Past & present tensions

Contested histories - including treaty interpretations - stem from individual memories and experiences, historian Rowan Light suggests. 

- PAUL LITTLE

New Zealand history is so dangerous it’s only recently been approved for teaching in schools, with a new curriculum that will, as the Ministry of Education website sententiously describes it, “support ākonga [students] to be critical thinkers and understand our past, in order to make sense of the present”.

Previously, our history has been deemed safe only in the hands of experts, but now children as young as 5 will be allowed to use it.

New, or at least different, ways of thinking about the past are the subject of Rowan Light’s Why Memory Matters: ‘Remembered Histories’ and the Politics of the Shared Past. This is not quite as daunting as it sounds. Light is a historian and curator at the Auckland War Memorial Museum as well as a lecturer in history at the University of Auckland.

The subtitle refers to the ways in which different groups perceive, describe or remember the history that most of us have in common.

It would be fair to say that Light sees history as a malleable phenomenon. It’s a subject he touched on in his previous book, Anzac Nations: The Legacy of Gallipoli in New Zealand and Australia, 1965-2015. This was an account of the different ways those events and their commemoration have been seen in the two countries. It outlined the differences between Australia – where governments have staged anniversary events to suit the political agenda of the time – and New Zealand, where this has not been the case. It also looked at how the meanings people have given to commemorations of April 25 changed over the years, from an adventure in which proud sons of empire answered the call of home, to the forging of a nation with its own identity, to a wider acknowledgment of involvement in all sorts of conflicts since 1915.