The importance of seeing the people behind each story
Letter from the Editor
It’s now six months since I came home to Aotearoa New Zealand to edit The Dominion
Post, and I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a good Kiwi in the 2020s.
For me, it means being meticulous with my recycling, immersing myself in our unique culture, and thinking about how to reset after the Covid crisis. For my new-to-New-Zealand child, it means not standing too close to the batsman when you’re learning how to be wicket-keeper.
As I consider my reKiwification, two trips I’ve made in the past couple of weeks have had a profound impact on me. The first: the entire Dominion Post team went to the National Library to see He Tohu, an exhibition comprising the three documents that shaped our country: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Waitangi and the Women’s Suffrage Petition of 1893. It was very meaningful to huddle together in a dimly lit curved wooden room in the National Library – positioned to face the Beehive and Parliament, as a challenge – as the librarians went through the documents with us, refreshing our knowledge of our history and telling us fascinating facts.
Did you know two the parchment pages of the Treaty come from female sheep skin?
Poring over these documents felt extra meaningful given the journey we as a country and as a media company are on. Our education reporter, Laura Wiltshire, led us in a waiata at the end. Twenty or so reporters gathered around these living documents, singing together in the semi-darkness.
The second: this week I went to Ka¯ piti Island as a guest of the Department of Conservation, staying with the Barrett family at the northern tip of the island.
Manaaki Barrett told us the story of the island, from the arrival of his tı¯puna and then American whalers, through the island’s
conversion to farmland and the destruction of the natural habitat, to the restoration of the incredible flora and fauna of the island. We watched trees alive with piwakawaka and tı¯eke, we listened to kiwi and korora¯ making a racket all night long, and we shooed the cheeky ka¯ ka¯ away from our breakfasts. It was breathtaking.
The trip to the island made me think about the achievability of change. Ka¯ piti has been regenerated, and the birdlife is returning to Wellington thanks to the efforts of Zealandia and Capital Kiwi and other organisations.
I thought back to those founding documents and the promises unfulfilled. We have a long way to go. But I left the island optimistic. Change is possible.
On our front page today is a story about the human beings of Te Aro Park. We’ve run lots of stories about criminal and anti-social behaviour in the triangle between Dixon and Manners streets, and reported on plans to fix it with measures like removing the phone booth and increasing lighting.
But I’ve been struck by how few of the ‘‘solutions’’ looked at the reasons why so many people are now sleeping rough or spending long periods of time in the park.
So I asked reporter Tom Hunt and visual journalist Kevin Stent to find out.
They have spent hours on multiple occasions at the park this week, talking to people and finding out their stories. They heard tales of mental illness and addiction, but also of resilience.
Tom and Kevin deliberately went to the park in the mornings, when it was relatively quiet, and took extra steps to make sure the people they interviewed understood why we wanted to talk to them and what we would be doing with the information.
All the people in our report were happy to share their stories.
I hope that this will help lead to more understanding around the human dimension of the problems at the park.
Maybe you’ve noticed that we’ve added a new cartoonist to our lineup: Emma Cook. A few weeks ago, Emma told me she wanted to draw something about the crisis in Myanmar. I was all for it.
But Emma didn’t just draw the flag – she made the flag, dyeing it with food colouring, so it would look realistic in the cartoon. ‘‘This is what ‘democracy’ looks like in Myanmar,’’ she wrote.