The Smith Gallery: 100 Otago faces in the Toitū Otago Settlers Museum. Photo / Supplied
The Smith Gallery: 100 Otago faces in the Toitū Otago Settlers Museum. Photo / Supplied
OPINION:
Many people have commented on how we are all descended from immigrants to New Zealand. I think we can take this further and say a great many of us are also descended from refugees.
This week is the 175th anniversary of the Otago founders’ arrival, a settlement dominated by adherents of the Free Church of Scotland. The desire for greater religious freedom was a major reason for these lowland Scottish immigrants to come here. Five years earlier, the British Government had been interfering in the leadership of the Church of Scotland, as they had for generations in the Church of England. Many Scots could not tolerate this and so more than 500 ministers left the established Church. Within four years they had built more than 700 new churches and 700 schools, calling themselves the Free Church of Scotland.
The settlement of Otago took place at the height of this “disruption”, attracting those who wanted to create a community that would become like the New Jerusalem promised in the Bible — a community ruled by God.
While it may be a stretch to call these first immigrants refugees, many of the Scottish highlanders who followed could certainly be classed as economic refugees.
My mother’s ancestors were Gaelic speakers from the Isle of Lewis in the west of Scotland, and while my grandfather used to tell us stories handed down about the Western Isles, I cannot remember a single one of them now.
What I learned later was they were cleared at least twice off their crofts (small subsistence farms) and would have been like many other families who left Scotland, Ireland and England having few choices, but hearing stories of unlimited possibilities in New Zealand. Some of their journeys were harrowing and their suffering needed a great deal of resilience.
If you ever get to visit Toitū Museum in Dunedin, spend a few minutes in the recreated hold of an immigrant ship. Standing there on my own was claustrophobic, let alone imagining the crowds sleeping, eating and going to the toilet there together. In storms they were locked up for days, sometimes even weeks. These were slow-moving, rocking sailing ships that would take four months to reach New Zealand.
My mother showed me a diary that someone had kept of their journey to New Zealand, which contained how far the ship had travelled each day, but what I remember most is the 22 people who died along the way and were buried at sea. Life must have been hard in Britain to risk everything to come to Otago.
Today some would possibly call these people economic immigrants rather than refugees, but my father’s ancestors who came to Aotearoa on the Tainui waka were most certainly refugees. Pei Te Hurinui Jones recorded traditions of our ancestors fleeing a war that was overtaking many of the islands in what is now French Polynesia.
Replica of Captain Cook's Endeavour on a previous visit to the Bay of Islands. Photo / Stephen Western
The reasons my ancestors came to Aotearoa — freedom of conscience, economic prosperity and freedom from war — are why many others have come to this country.
In my lifetime we have had small waves of refugees, from Southeast Asia in the 1970s and war refugees from Somalia, Afghanistan and Syria in the past 25 years.
Sadly, as time goes on, we seem to be decreasing our support for refugees. Last year, 1 News reported that New Zealand was admitting less than half the 1500 refugees a year we had committed to. Worse still, according to data collected by the World Bank, in the past 10 years New Zealand has admitted its lowest number of refugees in 60 years. The number we let in is tiny compared with the high of 17,310 refugees we welcomed in 1992.
The United Nations claims there are 117 million people forcibly displaced or stateless at present, and when we count those under pressure from the climate crisis and those who were desperate for a better life for their children like our ancestors, the need is huge.
We pride ourselves on leading the world in many areas such as democracy, freedom and low levels of corruption, but we lag behind most of the world in accepting refugees, and we have no excuse. I do not think we stopped caring, I think we just stopped noticing because we are not faced with it every day.
For those of us who are Māori, we have rarely been consulted. In fact, many of those who arrived in the past just pushed themselves in and helped themselves to our resources. They were grateful to be here, but they weren’t grateful to Māori.
However, manaakitanga is our Aotearoa version of hospitality and is our opportunity to show we care about what is happening in the world. We need to up our game and show the compassion that is a vital part of the New Zealand character.
Anaru Eketone is an associate professor in social and community work at the University of Otago.
