Nickie Muir: Stories thats are not being heard

Cape Egmont Lighthouse and snowy Mt Taranaki.

Are we in Taranaki?" I asked the grey-haired doyenne at the bus stop. "If you mean 'New Plymouth' you are," she said. Loaded with maps liberally labelled with the word "Taranaki", we'd been bewildered to find not one road sign on the way with "Taranaki" written on it. Disorientating.

I doubt the bard ever actually made it to Stratford, Taranaki, either. Not that anyone would want to point this out to the Stratford council. A lot of time and money has gone into bronze Shakespearean busts and stamping his mug into the sidewalks of a town named after somewhere else, that had another name beforehand.

By erasing all traces of the real ghosts of history and inventing another one, the local council has effectively created nowheresville. Such a contrived form of forgetting or rewriting of a town's own narrative can only be compared to a form of civic mental illness.

I considered this while watching the faux Tudor tower town clock strike the hour, at which point out stepped spooky mannequins in the form of a collection of characters from Shakespeare's plays - to quote their lines in a Swiss style best described as creepy cuckoo.

I'm guessing, but there's probably been a lot spent on sister Stratford global get-togethers and general junkets based on the dubious Shakespeare connection.

And it's not like Taranaki has no real interesting history. Since trying to make November 5 in our house a day to celebrate the NZ warrior of peace, Te Whiti o-Rongomai, I've been trying to find out what happened at Parihaka. I'd given up on celebrating Guy Fawkes mostly because I couldn't decide if I felt like celebrating that someone stopped him blowing up parliament or the fact that he'd had the pelotas to give it a go in the first place.

Gandhi, on the other hand, had apparently followed Te Whiti's example of passive resistance and won back a country from repressive rule without bloodshed and so, arguably, was one of the founding fathers of New Zealand's political history. Taranaki seemed the perfect chance to do some research.

None of the tourist maps I picked up mentioned his name. One small road - out by the Cape Egmont light-house (if the Mount had changed its name surely the Cape should too?) bore the name of Parihaka.

I searched without luck along that road for some form of memorial. Nada. Later I asked friends and they said there was a memorial near Parihaka but it was an army one and, as such, only bore the names of the fallen British dead.

Not much ground shifting narrative there then.

The museum spoke louder of what was missing than what - no matter how good - was there. And it reminded me. Of the shock of hearing for the first time the story of Ruapekapeka here in the North although I'd lived here for over a decade. How a real bat cave and what it represents is just the sort of thing that brings history alive for kids and adults alike and is exactly the sort of story people will travel far in order to hear.