Speak Up - KōrerotiaThe changing face of rural New Zealand

15 March 2017

Female Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Join the New Zealand Human Rights Commission as it engages in conversations around diversity in our country. Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Hello and welcome to “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia.” My name is Sally Carlton and today we’re doing a live recording here in Ashburton and we’re going to be talking about the stories of migrants who have come to Ashburton, some of them quite recently, some of them a bit longer ago. And this is all in conjunction with the Ashburton Museum who is hosting us today so firstly thank you Tanya for hosting us here and thank you very much to all of you for coming along.

We’re going to start talking predominantly to two of our guests about the exhibition downstairs and what prompted it to get going, why did we want to do an exhibition on migrants to Ashburton? So Sophie-Claire and Tanya, if you could please introduce yourselves.

Tanya Kia ora, I’m Tanya Robinson and I’m the Museum Director here at Ashburton Museum and we’re a department of the Ashburton District Council.

Sophie-Claire

Kia ora, my name is Sophie-Claire. I am originally from Mauritius, I moved to Ashburton two years ago and I now work as the Coordinator of the Mid-Canterbury Newcomers’ Network. I came to Ashburton because I actually followed my partner to New Zealand and then I also followed him to Ashburton, I didn’t know where New Zealand was or what it was like and I had no idea Ashburton even existed and I remember when we came into land into the Christchurch Airport all I could see was just fields of grass - what I thought was grass but it was farms - and I remember having this moment of thinking, Oh my god, I have landed in farms, I can’t work on a farm, I don’t know how to use my hands, what am I going to do?! And then we arrived and the earthquakes had happened so Christchurch was quite distraught and damaged and it was a very strange period of time to be in the South Island, I think, but at the same time, coming to a place like this that’s… And you can see all the challenges that the people are going through but you can also see the

resilience of the people and the community and I think that was quite inspiring for me to overcome my own fears and my own insecurities about moving somewhere that I knew nothing about. And in hindsight - I’ve been here for five years now - and I look back on the progress that I’ve done and how far I’ve come and I realise that in lots of ways I’ve kind of replicated the conditions of my arrival in this country and I’m really grateful for that.

Sally Thank you and I know that we’re here today to talk about a particular exhibition at the museum. Tanya, you might be the right person to be telling us about it. What prompted the idea of an exhibition about migrants to Ashburton?

Tanya Well I’m a newcomer as well so for me - I arrived in March last year - and it was really… I think when you’re new in a town and you’re looking at how you’re going to connect with a new community through a museum collection and the kind of activities that a museum does, you’ve really got your ear to the ground. And when I arrived it was not very long after the Multicultural Bite event and it was not very long after Ashburton had been featured in the Listener - I think when I first told friends and family that I was shifting here five people sent me that news article about Ashburton with their clippings from the Listener which was pretty cool.

I firstly knew about that and then I had… I think when I first arrived, it was one of the really strong stories that people were talking to me about, talking about the pride in this community and those stories of migration of course are so important and also I think they’re also our foundational stories and that everybody did come from somewhere to this place.

Sally And Sophie-Claire, you said you’d been in Ashburton two years so you’ve had a slightly longer experience living here, what made you get involved in the Newcomers Network?

Sophie-Claire

I got involved in the Newcomers Network after curating an exhibition called Crossing the Bridge. Just like Tanya, I had these experiences as a newcomer myself and the challenges that came with being new to a town and not knowing many people and I wanted to seek out other migrants and newcomers who had similar experiences and learn from their journey. So this led to 22 of us coming together and working together for six months on a show that celebrated the contributions of migrants to the community. Through this involvement, I made relationships with people who are in this community working to change the way that we connect with one another and learn from one another and so that led me to then join the Newcomers Network.

Sally Now I may have got this wrong but I believe that the photo exhibition of the migrants is on the wall that at one stage tells the portraits of the founding fathers of Ashburton?

Tanya So one of the things that I inherited when I came into this job was that we

had a reasonably fixed exhibition space, beautifully designed but designed perhaps to tell a really introductory story to the region. So one of my challenges was how I was going to change that and I’m particularly interested in reflecting communities, I kind of look at history and think well history is nice but history is about how we think about the present and how we think about the future and that’s really important to me.

