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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1/10 First there was Jordan Williams, who wanted to take arts grants from Eleanor Catton after she criticised John Key. Then there Elliot Ikilei, who campaigned against drag queens reading in libraries. Now the Free Speech Union has found another representative opposed to freedom
2/10 Jonathan Ayling is the FSU's new Campaigns Manager, & has led recent attacks on critics of Matauranga Maori. Ayling is a fire & brimstone Baptist, who dislikes democracy & yearns for the old days when churches like his held sway over NZ society.
3/10 Before he took a job at FSU, Ayling worked as a lobbyist in Wellington. He campaigned against euthanasia, abortion, & the legalisation of cannabis. He also wrote a series of bizarre articles for the NZ Baptist magazine.
1/4 I'm sorry to hear that Jimmy O'Dea has died at the age of 86. Even if you haven't heard of O'Dea, you've probably seen him. This famous photo shows him being beaten by cops outside Eden Park during the Springbok Tour of 1981. O'Dea's was a life of protest.
2/4 I remembering meeting O'Dea through a barred window back in 1999. He & several other activists had barricaded themselves inside a state house in protest at market rents. The cops eventually cut through the ceiling to evict them.
3/5 O'Dea grew up in Ireland, & was a Republican as well as a Marxist. His Fenianism made him naturally sympathetic to Maori land struggles, & he was heavily involved in the epic occupation of Takaparawhau/Bastion Pt in the '70s.
1/3 Frank Ricard is criticising a Treaty Settlement he hasn't read. Moriori are being compensated not for the 1835 invasion of Rekohu by two north Taranaki iwi, but for the way the Crown took the side of the invaders, by giving them legal title to the land they took.
2/4 Ricard says 'Willie Jackson's tribe' invaded Rekohu. They didn't. Jackson's whakapapa runs through Ngati Maniapoto & Ngati Porou. Neither iwi had anything to do with the 1835 invasion, which was the work of Ngati Mutunga & Ngati Tama.
3/4 In 1829 a force of murderous whites invaded Rekohu on a brig called the Cyprus. P'haps we should hold Ricard, as a Pakeha, responsible for that event? It makes as much sense as linking Jackson to the 1835 invasion.
1/10 Professor Brian Boyd is one of the world's foremost experts on the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Armed with these credentials, Boyd has waded into the argument about Matauranga Maori. Unsurprisingly, Boyd has had nothing sensible to say.
2/10 Talking to Newsroom, Boyd claimed that Matauranga Maori was a threat to science, and compared it to Christian Creationism. Because indigenous thought is 'holistic', Boyd said, Matauranga Maori will demand that every Maori oral tradition is taken as literal fact.
3/10 Boyd is worried that Matauranga Maori scholars treat Maui's fishing up of islands as historical fact, and see taniwha as long-lost pleisiosaurs lurking in our rivers and lakes. He should have talked to some of his colleagues at the University of Auckland.
1/15 The controversy over the letter by a group of scholars opposed to treating Matauranga Maori as science continues. I think the scholars who wrote the letter rely on a glaring double standard, when they dismiss the idea that Polynesian societies had science.
2/15 In their letter, Michael Corbalis and co argue that science emerged from a range of societies, including Greece, India, Egypt, and the Islamic Middle East. They accept science was often misused for political & military ends, & that it was a tool of colonisation.
3/15 But the letter-writers argue that we have to distinguish between the misuse of science and a sort of true science, which is rational and progressive and untainted by irrational ideas. 'Science does not colonise', they say.
1/4 I've been writing for North & South about Arthur Dallimore, the Brian Tamaki of the '30s. Dallimore was a faith healer who preached to packed town halls over the prostate bodies of those he'd 'slain with the spirit'. Philosopher Dick Anschutz decided to test Dallimore.
2/4 Anschutz was a young lecturer at the University of Auckland. He knew Dallimore got audience members on stage, annointed them with holy oil, & then proclaimed them healed after they'd fallen down. Anschutz headed to the Town Hall one weekend for a Dallimore service.
3/4 Anschutz waited while Dallimore sang & preached, then joined a group of worshippers on the hall's stage. Soon the men & women began to fall down; some lay still, some writhed or twitched. Anschutz felt nothing. He stayed standing.