1/5 I tweeted about Tarara Day on March 15th, & about the shared culture Croats & Maori developed in the gumfields of Northland. In his book about the Maori Battalion, the late Wira Gardiner shows how this shared culture played a small but vital role in European peacemaking.
2/5 After fighting their way through Italy, the Maori Battalion was ordered to enter the city of Trieste just as the war was ending. But Trieste was already occupied, by the partisan army of Yugoslav communist Tito.
3/5 Both Italy & Yugoslavia wanted Trieste, & Tito was not happy about the Maori arrival in the town. Maori & other Allied troops were at first treated coldly by residents, & there were tense confrontations with Tito's bereted men.
4/5 Gardner describes how the Maori Battalion launched a 'peace offensive' in Trieste. Their food truck was turned into a tuck shop for kids. But the breakthrough came when Tito's men met Maori with Yugoslav ancestry, who could speak some Croatian. They were amazed & delighted.
5/5 The Maori Battalion left friends when they left Trieste. Their goodwill & their blood & cultural links with Yugoslavs helped avert a new war. Trieste was eventually made a Free Territory, & in the '70s it was peacefully divided.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
1/14 There's been a lot of discussion on social media about the new history curriculum for Aotearoa/NZ schools. If there's one thing that many commenters, liberal & conservative, agree on, it is that kids should be taught 'objective history'. But there's no such thing.
2/14 Facts are real. It's a fact that Germany invaded Poland on September the 1st 1939. It's a fact that John Walker won a gold medal at the '76 Olympics. Historians spend much of their time collecting facts. But facts can't make themselves into an 'objective history'.
3/14 Facts alone don't make any sort of historical discourse. They have to be organised into narratives, into analyses, into interpretations. & narratives, analyses, & interpretations are always influenced by the worldview & preconceptions of the person constructing them.
1/11 Since the revitalisation of feminism by the #MeToo movement, many female artists who were neglected by publishers & curators are getting attention they deserve. Miranda Art Gallery & Atuanui Press has published a book of Diana Halstead's drawings. I wrote the introduction.
2/11 Halstead's father was a minister in Sid Holland's union-busting government. Her whole life can be seen as a quiet rebellion against her background & upbringing. Disillusioned with life in Auckland's upper class, she spent much of her time with animals & in the natural world.
3/11 Halstead studied at Elam in the early '60s, but what affected her most were the journeys she took to Auckland museum's galleries. She saw the Nukuoro goddess Gawe (also known as Kave), which had only recently been liberated from the closet where she had spent decades.
1/10 I'm concerned that a new epidemic is stalking NZ. Unlike covid, this disease attacks only a select group of the population - ageing men with reputations as left-wing politicos. & it affects the brain, not the respiratory system. Matt McCarten seems to be the latest victim.
2/10 We've seen veteran left-wing journo Chris Trotter & legendary activist John Minto justify Putin's brutal invasion of the Ukraine. Now McCarten, former president of the Alliance Party & face of Unite union, says he's working to get a Trumpite elected as Auckland's mayor.
3/10 Molloy has gotten rich running bars & restaurants. He spent 8 thousand dollars putting a statue of Trump in one of them. He's ridiculed vaccine mandates. He's claimed that immoral 'subterranean gay bars' are spreading covid in NZ.
1/10 It was sad enough to see veteran left-wing journo Chris Trotter endorse Putin's invasion of Ukraine at The Daily Blog. But now John Minto, a legend of the activist left & the face of the protests against the '81 Springbok Tour, appears to have followed suit on the same site.
2/10 Minto says that Biden & the US, & not Putin, are to fault for the invasion of Ukraine. He accuses the US of seeing to encircle & blockade Russia. Minto refers back to the US reaction to the attempted stationing of Soviet missiles on Cuba in the '60s.
3/10 But I think Minto draws the wrong lesson from the Cuban missile crisis. The US saw the deployment of missiles to Cuba as wrong because it was a violation of the so-called 'Monroe doctrine', which said that the US had the right to control the states in its 'backyard'.
1/6 Vladimir Putin losing battles in Ukraine & friends around the world, but he still has at least one admirer in NZ. In a column for the Daily Blog Chris Trotter has saluted Russia's dictator & his invasion of Ukraine. Trotter calls anti-Russian fighters 'slavering curs'.
2/6 Trotter's column features a history lesson that might have come straight from Putin. He salutes the USSR, saying its breakup & the departure of Russian troops from former Eastern bloc states were a 'catastrophe'.
3/6 Trotter blames the 'cut throat nations' of the Baltic, Poland, & the Ukraine for the genocide of the Jews during WW2, & says the West should have been grateful that Stalin took over these 'bloodlands' after the war.
1/8 Multiple videos from Ukraine show Russian tanks running out of fuel, & soldiers standing round listlessly. Supply lines are breaking down, as Ukrainians harass the advancing army. Something strangely similar happened during the first months of NZ's Waikato War.
2/8 NZ's governor & settler politicians invaded the independent Waikato state after denying its right to exist & making absurd claims it was planning to attack the NZ capital in Auckland; Putin's used the same rhetoric about the Ukraine. But both invasions stalled.
3/8 After crossing the Mangatawhiri Stream, the northern border of the Waikato Kingdom, the invading army had to pause for months. The Great South Road, which connected it to Auckland, came under constant pressure from Maori guerrilla attacks.