Whoops!

First published in Column 8 on the 13^th October, 1993

Whoops! My column last week brought two phone calls about two different matters, both of which proved that I don’t know everything. Yet again. Naturally, I’ve since spent several sleepless nights evaluating my worth as a human being.

There was a third whoops (!) regarding an earlier column. In that one I said that the small Canadian town of Chemainus had only 32 murals. In fact, it now has 40. The brochure my wife brought home is the first edition, available at a more reasonable price only because it’s out of date.

To get back to the other two whoopses (!) Last week I talked about the success of Business Grow in Christchurch, wondering why Dunedin hadn’t picked up on the idea. Two days later Business Grow was launched in Dunedin! No credit to me, of course, since the first I heard about it was when the co-ordinator, Lynne Harrison, rang to tell me, but marvellous serendipity all the same.

I’m glad we’ve got in on the act, and hope Business Grow a la Dunedin is a soaring success.

My other phone call was from a European New Zealander. (That police word for Europeans, ‘Caucasian,’ gets up my nose.) He told me that October 10 (the day I thought there was little point in keeping in the calendar), had actually been a day of considerable importance in the history of the New Zealand Chinese community.

The Chinese called the day the Double Tenth, and always had a holiday on it until a couple of decades ago. The anniversary began with the dethroning of the last Chinese Emperor in 1911, when China became a republic.

New Zealand Chinese celebrated the day by shutting up shop completely, and holding a memorial service. Chinese children took the day off school, much to the envy of their European counterparts, and all the Chinese families went on a picnic at which sports and games were played.

One Chinese lady I spoke to said her family always had their portrait taken on that day, in the morning, before going off to Logan Park for the picnic.

By the 1950s the sporting side had become the major emphasis, according to Ng Bickleen Fong, the author of The Chinese in New Zealand and the sense of fellowship was being lost. The sporting aspect became a national affair; travel to the tournament was paid for by the Chinese Association.

In due course the Chinese people shifted the tournament to the Easter break so that more time could be spent at it.

The Double Tenth itself was stopped in 1972, write Dianne and Peter Beatson (in their book Chinese New Zealanders), because our Government decided to recognise the Communist Government in China. However, some Chinese still remember the day with a nostalgic warmth, though they celebrate it in a rather quieter way.

A similar commemoration takes place on November 18, but since it is a very much smaller ethnic group in New Zealand, the Latvians, most of us Europeans won’t have heard of it.

I’ve only ever known two Latvian New Zealanders, one of whom was the wonderful Lily Latisheva, an artistic and operatic lady of considerable presence. Her talents were rather unappreciated in her adopted town. (The other Latvian, conveniently, is married to my Chinese consultant.)

November 18, anyway, was when Latvia won her independence after World War I. Being squashed between other large hungry nations, she lost it again – until the recent demise of the Soviet Union.

Unearthing all these matters hitherto hidden to me makes it worthwhile writing a whoops (!) or two.

Puyi, the last Emperor of China

In 1996 I met Lynne Harrison. She came to the shop I was running to give us some advice on how to use Business Grow, which she was still involved with. I made mention of this in my diary at the time, but had forgotten about it until I checked for any references to ‘Business Grow’ in my own business life.

The full title of Ng Bickleen Fong’s book is Chinese in New Zealand – a study in assimilation.

 

Creating jobs?

First published in Column Eight on the 6^th October, 1993

The third anniversary of my first Midweek column comes midway between today and next Wednesday, on October 10. I could say this gives October 10 something to be proud of each year, but with due modesty, I won’t.

October 10 doesn’t seem to be a day on which other things of great note have happened, though it was the day Liz Taylor and Richard Burton got married for the second time – somewhere in Botswana. Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union on this day, and a British QC called Igor Judge rose to the High Court and became, confusingly, Mr Justice Judge.

Fascinating stuff, huh? At least the Pankhurst item has some topical relevancy.

Three years of finding column ideas have included hair-tearing when the Sunday evening clock is ticking on towards bedtime and I still haven’t written anything. On other occasions someone has spoken no more than a sentence and ideas have tumbled out too fast to keep up with.

The bit of the brain that produces ideas is a fairly enigmatic corner. It constantly cries, ‘Need more input!’ But having received aforesaid input, it’s just as likely to ditch the lot into some miscellaneous brain bin and inquire why you haven’t fed it today.

Thus, while feeding my brain from my 1988 collection of clippings, I came across a couple of items related to job creation ideas, both of which came from (good grief) Christchurch.

I hear on the news that Canterbury is now the fastest growing area for job creation in the country. Business Grow, the scheme which uses a business adviser to link businesses with a wide range of assistance to help them with expansion, began there. Four hundred have come out of this idea alone. (Has Dunedin begun Business Grow yet?)

Back to the 1988 clippings. On October 12 that year James Maddren, a Christchurch businessman, suggested to the South Island Local Bodies Association that they consider selective immigration to the South Island (like about a million people), to increase our population base and improve our economy. (A new job is supposed to be created for every five new people.)

The association’s executive committee was to investigate the proposal. I guess it did, but I haven’t seen droves of skilled immigrants arriving. Did the Government scotch the idea with its usual anti-immigration approach?

In another clipping a Christchurch law tutor named Owen Dennis ran an ideas seminar in Dunedin for the NZ Institute of Management. What he presented wasn’t new, but the first paragraph of the report reads, ‘Here’s a great idea: start an ideas competition to generate jobs and activity in Dunedin.’

I can’t remember anyone taking this up, although not being the most organised collector of detail, I may easily have missed it. Has anybody tried an ideas competition here in town?

We could do with an ongoing ideas presentation on a public basis, perhaps as a weekly column in one of the newspapers. A list of all sorts of ideas might well stimulate local brains dulled by too much occupation with incomes and outgoings.

The bright, witty, foolish and downright silly ideas would all need to have a home in such a list, because even though a particular idea may have no merit, it may spark off something really useful. They’d need to be ideas, though, not just criticism of the status quo.

Thomas Edison is said to have a goal of coming up with a minor invention every ten days and a major one every six months. He was one man. What might a similar city-wide goal in the job creation area achieve? And if Christchurch can do it, anyone can…I mean, can’t we?

 

Justice Igor Judge, courtesy of the BBC

As things do over 36 or so years, there have been some changes. I don’t know that the ideas idea has ever taken off, but immigration has, at least as far as the North Island is concerned. And Christchurch is a sprawling city nothing like its former self. So maybe the ideas idea worked well there.

Another creative idea in learning Spanish

 At the beginning of Sept I wrote about an approach to one part of learning Spanish that I was trying. It was slow, but was working well enough. It involved memorising ten random sentences and joining them together with a 'story' so that I didn't forget their order. 

The idea was to give me some fluency in getting Spanish words out of my brain in a proper order and onto my tongue. 

