Simon Perkins a colleague at Bournemouth University sent me these reflections
on the background to the impressive national response to the Christchurch
massacre:
If you see the recent attacks in Chch as part of a more long-standing and
generalised effort to deal with the country's inequalities then for me the
beginning of this was the civil unrest and the aftermath of the 1981 Springbok
Rugby Tour of NZ. What happened was that in protesting the inequalities in
South Africa there became a wide-scale recognition that NZ also had real
issues, which needed to be dealt with. The result was that there was there was
a groundswell to make the country work for all. As the NZ historian Jock
Phillips explains it "the tour represent[ed] the emergence of an independent
Pacific nation to challenge the previous image of New Zealand as the 'Britain
of the South Seas'. Playing rugby against South Africa was consistent with New
Zealand's traditional identity as a loyal servant of the British Empire. The
anti-tour movement had a different vision. New Zealand could be seen as an
example of an independent, racially tolerant society, a moral exemplar."
https://springboktournewzealand.weebly.com/aftermath.html
And so, the public outpouring that we've seen since the mosques shooting are in
someways a direct beneficiary of the Tour, where I think the attacks have
shocked the country into realising that again - more needs to be done. BTW. if
you're interested, this is a documentary made by the anti-tour
protester/director Merata Mita: https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/patu-1983
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
