NZ Honours - Reflection and Appreciation
It has been a time for reflection—and birthdays—this week as I think about all the people I want to thank since I received the Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the Queen’s Birthday Honours on Monday.
At the top of my list, I’ve been thinking about my parents. Born in 1916 and 1917, both left school at the end of their primary school years. Mum, the oldest of eight children became a cook in tearooms and hotels, then eventually owned a hairdressing salon. An astute businesswoman I always wished I had her ability to see a long row of figures and add them instantly in her head. Dad, the eleventh of 12 children, worked in grocery stores, on the farm, drove trucks and buses, buying his own bus, then becoming a self-taught master builder. Childless for the first seven years of marriage, firstly I arrived, then my sister and two brothers in the next seven years. Their legacy to us is their drive to continue learning and take on new challenges, their incredible work ethic, and their devotion to each other. It seems fitting that I post these thoughts, not for the Queen’s birthday, but on the day of my mother’s birth on 4 June, 104 years ago.
I’m not quite so thankful for their decision about my name! They never called me anything other than Ann but made it my second name because they thought Beverley Ann ‘sounded better.’ Never, would they have envisaged the nightmare that would cause for travel and passports or a digital footprint! Little wonder then that after the Honours List appeared on Monday I had several texts asking, “Is that you?” Dr Beverley Milne didn’t register for many!
Staunch royalists, my parents would have been enormously proud that one of us appeared on the “Queen’s list”. Finally, Dad might have stopped worrying that if I didn’t stop speaking out or “causing trouble” I would lose my job! Another often-repeated warning was that if I didn’t stop reading and writing I’d “wear out my brain.” He was totally against my desire to become a teacher. Teachers, he proclaimed, were “trained idiots”! Mind you, I could hardly blame him. After initially travelling to and from the single-room Pataua School by boat, we moved across the river and next door to the schoolhouse where Dad often had to complain about me, at about age 10, ‘teaching’ all 14 or so students while one of the sole teachers who stands out in my memory, was either hungover or drunk!
My own experience of schooling flies in the face of all that thinking that the school you go to matters all that much! I was lucky to be immersed in the predominantly Māori community where we swam in the river right in front of the school and the surf beach, chosen for a surprise visit recently by world-class surfer, Kelly Slater, was a few hundred metres from our back door. At high school, the Pataua bus kids were the strange group who arrived almost an hour after school started and left half an hour before it finished, to suit the bus schedule. We never did quite fit in or get to participate in much.
Dad was also right about me getting into ‘trouble’. After decades of butting heads with racist bureaucracy and education policies, I have to admit it is kind of nice to finally have that ‘trouble’ I was often embroiled in recognised as having some small value. And yes, I do confess there was a brief moment when I read, “If you accept, a formal recommendation will be made to the Queen for approval” where I struggled with the incongruity of accepting a “Royal” honour when I have for so long, and so vocally, denounced our colonial education system. I convinced myself it was the New Zealand Order of Merit and, seriously, I thought of all who should rightly share this acknowledgement, those whose “services to education” were far greater than mine.
You certainly don’t do this work for awards, and to be honest you are crazy if you do it looking for rewards – which are often few and far between, but I have worked alongside people who taught me far more than they ever learned from me, and those are the people I really want to thank. The community, parents, grandparents, whānau of Kia Aroha College—formerly Te Whānau o Tupuranga and Clover Park Middle School, in the community of Otara, who stood up and demanded more of an education system that still fails their kids, and challenged everything I thought I knew about learning. The young people, students and former students, the Warrior-Scholars, who speak out and tell the truth about a system that doesn’t fit, and all those teachers over the years who have loved them and continue to challenge that system to do better.
My thanks also to the many principals, schools, and educators I have worked with since “retiring’ from the principal’s role in 2016 and setting up my consultancy, who come to my talks and read my work, or join my online courses. You give me real hope that we can make change.
My thanks too for the hundreds of social media comments, the emails, the phone calls, and the flowers! I appreciate every single message.
It goes without saying that we are not a whānau that is very good at following instructions so I might have ‘leaked’ the top secret announcement to my immediate family members who decided Sunday was a safer day to travel and celebrate, and it was another birthday, my oldest daughter’s. As well as the amazing food, they had acquired some of the letters that apparently accompanied my nomination. My appreciation to those who nominated me or wrote letters of commendation from across the country and the world, including some from former students. I am truly humbled by their comments.
They had also asked my grandchildren and great-grandchildren to write their own citations. I’m disappointed that the official Honours citation makes no mention of my old age, my present-buying skills, or my really clean house and its toys. And I’m sort of secretly chuffed that a 23-year-old moko still thinks I’m “the shit”. Long may that continue! All of their messages were my greatest honour and I will treasure them because they epitomise what this work is about!
As for the alphabet soup after my name – I’ll have to work out how it goes. When I achieved my PhD the students at Kia Aroha College debated how to add ‘Doctor’ to the name they used for me, in spite of my protests they didn’t need to! They settled for DNA for “Doctor Nanny Ann” so this is Dr (Beverley) Ann Milne MNZM, PhD, DNA, saying a heartfelt thank you!
