New Zealand is racist as

Diary of the last 28 hours and five centuries of worldwide European colonisation

Sunday afternoon

Beautiful day in the seaside village. We walk down to buy all kinds of sticky goodness from the bakery and take it over to Windsor Reserve to enjoy ourselves in the sun. 

Some dedicated souls are carefully loading away the white crosses they set out each year for ANZAC day, and nearby a man is setting up to do some busking with - and I wish I could be  more specific than this but I can only say, because the sounds are really quite alien, some brass instrument? Anyway out comes God Defend New Zealand, I think, and if we rise to our feet it will only be to move further  away.

But it’s a perfectly lovely day to enjoying a custard square, in the sun, on the grass, by the harbour, and a perfectly lovely day to stroll back home up the hill, and a perfectly lovely day to open up the Twitter and Dear God just watch all the loveliness turn to steaming sulphur.

With the understated comment Just ya average day on NZ social media, Kiri Allan has shared some screenshots of deeply bigoted and braindead utterances.

The first is a bit of calculated ghastliness from the ludicrous Simeon Brown making outraged stage noises about Marama Davidson accepting an invitation to speak to the Mongrel Mob, and then it’s just one headlong plunge towards the sewage.

Next there are these two:

And lastly there’s a barely-hinged piece of conspiracist misogynist bigoted ordure offering line after line of bitter sneering abuse:

get over yourself Kiri...it sickens  me to see you paraded in front of the media  as this poor suffering wretch   

Cindy [was] projected on high rise buildings around the world as this amazing humanitarian pm when she knew all along how and why the massacre happened. 

I have a question, as do many who read it: What the actual fuck is wrong with people?

Here's what's wrong with people - and cynical politicians, like Judith Collins, with precious little else to offer, know it: some people are bigoted racists who cuddle their prejudices to sleep each night with lullabies of white supremacy. 

We brought all this bounty to these ignorant savages and where’s the gratitude eh?

We’re all one people, why do they want special rights?

They never had it so good and they can't stop moaning. 

What they will ever deny, what they will steadfastly refuse to ever hear, is the truth of it: colonisation, by Europeans - not just here but right across the globe - was a great wrong that left vast harm and this thing is not yet over.

You get the feeling that unless you keep it ludicrously simple, it’s entirely beyond these people to join any dots.

In one paragraph then: It’s a simple tale of a group of rich thugs coming down the street, spotting someone else's house, saying I fancy this, inviting themselves in, partying up large, trashing the whole house, staying on, and on, eventually burning it to the ground and pushing the owners out into the street, then building their own mansion over the smouldering ruins and then taking the people they’ve just dispossessed to come back inside to live in the cellar and work for a pittance.

That’s not bestowing  your bounty on people, it's wrecking lives and then telling them to just pull themselves together and stop wailing and get themselves a house like the one you've just built.

One further thought: whenever some bigot starts in on that whole We brought all this bounty shit, it's worth asking them:

We? How much of that bounty was your personal contribution? Which bit did you invent, champ? The cell phone? The blender? Or is your greatest invention dunking Drambuie into a handle of Speights, you knuckle-dragging  uninformed-opinion-having  warmed-over excuse for a human being?

That’ll do for tonight.

6.45am Monday

And another bloody thing. You know how Taika Waititi got all that grief  for saying this joint was racist as fuck? Take a look at what he was saying in the interview in the sentences leading up to that observation and tell me  it doesn't ring completely bloody true,

Taika Waititi: Exactly the same. Growing up it was very normal to go into a store and they would say, ‘What do you want?’ And you’d be like, (muttering) ‘I’m just looking at chips, man.’ I remember getting a job at a dairy and they would never give me a job at the till, I was always at the back washing vegetables. And then one day one of the owners asked me if I sniffed glue – like, ‘Are you a glue-sniffer?’ (Ruban laughs) In my head I was like, ‘Motherfucker, you grew up with my mum!’ And I knew for sure that he didn’t ask other kids in the store if they were glue-sniffers.

