Last night, at dusk, I watched a mass haka performed beside the Al Noor Mosque. And in that moment the gap between where I live, Australia, and where I am from, New Zealand, felt like it couldn’t be wider.
The haka itself was the rolling kind. After the first one, a smaller group of teens in school uniform got even closer, up against crime scene tape blocking us from the mosque, and started to perform a second haka the moment the first finished.
We could hear the teenagers saying “don’t film us” so we stood back and, as they started their haka, dozens of people from the first rushed past to join in. Caught between the two groups, it was a challenge to keep standing — the same feeling you get when you’re hit by a wave — but strangers’ hands steadied me on their way past.
The NZ anthem and other Māori songs were sung throughout the evening, but that rolling haka was the most emotionally raw moment for me since arriving in Christchurch last weekend. It’s impossible to not get swept up in it all, even if you have a foot trapped in each world across the Tasman.
Look, it’s been a big week. Before I left for NZ, I was working on a story about the first birthday of Isabella — the baby who has spent her whole life in a Melbourne immigration detention centre. Now, it feels like there are too many stories to tell.
There was our Uber driver. He picked up a woman from the hospital whose husband and son had been shot. She had spent all night beside them. She was alone, so he gave her his business card and told her to call if she needs anything at all. He’s still terribly worried about her. We sit with him for another five minutes outside our accommodation because he seems upset.
There is the young man who quietly reveals he had been at the mosque when the shooting started. He downplays his survival and experience so comprehensively that we can’t stop thinking about him.
A social worker from one of the poorest schools in the city tells me how he talked down parents who were trying to hammer their way through glass doors to get their kids during Friday’s lockdown. He wasn’t allowed to let them in, and stood beside them for as long as he could.
Then we attend a press conference with Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. She thanks the first responders to last week’s terror event. Ardern makes it clear she had wanted to meet these staff out of sight of the media. “I am so sorry, I had wanted this to happen somewhere quiet with a plate of lamingtons”. She moves quickly to get them into a side room.
I feel a tap on my shoulder. An old friend has managed to get there from the UK and we haven’t seen each other in 14 years. We hold on to each other like we are standing on a boat in a storm. Multiple outlets prepare to go live.
The world is watching as the NZ PM announces there will be a two-minute silence tomorrow to mark a week since the terror attack. The call to prayer will be broadcast live on both national radio and television channels.
We see Waleed Aly and chat briefly. I don’t ask him if Scott Morrison is still threatening to sue him because I can’t actually get my head around how to bring it up.
Then I see an alert on my phone: a message from a Muslim man, an asylum seeker I will call “L”, who has been held in various Australian detention centres since 2012. A week before the attack, L had asked me if it was true that NZ didn’t have detention centres. I confirmed it was true. An uncomfortable silence followed — at least, it was uncomfortable for me.
When L found out about the Christchurch attack, he sent me a series of emojis: praying hands, a heart and a crying face. When L found out about Fraser Anning’s encounter last weekend two new emojis appeared: an egg and a laughing face.
After the presser, many of us receive another alert: Morrison is going live to announce cuts to migration in Australia. There are quiet groans in certain corners.
The cognitive dissonance between Ardern’s steely and controlled compassion towards the victims — some of whom were refugees and recent immigrants — and Morrison’s continual tsunami of fear-mongering on asylum seekers and refugees has rendered me almost speechless. Almost.
Crikey has two reporters on the ground in Christchurch this week. Read more of their coverage here.
No, the Ditch is not wider nor deeper.
It is just the Aussie MPs who cannot catch up with the rest of us.
Kia kaha, Kiwis. Your Bros in the West Island are still with you.
“Leadership” . . . of the people; for the people. NZ has it in spades.
Australia . . . in a deep, deep trough! But as people(s); we remain connected; the ‘ditch’ always, washes both nation’s feet.
Excuse me ?
Maybe you’d better read this before you hush too hard about NZ. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugees_in_New_Zealand
NZ does have detention for refugees when they arrive in groups of ten or more . And they only accept 1000 refugees per year ……none from Middle Eastern or African countries by regulation. Comparable to Trumps’s Muslim ban.
Don’t believe the hype.
Australia does so much more for the globe’s displaced peoples that it’s embarrassing to NZ when the two are held together.
Well the killer was an Australian with views often nurtured by the Australian media The detention centres and incessant vilification of refugees is far from being a humanitarian act Time to stop believing and propagating the propaganda that the current Australian Federal government cares for refugees
I’m in the same waka as you, Rebekah. Aotearoa New Zealand is where I’m from, Australia is where I live. I’ve been here nearly 20 years, I love my life here, my neighbourhood and my city, but I’m finding it harder and harder to call this country home. That last link in your story damn near had me searching for jobs in Wellington. Sometimes I need to just close my eyes and picture Don Brash to remind me that politics is ephemeral and I shouldn’t sell the house.
Thanks for the reminder about Mr Brash f1p. We Aussies need to be reminded that NZ doesn’t have a special magic, it’s just blessed with some very good leadership at the right time. And we, unfortunately, aren’t.
Is this an appropriate time/place to wonder as many of my friends and family have in the last week whether the time has passed for Australia have a PM of Jacinda’s rare quality?
The relative sizes of our countries is an important factor of course for many reasons.
I fear that it is too late for the inevitable departure of Lord Moloch to make any difference but one has to wonder whether his absence from NZ is one very big reason.
As Rebekah implies, there is simply no comparing Mr slippery Shouty with Jacinda and we will never see her like over here.
“Mr Slippery Shouty” +100
As a Kiwi living in Australia, I do think Aussies are beating themselves up a bit more than they should. Two of Jacinda’s key responses to this atrocity – refusing to name the killer and promising to immediately implement some serious gun control – come straight from Australia and the response of (some) Australians to the Tasmanian massacre. That was a long time ago, sure, and maybe things have worsened, but I do think the Australian record on responding to gun massacres is a good one, and one of which to be proud.
Like most Oz-based Kiwis, though, I am mystified at the resistance here to indigenous culture: whether you think it’s appropriation or adoption, most Kiwis I know do scatter te reo through their everyday language and embrace the haka, the hongi and other aspects of Maori culture pretty much by nature. You grow up embedded in it and it seeps in. Yes, sometimes it’s superficial and no, it’s no panacea for the problems of racism in NZ, but it’s a lot better than the alternative, for mine.
The difference, I think, at least partly comes down to scale.
– The sheer number of differing languages and dialects across the continent (almost nobody knows how to say a simple ‘hello’ in their local original language – I only know ‘yaama’, but that is Gamilaroi language from about 1,000kms away from where I live…)
– The scale of the offensive against the indigenous population since the 18th century
– The scale of the success of that suite of genocidal actions
– The scale of the success of general Western ‘Supremacy’, especially in the 20th century and now into the 21st
– The scale of entrenched apathy – and, while I’m at it, the antipathy toward any form of treaty or redress for past policies and events
I’m sure there are more reasons, but those are definitely some of them (mostly stemming from entrenched racist attitudes). That’s not an excuse, because it is a deplorable situation, but merely an observation of how the two nations have approached their internal relationships with their respective first peoples.
Yes, good points, Adam, and I’m sure you’re right that scale across the board is significant. NZ has the population of a modest city and I guess that makes a big difference.