When I was a child our fence separated town from country. Climb it, and I was in a paddock dotted with sheep. There was a shallow gully that ran east-west across the paddock and we would spend hours in there playing armies or peering into rabbit holes. The paddock was bordered to the north-west by a line of huge pines home to a colony of magpies; every spring they made our war games all too real. Once, Mum shot one, resting the barrel of the gun on the kitchen windowsill — she’d meant to frighten it.
That home is no longer on the edge of town. Across the fence lies the town’s new cemetery, the gully filled in, pine trees and magpies gone. The paddock - where we ran and dived and explored and crawled and rolled; where we squealed and laughed and taunted and yelled; where a farmer grazed livestock; where, in many ways, our lives had begun - exists now only as a memory, a shadow.
Before settlers arrived in the 1850s, this area was a mixture of scrubland and forest. They came with ambition, sheep, axes, and fire, transforming the landscape so it could become productive. Fortunes were made, lives of gentry and privilege acted out in the image of ‘home’; you know, that standard settler narrative replicated across all colonies: lives made good through daring, adventure, and hard work upon the land.
It’s an alluring tale if you’re on their side, mostly because it is true on one level. These men did dare to dream, venture into unknown places, and work themselves, the land, and its resources hard. They got as much as they could out of it. Then they squeezed and got more. Towns, goods, trade — these all flourished, and as the population grew new opportunities arose. My family was there to take advantage of some of them.
But first, the land had to be cleared. The preferred method of clearing had two stages. First, the undergrowth was felled and left to dry. And then, when the trees of value had been milled, fires were lit in the now dead and dry undergrowth, razing what remained of the forest and leaving fertile ground upon which grass seed could be spread.
And then the business of transformation could begin in earnest: fencing, grazing, trading, the land turned into a canvas upon which individual dreams and ambitions could be realised. Men with one clear vision swooped in. Men who could measure. But more than that, men who believed in the primacy of measuring, because it’s worldview that matters — that’s what directs the application of skill and effort, directs what’s dreamed of. Hard lines were drawn on maps and fences built to make those lines real, erasing the unruly, diverse, untamed land of before. The deserving and able were apportioned their share to work and maximise. Profit was aimed at. Man, the master of nature, using it for his own ends, knew what was his and how to get more.
Every time I climbed the fence, wary of the line of barbed wire, I carried this narrative with me. Our war games were inspired by ANZAC tales of heroism in the trenches. Our roaming amongst sheep a confirmation of our Kiwi identity. Our peering into rabbit holes the strengthening of our link to England and stories of its fauna.
How could we play any other way? The land that had been transformed in the image of settler ambition worked to shape our play and that play worked to shape who we were becoming. And our imaginations were surrounded by stories of triumph too: of men who had come and made this town out of nothing but dreams and hard work; of men who had turned land into wealth and earned everything they got; of men, our men, who had won wars; of men who had taken that pioneering spirit back across the seas and used it to show the Motherland our strength on the rugby field and by extension our worthiness as a people. Yes, the land and the stories around us spoke those truths: a pastoral paradise surrounding a nicely planned, busy town; where we could walk to school and do our work learning what we needed to learn to become part of that story of triumph; where sports fields allowed us to get comfortable with what it took to win, or feel the pain of losing and have men tell us to be more ruthless next time so we didn’t have to feel it again.
What a canvas. Nicely framed. Nice and smooth. It never occurred to us that beneath our feet were the decaying remains tree roots, twisted into the earth. We never thought about the violence on the day those fires ripped through the forest, fires lit by ambition, clearing the way for an ideology to be unloosed upon the land. We never thought about the real purpose of a fence - they were just there, everywhere.
Perhaps we should have. My cousins lived on the edge of the other side of town. Between them and their mean and scary neighbour was a small paddock filled with rusty old farm equipment and a goat. I must have been about 10 when we finally had enough courage to climb the fence and transgress that hard line between their place and his. We didn’t get far before the dogs started barking. And then came his anger. Of course we turned. Of course we ran. Of course we screamed when we heard the gun go off. It was his paddock. He had the power to define what was in and out.
But what is a fence to a bird, a worm, or any other form of life not under the domain of man? Pay attention: in them we see the shadow of what once was, a diversity that contrasts with what we predominantly see in our world — hard lines, uniformity, taming. The ideology of ‘mine and more’ that we live under, of squeezing resources in the name of progress, depends on these three things. The great project of our age has been extending the fields and resources upon which they can be applied. Land, livestock, people, minerals — all squeezed hard, every drop extracted.
We can’t look at anything anymore, especially the problems we’re facing, without thinking about how we can define it tightly, standardise our response, and control it. Education is not immune. Get in the literacy paddock, we’re screaming at our kids. The fate of our nation, your fate, depends on you making the most of that feed, we’re screaming. Teachers, you’re not maximising output, you’ve got to squeeze harder, differently, scientifically, we’re screaming. The great ideological project demands it.
Pay attention to the violence, the exclusion, the exploitation, that project requires. Pay attention to the fossils - the death we’ve unearthed - that it runs on. Pay attention to the uniformity it demands. Do we really think our future can be based on these foundations?
Pay attention to all the things that have accelerated as this ideology has become predominant: environmental destruction, species extinction, inequality, ill health (physical and mental), declining levels of academic achievement, social fracturing, decaying community infrastructure, isolation.
Pay attention to your anger.
You’re in a powerful position. Each child that comes before you is unique. You can help them escape from the paddocks. For, just like a bird or a worm, there are ways to approach learning that transcend fences. You can feed curiosity, imagination, attention, thinking, persistence, collaboration, etc. You can let them play. Look for the imprint of these approaches in your curriculum — they’ll be there. Our aim, surely, must be to grow courageous, strong, unique kids who aren’t easily controlled by those who want to fence them in, squeeze them, and measure what comes out.
We buried Nana in the new cemetery 8 years ago, around about where the pines were, although you need to have known the place as it was before to know that, the land smoothed and tended now as a mark of respect to the dead. But I knew this place before; I know — there she rests among the imprint of those ancient trees and their roots that dove deep into the earth, among the traces of ash left after the flames razed them, and among the amazing diversity of life in the soil, life that outlived the violence of colonial ambition.
I can’t condemn the men from the past, but we know now where their ideas and actions have taken us. The great project our our age needs to become nestling within and nourishing the diversity that has been denied, while we’re alive.
Our future depends on it.
Love the way this is put, full of memory , learning, understanding and challenge