I've been doing that over the last few months as one aspect of my Spanish learning, but it takes a bit of effort to keep up with that as well as the daily use of Anki cards, reading the Bible in Spanish, and memorising a couple of Psalms as well (in Spanish, of course - I already know them well in English). 

I'm always keeping an eye out for different approaches because it's easy to get into a rut and not really put any effort into something you've doing for a while. Continuing to be creative, in other words. 

Anyway, another aspect of my learning has been to get Grok (the AI from X, formerly Twitter) to translate a children's book I wrote a few years back into Spanish, one short section at a time. At present we've just finished chapter four, so the progress is quite slow. That's okay, it's all part of the learning process. 

Yesterday I had an idea as to how I could make further use of this translation. Up till now I've been taking various sentences from each section as it gets translated and putting them on the Anki cards. I have a 'deck' on Anki that's devoted to these. Yesterday, I decided to challenge myself further by seeing if I could memorise the latest section that's been translated - in Spanish. This is going to take some time, but then learning Psalm 139 also took some time, but was worth it. It introduced me to new words, gave me a better sense of grammar than I'd previously gained while doing Duolingo, and showed me how Spanish has a different approach to the arrangement of words in sentences. 

I was already aware of that, of course - two years of Duolingo taught me some things at least - but getting that sense of re-ordering in my head rather than just parroting it off Duo forces me to think more carefully about where words go. Sometimes it even shows me why they go that way, though not always (so far!)

So, one more step on the way. I don't have any great ambition in terms of being able to speak Spanish at this point - there aren't many Spanish speakers in my part of the world - though I have improved in terms of reading it. Being able to speak it out, even if it's because I've memorised it, is another way of helping myself become more familiar with the language overall. 

The original cover of the book I'm having translated into Spanish -
one day I may have another go at updating it. 
Cover by Regan Nicholls

Murals

First published in Column Eight on the 22^nd Sept, 1993 

Before my wife went overseas to visit her family, we spent an evening with some friends. These people had not long before to Canada’s Vancouver Island. Since my wife was also going to be spending some time, they encouraged her to go and visit the town of Chemainus (pop 3500). She did. But more of Chemainus in a moment.

I suppose Dunedin is not unusual as a city these days in having a few murals scattered around. Every city has walls that cry out to stop being so boring. Neither, I guess, is Dunedin unusual in that it gives scant attention to those murals when someone decides the walls no longer serve a ‘useful’ purpose.

Considering the immense amount of fuss that’s been generated regarding the proper location of the Art Gallery, I find it strange that on at least two or three occasions I can think of, perfectly good murals have vanished because of some redevelopment.

Obviously art is only of worth when it’s stuck up in a gallery, at the perfect temperature, with lights somewhat dim, and people walking around in reverential tones. Robust outdoor art has to look after itself, and too bad if someone wants to take the wall down and recycle it.

Until a few years ago there was a delightful mural painted on a house on the corner of Tennyson St. All other buildings had been demolished, but this one hung on. Someone was optimistic enough about its future to paint a mural on it, but finally the house, and the mural, crumbled. I have a photograph of it somewhere, and wonder how many other people recorded it.

In the Dowling St carpark another mural was painted, on the shell of what had once been a picture theatre. This was truncated when some city planner decided the the shell served no purpose, and an open-plan carpark would be more aesthetic. Now we have what might be called the Venus de Milo of murals.

Murals are only to stop vandals spraying graffiti, aren’t they? Murals are things kids do on walls, as class projects, aren’t they? Murals are meant to be temporary, right?

That’s how it seems in Dunedin, but in Chemainus (pop 3500), they think otherwise. Over a period of several years the people of nearly-dead-on-its-feet Chemainus refused to let it become a ghost town. Instead they commissioned artists to paint murals on any walls not otherwise occupied.

There are now 32 murals. These murals have a double function: they are firstly a top tourist attraction, and have given Chemainus a revival in income terms.

Secondly, they’re a panorama of the history of the town, from its earliest Indian occupied days through the time when the sawmill made the place thrive, right on up to the present.

These paintings are representational, for the most part, some having an almost photographic reality about them. They’re full of the faces of earlier town residents, usually taken from old photos, each in a setting that explains their part in the town’s life.

Just imagine if, in Dunedin, the stern characters on the Early Settlers’ Museum walls left their portrait gallery and came out to breathe the open air, to be seen doing the things they did in real life. Or if events out of our history book took on a more visual form.

We’ve got plenty of boring, blank-eyed walls lazing around the city – including the new Archives building. New Zealand has plenty of artists who’d be glad of a commission to paint on a large ‘canvas’ a picture that would be seen by more than just the elite or wealthy.

And the people of Chemainus wouldn’t begrudge us imitating them. Karl Schutz, the man behind the idea, has already been in Australia to help set up a similar scheme there.

Almost the only kind of large-scale murals we now have in the city are advertisements, the sort of thing you can see anywhere in the world.

Let’s go for something different.

 

Lurch, a character from The Addams Family, 
which used to be on the entrance to a flat in View St. 

I’d love to say that this column had some effect on those in authority in Dunedin, but perhaps others were already thinking along the same lines. Suffice to say, Dunedin now has a large ‘collection’ of murals that range from the rough-edged to the superb…a few can be seen here. Already some of those that were existence when I wrote this have gone, but in general the newer ones are outstanding examples of what can be done.

I can no longer remember the mural in Tennyson St, and sadly don’t appear to have the photo that I talk about, though I have a wide range of photos of Dunedin murals taken over a number of years.

Chemainus now has around 53 murals. You can find an earlier post here that has links to some other sites with photos of Dunedin murals. 

Curiously enough it’s only in the last few days (late Sept 2026) that a mural of Ed Sherrin that itself dates back only a few years was ‘vandalised’ after his opening act Macklemore started to preach Pro-Palestine at a Sherrin concert.

Ed Sherrin mural before and after 

Useless?

First published in Column Eight on the 1^st Sept, 1993

While attending the last stretches of the Dunedin Competitions, my ear caught a line from a song on suffragettes: ‘We enjoy men individually, but as a group they’re rather stup…id.’

This must be Give Men Flak Week, because I’ve also come across two book titles: Things You Can Do With a Useless Man, and Dads Say the Dumbest Things. Can you imagine the outcry if the subject was the opposite gender? Sexism doesn’t appear to exist when men are being put down – it only runs one way.

Men, solid citizens as they are, have put up with being flailed for decades – long before women’s lib came on the scene. And they continue to suffer it. you only have to look at the television to see the way men are treated in commercials, or in sit-coms. They’re always the fools. The worst examples are the ones where some game is being advertised. Who’s the schmuck who loses? Always the father.

