Think you know your stuff? Test yourself
course in New Zealand history, encourage your school to teach New Zealand history. We have a dramatic story to tell.
The New Zealand History Teachers’ Association has called for ‘‘the coherent teaching of our own past across appropriate year levels in our schools’’ in a petition addressed to Parliament.
In most parts of the world such a petition would be unthinkable. Not because it is not a good idea, but because history is a foundation. Ask Americans about the constitution, the French about the revolution, Canadians about federation, Britons about 1066.
We have had an odd idea in New Zealand that we don’t have much history, or that it is not very interesting. False on both accounts.
Human history in Aotearoa is as unique and curious as our birdlife. A mere 800 or so years old, it is possible to trace the whole span of human existence in these islands through soil, bones, gardens and whakapapa as Atholl Anderson has so recently done in Tangata Whenua: an illustrated history (BWB, 2014). Between 1851 and 1861 New Zealand’s population grew by 280 per cent. This was not a place standing still.
Nor was it a place that was quiet or predictable. Everybody, Ma¯ ori and incoming Europeans, were finding themselves in a world that was new. Ask Tamihana Te Rauparaha about his life compared to that of his father, or Mary Ann Swainson, whose letters from Wellington to her Birmingham friend Isabel Percy discussed violence in the Hutt Valley alongside the 1848 revolutions sweeping Europe.
The history we know is itself being made new. Visit the stunning Aotea Utanganui (Museum of South Taranaki) at Patea, or Te Awahou Nieuwe Stroom at Foxton (telling a Ngati Raukawa ki Te Tonga, Dutch and European story). Here we see ourselves in fresh, sharp colours.
What is there not to like? Nothing. History is the story we have to treasure. A story of ourselves, our places, our best and worst: interesting, tragic, funny, hopeful, gritty and impressive. And ours to know, and to tell.