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Is there a growing interest in New Zealand stories?
William: I don’t know that it’s growing… I think we’ve always been interested in New Zealand stories. I mean for many Māori, knowing the stories of their history, both pre and post-colonisation, is just a fundamental thing to their culture. But even with Pākehā, stories about New Zealanders have always been popular. I mean RNZ’s Spectrum programme was telling NZ stories for 44 years until it finally ended in 2016. Maybe you could say that interest is being served better than it used to with a wider variety of styles of storytelling? It’s surprising what people are interested in. For example, before The 9th Floor was released I was pretty sceptical that many people would listen to a series of hour long interviews with former Prime Ministers, but that show was the most downloaded thing on RNZ’s website for several weeks running. I also think it’s interesting how popular New Zealand stories can become overseas. The awesome thing about the internet is that really niche content can reach a huge number of people in a global audience. On Spotify Black Sheep actually got a lot of downloads in the USA which I found pretty surprising. * I explained to William that what I meant was whether there was a growing interest in facing up to the darker parts of our past — whether we were moving beyond narratives of battling white settlers, myths of good race relations, and our “pure” environment, often in denial of what was (and to a certain extent still is) a very gritty process of colonial conquest. Black Sheep seems to do this really well, offering a nuanced take on the various pieces — good, bad, and messy — but William deferred,
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suggesting that I see what an actual historian had to say. I took William’s advice, and called Vincent O’Malley, historian and most recently author of The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000. Dan: Do you think New Zealanders are getting better at this, at facing up to the bad side of our history?
Vincent: Yeah I think we are starting to get better at acknowledging that stuff, and really that was the key theme of my book: that New Zealanders need to take ownership of our own history, the bad stuff as well as the good. And it’s not about finger-pointing or making people feel guilty or ashamed, it’s just about being mature enough to say, yup, this happened, it’s bad but it’s part of our history, and we can’t just cherry pick the good stuff. You know — rallying round the flag on ANZAC day and so on. We need to acknowledge that some really bad things happened as well in our history, and what I say in the book is that acknowledging that for Pākehā is crucial to better relationships with Māori in the future, so, you know, it’s a way of healing. A precondition for genuine reconciliation between Māori and Pākehā is accepting and understanding and owning that history. I mean, at the same time, to be realistic about this — my book’s had a really overwhelming kind of response, which has been heartening, but it’s still kind of a small minority of the population, and large numbers of people will be unaware of this history. There is still this kind of wider forgetting, and there’s this phrase I quite like that some historians came up with, it’s called “the art of forgetting”, which kind of implies that there’s kind of... a deliberate aspect to this. It’s not as though things are completely forgotten. People know that it’s there as a background and bad stuff happened, but for many people