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This Thing of Darkness... or a timely reminder for New Zealand Politics

Whilst loitering the isles of Whitcouls on the weekend I picked up This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson, I'm a long way off even starting this historic fiction novel but flicking through it a chapter dealing with early New Zealand jumped out at me:

Emily had caught him red-handed, leafing through his latest batch of bad notices in the press. There were many more titles to choose from, these days: the New Zealand Herald, the New Zealand Spectator, the Auckland Gazette, all of them company titles, spreading the Wakefields' pernicious gospel like missionary tracts penned by the Lord of the Flies himself.

It was incredible that an immigrant population of just three thousand whites could sustain so many newspapers, but most of the settlers had nothing to do but read - or, in the case of the illiterate, have read to them - a rousing articulation of their burgeoning grievances.

The object of their hatred, the governor who stood between them and the lands they believed to be rightfully theirs, had been caricatured as "The High and Mighty Prince FitzGig the First, One of the Kings of the Cannibal Islands".

So, from day one all the invading white folk could do was bitch, whine, and moan about their problems, looking at the papers today, and even the blogosphere, we've not really progressed far have we? I was just thinking that I've not really come accross many, if at all any, maori based blogs. A quick google search brings up plenty of blogs mentioning maori and/or maori events, but I can't seem to find any that are specifically based around maori issues/history/religion etc.

Surely its not just the white man shaking his pointed stick at the world?

Without money he could not build a school, or a church, or a hospital, or even any defences. The process of justice had been frozen, for there was no money to pay lawyers. Even legitimate land sales had stopped, for his administration had no funds with which to purchase land from the natives.

He even had to keep a tight rein on his own currency issue, for fear of sending inflation spiralling out of control. Just a limited sum of money, he had told Stanley, would enable him to pay small salaries to friendly chiefs, to purchase their allegiance; as it was, the love of Christ instilled in some of the tribes by the Waimate missionaries was the only leash holding back the New Zealanders. The country was in a state of paralysis: all he could do was to keep the two sides at arm's length for as long as possible.

The fine balance between old and new religions, the balance between peace and all out bloodshed. These days we have the militant Destiny Church and the National Front in the fight for Family Values. Ok, so the two parties differ in ALOT of ways, but they do share a vague commonality in family issues (that is, taking a liberal view of their stated policy).

The company had assured the government that New Zealand should be entirely self-supporting, which, of course, it could be, were its native population to be conveniently wiped out.

Ewps... I think I can this being a problem somewhere down the track...

There was a tight, anxious silence at the dinner table. It was broken by Hone Heke. "You See? You white men talk to us about Christianity, and the gospel of peace, but your countrymen come among us with seven-barrelled guns!" Hone Heke's table manners, FitzRoy could not help noticing, were curiously elegant.

"The white men who came to Wairau were not Christian men," insisted the elder Mathews passionately. "God shall be their judge, may he have mercy on their souls. If they have done wrong then they shall go to hell. The same goes for those who ordered the execution of the prisoners."

"Hell is for white men only," Hone Heke corrected him, "for there are no men half wicked enough in New Zealand to be sent to such a place. If Atua had intended our people to go to hell, he would have send us word about it, long before he sent the white man into our country. Our people, when they die, go to an island off the North Cape, to live there in happiness for ever. We will have nothing to do with a God who delights in such cruelties."

"Hell is for white men only..."

Ahhh, I think this could also be a problem elsewhere down the track...

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