Lucky Phoenix

A 5-1 win against Melbourne City is a respectable enough achievement, but it conceals Phoenix's incredible luck that they were not two or three goals down in the first half hour of the game. The Phoenix had trouble containing City's attacks and two or three times City just narrowly missed scoring. A near miss is a miss, it doesn't count. What did count was Phoenix's opportunistic first goal. That goal changed the whole tenor of the game. It fired up the Phoenix players, enhanced their self-confidence, elevated the individual skills of players into a coordinated team effort. From that point on victory was within their grasp, while Melbourne City went to pieces, their often brilliant attacking players were left out on a limb with insufficient back-up. Similar things happened to Phoenix in the previous two games, where they conceded a goal and could not regain their composure. Football is a mind game as much as a game of physical stamina and skill. It is hard to develop the attitude that the All Blacks have mastered, that you fight until the final whistle, you don't give in, you have the self-belief that winning the game is your entitlement. Let's hope that with this emphatic win against a very good team, the roller-coaster ride of the Phoenix is over and the team will approach every game as theirs for the winning, that they have to strive for every ball, move forward, attack and make the most of every goal scoring opportunity that comes their way.

Where does the Road from the Camp go?

A response to Vincet O'Sullivan's Road from the Camp (From Us, Then)

“A row of prisoners stitched with yellow stars”

Was perhaps my father among them?

Not on a summer road, the season, the date don't fit.

It might have been late autumn, trudging towards Austria.

Not the Austria of gemütlich operettas and Sacher cakes

But Austria of the camp with the stairs of death.

No bears there, the bears like all animals for entertainment

had been devoured long before.

“Those casual days a hundred years back”

Never came back, a lost world, a dream, perhaps a nightmare.

“The story of the final show” can't be told

It was felt through the pores, the cold-numbed fingers,

The stomachs that knew no food, frozen bodies

And the autumn greyness that enveloped all.

Had there been bears they would have withdrawn their paws

They would have had more pity for these men

Then the hollow human beings who looked on.

A cultured man

I went to the Turnbull Library to a presentation of Bill Renwick's illustrated lecture, Emblems of Identity which he originally delivered in Australia as a keynote address in 1978  at the 23rd congress of the International Society for Education through Art. I had known Bill for the best part of 60 years and thought of him as a very good close friend. Yet I realized that I didn't really know him until after his death, after I heard his eulogies and learned about his early life and his family background. I knew that he had a very broad vision of education, which he did his best to foster as Director of Education, I knew that he shared my love of music, I knew that he was widely read, I knew him as a historian, He was someone I could have great conversations with. I knew that he was an inspired teacher because I knew some people whom he had taught, but I didn't know his long life journey from a deprived impoverished background, growing up in a simple home with no books, no music, no art, facing the hardships of the great depression. I didn't know that it was the excellent education that he received at Seddon Memorial Technical College that encouraged him to train as a teacher, then on to lifelong learning, training teachers, teaching at the university, and ultimately moving into educational administration and policy making. It said a lot about New Zealand of the 1940s and 1950s, the New Zealand that my father fell in love with sight unseen, that a boy, coming from a poor, working class background with only his great capacity for learning, could have the opportunity to realize his potential. Bill was a polymath, at home with history, art, music, educational theory, and probably a great many other things, as well as a tramper, a naturalist, an aspect of his life I didn't share. This lecture showed the breadth of his interests. It was about art, about history, about people at home in the land, but it was also about an understanding of what made people tick, what the common grounds were and what were the areas of difference. Bill had the ability to see not only the details but more important, the whole picture. He shared this quality with another Bill, another senior public servant I knew, but Bill Renwick had an attribute not shared by many. He was a cultured man. His manners were gentle. He was soft spoken. He was a good listener. He took a genuine interest in others, and this made him a good conversationalist. As an outstanding scholar and administrator, he could have been justified in giving the impression that he was superior to other lesser mortals, but this he never did. He was humble as befits a cultured man who is aware not only of all the things that he knew and had accomplished, but all the things that were still out there to learn, to explore and to understand. He was really the best kind of New Zealander that my father, coming from in some ways a slightly more privileged background admired and respected on New Zealand.                                                                                                                                                                    

Human rights?

