This is not how you treat family

I was a grown-up before I travelled, unless you count a school choir trip to Sydney as a teenager, or years before that, a forgotten trip to Scotland as a preschooler.

My first proper overseas trip, when I was forty, was to Sāmoa. Because it was the first - the anxiety and anticipation, the sense of adventure and of wide-eyed joy - everything felt like it was in technicolour.

Descending the steps from the plane with my family, wide-eyed with the delight of it, and sweating in the warm and fragrant night. Sniffed by suspicious dogs in the customs queue, to the terror of my dog-fearing teenager; followed, later, by roaming dogs as we took our first tentative steps outside the hotel grounds.

Plucking up the courage to divebomb into the To Sua trench, while the kids egged me on from the azure water below. Inching towards the crabs on the rocks nearby; then running, squealing like a kid, away from them.

Wandering, pausing by the nearby school, as the young people raised the roof and filled my heart with 'How great thou art'. Too much sun on my skin, too much food in by belly.

It's a cliché to say it, of course, but it was the people that left the deepest impression. I'll pretend no puffed-up expertise after a few days' holiday: I just offer memories of unfussy and practical kindness, everywhere we went.

The woman who left her post behind the counter to make us cups tea and spaghetti sandwiches, as we waited for our rental car to be ready. The young man who walked with me one night, back to the hotel - worried, I think, that I was by myself - and who told me effusively about the business he'd started, sharing with me his ambitions and dreams.

The older man who took pity on us - the silly tourists who'd come to scuba dive in the coral, without bringing diving shoes - and drove us to a nearby business, who insisted we borrow their gear for free.

It was a taxi driver who left the deepest impression of all.

Having tried, and failed, to find the turtles in our rental car, we called a cab. Our driver took us under his wing. As he drove, he told us all about his country, stopping only to pull over and buy us mangoes at the roadside, so we could give the turtles something to eat. He told us about growing up and going to school, about being bilingual but intensely proud of his native tongue, about how much he admired the vision of the Prime Minister.

And he told us about Black Saturday. He had been relentlessly upbeat, but now he wasn't. He looked ahead at the road, hands on the wheel as we slowed through the villages, and the way he spoke changed.

On 28 December 1929, a crowd gathered in Apia to welcome a returning leader. It is not clear exactly what happened - the New Zealand government, at that time the colonial ruler of Sāmoa, was to cover it up for many years - but a beloved leader, calling for calm, was shot dead before his people by New Zealand police. When the shooting stopped, eight were killed and 50 more injured, many of them women and children.

And the driver said - with something in his voice that I could not pinpoint, an injury handed down over decades - most New Zealanders don't know about it. They don't even know.

I knew about it, a little, but I said almost nothing, except to convey something inadequate, a sort of mumbled shame. There is no defending the forgetting of such an act, any more than the act itself. Our history makes us - whether or not we know it, and whether or not we care to know it. That was true of the driver, and it was true of his frontseat passenger.

There's a good argument for not giving Tremain's cartoon in the Otago Daily Times any more oxygen, and I respect that. But maybe this is the prompt to have a much-needed conversation about everyday racism.

Before it was published, this hateful thing, it passed through a lot of hands. And none of those people put a stop to it - we can only hope that someone had the decency to try.

To mock the mass deaths of white children from a wealthy country would be unthinkable. Yet here we are, indulging the snickering of bigots over outspread newsprint and morning coffee, even as aiga are burying their precious babies.

And an irony Tremain and colleagues didn't know about, or simply didn't care about, it's one hundred years since the end of the influenza pandemic - brought to Sāmoa by a New Zealand ship, and killing more than a fifth of its population.

Sorry from the publishers doesn't cut it. A tepid apology, delivered after cruelty has been rewarded by clickbait, doesn't do squat. It merely encourages more of the same as the news cycle moves on, taking our attention with it. We've already shown how readily we can forget. We've got form.

Our Pacific neighbours, they are our family. This is not how you treat family. If we can learn one thing, remember one thing from our shared history, let it be that.