6 March 2012
I am beginning to wonder if there is a deliberate attempt currently being made by our secondary schools to teach their pupils that all whites are racist and that the much-vaunted "colonialism" is the reason for Maori & Polynesian poverty and crime.
Small anecdote, maybe, but my daughter - who is in her first year of high school - has had several recent assignments and studies of NZ literature and film that feature exactly these perspectives.
First up is a short film "Manurewa" by the allegedly top-flight film maker Sam Peacocke. This piece of fantasy would sit well alongside a revisionist history of the Holocaust. A pack of small-time criminals is portrayed as sensitive and thoughtful as they variously feed horses and make boom-box combinations.
Worst of all, the film shows the shooting as accidental, when actual video footage shows the cold-blooded shooting as no accident, but a deliberate and calculated murder. It is impossible to reconcile the real shooter with the sensitive young man in tears at the result of a horrible accident, as the film shows.
I can understand why a minor film maker would want to make a controversial film, but for a school to show it is beyond belief.
I live in South Auckland, and between 1999 and 2004, my family and I lived less than 200m from the Riverton Drive liquor store, where the killing took place.
Next up, we have a short story, by another allegedly high-quality writer, Patricia Grace, New Zealand's foremost Maori woman author. The short story, Going for the Bread is said by Patricia Grace to reflect an actual incident that happened to her when she was five years old.
The basis of the story is that she was sent to the shop to buy bread, bullied and beaten on the way there, only to return home a bloody mess.
Why I doubt the story is that while there were indeed racist laws in existence in NZ up to WWII, there was little discrimination at the societal level, mainly due to the well-known and -publicised efforts of the Maori Battalion. That doesn't mean incidents of racial discrimination didn't happen, but the story goes further and enters fantasy, which gives me serious cause to doubt the major premise.
At the end, the mother tells her little girl that she won't have to go to the shop any more, because the mum will pay for a taxi from now on. As the story takes place in 1942, there is no chance whatsoever that anyone was going to take a taxi to the shop to buy bread. Petrol rationing had been in place for two years at that stage, and taxis, such as they existed at all, were used only for emergency or official business, and while there may have been exceptions in the rural areas, away from official eyes, the story allegedly took place in the capital, Wellington.
As the story contains one clear falsehood, I am not prepared to allow that the major premise has any more veracity than the taxi myth.
Maybe I'm just a cynical old bastard (I freely admit to that) but it smacks of propaganda at this stage. The rest of the year's curriculum will be interesting.
Copyright © Alan Charman