Let’s get real here. What man is useless? Useless is defined (rather weakly) in my dictionary as ‘having no practical use or advantage.’ But the inference in the book title I mentioned is of something even less than that: a person with no purpose or function at all.

You’d think that womankind, having been victims of oppression for so long, would (on gaining a measure of equality), look kindly on those now less fortunate than themselves. Not so. Condescension is the order of the day.

A Useless Man: this sounds to me like a man seen through the eyes of some woman who expects things of him that he has no skill at, or no innate ability to do.

Perhaps a useless man is one who doesn’t fit the Kiwi bloke model: the man who doesn’t drink much, if at all; the man who doesn’t go crazy if he misses a rugby match, or the man who can’t remodel his home because it’ll look worse at the end than it was at the beginning.

On the other hand, perhaps a useless man is one who communicates with his kids (even if, as they grow older, it is with some increasing degree of difficulty). The man who knows when his wife’s birthday, and their wedding anniversary, occur. The man who can take something his wife bought back to the shop, and complain – because his wife is too chicken to. The man who knows how to cook three variations of his favourite mince and rice dish.

The man who continues to love his wife when her logic fails him, when she has PMT three weeks running, when she decides to try out a recipe for a very strong curry or when she’s got the cheque book in a muddle.

If there really is such a creature as a useless male, he must be getting as rare as the yellow-eyed penguin, though perhaps needing less money spent on preserving his species.

One of the positive things unemployment has done for many blokes is to give them time with their kids when they never had it before. Time when they’re not tired, or absorbed in trying to do up the house after tea and on the weekends.

Now they have time to walk with their kids to school, to sit in on classes, to help them with their homework, and tuck them up at night. To go out and play games with them. That can only be an improvement.

But even apart from unemployed men, a feature of modern day manhood is the way in which they parent their kids: how many men of the last generation would have pushed a pram, carried their babies in a backpack, or even changed their nappies?

I get irritated at the way fathers in American sitcoms still act stricken when their wives are having a baby. I saw each of my children born: five wondrous and unforgettable occasions. I even helped deliver the last, a rather frisky fellow. This is something many older men never experienced.

But according to some, men are so useless. They can only repair cars, play pianos, clean drains, paint pictures, empty gutters, wash dishes, program computers, lay concrete, write books, keep wives warm, and snuggle children on their laps.

I’m sure there are many more things they’re useless at, but that’ll do for starters.

The Dunedin Competitions would have been the singing competitions specifically, the section I had most involvement with. I did occasionally accompany instrumentalists in the instrumental section as well.

Somewhat sadly, the two books I mention were both written by men. Men have a great ability to put themselves down.

Respect

First published in Column 8 on the 25^th August, 1993

A caption accompanying a photo of the Tokoiti School children receiving a computer from Mr Bolger was unsure whether the children were more in awe of the computer or of Mr Bolger. After all, he is the Prime Minister.

In the same week, however, we were told that yet again politicians had made it to the bottom of the list when it came to being trusted as a group.

I rather think that answers the question. Nevertheless, this isn’t going to be a column putting down the worthy people in Parliament – they spend enough time doing that themselves. Rather I want to look briefly at the whole matter of respect. (I note that Miles Singe had the same idea in his last column.)

There’s a prevailing theory that no one should be given respect as a matter of right. They have to earn it.

I don’t know when this idea arose, but I don’t think it was the norm in my youth. In those distant, halcyon days, if a person held a position of respect, you didn’t spend time questioning their motives, their behaviour and their attitudes. Rather you just got on with life and assumed they held that position because they’d been entrusted with it.

There have always been some people in authority who have demeaned their positions by poor behaviour. But the poor behaviour of some isn’t a reason to question the behaviour of all.

I believe there’s a place for questioning some in authority, but equally we have to assume a person holds a position more for a good reason than for a bad one.

Television is a prime mover in the demeaning of all sorts of groups, and not just demeaning them, but shoving their faces in the mud.

Television interviewers, in fact, would have to be considered leaders in the ‘earn-your-right-to-respect’ stakes: the normal approach to interviewing a person these days is to drag down all their defences.

Don’t let the person finish a statement; don’t let them contradict what you think they should say; mock anything that smacks of opinion; run down anything that hints of taking a stand.

Unless, of course, that stand is itself one that mocks authority.

When this approach becomes the norm for everyone, no one can do their job properly: someone will always question the behaviour of others, including their proper and good behaviour.

No authority group is immune from this questioning: police, judges, ministers of religion, teachers, civic authorities, parents – the list could be extended for pages.

In my more opinionated moments, I’ve blamed teachers for the way kids behave, and the way kids knock everything that was given due respect in the past. Teachers no doubt blame parents for allowing their kids to go their own way. Wherever the blame lies, both groups suffer, and as they suffer, so ultimately do the kids.

I know some authority figures have let us down, and others will continue to do so. In the end, however, an attitude that says you can’t tell me what to do because you haven’t earned the right to do so, is self-destructive.

A society where no one trusts those in charge, whatever that charge may be, is a society that will wind up trusting no one.

A backstabbing, name-calling, tongue-lashing, slur-casting, lampooning, scoffing, sneering, carping, critical and cynical society. Sound familiar?

Not the place to bring up the kids.

 

Respect across generations
courtesy AlgerianFrames

It’s disturbing to read this piece after thirty odd years: on one hand there is now virtually no respect for any authority, and on the other, there is virtually no authority that deserves respect. Every avenue of society has been affected by this disarray. Worse, for me, is that fact that we all join in this to some degree, in spite of knowing that we are soiling our own trousers in the process. The buck stops firmly at each of our doors.  

Men in danger

First published in Column Eight on the 16^th of June, 1993

When I began my column last week, Peter Ellis had been found guilty, but continued to act as an innocent man.

As the days moved on, it became obvious that there was more to the matter than we’d previously heard. Guilty or not, Peter Ellis’ behaviour had often been foolish, and the staff at the centre had allowed it to be so. We can now see why Ellis wasn’t – at first – the only person incriminated.

In the end, he took the brunt of the blame. and his conviction will add fuel to a volatile debate.

The debate is about a good deal more than the rights or wrongs of a particular childcare worker’s case. It’s about men working in childcare. I have no doubt there are some members of the community who now believe more than ever than men should not work with young children.

If Peter Ellis was guilty, and a long trial and jury decision say he was, then male childcare workers will have an uphill battle to maintain their jobs. Their behaviour with young children will become suspect in even the most innocent of situations.

The whole vile matter of child sexual abuse has poisoned the atmosphere of modern communities. We have the paradox that while society is now more generous in what can constitute a man’s role, men’s ordinary behaviour is treated with increased suspicion.

What was regarded in the past as part of wholesome normal relationships is even under a cloud. Bedrooms and bathrooms have become places where men can find themselves in danger.

