Why NZ needs to pay attention to Black Lives Matter
Names give shape to the way we think about things; however they can also be exclusive. So what to do about it? Here are a few ideas
All this talk of pulling down statues and changing place names — why don’t we think a little bigger? New Zealand history will be compulsory in schools by 2022, so what about a nationwide project off the back of it? The Aotearoa New Zealand Civics Project, or something like that. Put up for debate a whole bunch of name changes and rethinks that represent who we are and what we want to become.
Do it with kindness, because we know the power of that now. But also recognise the value of anger. Nothing gets changed without some anger along the way, because when there’s no anger nobody takes a lot of notice. Especially if you’re talking about redistributing power.
Names are important: they give shape to the way we think about things and they can connect us to our history, our culture, our identity. They can also exclude. When you call a town Hamilton, replacing the name Kirikiriroa, you connect it to one version of history and exclude the other.
Former Hamilton mayor Russ Rimmington was on the radio this week arguing eloquently to keep the Hamilton name. He loved the traditions bound up in it, he said. It wasn’t clear if he realised that if he was on the other side, advocating for change, he would probably say exactly the same thing.
It’s true that colonial Pākehā names now have a history here. But that’s not a reason to leave them as they are. If nothing else was at stake, that would be an argument to choose the names with the longer and deeper history, wouldn’t it?
Rimmington said, “You can’t rewrite history.” But that’s exactly what you can do. History is rewritten all the time. It’s exciting.
Although, in passing, let’s just say the white supremacists “standing guard” in London around the boxedin statue of Winston Churchill may be taking historical rewrites a little too far. Churchill was an anti-fascist. He fought a war against that lot.
The Aotearoa Civics Project: Take 10 years and come out of it refreshed and invigorated. There are so many things it might include and names and statues are just a few of them. For now, here are 10 suggestions; a list of names, statues and historical associations we could change.
1 North Island and South Island
This one’s easy. Te Ika a Maui, the Fish of Maui, and Te Waipounamu, the Waters of the Pounamu, or greenstone, are beautiful names, resonant with history and myth and inviting a conversation that surely could have no bad outcome.
I can’t even imagine why anyone would prefer the unlovely and imaginatively bereft names we have now.
While we’re about it, let’s nix Northland, Southland, West Coast, Westport, East Cape, etc as well. For shame, those colonials were dullwitted.
Actually, it’s not just dull, it’s also insulting. At least when you call a place Hamilton you’re commemorating someone. There’s a point to it. But North Island says, “We don’t care what it’s called as long as it isn’t some bloody Māori name.”
In the real world, we’ve already started to do this. Tairāwhiti, for example, is widely and officially used on the East Coast, as is Te Tai Tokerau in the North. Let’s ramp it up.
2 Auckland
Let’s see. Our main city could have a historical name that means “place of a hundred lovers”, or variations on that entirely lovely idea. Tāmaki Makaurau. Or we could keep the name of a man who never visited this country, had no association with it, and was responsible for one of the most criminally incompetent disasters ever perpetrated in the name of the British Empire.
George Eden, the first Earl of Auckland, was the worst.
In 1839, as Governor-General of India, he sent an army of 59,000 soldiers and their followers to invade Afghanistan, for no clear military or political reason. When they were driven away in a winter retreat four years later, almost every one of them was slaughtered or died of the cold. Most of them were Indian.
It was the epitome of imperial excess. One regiment took its foxhounds. Even junior officers had up to 40 servants. One senior officer required 60 camels to carry his personal belongings.
They “fraternised” with the local women, which caused outrage among the local men.
In the House of Lords, the Duke of Wellington denounced Lord Auckland as “stupid”, but he wasn’t listened to.
Auckland is named after this appalling man because he launched the career of William Hobson, the naval officer who supervised the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and “founded” a town on the Waitemata¯, calling it after his patron.
That was in 1840, during exactly the same period Lord Auckland sent tens of thousands of people to their deaths in Afghanistan.
There’s a statue of him, by the way. It’s in storage at the moment but it used to stand in the southwest corner of Aotea Square, in front of the Civic Administration Building (CAB) now being converted to apartments.
The Indian city of Kolkata gave it to us when they didn’t want it anymore.
Just a guess, but when the the CAB construction is over I suspect Lord Auckland won’t reappear. With many colonial figures, their role in history is complicated and deserves a considered debate. But not that one.
Who needs his statue or his name? We have a beautiful, meaningful, better option.
3 Wellington
The Duke of Wellington was another never to visit this country or have any connection at all with the city named after him.
The capital has the option of a name with far greater historical resonance: Te Whanganui-a-Tara, the great harbour of Tara. It feels like a perfect fit: descriptively apt, an invitation to some storytelling about who Tara was, a commemoration of the great Polynesian voyages.
4 Hamilton
John Hamilton came a bit closer, though hardly close enough. He was an officer in the colonial army who died in 1864 in the battle of Gate Pā, near Tauranga. It was one of the most remarkable moments of the Waikato Wars: 230 Māori in the pā defeated an attacking colonial force of 1689 soldiers and sailors.
They won the battle but they lost the war. Land confiscations in the Waikato were among the most punitive of the entire period of the New Zealand Wars.
Waikato-Tainui asked for Hamilton’s statue to be removed last year, but they didn’t get angry and nothing happened. Now it’s gone, hauled away into storage before it could be knocked down — and the city’s name is up for debate too.
