Living On The Fault Line : Aotearoa New Zealands Bicultural Future

This book is about unfinished business.

Travelling around the country to launch his successful Becoming Pakeha: A journey between two cultures (HarperCollins 2022), he met many people who found the name Pakeha not fit for purpose and who were anxious about the future of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. That anxiety has translated into turmoil with our new coalition government’s policies on things Maori and a wider than ever ethnic divide.

Living on the Fault Line tries to address this crisis time that’s triggering Maori anger and Pakeha silence. It explores what a Kiwi identity might look like that keeps faith with Te Tiriti and celebrates the shared culture that makes and breaks us in Aotearoa.

Pakeha themselves are divided between those who dream of a tiriti-based future, with shared language and entangled cultures and those who fear that future, branding it as unfair, unequal, imposed. John Bluck, speaking for and to Pakeha, makes what one early reviewer calls an eloquent and impassioned plea for a Pakeha voice that is confident enough to join the debate about this country’s future without being defensive about or disconnected from the history we have to own.