The majority of the schools who come to the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand come to learn about Human Rights In the context of the Holocaust, a popular topic for year 10 students. Yet I am not sure what we can teach them about Human Rights. We have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights displayed on the wall, but this is beyond the comprehension of most of the students. This was promulgated as a response to the events of the Holocaust which Western jurists and law makers in general needed as judicial instrument to call to account perpetrators of unspeakable crime, But the concept of Human Rights evolved during the eighteenth century, when philosophers looked at the nature of society, the idea of the state as distinct from a kingdom or an empire, held together by a network of loyalties to the divinely ordained ruler. The feudal political structure of intertwined loyalties, rights and obligations had been disintegrating for some time, and was gradually replaced by the idea of the nation state and citizenship. Citizenship involves obligations such as paying taxes, serving in the armed forces, obeying the laws of the state, but it also involves the right to have a say in the governmental process, and the right to be protected and safeguarded against discrimination. There were three different references in one of last week's newspapers to Human Rights violation, all involved murder, violence, perhaps imprisonments, but their links to human rights violations were not clear. So I am not prepared to talk of Jewish children being forbidden from sitting on park benches or going to swimming pools as issues of human rights violations, because this would trivialize the issues underlying the Holocaust, nor treat the mass murder of people on an industrial scale as anything but a heinous crime because saying that killing someone deprives him of his human rights is simply bizarre. The definition of Human Rights is part of the fundamental principles that modern liberal enlightened Western civilization is based on and I am reluctant to deal in vague simplifications. The accurate, precise use of language is important for the understanding of the process that was the Holocaust.

Profound sadness

I am reading Don DeLillo's Falling Man, a novel about the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Centre. I don't enjoy it, I am afraid. I find it confusing, the sense of the tragedy trivialized by personal issues I am not engaged by it, But somehow, reading it, I thought of Emil Holtzl, an old friend of the family. Jancsi (Johnny) and Rozsi (Rose) Deutsch shared their villa in Mathasfold with Emil. Emil was Rozsi's partner. He was not her husband. He was also Jancsi's friend. Their beautiful villa was not far from my grandparents' summer house, and we used to visit them. I have a memory of sitting on their terrace on a hot summer afternoon, the adults playing cards, we children having a lemonade, or more likely our drink of choice, a raspberry syrup. Although it was afternoon, the hosts were wearing pyjamas, silk pyjamas. This to me seemed like ultimate decadence. The Deutschs' had a menswear store, the finest menswear store in Budapest, and one of the best in the whole of Europe. Their distinguished customers included the Prince of Wales when he visited Budapest in the 1930s. The shop was located in the Vaci Street, one of the most elegant shopping street anywhere. It spoke of the elegance, the refinement, the special culture, the love of fine things that defined the Hungarian capital in the years between the war, years when gathering dark clouds were obscured by unfounded hope and optimism. My father could see the threats that most people ignored and he wanted to get away, leave the beautiful life behind for a less worrying peaceful existence. Preparing for emigration, both my father and my mother tried to acquire skills they could use wherever they moved. They were not good at reading the signs. My father trained as a pastry cook and learned to make exquisite mouth-watering pastry in preparation for moving to New Zealand where a sultana scone or a lemington was the acme of offerings in pastry shops; my mother learned bespoke shirt making, creating the shirts the Pince of Wales would have been proud to wear, a skill no one would have appreciated in a country where men wore mass manufactured ill fitting suits and shirts. She was trained in the Deutsch exclusive menswear salon. Jancsi, Rozsi and Emil were family friends. They must also have had some very influential friends, because when Jews were rounded up, confined to the ghetto or marched off to concentration camps the three of them stayed behind and sheltered somewhere in Budapest. One day, during a bombing raid the building they were in was hit by a bomb. The building collapsed. Jancsi, Rozsi and Emil were in the air raid shelter when the wall collapsed, burying Jancsi and Rozsi, and killing them. Emil somehow survived. Physically he survived, but mentally he never got over the tragedy. He mourned Rozsi day and night, wherever he went. He would walk into a room and spread gloom. In a city where everybody had someone to mourn, where tragedy stalked all, Emil stood out as the most profound mourner. The survivors sought to make a new life, get over their grief, but Emil haunted them like a ghost of those who perished. I don't imagine that anyone but I remembers Jancsi, Rozsi, Emil, and their lovely place in Matyasfold, or their exclusive store. That world  disappeared for ever. Only EmIl, the profoundly sad mourner stayed with me in my memory.

