KAPAI: Their place or ours, an inconvenient query

Don't know if it is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning but I seem to be seeing things in a lot lighter and left of centre vein lately.
Here are a couple of examples. Every time I see the television ad of Aunty Mabel sitting outside the Four Square waiting for the bus I envisage her reading a copy of the revamped Truth newspaper with Al Gore on the cover and the quote just has to be "How Inconvenient".
For those of you who don't know or who simply haven't switched on to the joys of Maori Television, Aunty Mabel from Ask Your Aunties is a diva of the highest order and she comes from the rohe of Rereatukahia in the culturally cool community of Katikati. Aunty Mabel is world famous when it comes to commentators and she really is one person who could talk a light bulb into turning itself off, unlike Oscar-winning Al Gore who had the environmental spotlight shone on to his own gas guzzling lifestyle last week, and was exposed for using more than 20 times the national household average of electricity.
Like my mad mind thought, "How Inconvenient".
Another milestone of movie madness during Oscar week was Director James Cameron finding Jesus, and I don't mean the Destiny-type discovery on a Sunday night at the Bishop's wharekarakia (church) either. No, this A-list celebrity on the Hollywood walk of fame believes he has found the actual remains of Jesus and he is going to make a movie about it. Can't wait for the sequel starring Al Gore as al-Qaeda called Where you bin hiding Mr Laden?
Something you cannot hide is history and when I heard Councillor Mary Dillon saying Maori did not want a museum up by The Elms I thought to myself, ``hang on a minute Mary'', it's called The Elms not The Alamo, and the only way to learn from history is to face it, not hide from it.
I find bygone battles fascinating and many Maori I have spoken to feel the whenua up there on Cliff Rd should be a home for Te Papa _ Our Place and Our Museum. The 1000 acres of prime Tauranga real estate Archdeacon Brown was given to guard for Tauranga tangata whenua was indeed called Te Papa _ Our Place. Not my place or your place, not Neptune's shed or another boring building built on a barge but Te Papa _ Our Place.
Our Museum, teaching our children about our history and for my two bobs' worth you cannot hide history, just ask my mate Bruce Matuschka.
Bruce Matuschka or Tusky as we called him back in the day when he coached the Mount Maunganui Senior Rugby team is a living legend of grass roots rugby. He knows more about the game than some of the so called "gumboot goal kickers" who are booting the backside out of Bay Rugby today. Tusky reckons and I agree we should crouch 'n hold before we engage in buying Bob's Baypark.
Just as The Elms holds the mana of the oldest museum in Te Papa, The Tauranga Domain is the turangawaewae (birth place) of our national sport with many magic memories of bygone matches. For my two bobs' worth Baypark is built on ``wahi tapu'' (sacred ancestral) land against the wishes of tangata whenua and an independent report should be commissioned into the pros and cons of its purchase by the council before we kick the Domain into touch forever.
Imagine if we had done this with the surf reef and looked below the surface as some are suggesting for the proposed site of the museum down on the waterfront. We would have all been waving goodbye to Tay St like we are now doing to The Elms and The Domain.
When I hear the figure of 600,000 visitors a year for our new museum bandied about I have immediate flashbacks to the million-dollar promises that the very vocal and now very silent Dr Kerry Black promised in his reefer madness proposal. It only takes a telephone call to Taranaki to talk to the operator of one of the concessions at Puke Ariki Museum (where the figure of 600,000 was gleaned from) and you will find out first hand that there has been nowhere near that number of annual visitors.
Museums are at best big libraries of learning and we will soon learn they only hold a very limited interest for most locals and even then they are selective of what they see.
History can be a very powerful teaching tool sometimes if we stand strong and listen to its lesson.
But sometimes the truth can be too inconvenient and it gets in the way of blinkered visionaries who want to be remembered for what they left behind as a legacy of their leadership.
I guess only time will tell if Tauranga's Te Papa museum was built as their place or Our Place.
Pai marire tommy@indigenius.org