne was the beginning of 56 days of protest, violent clashes between protesters, supporters and police, and division in communities and even families.

Not that I remember that much about it – I was seven. But it seems to me that afterwards this enormous country-wide experience wasn’t much talked about in society at large – or at least not around me. But I think that’s changing, and more people are able to look at what happened in context, see what it meant for the country, and examine the many different threads that led to this sort-of civil war.

Protestors and police at the Hamilton game, 25 July 1981

In commemoration of the tour we’re planning a series of blog posts from a variety of people looking at what happened or sharing their personal memories. For a good overview of the tour, check out NZHistory.net.nz’s coverage, which includes an interactive map of the games and what happened at them.

And, because it’s National Poetry Day afterall, I’m going to kick it all off (pun intended) with a poem that I wrote not long after the 20th anniversary of the tour. At the time I worked at the National Library, which is on Molesworth Street in Wellington, site of the infamous Battle of Molesworth Street.

Memories of the civil war

When the Springboks came
we were six or seven or eight.
I didn’t know much
about that
but I knew all about
the Royal Wedding.

Karen says
that she was probably
making veils for her
friend’s Barbie. They’d play weddings
‘But don’t worry,
we’d always drown her afterwards.’

I was in standard one
and my friend Catherine
was English and had the
same haircut as Lady Di. In class we
wrote stories about royal visits
but not about riots in
the streets of Wellington.

Brian was fifteen
and lived in the Waikato.
‘We were very pro-tour and pro-rugby.’
He begins to explain how
it was the last straw
for the Kiwi blokes
who’d recently been
told they were racist and
sexist and now
they couldn’t even watch the footy.

I think we must have watched
one game on television, because
I remember my South African mother
saying she wanted the Springboks to win.
I remember some other kid
telling me that his mum said
South Africans were bad. Most kids
just said ‘Your mum can’t be South African –
she’s not black!’

Joeli says she remembers being
scared, but she hadn’t been
back long from Iran, escaping
during the revolution. Loud noises
still terrified her.

We’re watching footage on the television
twenty years later. There’s a riot and
I can see the building
where I work.
I had no idea
what was going on
outside my window.

(Source: Helen Rickerby, Abstract internal furniture. Wellington: HeadworX, 2001)