The Treaty Of Waitangi and how to misunderstand history

Did Maori agree to cede sovereignty over New Zealand when they signed the treaty? This was the question debated by 'experts' and their report has just been published. But is this a meaningful question? The Treaty was cobbled together in a hurry. It was drafted by James Busby, better remembered as a wine grower than a constitutional expert and the British Resident, an inefficient representative of the British Government, It was translated into Maori by Henry Williams and his son, Edward. over one evening. In 1939 the British Government decided to take action over the unruly settlements of its subjects in New Zealand. But by then The New Zealand Company of Edward Gibbon Wakefield had despatched a ship on a land buying expedition. Treaty or no Treaty the land was in effect getting colonized. There was a groundswell of opinion in Britain that the country was overpopulated and the surplus population had to be dumped somewhere for the benefit of the people surplus to requirements as well as the mother country, who would benefit from the trade in produce from the newly colonized lands whose inhabitants then would be able to purchase the excess of manufactured goods. The disastrous experiment in settling South Australia in this fashion did not deter the New Zealand Company from trying again in New Zealand. So the Treaty of Waitangi had to be forced through in haste to forestall other attempts at colonization. How could the Maori signatories to the Treaty possibly understand the concept underlying the Treaty? The concept of nationhood, the idea of sovereignty over a whole nation, let alone an empire was totally outside the experience of the Maori. Maori was a tribal society, in which differences, conflicts, were resolved though Utu, marriages, alliances, but none of the tribes would have even considered accepting the chief of another tribe to rule over them. The concept of Rangitara was understood, but the concept of Tino Rangitaranga, highest chieftainship was an alien concept drafted on Maori tradition. There was no question about it, the Treaty of Waitangi was designed to rob Maori of their land. But by and large, both sides benefited from it. The Maori could not stop the process of colonization, whatever some of their leaders thought. The British government created a pseudo-legal form of accommodation. Tribal wars with murderous, genocidal outcomes were largely, but not completely eliminated. The excesses of European land speculators were curbed. Maori were, by and large integrated into a dominant European civilization and did not suffer the disastrous fate of the Australian Aborigines or the people of South America and even Africa. But couching the story of Maori land appropriation in a cloud of legalistic mumbo jumbo distorts history and only benefits the historians working on researching claims under the Treaty, lawyers negotiating Treaty settlements, politicians, and some of the more powerful Maori interests. Let's be honest about it, the discussion about the Treaty of Waitangi is a distortion of history.

