Stewart Gray: Beam me up, Scotty

This author objects to protesters defiling the legacy of Kiwi soldiers to make an invalid point. Photo / Getty Images

A few weeks have passed since my first close encounter with an anti-vaccinator freedom fighter. I met him outside a pub on the street where I once lived. Of friendly disposition and seemingly from what I would call the working class, he was intent on explaining to me the world as he knew it.

He was an intelligent being, I know because he told me so. He told me other things as well. Things he knew because he "followed the science" and because he was aware that "history is (only) written by the victors". He asked if I knew that. I told him that I believed there was some truth in the aphorism.

Buoyed by my disinclination to argue the vaccination issue and realising I shared his expressed cynicism of middle-class, middle-management bureaucratic procedure with all its woke pretence, he assumed my intellectual subservience and took on the role of a preacher. It was his pleasure to avail me of much of what he knew.

But much of what he knew seemed bizarre to me. After he left I had cause to ponder the nature of reality so I consulted Mr Google and ended up in a rabbit hole that took me all the way to quantum physics.

I too have a personal appreciation of what I think is a very basic understanding of New Zealand's recent history. At variance with my learned friend and sourced, I suspect, by different influences — gleaned by factors borne out of the experience of my Pākehā ancestors; and by those of their contemporaries as well as from my own observations and only in part from the annals of recorded history.

In the light of current events, the reality of what our early New Zealand ancestors endured is worth noting because the ramifications of the restrictions of today have precedent in our history and are mostly trivial by comparison.

The hardships most early settlers endured and the rigour they displayed in overcoming them established our post-colonial society of which I and many others have been the beneficiaries.

Early Pākehā families that arrived in colonial times endured what was tantamount to a lockdown period of at least three months in circumstances that were far more onerous than those of today.

In the case of those who came on the "Lloyds", the trip took five months with the loss of the lives of 67 children. Fathers who waited ashore for the arrival of their wives and children were told of their fate — buried at sea, victims of whooping cough because the ship's surgeon knowingly allowed an infected child to board the ship.

Whooping cough is a disease that, like many others — polio, tetanus, hepatitis, rubella, measles etc — is now controlled by vaccines. Vaccines have saved the lives of countless people across the world, in particular, the lives of children.

As a child in the 1950s, I have memories of the controversy surrounding childhood vaccination programmes. I remained unvaccinated during that period and resisted taking the oral vaccine in the early 60s.

My chances of contracting polio were diminished by the high percentage of children who were vaccinated. I knew two children who contracted polio in the early 1950s: They endured long periods of isolation and one was crippled by the disease.

My sense of the historical efficacy of vaccines challenges the strident assertions of those who protest that vaccines kill children.

Health Department clerks managing parental consent cards for the 36,000 children to be vaccinated against polio in 1957. Photo / Herald archives

But the claim that vaccines kill is not only restricted to children. My erstwhile friend from Guyton St, the man of a thousand faces, told me that the 50 to 80 million people who died during the Spanish Flu epidemic did so because they had been vaccinated.

The belief that in the latter stages of World War I that was organisationally possible is beyond belief.

Needless to say, the stranger on the street had interesting opinions on other matters as well, amongst which was the view that in World War II, the hated English were the baddies and the Germans were the goodies.

It's a view that seemingly isn't shared by those of his cohort who are, at the time of writing, protesting in Wellington, waving New Zealand flags, shouting the virtues of inclusiveness, love (and hate) and crying freedom.

They invoke the memory of our soldiers whose heroic endeavours helped preserve our way of life. They claim the Government has betrayed the legacy of those who died to preserve our freedom, oblivious to the fact that in order to preserve our freedoms, the soldiers were conscripted, put in uniform, mass vaccinated, sent overseas, obeyed strict orders, endured the horrors of war and were required to do other stuff, too horrid to mention.

On the home front, wives and mothers awaited the return of their husbands and sons, sometimes for years. Some, of course, never returned. The haunting image of a woman looking out the window at a telegraph boy walking up the drive is one that sticks in my mind. An example of the price some in history have paid.

My potted version of history is not based on viral internet influences and does not include all the many stories of hardships family members have adapted to over the decades.

The inclusion of the story of the "Lloyds" is one that I feature because five children from my ancestral family died on the "Lloyds". It was part of a commercial enterprise set up by the New Zealand Company Wakefield Settlement Scheme.

The scheme was a business failure in Nelson that had dire consequences (including starvation) for my three-times great-grandmother — a woman who gave birth to 13 children, three of whom were "buried" in various places across the Atlantic Ocean.

That's the way things were.

Businesses thrive and fail. Industries too. It is the nature of things. It is part of our history. The reasons for failure are many and manifold and many of us have had personal and family experience of the impact of the economic hardship that ensued.

Because I have a humble appreciation of New Zealand's historical factors, I resent the voice given by media outlets to precious expat New Zealanders who in a time of crisis complain that government border restrictions prohibit them from coming "home" for Christmas.

I resent, too, official Australian media outlets who insult and damn our Prime Minister.
And, in a way, I resent the fella whose diatribe I endured on the street where I once lived. And if we ever meet again, I will tell him so.