“We certainly favour Kirikiriroa over Hamilton,” iwi chair Rukumoana Schaafhausen has said. “Kirikiriroa was acquired as a result of the New Zealand Settlements Act passed in 1863, and that resulted in just over 1.2 million hectares of our land being confiscated.”
To my mind, the issue isn’t that Hamilton fought against Māori, and there’s no evidence of any atrocity. But the land on which the city stands was stolen, and that fact is celebrated with symbolic potency in the use of Hamilton’s name: it reinforces the victors’ sense of supremacy.
In this country, that’s surprisingly rare. From Kaitaia on south, most of our towns have always had only Māori names. Those with English names usually commemorate absent English heroes, like Wellington, or evoke English places, like Plymouth.
Speaking of English towns, why isn’t there a New Bath? There’s a name that surely would have lingered in the Kiwi imagination.
Back in the Tron, fear not. That name will always live on, and so it should. But Kirikiriroa is a fine official name. True, it sounds better in Māori than “long stretch of gravel” does in English, but take the larger view: it references the beautiful river.
5 Nelson and Marlborough
The might of the British Empire is commemorated all over the top of the South, despite Horatio Nelson never having sailed into the Sounds.
Blenheim is named for the homestead of the Dukes of Marlborough, aka the Churchills.
Lord Nelson is commemorated in the name of the city and many of its streets, including Trafalgar, where he died, and Hardy, whom he bade kiss him before it happened.
It’s a good debate for the locals to have: does all the Churchillian and Nelsonian memorabilia mean more than the names Waiharakeke and Whakatu¯ , which have been in use since the 1300s?
Picton’s easier. The town is named for Thomas Picton, a slave trader known as “the Tyrant of Trinidad” for the brutality of his regime as governor there. End of story. Waitohi is the original name.
6 Dunedin and Dannevirke
There’s a strong argument for keeping Dunedin: the Scottish heritage of the city is legit, a real thing that thrives today. The same is true for Dannevirke with its Scandinavian heritage, although don’t forget Rangitāne were there for a great many generations before the descendants of the Vikings turned up.
Towns like Dunedin and Dannevirke, whose names speak of real associations and a living history, expose the irrelevance of Auckland, Wellington and all the other places where that’s patently not true.
7 Hawke’s Bay towns
What about the city that might be called Karamu or perhaps Heretaunga but insists on sticking with Hastings?
It’s not named for the place where William the Conqueror vanquished the English King Harold in 1066, supposedly with an arrow through the eye.
That would be weird, but maybe kind of interesting. Instead, the name honours Warren Hastings, another scoundrel of the empire in India. Same for other towns in the Bay: Napier, Havelock North and Clive.
Clive of India, as he was known, was particularly awful: committing atrocities, allowing famines to rage unchecked, all the while corruptly amassing a personal fortune.
Another guess, but I suspect Ngāti Kahungunu have a better name all ready and waiting.
8 Poverty Bay
During last year’s Te Tuia 250 commemorations, much was debated and learned about Captain James Cook, although little was changed.
In 1769 he landed at Tūranganuia-Kiwa and called it Poverty Bay because, after his men killed the local rangatira Te Maro and eight others, they were driven off without being able to replenish their supplies. A poverty of something, that’s for sure.
But the land is fertile and the name blindly one-sided.
It’s remarkable we still use it.
Cook was the greatest navigator of his age and he certainly wasn’t a villain in every cheap sense of the word.
But he got that first contact terribly wrong and it wasn’t to be the only time. The place names he bestowed on this country require scrutiny.
In Tūranga, aka Gisborne, the question of statues and commemoration has been debated for decades.
There used to be a statue of Cook, on the Kaiti headland overlooking the place where Te Maro died. Absurdly, it wasn’t even Cook, but some Italian nob, the statue imported from Sydney.
The “Crook Cook” is now in a museum, available for education and debate, while on that same hill today stands a breathtaking and extremely popular sculpture of Te Maro, by local artist Nick Tupara. Good outcome? Who would doubt it?
Although, they also put a new Cook statue down on the foreshore and that hasn’t been universally acclaimed.
9 All the other statues
There are statues commemorating colonial rule and the colonial military all over New Zealand, because statuebuilding is what they did.
There are probably more statues of Māori heroes, though. It’s just that we don’t often think of them as statues, because they’re holding up the wharenui on marae.
Should we leave it at that, with Pākehā and Māori retreating to their own turangawaewae and not changing a thing?
That’s not how it works. Our towns and cities are not Pākehā spaces, they’re shared. They’re places where our histories and cultures entwine, where we try to understand what that means, celebrating the good, taking stock of the bad and looking for the best way forward.
Nothing useful happens if we close down history by pretending there’s nothing to debate.
History lives in us. We’re always free to reinforce and to reform our values, our heroes, our ideas about who we are.
A good place to start is with the history of the people who were here at the start. It’s hard to argue the newer history should take precedence if you don’t know what the older history holds.
Hard also to argue for a history that celebrates oppression. This debate is about colonialism, the process by which the rulers of one country subjugate the economic and social interests of the people of another, to their own benefit.
It’s about our ability to understand the damage that it has done and still does. When we argue about John Hamilton or James Cook, that’s what we’re arguing about.
10 New Zealand
Ah, but where’s it all going to end? If we start changing names, what else might change? Political structures, social and economic initiatives, our role in the world, Matariki instead of Guy Fawkes. Before we know it we’ll be changing the name of the country itself. Too right. Aotearoa, the time is coming.