https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/the-invisible-immigrants/
This article carries my family story further into the time when I was growing up as the son of immigrant's in New Zealand from the late 1950's.
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| This image of me building an asian elephant for the Auckland Zoo accompanies the article "The Invisible Immigrants" Photo credit https://www.nzgeo.com/author/arno_gasteiger/ |
An excerpt pertinent to my family reads...
"Most Dutch migrants’ children, however, would find little to interest them in Club Amsterdam. To all intents and purposes they are indistinguishable from any other New Zealander of northern European extraction. Yet for some, the conflict of cultures has left an indelible impression. The drive to be like New Zealanders, and thus different from their parents, has created a rift in some families, while others have actively rejected their parents’ obsession with work. A few, like Harmen Hielkema, have felt the tug of two cultures strongly in their own life.
Hielkema’s parents are from the Friesian-speaking area of the Netherlands, and so he speaks Friesian, Dutch and English. They were one of the few “foreign” families in Torbay 30 years ago, and this redheaded son has strong memories of feeling different and isolated.
His mother’s yearning for home prompted the family of four children to pack their bags and leave New Zealand for good in 1971. Harmen was 13, just the right age to explore the emerging youth culture of Holland at the time. He soon fell in with a group of friends, whipping around the narrow streets on mopeds, all wearing corduroy jackets and trousers, enraptured by rock music.
But even here Harmen was a curiosity. He was handier than most children his age, and good on a bike and a boat. Yet he spoke an old-fashioned form of Friesian which had changed during his parents’ time away. When he spoke in shops, the person behind the counter would invariably eye him askance and ask where he came from. Given the strange ring to his Dutch, they assumed New Zealand must be somewhere in Holland.
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For Harmen it was the visual difference he remembers most vividly, even now. The skinny fillets of houses hard up against one another, the multi-level perspective, seeing a train running across the top of a dyke with a ship at eye level, all viewed from your car.
Lacking qualifications, his parents found it harder to get work than they expected, and three months later they returned to New Zealand. Back home again, the newly sophisticated Harmen felt more isolated than ever, and though the feeling wore off, the experience left its mark.
Dr Robert Leek, a Dutch lecturer in English at Auckland University, agrees that many Dutch New Zealanders would no longer feel at home in the Netherlands. “The Dutch of the 1990s are very different people from those who emigrated in the 1950s,” he says. “They are less traditional in their culture, and more international in their outlook. After seeing the Netherlands today, visiting Ons Dorp is like stepping into a time warp.”
While Harmen Hielkema feels somehow “between cultures”, he says his own children love their Dutch background. New Zealand has changed too. “They’re not having as much trouble with our surname as I did.”
For the Dutch, 1992 has been a year of "coming out". Whether that means attaching cotton braids to your hair or cycling in clogs and full costume, the country has enjoyed the spectacle. Geweldig!
For the Dutch, 1992 has been a year of “coming out”. Whether that means attaching cotton braids to your hair or cycling in clogs and full costume, the country has enjoyed the spectacle. Geweldig!
ARNO GASTEIGER
Hielkema may have put his finger on the true inheritors of the Dutch tradition: the third generation. Thriving folk-dancing groups in Hamilton and keen interest shown in the new Dutch course at Auckland University indicate that the third generation may be more interested in their grandparents’ origins than their parents were.
That’s often the way. The further you are from the Dutch, the more interested you are in them. Dutch husbands notice their New Zealand-born spouses are often more enthusiastic about their heritage than they are.
Since the Dutch wave of immigration, a multitude of newcomers, mainly from nearby Pacific Islands, but also from, South Africa, England and Asia, have arrived in New Zealand to change things once again, bringing the same hopes, arousing the same prejudices, and settling into the nation’s microcosm just as naturally in the end.
Mind you, any self-respecting Dutchman reading this is bound to add the rider, “Yes, but we make the best immigrants.”
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