Thoughts about Himmler and Eichmann

I wrote about teaching about the Holocaust in my previous blog. Today I read an article in Tablet about the newly discovered papers of Himmler and interviews with Eichmann. Should I even take an interest in these? Both of these men, to me sitting on the other side of the cultural divide, were embodiments of evil. I know a good deal about both. Do I need to waste my time learning more about them? The day has only 24 hours. Yet you could not find a better confirmation of the Nazi denial of humanitarian values that my last blog discussed then these two. Himmler talks of the 'moral right, an obligation, to take the people who want to kill us, and to kill them.' But really he is not talking about people who want to kill him personally, or kill his soldiers, or kill citizens of his country. He is talking of phantom killers, the emaciated, helpless victims of his persecution, whom he sees as such threat that refined, educated moral person that he is, he still feels morally obliged to murder them. They are different. They are a danger to what he believes, that 'order creates the nation, the culture, and order creates the state'. Not that his victims were disorderly. He just didn't consider them to be part of the orderly fabric of his nation. He thinks of himself and his SS officers who carried out the genocide of the Jews as fundamentally upstanding people. 'Most of you will know' he said in his speech to his troops in Posen in 1943, 'what it means when a hundred corpses lie side by side,  whether there are five hundred or one thousand, and endure that, and apart from a few exceptions, remain decent.' This makes them tough, even if their achievements are not glorified in history. What sort of strange mentality, what warped values, drives a man like that?  Yet Eichmann, living in Argentina, met regularly with a group of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, and talked about  how Nazism, suitably cleansed of tainted leaders, could become a revitalised political force. They were true believers, but perhaps even in their wildest dreams they could not imagine the resurgence of anti-semitism and Nazi ideology in Europe some fifty years after Eichmann's capture. Or perhaps they could, as Gudrun Himmler, Heinrich Himmler's daughter, now 85 years old, for whom her father is still a hero, probably still does.

The relevance of learning about the Holocaust

What will be the relevance of learning about the Holocaust for the next generation, and in particular, the next generation in New Zealand? There are almost no Holocaust survivors left, and in a few years there will be none. Seeing DVDs of old people in distant lands talking about their terrible experiences will hardly be the sort of thing young people will be interested in. There is a real danger that Holocaust studies will be absorbed by programmes on Genocides, Human Rights, or God forbid, Tolerance. Whoever wants to be tolerated? Tolerance implies that the people tolerated are in some ways inferior, but due to the magnanimity of  societies that are tolerant, such inferiority is not rubbed in. There are Genocides and Genocides, all different in their way, all terrible, all with victims and perpetrators, but the Holocaust is significantly different from genocides. Human Rights is a basket that can accommodate numerous platitudes and at the end there are no lessons to be learned. It is not about Jews being forbidden to go to the swimming pools or sit on park benches, and certainly not about mass murder. To learn something about the Holocaust and to understand its significance and relevance to our time, you have to think of it as a rift within Western civilization. It was a denial, a destruction of the values and principles of humanism that evolved over many generations since the seventeenth century, and that underpinned  the basis of European values. Europeans who first encountered the Maori people found cannibalism abhorrent, Maori people on the other hand found flogging and hanging, European practices, cruel beyond all understanding. Maori saw kingship and aristocracy in simple tribal terms, something quite different form the British and European perceptions. Slavery as the Maori understood it was quite different from slavery as practiced in the American South, the Carribbean and Latin America. The wanton cruelty of ISIS or Boku Haram make perfectly good sense for people steeped in a primitive interpretation of the Koran, Stalinist crimes made sense in terms of his attempts to build a new dictatorship of the proletariat, and similarly racial purity, the annihilation of Jews as a priority above fighting and winning the war made sense for all whose thinking was confined by Nazi ideology. The question that those of us who teach about the Holocaust need to address is what are the humanist values that are worth cherishing, values that we need to share and make a stand for. The Danube flows right though Hungary, and it divides the chauvinistic, intolerant patriotism of the Szeged school of politicians from the more universal, tolerant, broad embracing aristocratic school of Vienna and the West. Granted that this is a simplification, but there is an underlying truth in it. So if we talk about human rights we have to talk about the humanist view of human rights and citizenship. If we talk about racial harmony, about inequality, about humane treatment of minorities, of enemies, of victims, we have to turn back to the values of humanitarianism. We have to acknowledge that in an imperfect world such humanitarian values were always breached. The signatories of the American Constitution did not consider that the rights accorded to American people applied to African slaves, the humane treatment of the enemy in our time does not apply to torture of suspected terrorists and other enemies of the state. Teaching the Holocaust we should set out to foster a consciousness that embraces the liberal humanist ideals that permeated Western culture and was destroyed by Nazism.

