A Pākehā place to stand
A former Anglican bishop has written a book exploring biculturalism and spirituality. It has been a painful journey, he tells
It is a tale of two clubs, separated by decades. Retired Anglican bishop and writer John Bluck hoped to launch his new book at Auckland’s prestigious Northern Club. That was until the club got wind of the title.
He finds it all pretty funny, to be honest. What exactly did they say? He pulls a handwritten note from his laptop travel case and reads it aloud. ‘‘It wouldn’t be appropriate,’’ he was told. ‘‘It’s just not worth it. It’s just not worth our while to do this as we have such a diverse membership.’’
And the title of the book that is too explosive for the good people of the Northern Club? It is called Becoming Pākehā.
Perhaps the minor furore proves Bluck’s point, summarised in the back cover copy, that Māori and Pākehā are growing ‘‘ever more separate’’ and that the landscape of Aotearoa is ‘‘fractured and risking eruption’’. When words like Pākehā, Aotearoa, He Puapua and co-governance appear in letters pages, on talkback radio and in social media, they set off explosives.
Now go back three decades to the other club story.
This one involves the Canterbury Club in Christchurch, which Bluck interprets as the very apex of the city’s blue-blood conservatism. After he was appointed Dean of the Christ Church Cathedral in 1990, one of his first tasks was to address the club.
He had just shifted north from Dunedin but had encountered Canterbury’s ‘‘all-white world’’ as a theology student in the 1960s, when Pākehā students looked at the sole openly Māori student, Hone Kaa, as though he was ‘‘a previously unencountered wild creature’’.
The drinks flowed that night in 1990 but Bluck chose to abstain. Finally, late in the evening, he got to speak about his chosen subject, Pākehā male identity. Maybe it was not the wisest of choices. He writes that the silence in the room settled more deeply the longer he spoke.
Bob Lowe, the vicar at St Barnabas Church in Fendalton, was the club’s chaplain. Bluck recalls that after he finished speaking, Lowe ‘‘proceeded to shred everything I’d said into small pieces’’. This, Bluck writes, ‘‘was a group who knew all they needed to know about Māori and the irrelevance of words like Pākehā. I went home as humiliated as I had ever been’’.
For Bluck, his 12 years as dean were marked by an exhausting heritage fight over the cathedral visitors’ centre – he was for it, many Cantabrians were against – and a valiant effort to bring more te reo and biculturalism into the city’s Anglican world.
After Christchurch, he moved north to become Bishop of Waiapu, which includes Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne and Tauranga, before retiring in Pakiri, north of Auckland.
When he left in 2002, The Press newspaper covered his final sermon, in which he said Christ Church Cathedral ‘‘had grown on him more than he dared admit’’. The newspaper added that his sermon, ‘‘full of rich, subtle humour and strong messages’’, came near the end of a service tinged with sadness at his departure.
That was 20 years ago. Meanwhile, the building that grew on him is still under long-term repair. ‘‘For me, the collapse of that cathedral was the collapse of part of my life, really.’’
He says he had strong opinions on whether the cathedral should have been restored or replaced, but he has never shared them. But he will say this much.
‘‘I think what this church needs more than anything, at this point in history, is new expressions that belong to the 21st and 22nd century, and I’m talking architecture, music, liturgy, art, language and most of all theology. We’re still working off an old playlist, an old song sheet.’’
Hard stories to hear
Despite his retirement, Bluck still preaches sometimes in a small Anglican church at Matakana. But Matakana, he points out, is a hotbed of alternative spirituality, alternative therapies – the kind of stuff that was called New Age before it went mainstream.
When he takes funerals, people often ask him to leave out the business about God and Christianity.
What is the difference between religion and spirituality? It is sometimes said that, unlike religion, spirituality does not make demands on you.
‘‘People want to talk about spirituality, but they don’t want to talk about religion, and they don’t want prayers,’’ he says. ‘‘A karakia is okay. I’ve been to so many places where people say, ‘Don’t use any prayers, thank you, not even the Lord’s Prayer’, then the kaumātua gets up and says the Lord’s Prayer in te reo.’’
But there is still a place for Anglican tradition in Matakana’s new world of free-for-all spirituality. ‘‘It’s very nice to have a
history. It’s very nice to have a heritage. It’s very nice to have a liturgy.
‘‘When you start talking about spirituality in any form, you can’t just chat about it. It needs refined, reflected, honed language and music. It takes hundreds, thousands, of years.’’
But this might sound contradictory. He talked earlier about the need for new expressions, new theology, new music and so on.
We need both, he says. ‘‘It’s not new cancelling out old. It’s new embracing old. We’ve got these beautiful words. The metaphysical poets, people like George Herbert. My goodness. You sing one of his hymns and 400 years disappear. He’s like Shakespeare, it’s so just right. And good liturgy is full of phrases that are just right.’’
There are the same tensions, but on a much larger scale and with much higher stakes, in his thinking about being Pākehā in a bicultural country that is rapidly becoming multicultural.
What do we keep of the British heritage and what do we throw out? What was worthwhile and what
should go? These are good questions, but there aren’t firm answers.
While he was dean in Christchurch, he published books on Kiwi spirituality and our culture of complaint. They were mildly provocative, just as he seems to have been.
