It was Dave Dobbyn, Billy T James and a whole bunch of 1980 celebrities singing Sailing Away, an anthem to New
Zealand’s 1987 America’s Cup Challenge.
It starts with a hauntingly beautiful version of Pokarekare Ana and then the ensemble joins in with some legendary lines like ‘Bunny Waters’ and ‘One people on the water’ which is followed by Barry Crump’s raspy voice singing ‘One people on the land’ and a chorus of school kids and Ray Wolfe reminding us ‘New Zealand can do it’.
Unfortunately we didn’t do it , it took another eight years for our national pride to be sated.
We truly were one nation, as we finally watched our yacht cross the line to the immortal words of Peter Montgomery, “The America’s Cup is now New Zealand’s cup”.
We were one nation but I don’t think we were ever one people on sea or land.
Many wouldn’t know it, but ‘we’ are competing for the Olde Mug again right now, ‘we’ are the holders, so get to host the regatta and ‘we’ have chosen to host it, not in Waitemata or Whanganui a Tara, not even in Taūranga, but in a lovely wee spot, literally on the other side of the world, Barcelona.
I used speech marks on the ‘we;, because in my mind, despite having New Zealand on the stern of the boat, it’s more ‘them’ than ‘we’.
I see it as mega rich people competing against other mega rich people to see who can buy the fastest boat and crew. Actually when you think about it, that’s what the America’s Cup has always been, I think we just got sucked into thinking it used to be something different.
That was not the only thing we were fooled by, in my opinion.
Many hark back to those times as the Golden Days, but not all of us. You see the ‘One people’ thing has always been a myth. Since the 1800s there have been at least “two people” in our motu, with two very different ways of thinking, being and using resources.
When the two started becoming three, we created the Chinese Immigrants Act, then 90 years later launched the Dawn Raids on our fourth peoples. Of course, Māori, Chinese and Pasifika people were not the only groups that were marginalised.
It was horrible if you were gay, not great if you were a woman and downright dangerous if you had a mental health issue. Basically if you were not a rugby loving, beer drinking, straight white male in 1987, you most likely fell outside the definition of “one people”.
As a rugby loving, beer drinking, straight, white male, I speak from experience.
Still, the 80s were not all bad, we had Split Enz and Herbs, K bars and Cobblestone pies, Commodores and Falcons, and of course, the humour of Billy T James and Barry Crump.
There are lessons to be learned from those days, but in the immortal words of Neil Finn, “History never repeats, I tell myself before I go to sleep”.
