Public Address: Great New Zealand Argument

No Fretful Sleeper

Paul Millar — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 09:31:00 +1200

In November 2004 Bill Pearson’s trenchant essay ‘Fretful Sleepers’ was posted on Public Address as part of Russell’s Great New Zealand Argument series. As I was then researching Pearson’s life for my biography No Fretful Sleeper: A Life of Bill Pearson, I wrote a brief preface to the essay. But looking back I find my comments significantly lacking in detail and insight because in late 2004 I wasn’t fully aware how intensely private and complex was the life Bill Pearson had been forced to lead as a closeted homosexual. Only as I wrote the biography did I come to a…

My Imaginary Journey

Fairburn 1 — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 09:27:00 +1300

If Rex Fairburn had been writing now he would surely have been a blogger. Not one whose work fell easily on the "left" or the "right", but assuredly one who would not shrink from a good argument. "He always wanted a scrap …" wrote Denis Glover and Geoffrey Fairburn on the jacket of The Woman Problem and other prose. "Right or wrong, he would argue the hind leg off a cow and bite a camel's bum. What he has to say is not so much to convince us that that his is the only thinking … as to make us…

Nuclear Weapons Are Morally Indefensible (the Track)

David Lange — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 14:17:00 +1300

The file on this page, 'Nuclear Weapons Are Morally Indefensible', is a derivative work incorporating audio from the recording of David Lange's speech in the 1985 Oxford Union debate, arguing in favour of the motion that "Nuclear Weapons Are Morally Indefensible."
The speech is used with the permission of David Lange, Margaret Pope and Television New Zealand. The music was composed and produced by Andrew B. White, aka Tomorrowpeople.
The record is a 192Kbit/s MP3 and is 8.93MB in size.
This recording is copyrighted by Andrew B. White and may be freely distributed, played and broadcast in line with the…

Information Entrepreneurs

Russell Brown — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 08:39:00 +1200

The following is the text of a paper presented to the Research, Libraries, Collections, Creating Knowledge conference at the National Library, Wellington, on September 2, 2005. A recording of the address, with a few more jokes in it, is available at Scoop.co.nz.
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The handful of men who decreed the terms of what we now know as the Internet were benevolent dictators.
They made decisions on the basis of what was, in engineering terms, no more or no less than good taste. They weren’t averse to using more than moral suasion. They controlled a good deal of research funding, and…

Nuclear Weapons are Morally Indefensible (Audio)

Lange Audio — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 19:06:00 +1200

This audio recording of David Lange's speech arguing the proposition that "Nuclear Weapons are Morally Indefensible" in the 1985 Oxford Union debate is used with the kind permission of Television New Zealand. A full transcript of the speech appears online here and is published in Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas about ourselves, with an accompanying commentary by Margaret Pope, the author of the original speech notes. Thanks are due to Karajoz Coffee Company for covering costs associated with this project, and CactusLab for their technical assistance and bandwidth.

Standing Upright

Traue — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 08:45:00 +1200

Jim Traue, one of the authors of Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas about ourselves joined us at the recent launch for the book in Wellington, and made a lively and forthright contribution to a panel discussion on ideas raised in the book. It was a pleasure to meet with and hear Jim, a former chief librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library and the author of the essay 'Ancestors of the Mind: A Pakeha Whakapapa' in the book. He was good enough to put some what what he talked about on the night into prose, which follows. RB. Great New Zealand…

The Historian as Prophet

KEITH SINCLAIR — Thu, 03 Mar 2005 09:20:00 +1300

The University of Auckland Winter Lecture series of 1963 took the theme of The Future of New Zealand. The seven lectures in the series were subsequently published as The Future of New Zealand, edited by Muriel F. Lloyd Prichard and published by Whitcombe & Tombs.
The book includes lectures by Allen Curnow and Bill Sutch on New Zealand literature and the future of manufacturing respectively, but it is perhaps the last entry in the book, Keith Sinclair's The Historian as Prophet: Equality, Inequality and Civilization that has weathered best.
Sir Keith's essay is copyright to the University of Auckland and is…

New Zealand: A Maori Lament

JACK TUAWHAIKI III (aka Bob Gormack), 1948 — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 11:17:00 +1300

Ignorance can have its purpose. When I was reading through issue one of Bookie, a 1948 "miscellany" from Christchurch's Nag's Head Press for items that might make a Great New Zealand Argument, I was particularly taken with a polemic poem - New Zealand: A Maori Lament - by a Jack Tuawhaiki III.
From the context, I took the author to perhaps be a descend of the well-known Otago Ngai Tahu chief Tuhawaiki, or "Bloody Jack". Keen to do the right thing, I called the whakapapa office at Ngai Tahu to see if they could turn up anything more. (In retrospect,…

The Singers of Loneliness

Robyn Hyde — Fri, 10 Dec 2004 09:22:00 +1300

Written from memory, a long way from home, and in the midst of a war, Robin Hyde’s 'The Singers of Loneliness' is a something of a letter in a bottle. This impassioned assessment of New Zealand literature - an account of “what has been saved, what thrown away, and what is still possible and urgent” - made its debut in August 1938 in an unlikely venue: a small internationalist magazine out of Shanghai called the T’ien Hsia Monthly.
Why T’ien Hsia? Why Shanghai? In January of 1938, Robin Hyde had set off on her long-awaited journey to England. The original…

Ancestors of the Mind: A Pakeha Whakapapa

Ancestors — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 11:02:00 +1300

It's easy to forget that today's debates about culture and identity are not all new, and that the thinking of years past can be usefully applied today. I was alerted to Jim Traue's 1990 pamphlet Ancestors of the Mind by a friend who had had it "kicking around the house" for years. I read it and agreed it had much that was useful for us now. Jim kindly agreed to its republication as part of Great New Zealand Argument, and also supplied a comment on how the essay came to be, and who has happened to it since its original…