Men can be in danger when cuddling children on their laps, or in having children in close proximity to the lower half of their bodies. Men can be in danger if they take children for walks in back streets or go into native bush areas.

And when men are put in the harrowing situation of being accused of sexual abuse, falsely, the discolouration of their lives extends to men in other, similar situations.

Do I exaggerate? Sexual abuse has so damaged many women’s view of men that not only are the guilty condemned (as they rightly should be) but the innocent are tainted.

If Peter Ellis is guilty, then he deserves punishment; there’s no doubt about it. He himself has said he regards sexual abuse of children as a disgusting thing, and it is.

But what if Peter Ellis is not guilty? What if the jury was wrong, and the prosecution was wrong? Worse, what if the social workers were wrong (as they were in an infamous case in England, when the families of half a village lost their children for a time because of the obsessions of social workers)?

Worst of all, what if the parents were wrong because their children told lies, or half-truths, or were led to say things by adults determined to find something sinister?

I worked in childcare when I was younger, in a climate that believed pre-school children needed males to relate to. It had taken years for men to be accepted in this area, an area where men are now needed more than ever.

I’m glad I’m not starting out in that work now: a man could quite innocently step into quicksand.

Sexual abuse, for all its publicity, its court cases, and all the suppressed hurts of people who are now speaking out, is not something the majority of men do. At a time when children need fathers in their families, and when they need men in daycare centres, it would be tragic if we began to believe it was.

 

Some years after the first trial and all the subsequent appeals and so on, an immensely well-researched book appeared on the case: Lynley Hood’s A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case. (October 2001). Dunedin: Longacre Press. ISBN 1-877135-62-3. This book produced extraordinary evidence that case was exceptionally badly handled by the police, that there was an large element of hysteria amongst the parents (a copycat of similar hysteria going on in the States at the time), the people who interviewed the children frequently believed things that the children made up, and much more. The book is hugely detailed, and makes for difficult reading, but it was in part instrumental in turning Ellis’ conviction around. There’s more information on the book in the link above.

 

Speechmaking

First published in Column Eight on the 9^th June, 1993.

Two rumours are doing the rounds. One has it that a computer programmer, hoping to promote his software, recently sent a programme entitled, ‘Make Your Own Speeches,’ to the Beehive. One of the queen bees, Jenny, desperate for help with her speech-making, threw it in her compatible and got a real buzz out of it.

The other rumour has Mike Moore secretly faxing his speeches out to all the other offices in the Beehive in the hope that someone, somewhere, will listen to him. Queen Jenny, being ultra-busy, grabs one of these and makes it the basis for her National Party conference speech.

I suspect that latter rumour has Moore basis in reality, since a typical piece of Moore impromptu was: ‘I don’t make promises, and those I make, I keep.’ (Huh?)

Jenny’s conference speech went much further into cloud cuckoo land: ‘We should not flinch from breaking the surcharge promise…to take the tough decisions to allow New Zealand to make more money, pay more tax and provide a better welfare society. Some people want social justice to come from socialism. I want it to come from opportunity.’

Lots of rhetoric and not much reality.

Maybe this is foot-in-the-mouth month. An Australian linguist recently claimed the New Zealand accent was rapidly changing. Why? Because, when we New Zealanders saw Britain joining the Common Market, we lost confidence in our Britishicity. Collectively we’ve instinctively felt that we’d better start sound like New Zealanders. Huh?

According to this linguist, if you’d asked an Aussie twenty years ago what a New Zealander sounded like he would probably have said ‘no different.’ This linguist is obviously a baby boomer. One Kiwi member of my family clearly remembers Australians laughing at her Kiwi accent as long ago as the 1940s.

The spoutings of the Experts (the Spurts?) is a plague upon all our houses. Not only do we have our own New Zealand variety – parliamentarians – but an endless stream of overseas Spurts who manage to make New Zealand a target for their roustabout sayings.

Fr Robert Sirico (yes, I asked who?, too), came here on a whistle-stop tour (or a mission from Michigan), to tell New Zealanders what to do about their economic situation, and to discredit clergy criticism of the Government. Maybe he’d also received one of Mike Moore’s speeches.

Fr Sirico, from Michigan, tells us that our domestic purposes benefit subsidies divorce. To take the financial considerations out of divorce we should scrap the benefit. A ‘free market free of government intervention’ wouldn’t pick up the pieces, says Fr Sirico. ‘The church must assume the role of the state in providing support for the needy.’

I thought the church was already having to do this – and barely keeping up with the overflow.

There are days when I think it’s the way I read the papers: do these aforementioned people only appear not to be making any sense? Are their words misrepresented, or placed out of context?

Sometimes when reading the news I feel like citoyen of Nancy who has been caught failing to wear his seatbelt while driving. He has a choice of punishments – a 150 franc fine (c’est irritable!), or a carnival-like trip in a car that rolls over and over (c’est magnifique!)

Trying to grasp some of the statements by those personages listed above leaves my head in the same state as the rolled-over Frenchman: Dizzy a la Gillespie.

Or alternatively, reading the news is sometimes like trying to read in the bus on winter nights. Citibus now appears to be saving power: the internal lights are so dim you can hardly see the bell-pull.

Or worse, it’s like trying to figure out whether the graffiti on a billboard in Cumberland St is the beginning of a theological statement, or the end of a philosophical one.

With the enigmatic simplicity of a speech-writing computer program, the writer has writ: ‘I AM.’

 

From the French road safety campaign recommending
that men should drive like women....

 The version of this column that appeared in the newspaper had two proofreading errors in the first paragraph alone. Probably the worst place to have errors; the current edition of one of my books has a similar problem: a spelling mistake in the first sentence!

 AI provides us with more information about the speech-writing program (which I seem to have inaccurately named):

This historic moment took place in 1993 when New Zealand computer programmer and satirist Simon Kember created a software program called ‘The Politician’ (sometimes referred to as the Automatic Speech Writer) and distributed it to members of the New Zealand Parliament.

The 1993 Speech-Writing Software

Long before the advent of modern generative AI like ChatGPT, Kember coded a text-generation algorithm using a specialized vocabulary. By selecting certain parameters, the software would automatically string together political buzzwords, policy platitudes, and rhetorical filler to generate complete, grammatically correct—yet entirely hollow—parliamentary speeches.

Public Reception and Parliament's Reaction

Kember designed the program as a satirical critique of the repetitive, focus-grouped, and formulaic language used by contemporary politicians.

• The Distribution: Kember sent floppy disks containing the program directly to various MPs across the political spectrum.
• The Irony: While intended as pure mockery, several parliamentarians and their staffers reportedly admitted that the program was surprisingly accurate and hilariously indistinguishable from real political rhetoric.

This 1993 stunt remains a legendary piece of early New Zealand computing history, demonstrating that the anxiety—and humor—surrounding automated political speechwriting began decades before the modern AI boom.