I think I’ve got quite an idealised vision of New Zealand as like Australia without the racism and the blokeish sense of humour…

Taika Waititi: Nah, it’s racist as fuck. I mean, I think New Zealand is the best place on the planet, but it’s a racist place. People just flat-out refuse to pronounce Maori names properly. There’s still profiling when it comes to Polynesians. It’s not even a colour thing – like, ‘Oh, there’s a black person.’ It’s, ‘If you’re Poly then you’re getting profiled.’

I have a proposition, something we could do until people stop doing their cynical tubthumping about separatist path this and apartheid that and all one people, like the statistics about a seven year shorter life expectancy have no real life significance.

My proposition is this: instead of jaunty signs at our airports like Wellywood or whatever, let’s stand this up in giant letters to greet everyone as they touch down:

New Zealand is racist as fuck

Or if that's too much, simply:

New Zealand is racist as

And when we finally sort out our shit, we can take it down and put up a beautiful sign that says:

Aotearoa.

7.45am

Listening to a particularly tortured few minutes of someone getting Susied and hearing her not-especially-convincing explanations and thinking:

“Covid happened” is fast becoming the new “a dog ate my homework”.

4.20pm

Fourth Form Music Memories! The hopper is getting fuller and fuller! Let’s have two today, one from ad-land renaissance man Mark Easterbrook and one from redoubtable man of design, and letters, and rep theatre, Michael Smythe - great supporters, both, of this newsletter.

Hope you chaps don’t mind me putting you at the end of all this angry vituperation. Like they say at the end of the Mott The Hoople song, I’ve wanted to do this for years.

Guest Writer Mark Easterbrook

Fourth Form, Tikipunga High School, Whangarei, 1989. You’re a happy nerd at an economically deprived school in a recession-hit city at the tail end of a rough decade. You live in a bubble, wrapped up in your own head, bobbing along oblivious to how tough the world around you is.

You live on a sheep farm, surrounded by your dad’s country albums and listen to KCC FM. Years later, a man in a wine bar will tell you he named it, and that it stands for Kauri Coast to Coast. But you won’t know this yet.

The music reviews in the Northern Advocate sometimes hint at something beyond the edges of the mainstream, but for you it’s still out of sight. You know the golden oldies, or what’s on the radio Top 40. It’s the same stuff that gets spun at the school social. Bobby Brown and Poison and Madonna.

So much incredible music lands this year, but you’re not ready for it. Doolittle, but you won’t know it until you’re 16 and in love with a Pixies fan. De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising is out but you’ll get to it 30 years late. The Cure put out Disintegration and 3 years from now you will listen to it on endless repeat. You won’t know Nirvana’s Bleach exists until the year grunge breaks. Then you’ll be all flannel shirts and Gen X irony. Right now you’re just a straight kid earning credit in a straight world.

Paul’s Boutique. The Real Thing. Pretty Hate Machine. Don’t Tell a Soul. Who would you be if you heard them straight away? How would you have heard them, with no one to point you in their direction? You’ll never know.

But you hear one song on release that makes you feel a way you’ve never really felt before. Free Fallin’ from Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever. It makes something in you gently ache. It tells a cryptic story that you don’t understand, sounding like loss you’ve never experienced. It feels like the end of something you missed the start of. Free Fallin’ tugs at some melancholy thread, the line running through you that will eventually tie itself to Bill Callahan and The Mountain Goats  and Wilco and all those songs that will one day get you through actual pain. This song cracks something open and it won’t close. 

So you ride your bike to town, maybe, or get a ride with mum. You head to the dark interior of Musicor, across the pedestrian mall from the menswear store where you find your first part time job, later the same year, after your PE teacher tells the manager that you’re a good kid. You buy Tom Petty. 

You take it home and put it in your tape deck. One of those ones that plays both sides on a loop. You play it until the tape stretches, Petty’s pain in those long vowels dragged out even further out. That crack exposing the inside of your heart doesn’t get any wider, yet. But the sad song faver has got you good. 

Guest Writer Michael Smythe

Little v Cliff 

1960, 4B, Wellington College. Music master Rudolf (Rhubarb) Radford. Favourite song for lusty lads: Kipling’s poem The Road to Mandalay. Was he attempting to lift our gaze beyond our horizon or processing our adolescent urges as we contemplated the Burma girl a-settin’ and possibilities somewheres east of Suez… where there aren’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst …? It comes to mind when Myanmar is in the news.

