Dialogue: Why do we take such little notice of history?

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Remember "Kaore e mau te rongo ake, ake!" ("We will never surrender, never!") the legendary cry of Rewi Maniapoto? Where and when was that? Bet you don't know.

Same day, same place, the British soldiers asked that the Maori women and children be allowed to leave the pa and a woman stood up and shouted back: "Ki te mate nga tane, me mate ano nga wahine me nga tamariki" ("If the men die the women and children die also").

Have you heard of Ruapekapeka? Probably some of you have a faint recollection. Where is Gabriel's Gully, and who was Gabriel Read, whose name might have rhymed with greed but who was personally unacquainted with it?

These are names and events that have left their mark on our map as well as our history and which could enrich our sense of identity and, more materially, our tourism industry if only they were exploited.

The United States as a national entity is less than 70 years older than we are if you match their War of Independence and Constitutional Convention with our Treaty of Waitangi, but their sense of historical identity is light years ahead of ours.

Each summer, millions of Americans and foreign tourists visit their heritage sites, the Lincoln Memorial and other historical shrines as well as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC; the birth-of-the-nation sites in Philadelphia; and the many museums and battlefields (Yorktown, Gettysburg, and others) around the country.

I remember profoundly the experience of a living museum on the site of the Pilgrim Fathers' settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Diaries had been discovered giving vivid accounts of their first year and actors drawn from the community lived out each day.

They spoke in the authentic English regional accents of the time, according to advice from linguistic experts. They baked bread in a fire oven, killed and plucked turkeys and lived in cramped, makeshift houses and all the while visitors walked among them. The museum gave a pungent flavour of the hardship from which modern America had grown.

This is an industry - and I mean industry - that not only heightens the sense of America's national roots and feeds its modern identity but employs thousands of people and contributes enormously to the domestic economy.

New Zealand's only nod to its history is to museums, art galleries, collection libraries, cenotaphs, memorial halls, Busby's house and grounds at Waitangi and some mock-up commercial sites such as Arrowtown. Many of the most precious heritage sites that milestone our history and our emerging identity are only vaguely acknowledged or totally ignored.

One reason for the neglect is the diffuse and unfocused administration. Heritage sites are spread among the Department of Conservation, the Historic Places Trust, the Department of Internal Affairs and a number of local organisations and private companies.

One of the recommendations of the Heart of the Nation strategic working party was the formation of a Heritage Commission, backed by an on-line database of heritage sites and collections. This organisation would have coordinated the development of heritage sites in the interests of our cultural history and our contemporary economy.

The demand is there. Books on local history sell, per capita, better than anywhere else in the world, and James Belich's television series on the New Zealand Wars scored high ratings. Visits by New Zealanders to heritage sites already total more than four million a year, and a significant number of overseas visitors go to our museums.

So let's imagine a reconstruction of Orakau Pa near Te Awamutu (on the way to Rotorua and Taupo from Auckland) from where Rewi Maniapoto defied General Cameron's troops back in April 1864.

And Ruapekapeka - close to other major tourist attractions in the Bay of Islands - a battlefield that interests historians around the world, reflecting as it did the genius for military engineering of the great fighting chief, Kawiti.

Military experts have visited the remains of the pa, examined drawings of the fortifications and noted the extraordinary use of dugouts and trenches, the first in the world known to be used in warfare and grimly prophetic of what was to come in the First World War.

Was Ruapekapeka taken by the British because the newly Christian Maori left it to attend Sunday service and allowed the British to filter through the defences? Or is that unsupportable myth? A great story, anyway.

These and many other heritage sites lie mouldering in the countryside, trampled under the dilatory feet of apathy and ignorance.

And what about Parihaka? And where is the interpretive monument to the granting of votes for women? And Mesopotamia?

We are making the same mistake nationally we make individually when we omit to note the stories of grandparents, great aunts and uncles and even parents - and regret it so deeply after they've gone.