I’m not sure why I thought Jenny Shipley’s quoted speech was particularly unsound: compared to those we hear from the minor parties these days (the Greens at the moment are suggesting nationalising all supermarkets) it makes enough sense to sound feasible.

 As for Australians laughing at Kiwis accents, I can remember in the 1960s when members of a Sydney orchestra came over to play for a nationwide tour of the NZ Opera Company’s production of Die Fledermaus. The leader of the orchestra had an accent so strong that I initially thought he was a foreigner. I haven’t been able to discover who the Australian linguist was, sadly.

 AI also gives us more detail about the Nancy road safety campaign:

‘This scenario was a highly effective road safety campaign rather than a literal ‘pay or go to jail’ criminal punishment.

In Nancy, France, local police and road safety authorities utilized a rollover simulator (known in France as a voiture tonneau). Drivers caught without a seatbelt were given a creative ultimatum: they could either pay the standard 150-franc fine or agree to experience the rollover simulator to understand why the law existed.

• The Ultimatum: Instead of simply writing a ticket, officers gave unbelted drivers a choice. If they chose the simulator, they would get inside a modified, secured car cabin that safely but aggressively rotated 360 degrees on an axis.
• The Goal: The exercise was designed to vividly demonstrate the violent forces of a crash. Experiencing how difficult it was to stay positioned—even at a slow, controlled rotation—convinced many drivers that they would be severely injured or thrown from the vehicle in a real accident.
• The Outcome: Most drivers chose the simulator over paying the fine, and the shocking physical experience proved far more memorable and educational than a standard traffic ticket.’

 

 

Sounds

First published in Column 8 on the 2^nd of June, 1993

Recently, a blind youth visited my shop with his father. During the few minutes in which we shared company I was suddenly made aware again how little I listen to what’s going on around me. The youth didn’t himself say anything about listening, but it struck me as we talked that noises irrelevant to me might well have more meaning to him.

So we non-physically challenged people often think. We can hold this myth that someone who’s cut off in one sense automatically makes up for it in another. If we took the time to check it out we might find the truth was different.

Lisa Bendall, in the Canadian abilities magazine, soundly berates the film, Scent of a Woman,  for promoting the myth, in what seems to her to be an absurd fashion.

She says: ‘The average viewer now believes that a man who is totally blind can drive a car at over 100m/h without veering off the street; can interpret a woman’s appearance (right down to the colour of her eyes) by the sound of her voice; and can detect, with complete accuracy, the facial and hand gestures made by other people.

‘The same blind superman, however (who incidentally never blinks), was shown in other scenes groping, staggering and otherwise stumbling around his environment. He rarely uses his white cane and his sighted guide tends to walk pointlessly behind him.’

Okay, so Hollywood failed to take into account the way a real blind person behaves. For them only what’s convenient for the drama, whether realistic or not, is important. Thus they promote the myth.

My blind friend may in fact be just as oblivious to everyday sounds as I am most of the time. Nevertheless our meeting did make me think about listening again.

As I moved round the shop on that day I suddenly heard afresh the stapler being hammered into the paper, the crash of the till drawer opening, the clunk of a book knocked off the shelf, the clonk of a file being put back into place, my own footsteps stumping across the carpeted wood, the individual swish of the door the back room, and a hundred other sounds peculiar to my environment.

Lying in bed this week with a cold brought it home to me even more: a blackbird outside going crazy with his singing; another bird merely chip-chip-chipping away. The irritated squeak accompanying the undoing of the front door latch. The clatter as one of our furry inmates burst through the cat door, jerked the curtain hooks as it shoved the material aside, and then thudded on its four paws – all in perfect and unconsidered synchronisation – up the stairs.

Lying in bed listening to the radio is a reminder that most of us, privileged as we are now to have musicians on tap, don’t actually listen to them most of the time. But we expect them to accompany us wherever we go (like the bells on a certain lady’s toes) – in the car, the bath, the loo, the bedroom, outside in the garden and even at work, a place where listening to music is about the last thing we actually do.

Peter Kreeft writes that ‘God invented the senses to reveal the unique and irreplaceable tang of the Particular to (our) consciousness – the thisness as Duns Scotus calls it, of each thing in the universe.’

We take hearing – indeed, all our senses – for granted. To hear the world afresh, we have to make the effort to become like little children again. Unless we do, we’ll miss the minor wonders of this life – and may miss the entrance to the kingdom of Heaven itself.

Blind person listening

Column Eight and letters

A bunch of letters I received over the years regarding Column Eight. Some of these came through the post, as things did in those days, though my address was never advertised anywhere, and some were sent to the Midweek/Weekender office.

25^th May, 1992

Dear Mike,

We read with interest your Column while in Dunedin once again last week. We wish to say that we appreciated your tactful comments regarding the Dalai Lama’s Public Meeting in the Town Hall.

Thank you for exalting Jesus Christ as the complete answer for this World and its People today. We do wish many ministers would speak out from their Pulpits with this same courage as you have shown.

We have written a letter to the Bishop of Dunedin stating our disapproval of the fact that St Paul’s Cathedral was used for the purpose of a Public Meeting addressed by the Dalia Lama who represents the pagan god, ‘Buddha.’

It’s no small wonder that many people today are confused in trying to find the truth.

Your cousin Denise (nee Hannagan) has recently told us who you are. We are her Mother and Father-in-law.

Keep speaking out as you feel you have to.

God bless you for doing so

Eleanor & Bruce Teasdale, Arrowtown.

 

16^th August, 1992
Dear Mr Crowl,

Thank you from all of us for your very kind tribute to Dad in the Midweeker. Many people phoned to make sure we saw it.
We have copied it several times now to send the news of Dad’s death to his good friends overseas – in Canada, USA, Japan etc.
Yours sincerely, Mary O’Neill, Dunedin

 

Dec 16, 92.

Dear ‘Mike’

You and your column are really doing something for Dunedin, & Otago generally. You say such wise words, inspiring faith, hope and love, & all the godly gifts of mercy & justice & tolerance & truth. I look forward to your column more than anything & I hope it will be instrumental in bringing many souls to Christ (as He has been to me).

I hope your ‘virus’ & other painful experiences are of the past now. You have had a bad time! And you expressed it very well, I could feel it in my own bones.

This is written in an awful hurry. Some day we may meet, who knows.

Meanwhile God bless you & guide you all your days.

In sincerity, Effie Todd (81 yr old widow – but rich in Him).

Brockville, Dunedin.

 

29.5.93

By all means keep the copies of letters I sent.

You have some sort of influence & can spread it around – every little helps.

I also sent copies to ‘Women Against Porn’ & SPCS (I don’t know what they really do).

Rita Denham, South Dunedin

 

18.3.94

Dear Mr Crowl,

Your article continues to be excellent.

