A milestone for Aotearoa

James Cook’s landing at Gisborne 250 years ago tomorrow was a coming together of cultures that simply had to happen at some stage. And neither the benefits nor the harms that resulted can be separated from the other.

This doesn’t mean that resisting the twin pitfalls of demonising or sanctifying either of the parties leaves us conflicted to an emotional standstill and capable only of beholding the occasion blankly.

How might we legitimately feel? Fascinated. Seriously. Recognising, as we must, an alloy of inspirational and cautionary lessons, we can honour this as our own national story and a cracking good yarn to boot.

To do so trivialises nothing.

While no-one need propose Cook for sainthood there’s strong evidence he had the same heart for adventure that had led Ma¯ ori here before him.

Moreover, he was by any reasonable standards a decent man who encountered a culture that, like his own, had collective wisdoms and fallibilities.

It’s a mean, narrow view to burden the occasion with the representative status of an emissary of civilisation and nobility bringing redemption to a society of warlike savages.

Or, perhaps more fashionably but no less simplistically, to see an agent of malevolent acquisition and repression encountering a society akin to the lanky blue cast of Avatar.

The inherent dangers of those early encounters were massive and the dismay Cook (and botanist Joseph Banks) felt at the early deaths are well recorded as troubling them both on the level of personal conscience and as a breach of the firm instructions under which he had been sent.

As the president of the Royal Society of London, the Earl of Morton, had written, Cook was to ‘‘check the petulance of the Sailors and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms’’ because apart from self-protection ‘‘the sheding (sic) of blood of these people is a crime of the highest nature. They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word the legal, possessors of the several regions they inhabit. No European nation has the right to occupy any part of their country or settle among them without their voluntary consent’’.

We all know that it didn’t pan out like that. Terrible conflicts and injustices did result.

To regard them as cruelties that could have been avoided by a simple sense of human decency is to expect our ancestors to have swiftly – almost instantaneously – created a utopia rising above the experience of either of their own cultures, or humanity in general.

Were those standards to be applied to us, at present, could we claim to have met them?

The point is we keep striving for better. And in so doing, we need to understand our past, own it, learn from it, and carry that knowledge with us – not as a burden, but an assistance – as we move forward, with many a misstep, but together.

New Zealand is fortunate in its youth. Many countries carry hatreds spanning thousands of years and suffer, to this day, from the corrosions of those ancient, acidic enmities. For the most part we don’t.

We learn, we really do, that to let the wrongs of old hurts and harms languish without acknowledgment feeds resentment, bitterness and division.

Equally, that when we diminish our awareness of progress, achievement and collective endeavour, it sets us down the same unrewarding path.

So let’s not do that. And if we learn our own story, we’re pretty well positioned not to.

We keep striving for better. And in so doing, we need to understand our past, own it, learn from it ...