The Disease That Didn’t Spread

TELEVISION NEW ZEALAND’S re-screening of the documentaries it commissioned from Kindred Films in 2022 continues. Last night (26/5/24) it was “No Māori Allowed”, the bitter story of the racist South Auckland town of Pukekohe. Co-produced by Megan Jones and Reikura Kahi, and directed by Corinna Hunziker, the documentary was awarded the Best Documentary prize at the 2022 New Zealand Television Awards.

Only the most churlish and, dare I say it, racist, of viewers would refuse to acknowledge “No Māori Allowed” as anything other than a deeply moving documentary. Important, too, not merely for describing the profoundly shameful state of affairs that prevailed in Pukekohe, a town less than an hour’s drive from New Zealand’s largest city, for the best part of a century; but also for making clear the challenges facing those determined to write New Zealand’s history.

As the documentary makes clear, history is not to be found in the official archives alone; nor does it dwell exclusively in newspaper cuttings and old photographs. History also resides in the minds and bodies of human-beings. Bitter memories of awful events, some in the minds of the living, some inherited from the dead, also count as history. They are triggers of pain and suffering from which the men, women and children who experienced them have a right to be protected. Good reason for those with no personal or familial investment in the pain and suffering exposed by their historical researches to tread extremely carefully.

But if the results of historical research can evoke powerful responses from those on the receiving end of past injustices, that is all the more reason to be cautious and respectful in unfolding the historical record. Painting Pukekohe’s racism as a dark and dirty secret, which the rest of New Zealand was only too willing to keep under wraps, is a grossly unfair distortion of the truth which the makers of “No Māori Allowed” should not have encouraged.

The Pukekohe “colour bar” was known right across New Zealand: not only while it was in operation, but also following its demise in the early-1960s. It was the subject of newspaper articles and sermons, most of which were sharply critical of Pukekohe’s Pakeha townsfolk and their market-gardening neighbours. This criticism only became more acute as the civil rights movements in both the southern states of the USA and South Africa began to make headlines around the world in the 1950s and 60s.

The disgust most New Zealanders felt at Pukekohe’s overt racial prejudice was prompted in no small part by the then widely shared belief that New Zealand’s race relations were the best in the world. That Pukekohe’s Pakeha were benighted enough to have borrowed the obnoxious social-engineering of Mississippi and South Africa in a country where inter-racial marriage was commonplace, and expressions of solidarity had become the stuff of legend, was regarded as offensively perverse.

Had Pukekohe not heard of the Manners Street Riot of 1943? Did they not know that it was precipitated by American Marines who attempted to ban Māori servicemen from the Services Club? The response of both the Māori and Pakeha present was to tell the Americans to stick their Jim Crow expectations where the sun don’t shine. When the Marines started taking off their service belts, preparatory to teaching these uppity Kiwis some old-fashioned Southern manners, all hell broke loose. At its peak as many as a thousand soldiers and hundreds of civilians were brawling up and down Manners and surrounding streets. Only with considerable difficulty did the Military Police on both sides bring the bruising conflict under control.

Not that the Pakeha of the first half of the Twentieth Century were “progressives” in the modern sense. Many of them had grown up believing in the essential equality of Māori and Pakeha for the very simple reason that, according to “science”, both peoples belonged to the “Aryan” race.

In a book entitled “The Aryan Māori”, Edward Tregear, a leading civil servant, argued that, far back in the mists of time, the Māori and European peoples shared a common Aryan ancestor. For decades this “noble lie” (as Plato would probably have called it) was taught to New Zealand school-children as anthropological fact. Inter-marriage on a scale that would have scandalised any other settler population in the British Empire was accepted here because Tregear had reassured New Zealanders that Māori and Pakeha were brothers under the skin.

It is almost certainly on account of Tregear’s little book (described by New Zealand historian, Prof. James Belich, as second only to the Treaty of Waitangi when it comes to documents that shaped New Zealand history) that Pukekohe remained so singular. It required a very special combination of historical, economic, and cultural circumstances, to turn what in nearly every other respect was an ordinary Kiwi town into a cesspit of aggressive racial discrimination that endured from shortly after the Land Wars of the mid-1860s to the early-1960s.

Sadly, none of this background information forms any part of Professor Jenny Bol Jun Lee Morgan’s historical contribution to “No Māori Allowed”. Indeed, she is at pains to paint the New Zealand of 1863-1963 as a place in which the state consistently legislated against the cultural independence of Māori. She even repeats the myth that the Tohunga Suppression Act was a Pakeha attack upon Māori tikanga, ignoring the historical fact that the legislation was the initiative of Māori Members of Parliament determined to improve the health of their people.

What is truly astonishing about Pukekohe is that it was the only place in New Zealand where the vicious racism endemic to the other Anglo-states took hold with sufficient force to construct a permanent system of overt racial oppression and humiliation. At a moment in history when Western racial hierarchies were being endorsed as fact by “racial scientists” the world over, and the “science” of Eugenics was sterilising thousands of “substandard human stock”, it is actually quite remarkable that the Pukekohe disease did not spread.

Yes, the arrival of D. W. Griffith’s 1916 movie, “Birth of a Nation”, a feature-length hymn to White Supremacy, did inspire a flurry of Kiwi Ku Klux Klan wannabes in the early-1920s (involving upwards of a thousand at its peak) and there were at least two societies devoted to ensuring New Zealand remained “a white man’s paradise” – one of them, predictably, headquartered in Pukekohe – but the inescapable truth remains that, in spite of the fact that White Supremacy was the default setting of Europeans from Ballarat to Bloemfontein, Boston to Berlin, Pakeha New Zealanders, with the exception of those living in Pukekohe, escaped the worst of the racist viruses then sweeping the world.

“No Māori Allowed” deserves all the acclaim it has received for revealing just how malignant systematically applied racial prejudice can be. How it lingers in the bodies of its victims like a radiological shadow across the heart. Defying the passage of the years.

The equally important message to take away from the documentary, however, is that the virulent racist cancer did not spread. Working together, Māori and Pakeha relegated Pukekohe’s colour bar to the dustbin of history – where it must remain.

---

Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.

This article can be republished for free under a Creative Commons copyright-free license. Attributions should include a link to the Democracy Project (democracyproject.substack.com).