It seems a pity that the Midweek/Weekender has started up an ‘Adults’ Entertainment’ column, hopefully it won’t gather momentum until it reaches the mammoth proportions of the sleazy ads in the ODT, which are now akin to a walk around a red light district.

Ironic that close to the ODT columns is a paragraph stating that all ads must be in good taste. There is really no such thing these days, but I wonder exactly what criterion the ODT goes by.

The media re much to blame for the increase in pornography, sexual crimes, etc, in the way they continually dwell on it & dig out every little detail. Grist to the mill for potential perverts.

Yours sincerely, Mrs R Denham, South Dunedin.

 

July 28/93

Well done, Mike! I really enjoyed Column Eight: Fisherwomen. Not only was it great to read about women’s achievements but it was especially gratifying to see a journalist refusing to condone the use of ‘girls’ to describe adult women.

Thank you,
Yours sincerely

Shona Thompson, Dunedin.  

 

August 23^rd, 1994

Dear Mike Crowl

I meant to write to you immediately and congratulate you for your bravery in writing the Monarchy letter in Column Eight for Midweek of 10^th Aug 94.

Your opinion as portrayed would be one that is held by many silent Australian and New Zealand citizens.

While your Monarchy letter has appeared in Dunedin Star Midweek, it should qualify for publication in all New Zealand daily newspapers and that is what you may find difficult to achieve.

D J Ralston, Mosgiel.  

As of the 4^th of September, 2026 I’ve yet to discover which column this relates to.

 

17 May 1995

Dear Mr Crowl

I feel I must write in sincere appreciation of your timely column (‘Profane but PC’) in today’s Midweek.

Thank you for so aptly stating in a public forum what so many Christians strongly feel, yet cannot express due to lack of ability or opportunity.

With this article, you have pushed home a vital point: ‘How curious that political correctness protects all manner of groups but one.’ How curious, indeed.

May God bless you.

Yours sincerely,

Mary L Falconer, Mosgiel.

(I do not expect any response to this letter).

 

 

 

This came on a small card with no date:

Dear Mike,

I always read your column with interest.

Enclosed find a way of using all those unused envelopes.

M H Graham.

As of the 4^th of September, 2026 I’ve yet to discover which column this relates to.

 

Hello Mike,

I read with interest your article ‘A Sade State of Affairs.’ It so happens I lent someone a book once of Marquis de Sade but it was never returned to me. It annoys me that I am unable to remember the title and I simply wondered if you could inform me how many books there were and what their titles were.

Keep up the good work. You’re a great writer and I always read your articles with immense interest.

Have a great day and never mind if you cannot help me, it’s not too important.

With kind regards, Joss Detollanaere, Waitati

Sadly, this being before the days of Google, I was unable to help.

 

 

No date:

Dear Mike,

I like this column very much; would you sign it & send it back?

Jocelyn Jaquiery (same name, but not Stephen Jacquiery’s wife)

Stephen Jacquiery has been one of the ODT’s longstanding photographers. 

The end of Column Eight

The end of Column Eight. 

On the 20^th April 1996 I received a letter (by post, of course) from the acting managing editor of the Midweeker:

Dear Mike, we have recently been reassessing the content and layout of the Dunedin Star Communities. With this in mind it has been decided that we will no longer be requiring your column for publication. Your contribution and support has [sic] been appreciated and while this is an end to your column we do not discount the possibility of working with you again. Yours sincerely, Jeff Whyte, Acting Managing Editor.

I went into shock, since there’d been no warning of this on the horizon, though the ‘Acting Managing Editor’ had recently taken over from the Editor I’d worked with since I’d started the columns - a very supportive editor - and he was plainly under orders to cut back on costs. From memory, I don’t think mine was the only weekly column to disappear.

Here are three of the letters that appeared at the time. 

 Weekender, 5^th May, 1996

I wish to voice my dismay that presumably you have decided to do away with Mike Crowl’s weekly column in your paper. I, along with many of my acquaintances have enjoyed reading his comments on life, and his sense of humour about everyday things. His column was always the first and sometimes the only thing I read in each issue, and I feel that your paper will lose much of its appeal for many of your readers.

R. G. Hendry.

 I just want to add my voice to the many more who must feel as I do, so disappointed that ‘Column Eight’ has come to an end. It was for me one of the main reasons I looked forward to the Midweek. It was the first article I would read. May I take this opportunity to say thank you to Mike Crowl for the many humorous, thought-provoking and often inspiring articles he has produced. Hope springs eternal, maybe you’ll be back! You will be missed.

S. N. D.

 I am sorry that you have discontinued Mike Crowl’s column in the Midweek paper. I looked forward to reading his pithy and cryptic comments on such a wide variety of subjects. Your paper, I am sure, will be the poorer for this omission. Much which comes under the term ‘restructuring’ these days is merely an excuse to lower standards.

A.H. Richardson

 

These generous letters weren’t the result of an organised attempt to reinstate the column, as far as I know. 

A (very) loose Spanish story

Photo courtesy of the New York Times

In my last post on learning Spanish, I spoke about increasing fluency by memorising random sentences. This process got interrupted by the fact that I was also learning Psalm 139 at the same time, and I wanted to finish memorising it. Which I did.

Then I came back to the random sentences - as well as going on to start learning Psalm 1, another one I’ve known in English for a long time. In fact, I taught it to my kids as a song that I made up when they were all still relatively young – my wife learned it at the same time. And interestingly enough, everyone of them remembers it to some degree at least, once we remind them of the tune.

Anyway, back to the random sentences. Here they are, just for your information.

En una época de engaño universal decir la verdad es un acto revolucionario.

El fuerte olor a pintura me mareaba, así que salí a tomar aire. 

Estoy de acuerdo: será mejor vender la casa. 

No recuerdo en este momento, pero sé que anoche pasó algo grave.

Tenemos que conducir a la izquierda de la linea blanca. 

Cualquiera puede venir a la fiesta.

Judas Iscariote entregó a Jesús por treinta monedas de plata.

Lleva un carrito para poner la compra.

Estacio el coche en un estacionamiento y salió de él.

Mañana ayunaré porque tengo que ir a hacerme unos análisis.

Here are the rough translations, so that you have some idea what they’re all about.

In an age of universal deceit to tell the truth is a revolutionary act. (It’s a quote from George Orwell, apparently.)

The strong paint smell made me sick, so I went outside to get some air.

I agree: it will be best to sell the house.

I don’t remember at this moment, but something serious happened last night.

We have to drive on the left side of the white line!

Anyone can come to the party.

Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.

Get a trolley to put the shopping in.

I park the car in a car park and leave it.

Tomorrow morning I have to fast because I’m having some tests.

You can see there’s nothing connected amongst them. Nor did I choose them for particular words or grammar.