Fighting ISIS

ISIS has, it is reported, 30,000 fighters. The Iraqi army has 271,500 armed personnel according to Wikipedia, and 528,500 reserve personnel, It has a budget of $6.055 billion. The army is, or was trained by the Vinell Corporation, a privater military company, a subsidiary of the Noprthrop Gumman Corporation. A small insurgent group like ISIS should not be a threat to such a well endowed large army. What difference can New Zealand's modest and reluctant contribution make to the unequal fight against ISIS?

The world free of great problems though the eyes of the Dominion

The Dominion doesn't devote a lot of space to world events, but the little space given over to these was dominated by the staggering news that a young Arab man who attacked Israeli soldiers was shot by the soldiers, and died in an Israeli hospital where they tried to care for him. The lesson to Arabs in general should have been not to attack Israeli soldiers because they don't take kindly to people who assaile them with stones and knives. But this is not quite how the Dominion presented the report. It was about Israeli oppressions, poor Arabs victimized. And of course, being the lead article on the World page, it suggested that this was the greatest problem in an otherwise happy world. No bloodshed in Africa, or in Syria and Iraq, Donetsk and the Ukraine are at peace, all is well in South or East Asia, no trouble in the Americas. If only the Israelis would sit down and have a civilized chat with stone throwing or knife wielding Arabs, not to mention those who drive their cars into people waiting for trains and buses, the whole world would attain blissful peace.

Kristallnacht Memorial Concert - Music as memorial

I am very grateful to the students and staff of the New Zealand School of Music for participating in the concert I organized to commemorate Kristallnacht, which occurred 76 years ago, on November 9, 1938. The concert started with Bloch's Nigun, beautifully played by James Jin. Bloch was a  Jewish assimilated composer, with his roots going back many generations in Alsace and Switzerland. He encountered Chassidic Jewish worship in passing in Geneva, but more impressively in New York when he moved there. This was music of the Galician Jews, intense, infused with ecstasy, the music of a world destroyed by the Nazis. Daniela-Rosa Cepeda sang three of Georg Tintner's songs, youthful works which reflect the era they were written in, the Second Viennese School, with intervals very difficult to pitch, which Daniela-Rosa managed outstandingly well. Tintner had to flee Vienna in the aftermath of Kristallnacht. Pasquale Orchard sang two much mellower gentle songs by Richard Fuchs, who was also a victim of Kristallnacht, and like Tinter, found refuge in New Zealand. Lawrence Scherr's Elegy and Vision for solo cello, played by Inbal Megiddo, is a moving personal piece, written in memory of Scherr's dead brother, Edwin, named after his aunt who died in Auschwitz. The climax of the programme was Ellwood Derr's I Never Saw another Butterfly for soprano, saxophone and piano. It is a setting of poems written by children in Theresienstadt. With the dramatic use of voice, sung by Katherine McIndoe, clever effects on the saxophone, played by Reuben Chin and powerful piano accompaniment by Heather Easting this piece evoked tears. The audience was so moved, a great credit to the performers, that at the end of the piece people were stunned and for a few seconds they could not even applaud. Music means something different to each of us, as does the memory of Kristallnacht. For Paul Seideman who was in the audience, a child survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz the concert recalled loss, survival and a destroyed life, for Jim Baltax it was his parents' first meeting on Kristallnacht in Vienna and their subsequent escape. Donald Maurice remembered playing Boris Pigovat's Holocaust Requiem in Germany where the orchestral musicians were uncomfortable with the subject of the piece because it raised questions they would rather have not faced. All the credit for this amazing memorable concert belongs to the musicians, my modest part was to just making the concert happen, but I am proud of my role in this.