So the wall was beautifully done - it had 120 portraits in sepia tones and black and white and it was very much about the founding stories of this district - so we thought we’d just stage a bit of an intervention and do something quite different. So it’s now an electric blue wall which is the colour of the Start with A Smile couch that we have here - that’s a separate story in the region and it’s like a patchwork now… Because of course we’re taking those photographs, we were asking people to send in portraits and we’ve taken photographs of people probably taken on their cell phone, lots of selfies, some very high quality photographs as well and you really get to see that vibrancy and colour of the people that are part of the district. It’s much more like looking at a crowd of real people today rather than those quite formal old fashioned portraits that people used to have to have because of the technology.

Sally How have you found people have been reacting to the exhibition?

Tanya Well it’s amazing because we haven’t finished filling the wall but one of the things it tells me, people are really responding and recognising the people that are on the wall. That tells me that newcomers are making a really big contribution here and they think that’s an important thing, we called it New Faces and New Lives and it was really about recognising the people as well and we also have a little booklet of the stories from people. So I think people have found it quite exciting coming to a museum and recognising people.

But the second part of that would be that we’ve added recently the Crossing the Bridge video, if people have seen that it is very, very moving and we’re probably not supposed to have people in tears in museum but we have had people that moved; they’re the most beautiful stories. People that gave very heartfelt stories about their experiences here have been migrants.

Sally Sophie-Claire, just to get a sense of it, do we have any idea of numbers of migrants coming to Ashburton?

Sophie-Claire

Yes we do. I did a little bit of research: there’s been a 15% growth in the last ten years in Ashburton and this has made our community the fifth-fastest growing community in New Zealand and 60% of that growth comes from migration and newcomers. We’ve got a really rich array of migrants from all around the world - the last census counted about 47 different nationalities. Now, some of these nationalities like the Filipinos and the Latin Americans are very, very well organised and others are represented by just one or two people. And in the last ten years I think

we’ve also noticed that people were previously coming here to work on farms and in the meat processing industry and gradually this has kind of expanded and there’s more creative people here who have been attracted by the lifestyle and by the opportunities and I’ve really enjoyed seeing this expansion and this opening up of the different perspectives and professional opinions and careers coming here.

Sally We’ve already heard a little about the Start with A Smile couch, the electric blue sofa with the balloons. What else does Ashburton do to welcome migrants?

Sophie-Claire

Ashburton is a great example, I think, of how the community has come together and embraced change. I was talking with one of my mentors a couple of days ago and he’s lived in Ashburton all his life and he told me about how ten or fifteen years ago it was quite rare to see someone that was visibly different and the local community didn’t really know how to react to cultural difference and he was really proud to share with me that this has changed so much. If we look at what’s happening in community-led projects, we’ve got it all covered from language to connection, isolation. For example, there’s Kiwi English that has been running for many years now, I think this is a great resource for us to at least make sense of some of the Kiwi slang that we have to learn to communicate with. Ashburton also hosts Multicultural Bite [festival] which is a fantastic event that has really brought people together around the love of food and given them a space to learn more about all the different cultures. The Newcomers Network does quite a lot of work as well, Iris has been one of our volunteers for many years and she connects women from international backgrounds in her coffee club. We’ve also now got language groups that are connecting people, for example the French Speaking Club. There’s lots going on at various levels of community organising and from various perspectives as well.

Sally So this is my final question for you two and I think it probably also relates to our other guests. There’s obviously a lot going on here for the migrant community, but do we think that that differs from moving to a bigger city. Do you think is it a positive in some ways moving somewhere smaller, or is it harder?

Sophie-Claire

I think that moving to a smaller town gives us more time to interact with our social environment and also I think it feels… It almost feels safer to reach out and talk to people because they are people that you are going to see at the supermarket, they’re people that you’re going to see at work. And for me, from my personal experience, moving to Ashburton gave me a chance to really explore who I was as an individual, as a woman, as a migrant and how I could contribute to my community. I think had I moved to a bigger city maybe some of these ideas would have been lost in translation. There are some challenges, I think, especially when you come from a bigger place and you move to a smaller place, but after a while I think we all start enjoying this familiarity and the sense of connection that comes with being somewhere smaller.

Sally OK well we’re going to move onto the next segment of our talk which is talking with our three migrant representatives here who I believe are all part of the exhibition wall. So we’ve got Leen Braam, Cornelius Grobler and Mubashir Mukhtar and it would be fantastic to hear - just to start off - a little bit about yourselves, when did you arrive in Ashburton and what are you doing here, those sorts of things.