I spoke about using strong images in the last post to in order both to remember them and their order. At that time I was thinking of calling these to mind in a way that didn’t necessarily connect to the sentences as a whole.

But when I learned the first lot of sentences I found I would forget one or two and didn’t always get them in the same order. Not that the order mattered particularly, but it does help to remember them. Eventually I strung them onto a kind of ‘story’ and that helped enormously to remember them and their order.

I should have worked on that basis with the third lot as well, instead of trying give each of them ‘calling cards.’ So I took the idea of strong images and using those stitched the sentences together in a very loose story.

I’d had the ideas of explosions and battles and so on – I mentioned this in the last post. I noticed that the first sentence talks about revolution, and so suddenly a group of revolutionaries were taking over the town, shooting up things and setting fire to houses.

The burning houses linked to the strong smell of paint – I had in mind that in a hot climate (these were South American revolutionaries, it appeared) the paint on houses might burn fiercely, and with a strong smell. So sentence two sorted.

Next I imagined a husband and wife, caught up in the revolution, and, with the houses around them being set on fire, deciding rather ironically that it was time to sell their house. An unlikely possibility in the real world, but this is a story.

And then the wife opens the back door to find someone lying there who isn’t fighting with the revolutionaries. He’s bleeding badly all over the porch and the lintel. He explains that he doesn’t remember at the moment how this came about but obviously it was a serious matter.

The couple decide they have to take the risk of getting the man to the hospital, which accounts for the wife yelling at the husband that he’s driving on the wrong side of the road. Caused probably by other people trying to leave town as well.

Of course they come to a road block - set up by the revolutionaries. The man in charge finds the wounded man in the back of the car. He’s possibly the one responsible for shooting him, coincidentally. He’s a sarcastic bloke, as his words about ‘Anyone can come to the party’ indicate. We know that the ‘party’ is likely to end in the death of the wounded man.

The wife knows something about this revolutionary, and that he is a betrayer. Her comment about Judas and Jesus arises from this.

The road block is outside a supermarket. The revolutionary thinks it’s a joke to say the husband should get a trolley to put the ‘shopping’ (the wounded man) in. But the couple are hesitant: what will become of him?

Nevertheless the husband goes off, in his car, to park it in the supermarket parking area, and bring back a trolley. His words about this have a hint that he’s done something more than just leave the car. (Yes, I know I’m stretching things a bit here!)

The final sentence has the wounded man saying the words about ‘tomorrow morning’ and ‘tests’ – a grim joke perhaps indicating that he’ll be tortured in the morning.

Of course this ‘story’ is full of plotholes, and only partially goes anywhere. Or perhaps it leaves us up in the air and gives us a desire to know what happens next (!)

Once these stories are well and truly memorised I’ll move on, and we’ll see what happens next. Maybe.

 

Demeaning

First published in Column Eight on the 19^th May, 1993

Demeaning is the new in-word. Warren Cooper tossed it around like a hollow caber a few weeks ago when he claimed that the media is demeaning the Government. With all due respect it isn’t hard to do this, particularly when one minister (who shall be nameless) on the radio modestly declared he was ‘sincere and hardworking.’

However, demeaning the Government is child’s play compared with some of the more heavy duty demeaning that’s presently going on.

The Demeaning (formerly the Indecent) Publications Tribunal ruled recently that in pornography men are harder to demean than women. This rather curious ruling compares the treatment of men in a series of homosexual magazines with that of women in ‘heterosexual’ pornography mags.

Thus while women are ‘always’ treated as objects in heterosexual mags, the men in the homosexual ones were treated as both objects and subjects. So that’s okay. Follow? I must admit it took me several careful readings of the news report to understand what was being said.

Why do I have this niggling feeling that there’s something awry in all this wordplay?

I agree that an all-male porno mag doesn’t reinforce negative male attitudes to women, or reinforce gender-based inequalities. Of course it won’t. But surely that isn’t what the Indecent Publications Tribunal was set up to judge!

The IPT was set up to rule on indecency, not on inequality between the sexes, and I think it’s failed to do this. I also think it no longer understands the meaning of the word demeaning.

Demeaning has the sense of debasing. These days we usually understand it as an action on the part of one person or group which demeans another human being or group.

Surely, therefore, indecency itself is demeaning, quite apart from whether it debases women or men. And magazines are pornographic when they display human genitalia in such a way as to treat them merely as objects with no sacred worth, showing human bodies impersonally and without regard for their dignity.

The borderlines are being stretched constantly, of course, even in magazines that in no way would call themselves pornographic. But I think the average person has a fairly good idea, with or without the help of ITP, of what constitutes pornography.

In Melbourne the same curious double-standard as that used by the IPT recently appeared. A billboard of a naked 17-year-old youth with smutty words across his private parts was considered by women to be okay. However, it would have showed a ‘dominant and repressive’ social attitude if the person had been a young girl.

In New Zealand we have a naked man walking down the street on a television ad: in fact men dropping their pants on TV has become almost commonplace. Those who complain are told it’s only humorous.

Female strip shows are called degrading, yet women now attend male strip show in droves. How can it be demeaning for one half of the human race and not for the other?

The over-emphasis on exposing the human body in our society is excused on the basis that we’ve somehow matured from attitudes of the past. In fact it’s typical symptom of a society rapidly heading toward un-civilisation, and towards the decay, erosion and ultimate overthrow that normally follows such behaviour.

The Demeaning Publications Tribunal, meanwhile, contributes to our downfall, by allowing indecent publications to be sold. And the pornographic merchants of the world sit back and laugh, and rake in the dough.

 

The IPD was dissolved a few months after this column was written, and replaced by the Office of Film and Literature Classification – now called the Classification Office. It covers a wide range of areas, in part as a result of the huge changes that have come about due to digital information.  

Trade unions

First published in Column Eight on the 26^th May, 1993

An election year promise: New Zealand will become a nation of brown and white Asians.

Brendon Burns in The Press quotes words spoken by one Rev G H McNeur in 1926. ‘The average New Zealander has not begun to realise that the future of his country is in any serious way bound up with the happenings in China. China is awake. Is New Zealand asleep?’

Burns claims McNeur wondered why we hadn’t understood that our future is inextricably tied to China. Was that what McNeur had in mind? Perhaps, in those days, he was rather more concerned with China as a threat.

In the 1920s many New Zealanders barely knew that nations like China and Japan existed. And during the war one of these people became hated foreigners – for some Kiwis that still are. Perhaps we were wise to wait.

Mr Bolger, in his recent junket round three of the Big Asian nations, at least avoided the appalling arrogance attributed to Sir Keith Holyoake in his Asian dealings. Austin Mitchell wrote: ‘Sir Keith admonished the Japanese to drink more milk and eat more meat, to grow up big and strong and presumably slow their economic growth rate down to New Zealand’s.’

