Dialogue: Quest for nationhood must focus on our similarities

If we wish to rediscover ourselves as a nation, we must learn to accommodate change and look ahead, says DON DONOVAN.*

When my paternal granny died, my father had the dolorous job of sifting through her house, which had become the receptacle of a lifetime's memories: furniture, books, mementos and knick-knacks more or less important.

In the process, he opened a cupboard out of which tumbled a landslide of brown paper and string which had filled it from floor to ceiling. She had thought, as so many of that pre-disposables generation did, that "it might come in useful one day."

Child of a careworn family of slender means, she not only squirrelled potential utilities, she also harboured memories of hard times. Her father had been a lighter-man on the River Thames, working at all hours and on all days the dingy scows laden with unspeakable cargoes that plied a filthy river whose swirls carried the detritus of upstream poverties.

It was a short step of memory from there to the family cradle in County Cork, the potato famine, and the inhumanity of English landowners whose legacy still haunts those few in Ireland who look back with resentment rather than forward with optimism.

It was from my granny that I discovered my Irish heritage. I can't remember my father ever speaking of it. As far as he was concerned, he was English, born within the sound of Bow Bells, a cockney no less, with an accent to match and a rhyming-slang patter the envy of any music-hall comedian.

In my turn, I considered myself an Englishman, was proud of being one and saw myself as fortunate to have been born in the heart-city of an empire among people who treasured fair play and who, in a highly structured, class-ridden society, knew their place.

We had no difficulty understanding our values and never exerted ourselves in any search for identity.

What we didn't realise, of course, was that we were living through times of colossal upheaval in a century whose first half had already been shattered by wealth-sapping wars leaving in their wake two or three generations of refugees, cripples and displaced persons in a world of shifting boundaries, nationalities and political persuasions.

We just went with the flow, unidentified Celts, long-term nomads, part of the ebb and flow of tribes that have oozed over the face of the globe since human existence began. We were the beneficiaries of that earthquake - without conscious thought we trampled across the frontiers of class into a new society where merit was the key to success and opportunity abounded

In time, this detribalised Irishman shifted from what in the long context of family history was but a temporary stopping place in England and came to live in New Zealand (41 years ago, to be precise).

Where England had become a land of opportunity and the hand of unearned privilege had lost its grip, New Zealand went one better. It had no class structure and nothing could hold back any person who was prepared to work to achieve full potential.

In no time at all, I not only found myself accepted among friends but applied for and was granted naturalisation. From that day onwards I called myself a New Zealander. It was my people who fought at Gallipoli; it was my people who pioneered topdressing, beat the world at rugby and invented the welfare state. It was my country that was the most egalitarian in the world.

It would have been simple then to find my identity had I been concerned with seeking it. And as for values, well, they were those of the people around me: honest, easygoing, steady-working, amiable, law-abiding; healthy people with lives built around the idea of duty to the family and one's neighbours.

But now, 41 years on, we have apparently evolved into a nation of separate tribes who have, over those years, drifted apart like disintegrating ice-floes to such a degree that earnest politicians, inheritors of such a fragmentation that crimes unheard of four decades ago are now commonplace, seek to close the gaps and strive to have us "find our identity."

Despite the burdens of guilt taken up by innocents for past wrongs, and despite the reparations that have been made for those excesses, we seem further apart than ever. And in the quest to find ourselves we seem only to find the differences, not the similarities.

In the debate about the meaning of Pakeha, Europeans take it to mean themselves. But to Maori there are only two sorts of people in this country - Maori and Pakeha. That means that Pakeha embraces European, Asiatic, American, Latin and any other race not Maori. We are thus called a bicultural society when it is obvious that we are multicultural.

Until we recognise this truth, we will not be a nation. Until tribal boundaries no longer exist, we will not be a nation.

Until Pakeha have paid off the transferred debt and shed their adopted guilt, we will not be a nation.

Until Maori have accepted the apologies and the compensation and have ruled off the ledger, we will not be a nation.

A month ago, I was in a remote part of the Hokianga and I met a Maori man who looked after the grounds of a local church. His name was as ordinary as the alias I shall give him - Tom Green.

I asked him what his Maori name was and he shrugged; he didn't have one. He acknowledged that his tribe was Ngapuhi but he said he didn't feel the need to go back. In any case, he said, he was as much Pakeha as Maori and you'd be hard put to find a full-blooded Maori even in Dame Whina's territory.

And, anyway, we were all New Zealanders.

I walked to his car with him and saw that the rear window had been smashed. He told me it had been broken into by some young jokers.

"They got nothing" he said, sadly. "There was nothing. They don't seem to care any more ... "

When Tom Green dies and his son cleans out his cupboard, neither hoarded paper wrappers nor harboured grudges will tumble out. Unlike my Irish granny, he found himself years ago - a New Zealander.

And as for values, well, he was patently an honest man. He went with the flow, part of what was going on, living with change while accommodating it. Looking ahead.

When we are all like Tom Green, we'll be a nation.

* Don Donovan is an Auckland writer.