One of the most destructive things that can be done to another human is to take away their language. It dismantles them from the inside out. Colonisers used it to strip Indigenous peoples of their identity and self-worth
It can be done quietly — the stealthy removal of Indigenous place names and words from official use (as the conservative New Zealand government is doing) — or it can be brutal.
‘Six of the best’
My Māori father is 86 but hs eyes still flash with anger when he remembers the beatings he was given as a tiny boy for speaking Māori at the local “native school”, a national system of village primary schools in the 1940s.
The teachers called the whippings “six of the best”. He says he was ordered to get a vine which grew nearby and used as a cane and then told to bend over in front of the other children who watched in horror.
“There was nothing between the cane and your bare skin. It drew bruises and sometimes blood. It was seen as the norm at that time. if that happened today whoever treated children like that would be imprisoned … but for us it was like the lashings given to convicts, six of the best until their backs bled.”
Sorry not sorry
My father, a former Labor minister for Māori affairs, has repeatedly demanded an apology from the Crown for the violence that was inflicted, including an impassioned submission to the Waitangi Tribunal. The silence is deafening.
“My ancestors were seen as savages that needed to be civilised and the best way to do that was to start at the most vulnerable age of a generation, which was attendees at the so-called native school. It wasn’t just a matter of language. It was a matter of disempowerment.”
The loss of Indigenous languages is like a global virus. The Conversation reports Australia is on the brink of losing its Indigenous languages. Of the world’s 7,000 languages, it’s estimated 50% to 90% won’t be spoken in the next 50 to 100 years. Most under threat are that of Indigenous peoples, and one of the world’s fastest rates of loss is in Australia.
Why does it matter? Because language is more than the spoken word. It’s the carrier of meaning and identity. It’s the carrier of cultural stories and ways of life. It tells you who you are and where you came from. It connects you in a direct line to ancestors who may have spoken it 1,000 years before you. It’s nourishment for the soul.
Health care
According to Australia’s National Indigenous Language Report (2020), speaking language has “demonstrated benefits for individual well being and health, particularly mental health”. You would have thought preserving it a small concession to those from whom so much has been taken.
My father speaks and sings his language and it flows from him like his breath. I can’t speak the language of my ancestors. I was brought up in a predominantly white neighbourhood by beloved adoptive parents.
Meeting point
As an adult, I met my biological father who lived in the Bay of Islands. He’d been born in a palm hut on an isolated windswept beach. An English midwife passing through the district helped deliver him. She was from Dover so his mother gave him that name.
I’d travelled from Melbourne, a nobody from a mega city of skyscrapers and 5 million people. In that small village by the sea where they have spoken their language for hundreds of years, I was the English speaker related to them all.
My father organised a visit to our tribal marae (traditional meeting place) at the top of one of those impossibly green Lord of the Rings rolling hills. My late grandmother was famous up there for bursting in to one of the closed meetings the alpha male leaders held and furiously demanding the women also be heard.
Flesh and blood
So here was I, a stranger in a strange place, walking on dirt roads past the modest houses of villagers who shared my DNA, who’d grown up with my grandmother, known my father and his brothers and uncles and endless kids — but didn’t know me. One by one they emerged from their homes.
There was a flurry of discussion between them and my father. I could see he was telling them in Māori that I was his daughter, this green-eyed, English-speaking blow-in from Australia. They looked at me startled — then delighted.
There was laughter and a lot of incomprehensible questions. Some hugged me, some held my face in their hands. I could hear in their tone they were welcoming me. My blood was their blood dating back 1,000 years — but I could not speak to them.
Get down
The brutal colonial practices of assimilation worldwide require the removal of Indigenous children from their families, and their cultural identity and language being erased is a big part of that. Powerful government actors are the original influencers who decide what is valued and what is not. The population gets the message. Your language is shit. You are shit. Rinse and repeat.
Regardless of Māori aptitude or Indigenous Australian aptitude, racist education policies worldwide were designed to lock in a future of under-achievement and embed the status of second-class citizen for First Nations peoples.
In 1930, TB Strong, the NZ director of education, wrote:
“The natural abandonment of the native tongue inflicts no loss on the Māori. Education should lead the Māori lad to be a good farmer and the Māori girl to be a good farmer’s wife.”
My father’s Māori language got him whipped at primary school and into fights when he was a young man, but it could never be carved out of him. Te reo Māori is taught in schools and universities and there are dedicated television stations and radio broadcasts in that beautiful musical language. Government attempts to diminish it once more are met with protest and pushback.
Do tell
Indigenous people worldwide fight daily to be seen and heard. I’m thankful my adoptive mum spoke such great English and taught it to me. But there’s a loss in being unable to speak my father’s language in his village and at that marae where the legend of my grandmother taking on the patriarchy is still told.
How lucky am I that smiles and outstretched arms are still a language that require no words.
What mis-representation of history.