As a thumb-sucking self-secure little nation for so long, tied to Mother Empire’s apron strings, some of us are baulking at all the new trading partners we’re acquiring. We have some mind-resetting to do, especially in terms of viewing Korea, China and Japan as part of our neighbourhood.

Exporters, however, see dollar signs clinking above the heads of the 1.2 billion Chinese. But they look further than that: to other Asian countries – and the Pacific. There’s Papua New Guinea, and of course, the great Pacific nation, Australia.

Trade is all very well, but it isn’t all one way. You can’t just empty your containers on foreign shores while your overseas bank account fills up with dollars. Our trading partners will want to send us something in return.

Australia promotes Neighbours-liness in one of its soaps, but in real life, Crass Economic Return lies across the Strait.

What do we get for our export of expatriates, for example. A million dollar bill for feeding them! do they appreciate us sending them our finest rugby players? No – they stomp their springs all over the face of our national sport by cluttering up our TV screens with something called State of Origin. (Very puzzling – I thought I knew the names of all Australia’s states. Or is this some obscure reference to the confusions of an early church father?)

The more trading we do the more like our trading partners we may being to look. (And possibly like us, although with 1.2 billion Chinese it seems unlikely.)

Will all our New Zealand-made stuff have to go overseas, just to keep up with the rush we’re told is coming? Will we in return begin to wear garments made in places as diverse as Port Moresby, Osaka and Beijing (or even Melbourne!)?

No doubt this trading will eventually reduce our overseas debts. We can begin putting some money back into our own people again, in the form of classes in Japanese, Chinese, Pidgin and Ocker. That may prove more long-sighted than sending people off to Burnham/Waiouru for six weeks.

I would like to contribute this suggestion to international trade in celebration of my new-found Asiasticity. On a recent trip to China, a friend of mine found it necessary to carry toilet paper – at all times. Obviously this produce is in short supply.

Right here in Dunedin we have a company producing the stuff, almost on the wharf. How easy it will be to run the fork-lift across the road from factory to ship.

With all this new trade-unioning, I have another hope. That soon we’ll be able to call our national fruit by its rightful name again: the Chinese gooseberry.

Rev McNeur. Photo courtesy of 
The Presbyterian Research Centre, Dunedin

 think this is a good example of how not to write a weekly column. The title is a pun that doesn't get referenced again the text. The focus starts in one place and shifts halfway through to another. It begins in a fairly serious fashion and ends with mostly oddball humour. It doesn’t sound to me as though I actually had much idea what I was talking about when I wrote it, so it probably can be classed, at best, as a filler.

However, it has a certain historic value: trade is still a big issue, and there are now far more Asian people living in New Zealand than would have been contemplated in 1993, many from India, which doesn’t get a mention in this article.

 

The eyes’ habit

First published in Column Eight on the 5^th May, 1993

I started to write this week about the 5,000 school pupil suspensions/expulsions, and the statement that half that number were Maori or Pacific Islanders.*

Though my wife says it’s unlikely, I was going to be objective and fair. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised what a difficulty I have (along with many other New Zealanders), in being objective and fair about anything to do with race.

Concerning objectivity, American journalist, Walter Lippman, said, ‘The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes.’ I’ve been placed in a mostly pakeha lifestyle all my days, but I’m realising a need to change my eyes’ habits.

Over the last twenty years I have, along with many other Europeans in this country, become alienated towards non-European New Zealanders. Why? Because we’ve believed much of what we’ve read and heard in the media: mostly bad news about the people we share these islands with.

To describe a man in the news as Maori no longer defines him in the way the bland and rather meaningless word ‘Caucasian’ does. We read more into ‘Maori.’ We know Caucasians commit crimes, but we ‘know’ that Maori commit more of them.

I confess I usually react to news about Maori, and Pacific Islanders, in a fairly negative light. But while their worst citizens are just as evil as the worst pakeha, the majority of them are reasonable, good-natured, decent human beings trying to deal with a time that’s become morally, socially and economically chaotic.

We don’t hear much about the ordinary non-crime committing ones; they don’t make eye-grasping headlines, or shock-horror television clips. And until we begin to hear about them, our perception is going to be slow to change.

In my childhood, and further back, Maori people were almost invisible, especially for us South Islanders.

Perhaps after the Maori Wars we thought of their wild warriors as ‘tamed’ – and didn’t think much beyond that. With good reasons: they hardly appeared in our history lessons, nor much in our newspapers. If we thought about them at all, we considered they lived in harmony with us. They’d conducted their skirmishes in the 19^th century, and got war out of their system.

Since the seventies, however, we could easily believe that the once-peaceful Maori were conducting some sort of guerilla warfare – or peace-fare; it consisted of attempting once more to raise their mana in the land they share with their fellow human beings.

These days there’s a smattering of the Maori language taught in most schools and kindergartens. But the emphasis seems to be on songs that remain obscure to the kids, and on legends that don’t relate to daily life.

Understanding the Maori in his daily life is difficult for many of us. The best overview I’ve come across was in a novel, Witi Ihimaera’s The Matriarch. The author took us back into the Maori Wars, showing what a vicious and grim period it was, with much suffering on both sides. He also showed us what life was like in that ‘invisible’ time. But best of all, he present a picture of contemporary Maori life, the straddling between the community and the city, the being at home in both worlds, yet not quite at home anywhere.

We need to read Maori writers to appreciate Maori people. We need to see Maori artists at work in films and on television. Compare the ‘Caucasian’ film Utu and the Maori film Ngati; it’s an interesting exercise in viewpoint. Utu is vicious, violent and tasteless (a copycat Rambo); Ngati is dramatic, humorous and celebratory, sometimes self-mocking, and essentially gentle.

And we need to have journalism about, and by, Maori and Pacific Islanders. Journalism that accentuates the positive.

*In 1993, school suspensions in New Zealand reached an estimated 5,000 cases, sparking significant national concern and leading to legislative reform. This milestone occurred directly after New Zealand raised the compulsory school age to 16 on January 1, 1993. The surge in cases prompted an inquiry by the Education and Science Select Committee, ultimately reshaping how schools handle student exclusions.

 The Maori Wars are now mostly known as the New Zealand Wars.

Since I wrote this, the racial landscape in NZ has changed considerably. There are more Maori – or people of Maori descent – working as politicians in Parliament. In fact two of the three leaders of the current ‘Coalition’ are of Maori descent. There is also a Maori party, though its members have done themselves more harm than good during their time in this Parliamentary term.

The use of Maori language has increased greatly, and there are immersion schools where only Maori is spoken from a young age. More people of Maori descent are attending University.

Sadly, the crime reports in the newspapers continue to feature men (mostly) of Maori descent, and murder and violence is well and truly on the rise.

On the other hand, three of my grandchildren are part-Maori…