1829: A Letter from Sydney

March 20, 2019

By AHNZ

Today, March 20th, is New Zealand Founding Father Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s day of birth.

It’s a very flattering bust, I’ve always thought. Makes EGW look like Chris Pratt from Jurassic Park when really he resembled Chris Pratt from Parks and Recreation. Especially when EGW was the age depicted! In reality that unfortunate Middle-Aged Spread had set in.

His famous A Letter from Sydney (where he had never been) was actually written in 1829 while EGW was in prison for kidnapping! Nevertheless, it’s a good bit of colonisation economic writing that even Karl Marx himself appreciated. EGW was a Dignity Culture exponent and doesn’t mince words here putting his finger on the characteristics of Slave Culture and Victimhood Culture populations he set out to undo with his schemes…

“People who, though they continually increase in number, make no progress in the art of living… whose opinions are only violent and false prejudices, the necessary fruit of ignorance; whose character is compound of vanity, bigotry, obstinacy and hatred most comprehensive, including whatever does not meet their own pinched notions of right; and who delight in a forced equality, not equality before the law only, but equality against nature and truth; an equality which, to keep the balance always even, rewards the mean rather than the great, and gives more honour to the vile than to the noble.”- Edward Gibbon Wakefield, A Letter from Sydney

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Colonising New Zealand was the family business of the Wakefields.

Mr. EGW the grandmother’s toy, the kidnapper of women, the criminal, the prisoner, the economist, the coloniser, the settler, the politician.

The Great Spider!

—
Image ref  A life-size marble bust EGW, presented to the New Zealand High Commissioner’s Office, London in March 1932; Historical South Island

Update: Caught myself saying it was his birthday but I want to be pedantic and say ‘day of birth instead’. I think you stop having birthdays when you die, that it’s a phenomena of the individual and if you want to talk about chronology the term is ‘day of birth’. I read about someone long dead having their “57th birthday” or something and it bugged me so I asked “did I do that?” Fixing this will let me rest.

Like    Comment     Share