Leen OK we’ll start on this side then. Goededag - that’s the Dutch version, some of you might understand it. It’s something like your G’day how are you? I am Leen Braam, I came from a small place called Amsterdam so coming from Amsterdam to Ashburton was a wee bit of a shock 35 years ago I can tell you. Why did I come? Well, we had family here and we’d been on holiday, my wife and I, a year before and loved New Zealand so we basically chucked it in in the Netherlands and came to Ashburton because the family was on this side. I didn’t come for a farm job, I am a landscape designer by trade and came here for a job - in those days it was a nursery and due to an uncle, Julie’s father, he went there and he said, I’ve got a landscape architect designer coming here, is there any work for a landscape designer in rural New Zealand? And they said, Yes please, when can he start? So that was 35 years ago and I’m still in this place what I call home, Ashburton, with my darling wife, my daughter and son and two granddaughters as well. So three generations in 35 years.

Sally And what are you doing these days?

Leen I am still landscaping, I’m still a landscape designer and contractor and I’m a Councillor in Ashburton District. Looking around here I would say one of the older ones who came to Ashburton, I’m darn sure I’m not the oldest one. I can tell you I’m pretty sure I’m the youngest Kiwi here because I became a Kiwi to become a Councillor so I’m only a Kiwi for the last six months.

Sally That deserves a clap. And Cornelius?

Cornelius My name is Cornelius Grobler, I’m originally from South Africa, Johannesburg. I’ve been living in New Zealand for the past eight years. At the moment my current job is the head coach at the Mid-Canterbury Boxing Academy. I’ve also been boxing for the last four years in New Zealand and in this time I’ve also achieved two national titles in my weight divisions.

My experience coming to New Zealand was pretty amazing, finding a nice safe place - where I come from in Johannesburg it was quite rough and in the age between 14 and 16 I got robbed about six times and my family also went through some difficulties with crime over there - and it was really nice just to come interact with new people and see how safe it is. And to come into a place to see there’s no burglar proofing or big fences putting up to keep people out but actually the houses at the front actually have no walls or no fencing at all so it was really amazing

experience.

Sally So you had a very positive early experience.

Cornelius That’s right, it was a positive early experience but also I was still a bit wary, my brother was a lot younger than me and was 19. They came two years before me, I was working in the bank in South Africa and when I just arrived in New Zealand my brother was 19 and he asked me if I could join him to go to a club in Ashburton and said, Well I don’t really like going to clubs and then I just come and give it a go. I went with him… I said to him, if we go how are we going to get there> And he said, No, we’ll get somebody to drop us off. And I said, So how are we going to get back? And he said, We’ll walk back. I said, Walk back? I said, What time? He said, 3am. I said, 3am? He said, No it’s safe here in New Zealand. I said, Really? But I thought they had Māoris?

I did not have any idea of what the Māori culture was like and when I got to know them I’ve actually made a lot of Māori friends, I never felt any racial issues with Māoris, they actually accept me as a South African really well into the community and we made good friends and even in my boxing gym I’ve got probably half of my boxing gym would be Māori and Islander boys and the other half would be Kiwi boys and even different other nations.

Mubashir My name is Mubashir and basically I am from Pakistan, a small city of Karachi, a population of around 20 million! And I came basically to New Zeeland for my PhD in economics at Lincoln University and the first day I got an interview call and in the first week got a job in the Council, at Ashburton District Council, and so it was like love at first sight for this township and I have been here for around one-and-a-half years now and got my residency as well as well have got my family now, wife and two daughters and this one is three years old and this other one is one-and-a-half years, she was born when I was here, gave a good surprise!

So overall my experience was an awesome one, it’s quite unbelievable kind of thing and it’s still like a dream going on, it just keeps on going and going, every now and then there’s new things come up. There are a lot of community support around me as well from my work place, from the normal Kiwi persons in here and the wider community, people living in this town. So it was really nice to get to know about them. And like Sophie said, that it’s a small town, we just come across every now and then to each other, it’s really nice to just have a quick chat with them if I am in supermarket or in domain or in somewhere else.

Sally You mentioned the Muslim community, how many Muslims are there in Ashburton?

