New Zealand – a frontier of dreams
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Transcript
- Springlands School student
- We have been learning about how Frontier of Dreams has been helping us with the telling of our tale. I’d like to know where did the name Frontier of Dreams come from?
- Vincent Burke
-
Well, it’s interesting actually. When we first had the idea of doing this, that is my colleague Ray Waru and I, we went and sat down with a group of historians and we looked at what are the principles that we thought were unique that would bind the story together, that made it a valid way of telling the story. The two principles: one is that, this is one of the last, if not the last, frontier. So, we are a frontier society, have been and we still are a frontier society. The other is that everyone who has been here or arrived here, or is arriving here now, comes with dreams and aspirations. Everyone comes here with an idea of what kind of a society they want to have, and that’s been true from when the first Māori came – the first Polynesians came – to the Somalian refugees that are coming at the moment. It’s still the same, and what we want to do is look at how those dreams are shaped and re-shaped or re-forged. So that’s where it came from – the name just popped out based on those two principles that we saw as being important to the telling of this history.