Whilst I agree that the history of suppression of Maori language is true and unacceptable, the over-aggressive recovery it has made in NZ society is singularly unrepresentative!
As a pakeha of NZ and Australian origin, I find your representation offensive and unbalanced.
Just what we need – yet another black armband view of history!
I feel confident that indigenous languages will survive in the hands of committed elders and others, I am concerned that the kind of government involvement will only result in the kind of things that are going on in NZ. It’s gone too far, and we can only expect a retreat that you are lamenting is taking place in that sad country.
Oh Don. Really?
Goodness, what a strange response. I thought the article was an accurate account of the reality of colonialism as well as being well written and evocative. I was reading another account of similar treatment of the Irish language in the LRB today.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/july/take-these-yokesO
Don, your sarcastic reference to “yet another black armband view of history” means you haven’t been paying attention.
An offensive and unbalanced response that astounds me.
The evil of humans towards other humans is limitless and timeless. Since the beginning of recorded time, subjugated people have been treated like this by the conquering force. In the Middle Ages, the English forbade the Welsh their language. In 20th century Spain, dictator Franco forbade the Basques, the Catalans and the Galicians their languages. The Chinese word for language is the same and their word for culture. So despots have always known the power of language – and imagined their power was enhanced by abusing another culture they wished to dominate utterly.
Yes the account is an accurate account of colonialism and imperialism. Those who work to preserve and save languages are on the side of civilisation.
Don – what if the skins of the colonised were white? Where would you stand then? Would you be so vitriolic? Before they came to the antipodes, the English linguistically colonised Ireland and the Scottish highlands in an attempt to eliminate Gaelic; and in the Orkney and Shetland they managed to eliminate the Norn languages successfully by the mid/ late 19th century – not so long ago, and done in order to deny local populations their own culture as part of the attempt to make them more compliant.
I read Nicole’s article and was reminded of stories I heard from grandparents when a child about how language was lost to them. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Then the world’s culture becomes an international monotone: it’s like going to Dubai and finding the same shops as you would in GB, USA or Australia, the same dull. lack of diversity. Is that what you advocate for? Or would you rather we all spoke in Received English, pronunciation determined by the number of plums in the mouth and no other languages existing?
You, Don, summarise perfectly the problem here. I believe it can be clearly shown that when predominantly white people who have colonised other countries and displaced indigenous people that, unless they associate somehow with those people which is sadly often the only way to build the empathy needed to realise they are actually similar to ‘us’, then the attitude you display is shown. This sort of appalling dismissiveness displayed by you and the right wing of politics generally can, as happened in Australia with the referendum, is the key to not allowing people who are different and have a valid claim to the country to be recognised and respected. Here is a thought. I know exactly where your armband would fit. Begone.
Don’s response shows ignorance of how language loss occurs and how languages are revived. A few committed elders cannot by themselves revive a language in the face of the ubiquity of English and the powerful homogenising forces of colonialism. Government intervention and support is essential and New Zealand’s concerted efforts in past decades to revive and normalise the use of Māori within the mainstream have been exemplary. I was struck when working in New Zealand by the widespread use of Māori place names, the frequent use of Māori expressions in the mainstream media and the fact the Māori ceremonies were part of daily life. That all these efforts are being unravelled by the small-minded mean-spirited politicians who currently hold power is very distressing.,
Of the original 500 or so native languages in Australia, perhaps 50 survive, with various levels of commonality. Some are spoken by fewer than a thousand individuals, about the number of students in a good sized high school. While there is merit in retaining knowledge of these languages and the world view they represent, the aboriginal tongue will never be used widely. If there were a common agreed aboriginal vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation, there would be some chance of more extended use, but otherwise speaking in the native tongue will remaina niche enterprise. Learning English, the agreed national language, alongside a native language, is necessary if First Nations pupils are to advance in the broader Australian community.
Ever been to the middle of Australia? There are quite a few language groups there with well more than a thousand speakers. Many of the indigenous inhabitants are, of necessity, multi-lingual, needing to speak or at least understand the several, not always mutually intelligible, neighbouring language groups. There are a number who don’t speak any English. To them, language is part of their connection to country, take it away and you destroy or erode their tradition and culture.
“Learning English, the agreed national language, alongside a native language, is necessary if First Nations pupils are to advance in the broader Australian community” – why? What’s wrong with live and let live? Can you explain why people with a perfectly fine culture must confirm to a sycophantically Anglophone agenda?
Thank you very much for the beautifully written piece.
I hope you re-claim your language and speak those lovely words.
get a grip Don. the generations of Maori who were stripped of their language and culture would be offended by your pearl-clutching. your “over-aggressive recovery” is just code for agreeing with that assimilationist approach of yesteryear.