Mubashir Currently there are around 15 or 20 families and a population size of around 60 to 70 Muslim people in here. Some are living in rural areas, some are in the urban and we are from around ten to twelve different

communities or different nationalities so they don’t meet regularly.

At Hakatere Marae we got a welcome ceremony, it was really nice to get welcomed on that migrant community and we had a kind of working relationship or they are just trying to make more networks and connections with the Salvation Army and [inaudible] working in this township because we are living in this community and we have to return it back to the community, to give back something to them, not just live in our lives and just pass like… So it’s really nice to get in touch with them and play a positive role in this community.

Sally This is a question for all of you, you’ve touched on Islam and finding a community to practice with. Have you found it easy enough to form those connections, practice your faith for example, speak your language if you want to, those sorts of things?

Leen When we came in ‘82 it was different, there was not a group like what we’ve got now so basically for us it was really… We had family which was a great start but we really had to get into the community and become part of the community. We did it purposely. The first letter arrived to New Zealand was from the Dutch Club in Christchurch, invited us to join and be there every Saturday night. Basically it went in the fire and it burnt quite well because we came here to become part of New Zealand. I’m still Dutch - to be honest I’m a proud Dutch Kiwi - but I always been part of Ashburton because we found our way in without this group. This is great, it will be far easier if that was around but it wasn’t so we did our own thing. We found it really easy to become part of Ashburton, it’s like wow where are you coming from? Ah the Netherlands, ah I thought I could hear that… And I normally ask them the same question, where are you coming from? Ah no I come from Ashburton. I said, Oh I could hear that too. There’s not an Englishman or an English-speaking person who doesn’t have an accent so don’t be scared.

Sophie-Claire

I also wanted to add to this that in Ashburton there is also a very active Indian Multicultural Association and they celebrate Diwali which is the Festival of Light and it’s been a beautiful festival for us as a community to come in and learn about their culture, their traditional beliefs and also just partake in the celebration. Where I want to link in with this is we have an Indian Multicultural Association, we have the Ashburton Muslim Association, and it really seems to me like as a migrant community, we’re able to not only just live here and make the most of the opportunities and the environment that we have here but we can also pursue our own cultural aspirations. I think migrants and newcomers here are accepted for who they are and given an opportunity to express they are and bring that into the big fruit salad that we’re creating here.

Sally You’ve touched on having Māori and Pasifika students at the boxing school, you’ve touched on having a welcome ceremony at the marae, have you found that all these different elements of Ashburton culture, the

migrant cultures coming in, the Pākehā cultures, the Māori culture, the Pacific cultures, those are all fusing together?

Mubashir It was really amazing because was I didn’t know about the Māori culture, what is it… It was like a thing that OK, it is something like Māori but what is it I didn’t know. And when we started discussing with them and knowing more about them I was just amazed, really amazed to see that there is more commonalities between us than the differences. About 90% or 95% of the things are in common between the Māori and the Muslim culture and with the other Pacific and some more culture as well so we are trying to reach them but we haven’t touched them but some day we will do it so it will be nice because every now and then we keep on seeing them. Like my daughter has started at kindy and there are many Pacific people and Samoan people in there so she is making some friends with them because she doesn’t speak English at the moment so is just speaking a few words and the same thing goes with the Samoan families; their daughters and their children also cannot speak that much of English and it’s very nice, they can just communicate with each other in sign language and anything, it’s just like greeting them in the morning and then going this way… Nice to see them. It’s like a very nice thing on an individual level as well as on the level of the society.

Sally Now if we come and focus a little bit on the exhibition, you’ve all had your photos taken (or you took your own photos, I suppose). Why did you decide to get involved in this sort of an exhibition? Having your pictures on the wall as a newcomer to Ashburton?

Cornelius Well for me it was… It started for me coming into Start with A Smile campaign, it’s how I kind of got to know about all of this and I just saw it as a really positive thing for the community to take part of and also to send a good example for my younger boys. I thought it’d be good for them to show them that you take part in the community by showing interest and by just showing up with whatever they invite it is. So I think it’s also an easy way to get to know new people and connect with people so a lot of faces that I see here today I already know those connected to other places, different places. So that’s great to just get together by these places and get to know and find out what’s going on in the community.

Sally Have any of you noticed since you’ve had your photos on the wall that people have recognised you or have come up to you, anything like that? Has it made a difference in your lives?