When it came to music my twin brother John and I had grown up in the shadow of our five-years-older big brother Brian. He would listen to Selwyn Toogood presenting The Lever Hit Parade then sit down at the piano and play the latest tune right through with both hands. Around 1956 Brian bought an RCA/Victor 78rpm record with Elvis singing Hound Dog on one side and Don’t Be Cruel on the other. His avid consumption of 45rpm vinyl began soon after. I recall wondering why Elvis was calling for Uhmore sugar; Uh huh uh; Mm mm mm, mm, yay, yay, yay ... Then I read the label.

Arriving as “turdies” at Wellington College in 1959 we were even more in the shadow of big brother Brian. He had been in the A classes all the way through. The year before we turned up he had been in the First XI and the First XV as well as Head Prefect and Regimental Sergeant Major at cadets — and he was leading his 3-piece Delta dance band! How do you follow an act like that? Theatre was a point of difference. At the end of 1959 we trod the boards at the State Opera House as the twins of the Lost Boys in the Wellington Repertory production of Peter Pan with prim Alma Johnson as our Wendy. (The following year Alma became the first female continuity announcer on New Zealand television.)

We rode the peas-in-a-pod advantage on stage for a year or three. In 1960 we were thrust between the footlights and curtain of the St James Theatre clad in red tunics and white tights to herald the start of the Boy Scout Gang Show. Pretending to play trumpets was our one-and-only instrumental performance. The redness spread to our faces when someone chose to inform us that the white tights under the bright lights were, um, a bit revealing. 

Cross-dressing was considered less fraught than bringing in the Girl Guides at Boy Scout Gang Shows. I’m not sure these bathing beauties were riding along on the crest of a wave.

For the Wellington Repertory Robin Hood pantomime David Tinkham wrote us in as the avenging sons of Much the Miller — Much and Too Much. At Wellington College we were Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky in a production of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General. 

Popular music was centre stage in our first week at Wellington College – a top-level witch hunt was conducted to find the perpetrators of the daring but dastardly deed of requesting The Mole in The Hole on the Sunday request session on behalf of a string of masters’ nicknames including Fish, Loony, Inky, Baldy, Foxy, Horsey, Chook, Cheese and Rhubarb. The culprits were suspended. Only Horsey Bradly knew how to defuse such student smartarsery. He would greet each new cohort lined up in the corridor, open the door, and say, “Alright foals, into the stable.”

By the fourth form we had accepted that friendships we had established with the Queen Margaret’s girls — Jenny, Janet and Valerie — sharing the carriage on our electric unit commute from Khandallah to the city were purely platonic. The more remote Sharon Crosby got on at Simla Crescent. Shirley McGregor lit up the carriage with her wide smile and sparkling eyes when she entered at Awarua Street. (Shirley later joined the Blerta band and, in the original Goodbye Pork Pie, played Sue — the purpose of the major Mini road trip to bloody Invercargill.) Our Queen Mags female friends, now expanded beyond the commuter cluster, were pleased to be our partners at our college dances though.

That’s me dancing with Janet, with young Burton Silver of future Bogor fame behind me. We may have been dancing to The Librettos. And here we are a year later with (who was that gorgeous redhead?) and Libby. The evidence shows that each and every girl got leid.

Our problem was that the girls we wanted to know more, um, intimately were not into our years-old testosterone-driven favourites Great Balls of Fire (Jerry-Lee Lewis) or Tutti Frutti offering A Wop bop b-luma b-lop bam boom (Little Richard). 

Our young women friends eschewed red-blooded Little for wimpy-limp Cliff and we languished in his shadow. They probably felt empowered by, while we empathised with, Cliff’s September 1960 New Zealand chart-topper Please Don’t Tease (appropriately preceded by Brian Hyland’s Itsi Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini). 

Then Cliff’s backing band, The Shadows, swept Please Don’t Tease off the top spot with their Apache instrumental. We identified with its fluctuations between spacious lovelorn longing and headlong galloping urgency.