J M White
My grandfather William, aged 9, arrived in Port Chalmers on board the clipper ship Peter Denny on 3 September 1873. With him were his three siblings: two-year-old Jessie, his brother Adam, aged 7, and his older sister Alison aged 11.
Seven children died from dysentery on that voyage and Christina, my grandfather’s mother, aged 35, also died from it seven days later 10 September 1873 in a house in High Street, Dunedin. She lies in an unmarked grave in the old South Road cemetery. I am the only person left in the world who knows or cares where it is.
Their father Thomas had died in Scotland two years earlier, aged 36 from mercury poisoning.
Thus, four small children were orphans in a new land. Here they were, and here they had to stay, but that is another story.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of ‘sturdy peasants’ were brought to New Zealand from the UK but they weren’t pioneers, they were escapees. They came here to escape the British class system. Believe me, it is still there but here in this young country, they had a chance to improve their situation and hold their heads up with dignity. For them, this was a way out of the bondage, the servitude, the forelock pulling to a class of dissolute malingerers who wasted the resources of their own countries in their constant search for money, wealth, and yet more money and wealth.
Back in the old country, there were few ways out of a lifetime of back-breaking physical labour and poverty – death, the workhouse, or prison, and for very minor crimes, one of which was being found with no money in your pockets, a high possibility when a weekly wage barely kept a man alive. Working-class people were little more than slaves. That is why so many made the dangerous 13,000-mile journey of 3 months at sea. To escape the class system.
For many years in New Zealand, it was true. There was no class system. Social equality was freedom. Education was freedom. To speak freely was freedom. The ability to own property was freedom. To be able to make our own life choices was freedom. Safeguards against indigency and absolute starvation in old age were put in place. Anyone with a bit of nous could become someone and many did. And some became politicians.
It seems people have forgotten about that now and it took less than 75 years. It is unbelievable such a thing could happen when most New Zealanders are the descendants of people who fled their own countries for the freedoms our old folk set up for us here – and it is such a pity they have forgotten because it would have made them more aware of what is being taken from them.
Now we listen to a very strange very old man named Schwab, and his various agents, who tell us we will return to the state of having nothing, we will serve the ‘new normal’ – which is really a return to the slavery so many of our old folk sought to escape – and we will be happy. And like fools, some of us believe him. Some of us. But quite a few of us seem to understand exactly what ‘having nothing and being happy’ really means. It certainly doesn’t mean being free to have nothing or being free to be happy. In such a future we will have no choices. We will do as we are told because Schwab and his agents have told us to.
I know what my grandfather would have said.
Why did we bother?