He has kept writing, and the new book is both memoir and essay, which means he explores the country’s bicultural evolution with his own story as an illustration.
He grew up in the Māori settlement of Nūhaka, near Gisborne. The so-called public school for Pākehā had 30 or 40 children. The native school across the river had about 300 Māori children.
He writes that there ‘‘was no sense of the separation being hostile’’, but he also recognises that his childhood view may have missed the full picture.
He saw the recent television documentary on segregation in postwar Pukekohe, No Māori Allowed, which showed a shocking and largely forgotten history to younger generations.
His daughter teaches at Pukekohe High School, so he is familiar with the difficulties and
contradictions of the story, which the documentary explored skilfully. He knows it was based on a book by a US academic who lives in New Zealand, and there was ‘‘resistance to it from Māori elders in Pukekohe’’, although that did change. ‘‘These are stories that are still hard to tell, and Pākehā still find them hard to hear, but so do some Māori too.’’
The question of who gets to tell stories and how they are told is a tricky one. He was a friend of historian Michael King and they worked together in the 1970s. ‘‘He got hammered by Māori academics for daring to write about Māori things as a Pākehā,’’ Bluck says. ‘‘He really got a rough time.’’
He thinks King’s famous book Being Pākehā, published nearly four decades ago, expresses a confidence it would be hard to match now, especially around a claim about Pākehā indigeneity.
Yet he also recognises that King would be ‘‘totally horrified’’ by the way he is used by the right in New Zealand now, especially the antiAotearoa crowd.
He also points out that King was prophetic when he wrote, back in the 1980s, ‘‘Pākehā people will cease to feel threatened by the enlarging Māori presence in New Zealand when they begin to feel whole and to feel secure. The proponents of white backlash are those who are not whole, and who feel anything but secure.’’
That is really the intention of Bluck’s book – to help Pākehā feel whole and secure in a country that is changing rapidly and in so many ways for the better.
Culture is leading the way: there were 40,000 people singing Māori songs when the Black Ferns played England in the World Cup final at Eden Park; there are films like The Dark Horse and Waru and bestseller lists dominated by Māori authors; there are 29 Māori politicians in Parliament; there is even a strong Māori dimension in the Christchurch rebuild.
Who could have imagined that the old Canterbury Club figures would have to become comfortable with calling new major public buildings Tūranga and Te Pae?
Spiritual or legal?
In the Transitional Cathedral, before about 60 people, Bluck uttered the dreaded words ‘‘He Puapua’’ and the roof did not fall in.
Depending on where you stand, He Puapua is either a report outlining the ways New Zealand can meet its commitments to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples or it’s a top-secret agenda to hand control of the country to Māori.
What are Pākehā so afraid of, Bluck asks in the book.
‘‘The future is already being shaped,’’ he says. ‘‘The absurdity of thinking we could have a vote now on the Treaty to see whether we still want it. That we could somehow undo this entanglement.’’
He says he got the apt word ‘‘entanglement’’ from historian Tony Ballantyne, who wrote about the entanglements of empire.
Maybe theology offers some answers? There has been some talk recently about what was meant by those who drafted the English text of the Treaty.
Bluck cites some fascinating work by Archbishop Emeritus Sir David Moxon on how biblically literate Māori of 1840 would have understood words like rangatiratanga and kawanatanga.
In Māori translations of the gospels, they would have seen rangatiratanga rendered as the Kingdom of God or the sovereign rule of God, and kawanatanga, or governorship, as referencing the form of rule Pontius Pilate had.
‘‘It was more about spirituality than legality,’’ Bluck says. ‘‘It was more about a relationship than a contract. We talk past each other all the time.’’
To use a word you might not hear much outside a church these days, it was a covenant.
Moxon appears elsewhere in Bluck’s book, in a section on bicultural relationships. Moxon’s wife, Lady (Tureiti) Moxon, is chairwoman of the National Urban Māori Authority.
Bluck quotes another Anglican church leader who had a refreshing way of seeing things and that is Sir Paul Reeves, former archbishop and New Zealand’s first Māori governor-general. Reeves once told Bluck that ‘‘Pākehā can live happily in their non-Māori world, oblivious to anything Māori. But Māori have to live in both.’’
You don’t have to be au fait with the Bible to recognise that we can see the Treaty relationship differently. ‘‘Te Pāti Māori coleader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer wrote a nice piece about how the Treaty didn’t give Māori anything because they already had it,’’ Bluck says. ‘‘It gave Pākehā a place to belong, a place to stand, a relationship to sit within.
‘‘There are more benefits for us. But you never hear that.’’
There have been a few snarky social media comments about the book, and there will surely be more pushback from the critics of cogovernance and ‘‘Māorification’’ once they actually read it.
But Bluck sounds like he is prepared for it. ‘‘I’m certainly braced . . . I can cope with the exchange of ideas. I really struggle with the hate mail and the social media stuff.
‘‘It is really toxic, the kind of stuff that circulates in the eastern suburbs of Auckland from people of my generation. It ain’t nice.’’
‘‘The absurdity of thinking we could have a vote now on the Treaty to see whether we still want it. That we could somehow undo this entanglement.’’
Becoming Pākehā: A Journey Between Two Cultures, by John Bluck, is published by HarperCollins, $39.99.