The spying business

I am somewhat puzzled by John Key's announcement that there are 40 would be Jihadists in New Zealand that the government has to keep an eye on. Surely it is the job of the GCSB, the Government Security Bureau, to keep an eye on any mischief makers that may be around, and they don't need the government to alert any who they are spying on. So what is John Key playing at? What is he hoping to achieve? Who is he trying to fool? Over the last few days I watched the wonderful BBC Worricker Trilogy. I don't remember when I enjoyed television so much. Although it is a sophisticated slow moving spy story, it makes some very important points about spying. Can spys be trusted? Whose interests do spies pursue? In this story it is clear that spies cannot, as a rule be trusted, unless they are ethical human beings who are engaged in by and large nefarious underhand work. The story has contemporary relevance. At issue is the use of torture to obtain information, something that the British Secret Service claim not to condone, yet it came to light that rogue elements within the service, with the approval; of the Prime Minister, are cooperating with Americans in the use of private security firms like Blackwater, now renamed Academi in getting just such information. And the reason for this is that these security firms are not accountable to anyone, make obscene profits, part of which is used for a kick-back to fund the Prime Ministers lifestyle as an international peace negotiator after his retirement from politics. The parallels between Tony Blair's history and the collusion of the British Intelligence Service with American corporations is fairly obvious. The other underlying theme of the series is that Johnny Worricker, the main protagonist of the story, is a Cambridge educated smartly turned out member of the social elite, with a charming, modest, self-deprecating half smile. A man, born to rule, a member of the middle upper crust is a man to be trusted, the implied social upstart, the Prime Minister has a dubious character and may be untrustworthy. Trust the old rulers, don't trust the pushy ambitious young bounders..

Joel Polack, trader, artist, adventurer

Joel Polack was born in London in 1807, son of Solomon Polack, a well known miniature portrait painter and engraver, The family came from The Hague, Holland, Solomon Polack himself was the son of a portrait painter, From Holland the family moved to Ireland then to London. The name suggests that the Polacks were originally from Poland, possibly moved to Holland in the wake of the Jewish persecution in the seventeenth century. They were part of a constantly shifting Jewish diaspora, footloose, making the most of opportunities wherever they went. Joel Polack received a broad education, possibly some of it on the continent. He could read, and presumably speak French, he was at home with Jewish texts, and like his father, he was a competent painter, painting miniatures by the time he was sixteen. One of his pictures is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. He was clearly a restless and adventurous spirit, because still a teenager, he joined the Commissariat and Ordinance section of the War Office serving in South Africa and Mauritius for four years. His skills as a draftsman and painter would have been useful. Perhaps the conviction of his older brother, Abraham  or 'Grand larceny' in 1820 had something to do with his wish to get away. Abraham was convicted of the theft of a watch form a woman of dubious repute and was transported to Australia for a term of seven years. The circumstances were somewhat odd, and there is an implication that there might have been more to the case than appeared on the surface, that Abraham Polack was set up, possibly because of his Radical connections or sympathies. They were tough economic times, the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester occurred the year before, the Radical War in Scotland had happened just recently, there was unrest in Ireland. Abraham Polack claimed that he was in Gibraltar when the alleged theft took place, although this was disputed and perhaps disproved, it is quite possible that there were political motives behind the accusation. Joel Polack might have thought that leaving a radicalized England behind and seeking his fortune in other, less divided parts of the world had appeal. After four years in Africa he left to travel in America, and ultimately sailed to Australia to join his brother, Abraham, who by then was a prosperous businessman, publican and auctioneer. Joel,soon after landing in Australia, requested a grant of land in N.S.W. amounting to 2560 acres but he didn't stay around to hear the outcome of his application. In 1827, aged 20, he accepted the position of Painter and Designer for His Majesty, the King of Madagascar and sailed back to Africa. The King however died the following year and Joel Polack went back to Sydney.There the Polacks were part of the small but successful Sydney Jewish merchant community, and Joel could see business opportunities for an independent adventurous young man.

