Maps and Mapping for amateurs

I always had former ACT MP Muriel Newman marked out as a nasty crank who liked to patronise the poor (her book How to live on an oily rag etc), but now she has presented the world with clear evidence of her racism.

In this case it is a particular strand of racism, which has many adherents around her Northland base, which maintains that Maori have never amounted to anything and never will, and any past achievements must be ascribed to someone else, probably a white person.

I tend to ignore her rants, but the Tino Rangatiratanga mailing list has just got riled up about Newman’s January 21 article, posted on her Centre for Political Debate site. And it’s a doozy. Or should I say dozy.

Newman cites an Economist article about what is purported to be a map of the world prepared by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He in 1418, which shows New Zealand and Australia. The map is being championed by former Royal Navy submariner Gavin Menzies, writer of 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, a 2003 book which claims Zheng circumnavigated the world, discovering all there was to discover.

According to Newman, Martin and his team of eager volunteers believe Chinese colonies existed in New Zealand "for hundreds of years before the arrival of Maori". Since the archaeological consensus is Maori had arrived and established themselves in the century of so before 1421, There seems to be a clash of timelines.

Newman: "While our government appears to hold tightly onto the view that Maori are tangata whenua (with even the stories of the early Moriori occupation that our generation was taught in school having almost disappeared), local and international research is now painting a different picture of the early history of New Zealand.

"Claims have been made that New Zealand enjoyed waves of exploration from as early as 600BC by Phoenician, Indian, Greek and Arab voyagers. In fact, claims of these visits help to explain the existence in the South Island of the fossilised remains of rats that have been carbon dated at 160 BC - more than 1,000 years before Maori!”

Note the explanation mark! - a clear indicator of crankiness! Next Newman will be putting IMPORTANT words in CAPITALS!

Where to begin? It is fascinating Newman will put so much effort into reading fanciful works of history and anthropology, yet will ignore the work of professional historians whose reputations and income depend on establishing some factual basis for their conclusions. It’s a bit like Creationism. Evolution is a theory. Here is another theory. Since they both are theories, they have equal weight, and you can choose the one you prefer.

The reason the stories of early Moriori occupation you were taught at school have almost disappeared Muriel, is they were wrong. Bunkum. Inventions.

The Moriori myth grew out of a 19th century European belief that race determined culture. It was also a way the European colonists justified the damage they were causing Maori. As soon as scholars started examining facts and not trying to construct racial hierarchies, the myth was exposed.

As Michael King laid out so well in 1989 in Moriori: A people rediscovered, the Moriori inhabitants of Chatham Islands came from the same Polynesian stock as Maori, but moved on from Aotearoa to occupy those remote islands.

So far, there has been no archaeological evidence of settlement before the 12th or 13th century, which conforms to whakapapa records. The 160BC rat (as if carbon dating was that accurate) point to visits, not settlement.

Newman: "There are further claims that before Maori arrived in New Zealand settlements had already been established, by the Waitaha, the peace-loving fair skinned ancestors of the Moriori, by Chinese miners, and by the Celts."

There it is, the white skin!!! Or should that be WHITE?

This whole Waitaha thing strains credibility. Barry Brailsford, another amateur historian, had written a series of lavishly-produced books which fail to stand up to scrutiny. My take on Waitaha, shorn of the New Age hokum, is that it is a normal expression of dissent within Ngai Tahu at the dominance of the Ngai Tahu corporate machine. A common expression of Maori dissent is to ignore that element of one's whakapapa and play up some alternate strand, which can give one an alternate history. A good example is the dispute between Rangitane and Kahungunu around the Manawatu Gorge area. The Maori Land Court concluded both parties had very similar whakapapa, they just chose to identify in different ways.

Gavin Menzies has been eviscerated elsewhere. My concern is Newman.

Despite her commitment to less government, Newman is happy to receive her MP’s pension, which of course gives her the income to pursue this phony think tank business through her website.

Giving her site the stamp of credibility is National's Wayne Mapp, who this week posted his own contribution, a rant on Political Correctness.

Does this mean Mapp is endorsing Newman's racist fantasies? I think we should be told.

Banks adrift again

Former National minister and auckland mayor John Banks is continuing to show the disdain for Maori which was a feature of his polticial career.

