1/5 Australian cops & troops have been sent to Honiara after protests by the Malaitan community there. The Aussies are not neutral. They have been summoned by an anti-Malaitan government, & Malaita has always been a stronghold of anti-colonial feeling in the Solomons.
2/5 In the 19th C the blackbirding ships that sought slaves in Melanesia learned to be wary of landing on Malaita. Scores of white slavers were slain in the island's jungles, & ships were stormed & burnt.
3/5 In 1927 the Kwaio people of Malaita slew an Australian tax collector working for British colonial authorities. A retaliatory expedition led by Australian expats slaughtered scores of islanders. Malaitan feeling hardened.
4/5 In the '40s Malaita was the stronghold of the Maasina Rule, or Marching Rule, movement, which rejected British control & promoted cooperation between villages & ethnicities. Maasina Rule activists were arrested by the score.
5/6 Many Australasians mistakenly believe the long occupation of the Solomons by Oz-led RAMSI forces in the early 2000s was universally supported. In fact, as Matthew Grant Allen shows in his 2009 essay 'Resisting Ramsi', many Malaitans rejected the occupiers.
6/7 The latest intervention by Australia is likely to be seen by Malaitans, both in Honiara & on the home island, as yet another act of interference by colonialists. & who can blame them?
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1/60 Martin Phillipps contained multitudes. He leaves an oeuvre that is vast & varied, & that can be interpreted in various ways. I see him as someone who extended & updated a distinctively Pakeha cultural tradition.
2/60 Like the music of Douglas Lilburn, the poems of Ruth Dallas, Charles Brasch & Allen Curnow, & the paintings of Bill Sutton & Rita Angus, many of Phillipps' best songs are powerful responses to the land & seascapes of southern NZ.
3/60 I'm not arguing that Phillipps was necessarily directly influenced by the names I've mentioned. He didn't need to be. He responds to the same landscape, is part of the same history, and dealt with the same dilemmas.
1/3 Sean Plunket is promoting a 15 year old who gave a speech about Oswald Spengler's theory of the decline of the West. Since neither Plunket nor the kid seem to have bothered to read Spengler they won't be aware how silly they look. Spengler has some very bad news for them.
2/5 Plunket & his young protege are culture warriors, who think Western societies have been rotted by immigration & liberalism & transgender-friendly bathrooms & so on. They think a good dose of red steak conservatism can fix things. Spengler would shake his head in despair.
3/5 Spengler was one of many would-be prophets who emerged in the chaos of post-WW1 Germany to try to explain the collapse of its army & empire & the perceived crisis of modernity. His diagnosis was extremely gloomy. He argued all civilisations have the same basic course.
1/11 When I saw a photo of Farage posing with Union Jacks I thought about an interview James Belich gave about a decade ago. Belich observed that Britishness was one of the most effective ideas in history, but that it was withering in the 21st C. Farage symbolises that decline.
2/11 Britishness is a modern idea. Linda Colley has traced its emergence to the early 19thC Napoleonic Wars, when Britain faced off against a revolutionary France. British identity spread through the world during that century. It was capacious.
3/11 Like many Scots & Welsh before them, most Pakeha in NZ identified as British. As Belich shows in his book Replenishing the Earth, the colonial project was in part an effort to spread & share Britishness. The identity had room for non-white peoples.
1/4 Altho the problem seems to have gotten worse lately, the misuse of Nazi history by politicians & media began even before the end of WW2. Winston Peters was named after the man who fought the UK's '45 election by comparing Labour's proposed welfare state to Nazism.
2/4 Nor is the problem confined to the right, as this appalling cartoon from the Key era shows. The tragedy is that NZ appeased & collaborated with Nazi Germany & fascist Italy in the '30s, & that we may be on the way to making a similar mistake today.
3/4 The topic deserves a book, & I was only able to scratch the surface, but I detailed some of the collaboration, by both the NZ state & many non-governmental organisations, in this article: We put a trade deal with the Nazis ahead of helping Jews.thespinoff.co.nz/society/27-01-…
1/5 I find the eliminationist rhetoric that's entering NZ politics from Trumpian America disturbing. We're hearing the rhetoric from the right at the moment, but I've also heard it from the odd person on the left in the past. I've got a graphic to show to NZ's eliminationists.
2/5 This is a graphic of NZ's 1902 election, when Seddon's Liberals triumphed over Massey's Conservatives. In the 122 years since, NZ has been divided into left & right blocs. They aren't going away, because they're rooted in sociology & history.
3/7 Eliminationists see people on the other side of the political divide as either evil or deranged. They see the ideas of the other side as irrational, & consequently have the illusion they can be eradicated. I've been disappointed to see some on the left adopt eliminationism.
1/7 Imagine that settler govts had not denied Maori the vote, that there had been no wars & confiscations, that Maori & Pakeha had come together in a hybrid culture. This might sound like a plot for an alt history novel, but in a remote part of NZ it was reality.
2/7 These precise & exquisite maps are part of Kaye Dragicevich's book about the gumlands of early 20thC Northland, which I acquired yesterday. Amidst the swamps & hut villages on these maps a new, Slavic Polynesian people was born.
3/7 Tarara is the Maori name for a person of Croatian & Maori ancestry. Croats fled repressive Habsburg rule to dig for kauri gum in Northland. There they met another oppressed people. This photo remembers the first Croat-Maori marriage, in 1892.