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It is a tale of two clubs, separated by decades.
Retired Anglican Bishop and writer John Bluck hoped to launch his new book at Auckland’s prestigious Northern Club.
That was until the club got wind of the title.
He finds it all pretty funny, to be honest.
What exactly did they say?
He pulls a handwritten note from his laptop travel case and reads it aloud.
“It wouldn’t be appropriate,” he was told.
“It’s just not worth it. It’s just not worth our while to do this as we have such a diverse membership.”
And the title of the book that is too explosive for the good people of the Northern Club?
It is called Becoming Pākehā.
Perhaps the minor furore proves Bluck’s point, summarised in the back cover copy, that Māori and Pākehā are growing “ever more separate” and that the landscape of Aotearoa is “fractured and risking eruption”.
When words like Pākehā, Aotearoa, He Puapua and co-governance appear in letters pages, on talkback radio and in social media, they set off explosives.
Now go back three decades to the other club story.
This one involves the Canterbury Club in Christchurch, which Bluck interprets as the very apex of the city’s blue-blood conservatism. After he was appointed Dean of the Christ Church Cathedral in 1990, one of his first tasks was to address the club.
He had just shifted north from Dunedin but had encountered Canterbury’s “all-white world” as a theology student in the 1960s, when Pākehā students looked at the sole openly Māori student, Hone Kaa, as though he was “a previously unencountered wild creature”.
The drinks flowed that night in 1990, but Bluck chose to abstain.
Finally, late in the evening, he got to speak about his chosen subject, Pākehā male identity.
Maybe it was not the wisest of choices. He writes that the silence in the room settled more deeply the longer he spoke.
Bob Lowe, the vicar at St Barnabas Church in Fendalton, was the club’s chaplain.
Bluck recalls that after he finished speaking, Lowe “proceeded to shred everything I’d said into small pieces”.
This, Bluck writes, “was a group who knew all they needed to know about Māori and the irrelevance of words like Pākehā.
“I went home as humiliated as I had ever been.”
For Bluck, his 12 years as Dean were marked by an exhausting heritage fight over the Cathedral visitors’ centre – he was for it, many Cantabrians were against – and a valiant effort to bring more te reo and biculturalism into the city’s Anglican world. His memories are obviously mixed.
He retold the Canterbury Club story in Christchurch’s Transitional Cathedral this month when his Becoming Pākehā book tour took him south.
The following morning he reveals, just before setting off to Dunedin for another appearance, that this quick overnight stop was his first visit to the city in eight years.
“I have no engagement with Christchurch at all,” he says.
“The Bishop that followed David Coles, Victoria Matthews, I don’t think she ever approved of me. We were on different journeys. I never engaged back here in my role as a bishop up north.
“And I’ve never been invited back to the Canterbury Club.”
After Christchurch, he moved north to become Bishop of Waiapu, which includes Hawke’s Bay, Gisborne and Tauranga, before retiring in Pakiri, north of Auckland.
When he left in 2002, The Press covered his final sermon, in which he said the building “had grown on him more than he dared admit”. The Press added that his sermon, “full of rich, subtle humour and strong messages”, came near the end of a service tinged with sadness at his departure.
That was 20 years ago. Meanwhile, the building that grew on him is still under long-term repair.
“For me, the collapse of that cathedral was the collapse of part of my life, really.” Continue reading
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News category: Analysis and Comment, Palmerston.