On his Radio Pacific breakfast show, "Banksie" opined the incredible survival of diver Robert Hewitt was all a hoax.

Hewitt, a former navy diver, went missing from a dive charter on Mana Island, and was found 75 hours later by some of his mates who kept looking after the official search was called off.

According to Banks: "There are a lot of Maoris in the Navy. You'll never find a better Maori than the one that's in the military uniform. These blokes must be able to swim at least 400m. They've got to be able to swim with tanks, boots, respirators, and gear, 400m. Mr Hewitt was only 200m off Mana when he, quote, went missing, or found himself missing, or decided to go missing, or just missing. Why didn't he swim to Mana?"

There were lots of reasons, as outlined in the Herald stories, not least that he had hypothermia and was being swept along by tides and currents for three days.

Banks though has a deep antipathy to anything Maori, usually masquerading as a “joke”.

Let us not forget, when John Carter did his “Hone” stunt, pretending to be a Maori dole bludger on talkback radio, it was Banks he was sharing the jape with. And while Carter was banished for a while to the back benches, Banks skated - “That’s just Banksie.”

He is still, as they say in polite circles, a shit, as well as being a hypocritical humbug. Not that we can expect Pacific to take him off the air any time soon.

Not public broadcasting

National Radio has replaced Mana News with daily Watea Maori news feeds. I've given the new arrangement a couple of weeks before commenting, but my initial impression has remained - another bad decision by Radio New Zealand's current management.

It was a death of a thousand cuts for Mana News, which started with a 20 minute evening magazine programme 16 years ago, wehn Beverley Waken was running the state broadcaster.

That show got shorter and shorter, but it remained a valuable window into Te Ao Maori, offering viewpoints not heard in the mainstream media, and maintaining a style of its own.

Sometime last year Radio New Zealand spoken word manager Paul Bushnell decided things must change. Bushnell, who has no news background, has had a meteoric rise in the state owned broadcaster since coming on board to do an arts programme for Concert FM in the late 90s.

His innovations have included replacing the dull but extremely competent Wayne Mowatt with the soporific Jim Mora in the afternoons, dragging out Checkpoint to an awkwardly padded two hours, and relegating arts programme What's Going On, which was working nicely, to a Sunday slot.

Bushnell decided Maori news should come as bulletins read by RNZ's Maori staff. A content provider was needed to supply scripts and audio for three minute-long items per bulletin.

Despite such a package being more expensive to produce, RNZ offered less money.

Waatea, Willy Jackson’s Mangere-based news service, has the contract to provide news in te reo to the iwi stations. That is a legacy of Wira Gardiner's time in control of Te Mangai Paho when Gardiner, as is his normal operating procedure, changed everything for the sake of change, taking the contract off Ruia Mai. This means Waatea is the only Maori news organization with the infrastructure to provided the service RNZ was looking for at the price.

The result is, quite frankly, drab and uninspiring. Most of the stories seem sourced out of that morning's Herald. There is no surprise. The sound is the same as the main bulletins, even if the items are longer. It sounds like a ghetto slot - "this isn't good enough for the main bulletin, but we'll tuck it in here."

As a public service broadcaster, Radio New Zealand should be reflecting the whole diversity of this country's voices and experience. Instead, the powers that be have decided non-white voices should get the most token of slots, and only if they conform to white norms.

Mana News never accepted that sort of prescription. Founders Derek Fox and Gary Wilson believed Maori broadcasters should be able to find a distinctive voice and a way of telling Maori stories, and they succeeded in this. Their vision was under attack from the beginning, not just from Wakem's successor Sharon Crosbie (who also rid her airwaves of the Pacific Islands vernacular broadcasts) but from Maori broadcast funding agency Te Mangai Paho (whose members had no radio or journalistic experience – go figure).

Because it has so little to offer in terms of programming opportunities for Maori and because it is unwilling to consider Maori listeners of any importance, Radio New Zealand has problems attracting and retaining skilled Maori broadcasters. That seems unlikely to change.

Fortunately, the views of Bushnell and RNZ chief executive Peter Cavanagh are not shared by all staff there, and Fox popped up on Linda Clark’s morning show, offering his usual considered views of the current scene.

However, that is only one voice, compared to the many he used to bring to the air.