The Meeting Place - Maori and European

When I wrote about New Zealand Jewish Writers in Jewish Lives in New Zealand Joel Polack, the Jewish trader who arrived in Aotearoa in 1831 dominated the chapter. He was not the greatest, but by far the most interesting of the writers. Ever since, I harboured the plan to write something more substantial about him. I believe that I know more about him than anyone else does and I have looked at material about pre-colonial New Zealand that other historians ignored. For example the commodities Polack asked his brother to buy for him sheds a light on the changing nature of trade in New Zealand. Setting up a brewery was a big step in an environment where the drinking culture was dominated by grog and grog sellers. Polack had interesting things to say about the Maori people and their adaptability. He had his own vision of New Zealand as a place for European settlement. He was perhaps the best read person living in the Bay of Islands at the time judging form the list of books he listed that were destroyed when his house was set alight. He had an interesting relationship with Maori, stripped at one time and having had to call on Henry Williams to settle a dispute, yet doing deals with Hone Heke. He resisted the temptation to go native and marry a Maori girl, but Colenso claimed that Polack was attacked and beaten up for his affair with a Maori girl. Despite the opportunities to marry a well born Maori girl, he tried to find a Jewish wife and bring her over a from Hobart. He was interested in the very issue of the meeting place between two cultures and had a good opinion of the Maori people. I have a lot of material gathered on my computer, some of it no longer accessible because of the incompatibility between my old computer and the new Windows 8, and I keep coming back to Polack. But as the Ethics of the Father says:

• "It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it" (2:21)

For my birthday I was given Vincent O'Malley's The Meeting Place. It is interesting reading. He has read very widely, but I couldn't help feeling that his book is an argument, with other historians, tracing the perception of the intereaction of Maori and Pakeha form the Fatal Impact school of thinking to the contemporary Treaty of Waitangi school of Maori as a vibrant culture that survived an encounter that was not as fatal as some thought. In fact, there are parallels between the survival of the Jewish people and their resilience and that of the Maori. This is a theme that is worth exploring further. The centres of Jewish culture were destroyed, completely annihilated. Yiddish as a literary language, Yiddish literature, Jewish theatre, authentic Jewish music have become only subjects of academic study, as probably the vibrant pre-European Maori culture, traditional oratory, traditional music, dance, became only bastardised shows for the entertainment of tourists. Yet these cultures both proved to be resilient and a new culture emerged from the ashes of the old that was destroyed. The Meeting Place is an interesting book for historians with a real interest in pre-colonial New Zealand, but the stories of people are missing that would have brought the history alive, women like Charlotte Badger, Jane Kendall, Betty Guard, and men like George Bruce, Barnet Burns, and indeed, Joel Polack and his nemesis, Benjamin Turner and many other interesting characters among the first settlers.

The Phoenix - everyone can have an opinion

It was not a good night for Phoenix in Melbourne. It was a good game, both teams played well, you couldn't really fault either side, and it was a darned better game than some of the Premier league and Bundesliga games that I caught this week, but the side that could capitalize on goal scoring opportunities won. There is, however, hope for the future for Phoenix fans. Ther midfield worked well. The forwards didn't quite jell. The ball didn't always go to the player it was meant for, or the player was not in the right position to take it. The Victory had some very good players, including New Zealand's contribution, Kosta Barbarouses. The only way the Phoenix will improve is by playing against teams that stretch them and challenge them. More luck next week, perhaps.

The individual and the government

Chris Bishop is a new list member of Parliament. He contested the Hutt Central seat for the National Party, he is a former debating champion and a Young Nat. He is proud to be a libertarian, and is a firm believer that the interest of the individual should take precedence over the interest of the community, the state, the government.  May be I misunderstood the article about him in the Hutt News. Perhaps by individuals he didn't mean corporates. For example, the government built state of the art power stations using renewable energy, These were built using tax payer funds over the years and thus belonged to the people, the state, the country. For purely ideological reasons the government flogged some of these power generators off. There was no suggestion that private enterprise would make the rivers flow faster, the sun shine brighter, so that these power generators would function more efficiently. The only ones who profitted from these sales, and they profited very handsomely, are corporate investment funds, and perhaps a few large private investors. These power generating companies have returned good profits for the shareholders, mainly international investors, not the local pa and ma investors as the launch was sold in. These profits were made at the expense of the poor succers, the users of electricity, the manufactures who generate the wealth of the country and so on. Sure some individuals benefitted, but the vast majority, who make up the cpountry, who voted for the government were ripped off and will continue to be riupped off until a government takes over that is prepared to regulate profits for the good of the majority of the people.