Cornelius Well just for myself, I just walked into the door and we had some friends walking past and said, Hey Cornelius we just saw your photo in there! So that just happened as I was walking upstairs so that was awesome.

Sophie-Claire

I’ve got a really cool story actually that someone told me yesterday, they went to a rural women dinner and there was a lady who had been to the exhibition downstairs who recognised my friend and she said, Oh you are… I’ve seen your photo at the museum and I watched the movie that

you were in as well. And my friend said, Oh yeah what did you think about it? and the lady kind of took a moment and then she just started crying and my friend was… she kind of just was standing there and oh don’t cry, I’m going to cry, oh no we’re both crying and she thought it was really touching how not only people had come in and learnt about her story and looked at her photo but they had really connected with her at a personal level even though they knew nothing about her. And I thought that was probably why we do the things that we had.

Tanya We had two young men who are missionaries - I don’t know if they’ve turned up today, they were going to - and they’re a different kind of newcomer in Ashburton in that they only come for four or six months, that they’re called here as part of their Mormon faith. And they were amazing, the number of people they must have contact with, they could go across the wall and say yes, yes, yes, no, oh we would probably meet them somewhere else, yes, yes, yes. They knew so many people on the wall, it was fantastic and you realise some of these people aren’t actually here for a long period of time but have made amazing connections that I’m sure that they’ll maintain and just touched a lot of lives.

Sally I’m particularly interested, I guess, in thinking about has been part of the exhibition or what it’s meant to you guys, has it made you feel more like you’re part of this community?

Tanya It probably has for me because it’s been such an easy way to get to know people and to start to learn some of the new stories in addition that thing of keeping your ear to the ground so the contacts that I made, it absolutely has. Even this experience today of hearing that wealth of positivity, all I did was go to Australia for a few years having come from the North Island and come back so to imagine people travelling so much further. I have to say Australia is very different so it must be even more different to come from elsewhere and I certainly admire that. One of the really wonderful things for us has been because we’re constantly thinking about building a museum collection - we have one of the largest collections in the South Island and we have something like 20,000 objects, we have six million photographic frames and 1.6 kilometres of archives - but how do we use that and the growth potential in that exhibition to keep reflecting our community? So one of the lovely things was that I got to know Yep who has been in New Zealand since 1949…

Yep I’m not the newcomer!

Tanya He’s definitely one of the most famous faces on the wall! That led us to really starting to talk to him about his family who came here as market gardeners particularly and we have now added to our collection through photographs and through even the sketch plan of the settlement that the family lived at, to have that in the collection so that we know that it’s useful. I think our next thing is really collecting much better stories. Yep is very… He thinks it should be all about only his elders in his family but we’re quite curious about his kids and him as well.

Leen If I can add onto Tanya: because when she asked me, I was basically not going to do it. I’ve been in New Zealand plenty of time so you always see the old people who started this off - looking at it they were the forefathers, they started it - so why do want me? But then I started thinking. I said, Well hold on, all of us are part of the future and are part of the past so when I started thinking about it that’s the reason I said OK, yes, I’ve been here for 35 years, yes I have to admit that people know me by now, I am part of it.

Tanya And one of the things about the space that we’ve got the exhibition in and it’s right in the centre of the museum and it’s a circular area, it’s a curved wall that runs around one side of that circle and we saw it as being like this space in which the newcomers or these migrants are welling up in the middle of our exhibition areas, they’re quite long term areas around the outside but also that they’re surrounded by this history that’s really supporting that central space, that rounding up.

But one of the things in that area is interactive, you can click on like a touch screen and you can click on different names of different streets. And of course I’ve been thinking what happens in the future in a town and learning the names of the streets here - and of course streets are typically named after founding people or the people who owned the land in that area, occasionally events - and I was looking in that space thinking, Well in the future the naming of the parts of our town or our district are going to change as well so that will start to see more diversity. It won’t all be Camerons and Wells, these very English and Scots names - and funnily enough I discovered in that that there is a Braam Lane which I think is just a wonderful indication of a sense of humour in the family that Leen Braam would have a Braam Lane… But it’s the first indication of that happening as well.

