- [Tom] All of the colonial thought, all of the racist stuff
that informed the way that Cook came here,
it's not so much in the past.
Lots of those things are quite connected
to how we behave now.
(waves crashing)
- [Jo] As Pākehā, we sometimes try to distance ourselves
and say, oh that was Cook and his ways back then.
We ignore how much of that thinking we still carry in us.
- This is sort of the way that colonisation works.
Basically, you take a flag, you pop it down.
If you see something nice, then it's all yours.
It's a wonderful system, actually.
One that I use all the bloody time.
Oh this is quite nice here.
Here you go.
This is a lovely bit of bench, waterfront property.
You know what I think?
Bam, that's mine.
Dressing up in colonial garb made me feel so nervous.
It was absolutely terrifying
because it represents the worst of Pākehā people
dressing up in colonial, you know?
It feels so horribly loaded.
Oh god, that smell.
A mix of sweat and fear.
Right, (in character) Hello,
"Captain Cook Thinks Again" was a theatrical walking tour
that Jo and I put together.
- Cook has died, and basically Cook has spent
about 240 years thinking about what he's done
and reading blogs, and doing some reflection basically.
- Walking around the Wellington waterfront in colonial garb
is immediately, like that thing.
You get recognised in an instant and people point at you,
and are like, "what are you up to, mate?"
- Although, lots of young ones were like, "there's Mozart!"
- (laughs) Yeah, or a pirate.
"You look like a pirate." - Pirate!
And we were like yeah, well he is.
(upbeat music)
I was really interested in using him as a vehicle for us
to unpack what colonial thinking looks like.
- So, looking back while moving forward.
Everyone give it a go, here we go.
We don't want anyone slipping away
because if you fall out of formation, you'll be flogged.
So the scene is 1769, cross!
Everyone cross!
What I knew of Cook,
I knew from stories that I'd heard from my family
and from my school.
I would say that Captain Cook discovered New Zealand
and I wouldn't think more broadly
about why that's a problematic phrase.
Well that's funny, isn't it?
That's quite funny, the Taranaki Street, you know?
Like the Taranaki iwi that used to live in Te Aro Pa
Look at that, over there!
That's Wakefield Street.
Mister Wakefield was the man
who was in charge of the New Zealand Company
and he's basically the one that bullied
the Taranaki iwi off their land.
So you've got Taranaki iwi, Mister Wakefield, bam.
It's funny they crisscross in like that.
Over there, there's Halleys Lane.
Now Mister Halley, he was supplying the wood for the houses
that Mister Wakefield was building
when he bullied the Taranaki iwi off their land.
That's funny, isn't it?
And then over there is Cable Lane.
So Mister Cable was on the harbour board
at the time that Mister Halley was supplying
the wood to Mister Wakefield
when he bullied the Taranaki iwi off their land.
It is so funny.
Bing, bang, boom!
History everywhere you look, crisscrossing around.
(chuckles) God.
- It was interesting, do you remember
when one of Cook's descendants came on the tour,
a woman from Britain. - That's right.
- She talked about a shift that she had,
growing up with the story of Cook the hero
and then realising Cook the villain
and what a binary way to think about him.
Like, okay maybe he was doing the best with what he had
but that doesn't take away from the violence that he did.
- It's so easy to move around inside circles
where you don't have to confront any of this at all.
That's not the reality of what makes up Aotearoa
or any colonised country.
- And not just stopping at that Pākehā paralysis point
about going gosh, I don't know, I can't,
it's not my conversation.
I understand why we do that as Pākehā
but it's not gonna help us progress if we get stuck there.
Bonita Bigham, she's a South Taranaki district councillor
She was talking about Māori
as the founding culture of New Zealand
and I really loved hearing it phrased in that way.
That's our first nation, that's our first culture
and so it's okay for us to keep understanding
and honouring that, and being curious,
and figuring out more.
- So, who knows this man up here?
This is Kupe.
Now in many stories,
he's said to be the first Polynesian star navigator
to arrive here in New Zealand
and when he arrived, his wife,
Hine-te-Aparangi, stood up in their boat
and pointed out at the land mass in front of them,
saying "He ao, he ao, he Aotearoa"
"A cloud, a cloud, a long white cloud."
Now it'd be a very, very, very, very, very, very long time
before the first Europeans would arrive.
The Dutch named the whole of this country Nova Zeelandia
and then I came along, and I was like oh God,
that's a bit of a mouthful, isn't it?
So it translated that straight into English
and that's how we got New Zealand.
Of course, we all sort of forgot
there was already another name for this place.
I think whatever you call something,
it's reflective of the history you think is most important.
So we have the English name for this country,
and one of the Māori names for this country, Aotearoa.
New Zealand Aotearoa, what do you think?
I don't know, come on.
There is that bit in the show, right at the very end
where we tried to humanise Cook a little bit.
- Yeah, one moment we talked quite a lot about
was whether or not there should
or could be an apology in there
because we have to own up to the violence.
- That kind of violence that Pākehā people
might have used when they were colonising
was so much more direct than I thought it was.
I arrived on my ship The Endeavour led by Tupaia
into a bay called Tūranganui-a-Kiwa.
Our expedition's first time
meeting the local people there went badly.
I shot and killed a man named Te Maro.
We stayed for two more days after that
and in that time, we killed eight more men.
We sailed for a week to get away from Turanganui-a-Kiwa.
I had wanted to call it Endeavour Bay
but instead I ended up calling it Poverty Bay
because I just had such a terrible time there.
Wherever we went, we just tried to get our flag up.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that
we often missed what was already there
tried to call it something else.
We didn't listen hard enough.
And with the little bit of hindsight,
looking back at what I did,
I wish I'd played that whole thing rather differently
because what we did left so much pain and suffering,
and death, which is still going on today.
Lots of the process was unpacking my own invisible racism
and trying to uncover what I really thought
about some things.
- Well that's the hard thing though, isn't it?
To be like, yeah we're getting all these things wrong.
- Yes. - We're racist here.
That is the place that we are coming from as Pākehā,
making this work and trying to do our work
and not put that all on our indigenous people here
and go we've got to do some work.
It's like if you've got a problem in your relationship
you have to talk about it rather than ignoring it.
- Yeah. - That's my analogy.
- Nice one. - Thanks.
We're not bound to repeating the same mistakes
that we've always made in the past
but we have to look back, like hindsight, at the past
and see what's happened and what we've done
in order to inform how we approach today.
How we behave, what choices we make now.
So, with that, I hand it over to you,
and to me, and to all of us, all of us.
What are we gonna do?
(upbeat music)