Where do you draw the line?
Newspaper cartoons show how attitudes to Ma¯ori have changed over time, writes Philip Matthews.
Do you know about the Haka Party Incident? Chances are you’ve never heard of it but it was an important event. The year was 1979 and the setting was the University of Auckland. One of the dubious rites of passage of the university’s engineering students was to dress up as Ma¯ ori, complete with grass skirts, and run riot in the central city.
Their version of the haka was an obscene parody that stopped traffic. But by the 1970s, this kind of thing was becoming hard to defend and Ma¯ ori activists had repeatedly asked them to knock it off.
So, one night in 1979, a group known as He Taua broke up the students’ practice. Some violence ensued. The bit that struck a chord for Paul Diamond, who works as curator, Ma¯ ori, at the Alexander Turnbull Library, was when one of He Taua rang the media and said they were ‘‘protesting at the way the student haka party was turning Ma¯ ori culture into a racist cartoon to be laughed at’’.
Diamond recognises it now as one of the key moments when Ma¯ ori pushed back against racist and demeaning images of themselves. A lot happened in the 1970s during what we call the Ma¯ ori renaissance: land and Ma¯ ori language marches, the Bastion Pt occupation and a wider understanding of how the Treaty of Waitangi had not been honoured.
‘‘One of the reasons things change is there’s a moment of resistance,’’ he says.
The words ‘‘racist cartoon’’ got Diamond’s attention too, as he was absorbed in the long and often depressing history of racism in New Zealand newspaper cartoons.
A new book is the result of that work. Savaged to Suit: Ma¯ ori and Cartooning in New Zealand concentrates on the decades from the 1930s to the 1990s, with some dips into the more remote past and more recent history. The title puns on the idea that Ma¯ ori used to be depicted as degenerate savages but are now as likely to be seen wearing suits in corporate offices, thanks in part to Treaty settlements.
When launching the book in Wellington last week, Labour MP Louisa Wall noticed how few women were depicted in the cartoons, with the exception of the widely caricatured Whetu Tirikatene-sullivan, who was a minister in the 1972-75 government. ‘‘How dare a Ma¯ ori woman become a minister,’’ Wall says, rhetorically. ‘‘Just who did she think she was?’’
Wall agrees with Diamond that ‘‘racist stereotypes have changed over time, with humour designed to exercise power over and to belittle Ma¯ ori so as to put them in their place’’.
She adds that ‘‘cartoons, because they can pack more punch than 1000 expertly chosen words, and within a context of illiteracy, translated public affairs into something we could see. The Waitangi Tribunal 1986 Taranaki Raupatu Claims report argued that these depictions had an impact on how Ma¯ ori were seen by themselves and others.
‘‘My challenge was how do these continued depictions serve Ma¯ ori and non-ma¯ ori communities when they so obviously contribute to negative attitudes and beliefs about Ma¯ ori that continue historical discrimination and inequality?’’
Stereotypes can both reflect and guide public opinion. In the late 19th century, Ma¯ ori were depicted as a vanquished race. There was an air of gloom or melancholy – Ma¯ ori were thought to be dying off. You saw that impression in Goldie paintings, which recorded oldtime Ma¯ ori before they were forever lost to history.
But, from the 1930s, as Diamond writes, different stereotypes appeared, including ‘‘the mischievous piupiu-clad warrior, the obese manual worker and the happy-go-lucky ‘Hori’ figure’’. And while racist depictions of Jews, Indians and Chinese had largely disappeared from cartoons by the 1930s, Diamond says, these Ma¯ ori stereotypes persisted.
One cartoonist dominates the book and the history. Gordon Minhinnick’s work ran in the New Zealand Herald for more than 50 years, through the Depression, World War II, the postwar boom and the social changes of the 1970s and 80s. He was ‘‘distrustful of change’’, as cartoon historian Ian Grant once put it, and seemed at his angriest when Labour was in power.
Minhinnick and his predecessor, Trevor Lloyd, ‘‘were in lockstep with the Herald’’, Diamond says. ‘‘They agreed implicitly with the editorial line.’’
Another aspect of his power is that Minhinnick was strongly influenced by legendary New Zealand cartoonist David Low and while you might dislike his politics, you had to admire his ability. ‘‘His presence was just so incredible,’’ Diamond says. ‘‘He had amazing skill as an artist.’’
But even Minhinnick questioned whether newspaper cartoons can really be taken as a first draft of history. He said, ‘‘a cartoon is a negative conception. It is usually against something or somebody. Thus the history of a country seen through cartoons of the period may have an inherent imbalance.’’
Does Diamond think cartoons are necessarily a useful guide to history? He answers the question with another, perhaps cryptic one: ‘‘Will people know who Kim Dotcom is in 60 years?’’
One of Minhinnick’s trademarks was something he called the ‘‘little brown mandate’’. This was a tiny Ma¯ ori warrior that appeared as a mascot in cartoons from 1946 onwards to satirise Labour’s dependence on Ma¯ ori electorates. ‘‘I find the mandate really troubling,’’ Diamond says. ‘‘It didn’t just reflect on Labour’s relationship with Ma¯ ori MPS. It reflected on Ma¯ ori. The longer I sat with this project, the more it got to me. It was still going up to the 1970s.’’
Academic Maharaia Winiata