The day’s shocking news stays with us on our snowy walk, the wind whipping hard-packed flakes across our faces. A distant city whose streets we once walked turned upside down by the actions of one hate-filled individual, who seems to believe that the different religious practices, skin-colour, recent arrival – or a whole dung-heap of other excuses – are an intolerable stain on his own existence. Alas, his actions are a sign of the times, the apparently increasing inability of our species to get along with one another.
Once upon a time – over thirteen years ago now – I had a proper job. It was, in theory at least, my dream job, the one I spent a number of years striving to get after my Ph.D. It was also, after an initial spell on a short-term contract, a job for life – academics are still lucky that way. But eventually I ended up running a research centre, which just wasn’t me and I missed teaching students. So, after much agonising – this was, after all, who I’d always been – I took the plunge and left in 2006. Now I was freelance, taking odd jobs and contracts and writing books.
Which meant that in 2008, when my husband – who is also an academic – was due a sabbatical, we were free to go somewhere completely different. And we chose Christchurch, New Zealand, largely because it was a country we’d always wanted to visit, but also because my husband had work contacts there. The Boy was only four and fairly indifferent to where we happened to be, so long as there were enough fire engines and steam trains to pack out his day.
We had a great six months living the Kiwi outdoor life (though we were slightly bemused by the fact that, no matter how hot it was in the daytime, it was rarely warm enough to eat outside in the evening). We loved the little towns and villages that ran along one side of the Banks peninsula (Christchurch is situated right next to the remains of the craters of two extinct volcanoes, though the ground beneath the city is far from dead or even dormant).
Cass Bay. Living the Kiwi dream.
We loved the life so much that we promised ourselves we’d go back for my husband’s next sabbatical in 2012. But in 2011 a devastating earthquake hit Christchurch, killing 185 people and destroying large swathes of the city, including its historic centre with its cathedral and old university buildings. The aftershocks continued for almost a year after the quake itself.
Sunset, Kuaotunu, Coromandel. Heaven on a stick, not least because of the great pizza place just to the right of the photo.
We changed our minds and went to Canberra, Australia instead in 2012. But in 2014 we returned to New Zealand, but this time we lived in Cambridge on the North Island. I hadn’t expected to love the North Island so much – most of the really dramatic scenery is on the South Island. But we really did love it. The Coromandel peninsula about three hours to the north-east of us has some stunningly beautiful beaches and the northern parts of it have almost no-one on them. Then there was the spectacular Tongariro Crossing, a 19 km hike up between two glowering volcanoes, both of which can (and do) smoke and steam, belch sulphur and occasionally explode.
Emerald Lakes, Tongariro Crossing. The right-hand of the volcanoes we walked between – Mount Ngauruhoe – was used as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings films. But we didn’t spot a single hobbit.
What was so noticeable about the North Island was the Maori presence, which had been conspicuous by its absence in Christchurch, which is a very white, almost European city. At the Boy’s school, there were loads of Maori kids, who mostly didn’t bother with things like shoes, a habit many white kids adopted too. On his last day, three of his classmates did a goodbye haka (hakas are for many things, not just scaring the living daylights out of opponents). We went to a Maori village, which was interesting, though when I asked about the songs they sung, the girl told me she just learned them for the tourists. The Maori are generally poorer than average and wealthy ones are presumed to be either sports stars or drug dealers. Last year a famous Kiwi director Taika Waititi (among other things, he directed the recent Marvel project Thor: Ragnarok) caused controversy at home by saying that New Zealand was a racist place, especially for those of Polynesian descent (though he also said it was still ‘the best place on the planet’). Kiwis of European descent might take comfort from the fact that their relations with the peoples already there when they began to take up residence from the later eighteenth century is much better than their Australian cousins’ attitudes to aboriginal rights. But that will be cold comfort to those who experience casual racism on a daily basis – from a lack of interest in pronouncing Maori names properly to automatic suspicion of criminal activity and other negative traits.
As the whitest of New Zealand cities, Christchurch also has a reputation for being its most racist. Yet no-one would have predicted the terrible events of Friday, where it was not the original New Zealanders who were targeted, but the nation’s newest citizens and some of its most vulnerable. The shock felt by the city as a whole has been visceral and genuine, along with the rest of the country, but if the gunman intended to show that such an attack could take place anywhere, however unlikely, then I’m afraid he succeeded.
But in the stories of individual heroism – within the mosques and from the police – and the shock, horror and revulsion felt by those who believed their country was a fair and decent place, perhaps something meaningful will come from this tragedy. If there is a swing away from the exploitation of difference – in skin colour, in religious worship, in (some) cultural norms, in forms of dress – by our politicians, then that will hopefully, in time, bring an end to the acceptance of destructive ideas based on the superiority and primacy of one particular variety of the human species over any other. At the same time, political correctness should never stand in the way of dealing with behaviour by one member of society that would not be tolerated in another just because there is a fear of accusations of racism or a concern that this might be an issue of different cultural norms. All cultures may be equal, but all behaviours are not.
Last week was also the twenty-third anniversary of the Dunblane massacre, when sixteen five and six-year olds and their teacher were murdered in their school. It remains the worst mass shooting in Britain and I hope it stays that way. Though I lived only six miles from Dunblane at the time, I wasn’t directly involved. But I now know many who were and it has shaped who they are and always will. One of them now lives in New Zealand and she wrote a very moving piece about how to help survivors of Friday’s attacks. If you would like to read it, you can find it here.
If we believe that another’s right to live their lives as they see fit is an attack on our way of life, then we are doomed to repeat such dreadful days. If we believe that destruction is a solution, then we are doomed to repeat such dreadful days. If we fixate on those who perpetrate such appalling, pointless acts of violence, rather than those heroes who put others before themselves, then we are doomed to repeat such dreadful days. If we, all of us, every day, do not in word and deed call out those who think intolerance is acceptable, then we are doomed to repeat such dreadful days. And if we do not reach out a hand to those who, in their own suffering, in their own lack of self-esteem, begin to wish suffering on others, then we are doomed to repeat such dreadful days.
The Garden of Everyday Delight 