Editorial: What a yawn marae biffo has become

Today  is the most fraught of our public holidays.

A day of post-colonial stress disorder, where powhiri meets pain and wide-eyed pukana clashes with awkward hongi.

Perhaps that's why the rest of the country simply prefers to mow the lawn.

It's of little surprise most of us opt to spend the politically-charged day gently buzzing in two-stroke Masport heaven.

Such apathy is not without irony, given in doing so we're tending to that most celebrated of British botanical conventions - the lawn.

But I digress. If lawn mowing is an attempt at a snub, it's completely understandable.

On Saturday, a Hawke's Bay kaumatua told this paper he preferred to spend Waitangi Day focusing on how far Maori had progressed with the Crown. A day later, we all saw Prime Minister John Key make a heated exit from Ti Tii marae.

While Australasian prime ministers fleeing angry indigenous mobs makes for great theatre, I'm not convinced we've progressed much at all. I'm sure (and I hope) that anyone watching last night's news rolled their eyes in collective derision.

TV footage of marae biffo and self-conscious rhetoric has headed Waitangi Day news segments for as long as I've been on the end of a lawn mower.

The tradition has become farcical in its repetition.

Today started with a dawn service on Ti Tii marae. That's also the way we begin Anzac Day. Yet on that occasion we celebrate the memory of Pakeha and Maori soldiers fighting the good fight.

These two public holidays, celebrated only two months apart, seem to preclude each other.

Our country's war wounds are honoured in strangely disparate ways.

So, rather than watch dignitaries and Maori militants embarrass the nation on national TV, I'll sit back tonight and ponder a conversation I had on the subject with Flaxmere's Henare O'Keefe.

Over hot scones and coffee, he told me about his uncanny experience on a plane over Ireland a few years back.

Looking out from his window seat, he said he was surprisingly overcome with emotion. He had "goosebumps"on seeing this land of his forefathers, his tipuna, for the first time.

Someone please get this Maori-Irishman to Ti Tii marae.

He's a unifying example of what historian Michael King meant (I can only assume) when he claimed our country, in fact, has two indigenous cultures.

That's something to contemplate when I'm emptying the catcher this afternoon.