I also am a Pakeha, now living in Australia. When I visit my homeland I am moved and heartened to hear the sounds of Maori on radio, television and even among my pakeha family. The respect is genuine and sadly missing in Australia, where few people seem to care and the right wing of the Liberal Party is trying to distance themselves from ‘acknowledgement of country’. To lose your language is to be lost in another person’s culture. All power to preserving and speaking every endangered language.
Well said Michelle.
I think ‘Welcome to Country’ is mostly about respect.
Unfortunately not to many Australians have much anymore.
A well written article. Well done!
I loved reading this article… the gentle respect with which it was written..I felt I was right there.
And if it’s that connection to culture, via language, is all that is needed for people to show and BE respectful – which it seems is the case – we non-native speakers could do with that grace and respect. More More More, I say.
Such an interesting article. I’m a pakeha who’s lived in Australia for half my life and to me the rise in prominence of te reo Māori is the biggest cultural change I’ve seen in NZ since I moved here in 1998. Unlike Nicole’s Dad, I didn’t see any punishment for speaking Māori at school, I suspect because nobody did so anymore by the 1970s & 80s. We did have Māori immersion classes in primary school but any other usage was pretty tokenistic.
The rise in te reo Māori since I left has made me feel more ‘foreign’ in NZ, but that’s my choice and anyway, it’s also what makes me the most proud to be a Kiwi in the first place.
It is sad to see similar problems in NZ as we are facing in Australia.
The referendum was meant to achieve recognition and reconciliation. We failed unfortunately and this country remains racist to it’s core, by design as well.
David Littleproud, NP, only yesterday said we as Australian’s have done nothing to be ashamed of throughout history. He seems to have forgotten that the real history of this country is not recognised or taught in schools for one.
He needs to at least keep his mouth shut where possible I think.
Hopefully our indigenous population can keep their languages going despite the pressures. One good thing they have going is that their way is to pass down from generation to generation.
An offensive and unbalanced response that astounds me.
Don
Try this on for size:
https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/editorial/people/Tone-on-Tuesday-Naming-Things
Cheers
TW
Great piece. Thanks.
Nice, love it!
Hello Nicole I remember you well from your time at Mooroopna High School. Thankyou for this most interesting article. I’m so pleased that you that you have been able to discover something of your genealogy and meet your relatives. The Māori are proud nation and no doubt you are very proud of your roots.
As a Pakeha living in Australia, your story made me cry. But all is not lost while language continues to be taught and used and shared.
Thank you for this article.
In the 1950s, I was lucky enough to live on the East Coast of Aotearoa in a very small town near Gisborne.
Each of my parents had a separate one-teacher school. We were the only Pakeha kids and my talented mother made readers with stories of where we were and how Maori lived. I still have some of them.
No child was punished for speaking their home language which my sister and I also learned.
My mother was exceptional in many ways, and was fierce in her determination to honour culture.
Thank heaven today Pakeha of many ages are celebrating the rituals that knowledge of te reo Maori allows.
The regressive National Party and their supporters are horribly out of step with what makes Aotearoa a magnificent nation with a unique place in Pacific culture. (Australia could learn so much.) Still ways to go, but the positive direction is clear.
The indigenous community of Australia needs to come together and put forward their language as one, not 300 different languages and should then be taught in all schools so we all can appreciate the rich culture of our protectors of country. Is the Māori language just one or many but I love their anthem sung in both tongues and think ours is a bit too whitey.
There is no one indigenous language or culture, but many. What would happen in any attempt to amalgamate them into one language would be a bastardised pidgin, totally unreflective of the rich cultural diversity present in indigenous communities across Australia. Lose language, lose culture. ANY attempt at homogenisation would just be a furtherance of colonisation
Ngā mihi nui Nicole, for sharing this insightful, honest as well as deeply personal account of tracing your whakapapa within the context of intergenerational disconnection and the adverse impact of colonisation and its aftermath. As a Māori Australian your journey is very resonant. You correctly show how powerful language is for First Nations’ people. Te Reo Māori is foundational to Māori ways of knowing and being; its activation across Aotearoa New Zealand in public spaces and institutions such as schools and universities, hospitals, on buses and so on, is a powerful and tangible expression of collective decolonisation and respect. Yes, there is pushback by some. But the Māori renaissance that began in the late 1970s has more than momentum: it has the collective energies of voices like yours.
Four points to add:
Po Kare Kare Ana…most beautiful sounds
Nardi Simpson of the Stiff Gins sings awesome sounds in language.
My granny was raised in New Zealand and a story she wrote was under the byline Hinemoa…what a delightful sound to hear.
Traditional language emanates from the land on which people live; losing language is further loss of connection to the earth.
in OZ I apricate the welcome to country at the beginning of a function .BUT not when every speaker repeats it.
I remember when the anthem was played in the flicks and no one took any not notice .It was over done
Thank you Nicole for that beautifully expressed and very moving piece. The loss of language is a loss of cultural identity. We are the poorer for that loss.
Thank you Garry