Leen There’s a wee story to this. The name Braam - a lot of Kiwis have trouble saying, they make Bram out of it, Broom, Brown, I’ve been called “Hey you” - Whatever! But Braam is a plant and if I translate it it’s blackberry. So when we did a small… We’re self-sufficient, of course we shifted out of town and I thought how are we going to use this name of Braam or blackberry so I had blackberry nip, we had three or four names and Council asked us to put a name down for Council and of a sudden it was our daughter Ainsley who said, Hey Dad, you spell your name quite often as Lane, why not Braam Lane? So that’s where Braam Lane came from.

Sally I think that seems like a lovely point to start to round up this part of the discussion. We’ve spoken about the past and the present and moving into the future and Cornelius you touched on the kids in your boxing gym for example, you’ve just arrived with your family, we’re talking about renaming streets, there’s a lot of things moving forward and so now we’re going to open the floor for audience questions.

Female1 With the panel, would you recommend Ashburton to your families and

friends to come here? Is it that good a place that you’d tell them to pack up and move over?

Mubashir Absolutely and I’ve been trying to call all the students or all the new families or newcomers who are coming to Christchurch and are located in Canterbury, anyone in North Island to visit at least as you go down and try to settle down in there and a couple of them have settled in there now so we are coming in here and it is very recommended to move over and come to this township. Because it is a small town and compared to Christchurch but when you see by living in here you will see that everything is here, even for us we just have to buy some supplies, some special ones and we have to go to Christchurch, elsewhere everything is here. And we have most friendly people here and especially from my experience in here during my couple of initial months and whenever just walking down the road or across the street people were just seeing oh, ok, and I can just see the faces of the people turning around and things like that and one day I was standing outside the restaurant, just ordered dinner because I didn’t cook that night and a man come across to me and shake my hand and ask how are your life going now? And I was just amazed to see that he is a total stranger and he doesn’t know me or nor I know… He just kept on asking how are you feeling, how is everything going on? And he was just in this township area in some… I don’t remember his name now or his business but he just kept on talking with me for around ten minutes or so and my order was ready and it was very lovely, it was just one of the examples, I’ve come across a lot of examples like that.

Cornelius For myself yes I would recommend family to come and stay in Ashburton but most of my family is already here. Before I moved to New Zealand my mother, my brother and my two sister moved the year before, maybe a bit more than a year and I was still happy with my job in South Africa working at the bank but seeing my brother being at the age of 18 or at that stage at 17 driving sports cars and having big screen TVs made me a bit jealous knowing that he’s so young and he found a good job on a farm and he was doing really well for himself, wanted me to come and see what it’s all about and that was Ashburton because Ashburton did not just have a… Well it’s not a big city like Christchurch but there’s a lot of job opportunities here: we’ve got dairy farms, the meat works, all these things around Ashburton which attract a lot of foreigners to come and work and it’s also a good way to connect to people throughout those big companies because that’s where I made most of my friends is working at those big meat works. Even starting at [inaudible] when I started here eight years ago, that’s where I made all my main friends, the company is massive, we’ve got hundreds/thousands of people in that time that I moved around and I got to know in that stage, it was awesome.

I would recommend people to come and stay not just for work opportunities but because of Ashburton the community. Everything went really well, I moved away for one year to Christchurch but I don’t like it so I came back and one thing that really attracted me back to Ashburton

was my sport, my church and my family. I also gained a Kiwi family since I’ve been here and that’s Lisa and Carl and Lisa’s here at the moment sitting at the back there hiding, she doesn’t want to make eye contact. So I came back for them as well because they’ve been a massive part of my life, they’re from a different country but we are family, wherever I’ve went with my boxing around New Zealand they’ve always followed. Carl Anderson, my boss, he’s not missed one of my fights wherever I went around the country and it was a massive support to find people being so kind, coming into a community that people can actually welcome you in as a family and accept you for your differences or for your culture and for all those things that people sometimes make you scared to connect with you because of all the differences.

People usually say you’re scared of what you don’t know and one thing I’ve noticed about a lot of Kiwis is that they’re not scared, they do make the effort to come out and meet you and introduce themselves and make you feel welcome.

Female2 I was just wondering what are some of the things that amuse you about being in Ashburton? Some of the things that we perhaps would complain about - like I didn’t find a park right outside so I went around the block again to find something closer and it took me five minutes longer to come to work today, things that we think are a bit of an issue. What are some of the things that amuse you that we comment on and you think you’ve got no idea.

