Blogs • Revd Tim Hurd (Former Chaplain)

The prospect of spending some time overseas makes you think about what national days mean.

Sure, Waitangi Day may be a great excuse for a pub crawl in London, and - bizarrely - for Sales in Fiji (multiculturalism: so many cultural holiday sales to exploit!), but what does it mean to us, right here and now?

Of course, the papers and TV are full of such musings, but as part of the Anglican Church family, and named for it’s first NZ Bishop, Selwyn College might like to think about such things.

Those who drafted the Treaty at Waitangi were Anglicans. It was Anglican missionaries who had enough Reo to translate them, however imperfectly. Governor Hobson was an Anglican.

In recent years - 17 and counting - the Anglican Church has tried to model in its governance a partnership that acknowledges the Treaty. It means we sometimes have to talk a lot at meetings - sometimes frankly, other times with infuriating obliqueness. Sometimes we have to agree we can’t. Some of us choose to use the structure as a way of hiding from real encounters with real Treaty partners.

Nonetheless, it has been a really useful part of the journey as far as I can see. We’re forced to identify elephants, historical and present, in the metaphorical room. Pakeha have been invited to think about who and what we really are, apart from “the majority”, as a culture and a partner.

And we discover together some of the richness of the cloth from which our “now” is woven. (The Anglican symbol in this country is the “flax cross”, which tries to depict something of that).

As a theological student, a friend and I offered a presentation on identity and meaning in the very tongue-in-cheek persona of a pakeha-angst-ridden Folk duo, called “Generation Xile” (even before Flight of the Conchords!)

The keynote song was, deliberately, awful. But maybe the parting shot was not so pretending-to-be-insightful-but-actually-saying-very-little as I intended.

You may call me melancholy, / “A rose by any other name…”
And was the Treaty Hobson’s folly?
When he said “we are one people” did he mean,
“we are the same”?

Identity and partnership.

Just some of what might be up for exploration, Selwyn 2009.