1964: Washday at the Pa
March 24, 2025
By AHNZ
A great New Zealand book burning took place from August 1964 by The State. Our Government, the National 2.0 Ministry was in fact recalling and destroying its own books! From May that year 38,000 copies of a picture book had gone to the government schools of the nation named Washday at the Pa by Ans Westra. Now they wanted them all back at once!
Westra had just become a New Zealand citizen having immigrated from Holland about 7 years prior. She was an excellent photographer and at the behest of the Department of Education wrote this book which used her pictures. As per usual, Westra sought to capture realistic scenes from everyday life in New Zealand as it truly was. Well, that was the problem.
Groups like the Maori Women’s Welfare League and the Maori Education Foundation were spitting out their Bluff oysters and champagne when they found out what this book was about. These organisation pulled in millions of our dollars with the mission to make poor Maoris look like they were being helped. The photo essay did not back their propaganda. Welfare and Education were not on show here. Our anxious bureaucratic elites demanded a recall on the honest and decent copy so that nobody would be able to draw their own conclusions from plain and simple facts.
A bit of innocence and decency had apparently crept through into our schools within this book. Children were being permitted to learn from reality and think for themselves rather than be propagandised. This time in 1964 was perhaps the last time anyone let that happen again. The story of the book was of a typical rural family on a low income living in Ruatoria on the East Cape. A happy, warm, family living in the country like so many others. They were soon to leave their ramshackle old home to immigrate to New Zealand as part of The Second Great Migration.
The censorship reaction also focused on a page showing one of the children standing on the stove to warm her feet as a bedtime ritual. It hurt one of the essential threads of the Modern Māori Mythos that food preparation areas must never make contact with the lower body. All Maoris supposedly know this in their bones as some innate Rousseauian identity fact. Woke workplaces and government institutions rely on it for hegemonic appropriation of space. For example, Anglo-Zelandians might like to sit on a table or desk but a Wokester can shame them for it on the grounds that a Maori might wish to prepare food there some time (this used to happen at my university.) The lived experience of this family was getting in the way of the grifter’s racket.
The Maori Education Foundation endorsed censorship but went even further by calling for some race-based oversight. They wanted to create a Maori editorial veto, by the sounds of it, over all government publications. These censors would be “responsible,” “thoughtful,” and “Maori.” A State institution only 2 years old had already adopted a remarkably possessive attitude toward what the public were permitted to read and write about Maoris.
“Minister of Education, Arthur Kinsella, was starting to be swayed by the strength of the league’s criticisms and by the growing political power of the emerging Maori middle-class. His statement later that month explained why the government reached the decision to withdraw all copies of the bulletin: Nobody has denied that the family relationships as portrayed in the bulletin are affectionate, good-humoured and co-operative …. The objections mainly refer to the family’s living conditions, which are said to be untypical. They were not intended to be regarded as completely typical …. However, it is clear that the publication has given offence, and I have therefore decided that it be withdrawn from the schools.” – New Zealand in the Twentieth Century, Paul Moon (2013)
“…Turi Carroll (a nephew of Sir James Carroll) was present at these discussions in his capacity as a member of the Maori Education Foundation, and was able to lend his organization’s endorsement to the motion to ban Westra’s book, with the further suggestion that, in future, all publications ‘dealing with such topics be checked by responsible and thoughtful Maori people’” – ibid
“Scenes focus largely on the family’s nine children, mostly playing or getting into mischief, as well as some scenes of domestic chores,…The rural home had no running water or electricity” – Wiki
“The Māori Women’s Welfare League severely criticised Westra’s photographs at their conference, labelling them inaccurate, atypical and unhelpful. They argued that the sub-standard living conditions portrayed would reinforce Pākehā stereotypes of Māori as poor, rural and happily primitive…Nevertheless, in 1961 nearly thirty per cent of Māori lived in houses with no hot water, just over twenty per cent had no bath or shower, over forty per cent had no flush toilet and over seventy per cent relied on an open fire for heating.” – Museum of New Zealand (1998)
“When I first heard the term, I naively thought, Is that about the effect of my music? Little did I know.” – Barbra Streisand
“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine” – Obi-Wan Kenobi
The State grifters, by censoring this primary school bulletin publication did what all government action always does: Achieve the opposite of the intended result.
Instead of obscurity and being quickly forgotten like all the others, this Westra bulletin is a famous part of history.
The controversy shot Westra’s career up the ladder.
The book was re-published anyway with even more photos by a private printer, Caxton Press.
And, now we know that everything the government prints should be assumed to be propaganda. Anything that gets through their nets will not be about a clean, honest, portrayal. Everything will be informing a particular general narrative: the one they want you to believe. State History is not there to help you know yourself or your heritage. Anarchist History is the only chance at that.
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Image ref. Maori kids share a light in Washday at the Pa, Ans Westra (1964.) photography-now.com. Colour by AHNZ (2025)
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