Sure, everyone enjoys White Girl Sundays™️ in Hamilton East. Oat milk lattes, popping in to Recycle Boutique, getting a vegan scoop from Duck Island – sounds like #bliss, right? But what you may not realise is that the street you’re standing on is deeply cursed, and it’s not because you forgot your Keep Cup – it’s because the street itself is named after a giant sack of human shit.
Grey Street’s namesake, The Right Honourable Sir George Grey, isn’t the kind of person you’d expect a street to be named after. In the 1800s, he scammed his way into getting elected, ruined his ex-wife’s entire life, invaded the Waikato after falsely claiming that Māori were about to invade Auckland, committed the most horrific war crime against Māori in Aotearoa’s history, and then ran away back to London where he died with piss and shit in his pants. You may be wondering how he was able to clean up his rep enough to be honoured with a street name: scholars claim that his stellar reputation was “gained by systematic misrepresentation of the facts and denigration of other men.”
Kinda fucked, right? But Grey Street isn’t the worst of it. Bryce Street, von Tempsky Street, and the Captain Hamilton statue (that definitely isn’t being kept in storage at the Transport Centre) are all relics from a simpler time where honouring war criminals was totally Cool and Normal. Over the last few years, hundreds of submissions have been made to Council to change our street names to more accurately reflect who we are as a city.
“Regarding the street names – it’s such a hard, painful, traumatic topic,” says Jahvaya Wheki, who recently presented Council with a petition to update the Hamilton City emblem. “It’s painful for our people, for tangata whenua. We need restorative justice, honouring the mana of the land, Kirikiriroa.”
How is the Council responding? “I’m aware of the historic offence caused by a number of street names, and I’m also aware of conflicting views on this issue,” Hamilton’s mayor, Paula Southgate, told Nexus. “Council has already committed to a process through the development of He Pou Manawa Ora to address cultural offence. This will involve working with Iwi and the community to develop a much better understanding and consider a way forward.”
Simply changing the street names isn’t as easy as it sounds, either. According to information provided from Council, an application that meets 12 pages (!!) of criteria needs to be made to be submitted. Then, all of the owner/occupiers on that street and the local mana whenua will need to be consulted with. Even after all that, Councillors still get another shot to veto the proposed change, but if they fuck with it, an even more complex process begins to update the official Land Information NZ records, and notify services that rely on correct address data (police, ambulances, Uber drivers).
And sure, the argument can be made that we have bigger fish to fry, and we can’t just sweep our history under the rug and pretend it never happened. Simply changing the name of a street probably won’t do much to address the historical abuses of Māori from the Crown. But at least it’s something, right?
“From doing my campaign about updating the Hamilton city crest, I had to come to a point of somewhat accepting that even though [our history] is so painful, that it is what happened,” says Jahvaya. “It is a part of our history. And it’s up to us to co-create and co-design how we would like to move forward together as a city.”
“I have always said we n eed some bold and brave conversations about this,” says Paula Southgate. “And I am committed to that.”
You can sign the petition to update the Hamilton City emblem at https://our.actionstation.org.nz/petitions/change-the-hamilton-city-emblem