Tanya One of the things that we do at the museum is we write a heritage page for the Guardian newspaper every week which is quite an undertaking and one of our most popular ones was one where I just wrote about does Ashburton have history. I’m not quite sure, I think this came out of a conversation that we were having in my team which was around people saying, Oh Ashburton doesn’t have history like Oamaru which has beautiful white stoned buildings or wherever. So I wrote this story but one of the things that I couldn’t help but write about in that one was how people say, Oh it’s just next to the Farmers corner or it’s just next… And you’d think, But that’s nowhere near the Farmers department store! But 40 years ago or something it was called that! And I find that really hilarious, it can’t stay this way surely or otherwise we’re all going to have to learn these dozens of little quirky local things.

Female3 A couple of weeks ago I happened to attend a service club dinner with Sophie-Claire and the evening was about newcomers and there were about seven or eight people who told their story in the room. I was delighted to see the hand of friendship extended and received so well. I’m wondering what more as a receiving community Ashburton and wider Canterbury and New Zealand can do to welcome migrants?

Sophie-Claire

I think that there are certain areas where as a community we can improve in terms of making information easier to find for people who are not familiar with where the Farmers corner is now or used to be 40 years

ago and maybe in terms of language barriers as well but those are things that come with practice and that come with us learning and moving forward as a community. I think we’re already doing so much, you’re leading the Canterbury Mayoral Forum for migrant integration which is a great programme and it really involves everyone at various levels of community to think about what we can do to welcome people but as we grow, as we welcome more people, as we face more challenges I think that’s how we find solutions to these challenges. Migrants have needs now that they didn’t necessarily have five or ten years ago, so it’s up to all of us - not just the local community but also the migrant community - to learn to come together and look at how we can make things better for all of us. I think the responsibility shouldn’t be just to Ashburton as a community, it also comes on our shoulders to go into the place where we live and learn about them, learn about the history of Ashburton, learn about the culture and the people who are here who are working to help us too.

Mubashir What we can put forward for the future of Ashburton or what’s on your mind down the track, five years down the track, what will we have in Ashburton?

Sophie-Claire

I think that we can grow more and we can also expand the areas that we are currently focusing on. I know and I respect and I understand the importance of the farming community to our community but I also know that things are changing and people who are coming here are coming here for different reasons as well. So in five years I would love to see Ashburton be recognised in the way that we recognise it. We see what people are doing here, we see the entrepreneurship, we see the inspiration, the creativity and the progress but if we can band together and push this out to the rest of New Zealand I think we can really become an example for the way in which we negotiate diversity and grow diversity.

Leen It’s also not being scared to ask, if you’re new it’s real easy to stay offish and don’t be part of it. We have friends who did that and they could not believe at how many people we knew within a year and they’ve been here years before we came, we really went in, we jumped in boots and all. If we didn’t understand… I had people laughing at me because you know, stupid Kiwi sayings - hitching and hijacking, that was something I always mixed up - that was great fun. A diary and a dairy… Things like that. But if you don’t take the first step then you can’t expect anything back, you have to be the first person to act. So it’s really: take the first step, say g’day or hello, whatever you want to say as long as it’s not a swear word. You will get an answer back and that’s how you start off and where we should be five years from now is doing it every time, talk to each other.

Male1 And don’t forget to smile.

Leen Yes.

Female And the key too is always be connected to people, always try and find ways to be connected, keep that connection going.

Leen Be honest, be open.

Tanya One of the lovely things about the history of this District is that this region was travelled through and to by so many people for such a long time and so we have for example down at Wakanui is a settlement which was from 1350 which in New Zealand that’s a very old - a long time for New Zealanders, maybe not for Leen or South Africa but anyway -.and for Māori this was an area that there was a famous tree, it was called ___ and it was like a sentinel that people travelled through our district and they used that tree to wayfind. So it was also a felling tree so it was an important food tree so this was the key symbol of this region, it was the key meeting place for this region and so if you think of those themes of sustenance an wayfinding and shelter which that tree gave those three things and many, many, many people who have travelled through here before and it was a meeting place as well and I think that those are really lovely things that have been here for so long and they’re still here now.

Sophie-Claire

And they can become the basis for the way that we see ourselves collectively as well and how we move forward, we’re building this meeting place and this converging of different cultures and different lifestyles.

Sally OK well I’d like to thank everybody very much for coming along today and otherwise I believe its afternoon tea time. Thank you very much.

MUSIC