Opinion
An NCEA history exam this year included a poem by Lionel Terry, a white supremacist and cold-blooded murderer. Chris Tse, who wrote a book inspired by Terry’s victim, explains why the exam question has caused such hurt within the Chinese New Zealand community.
I have a complicated history with Lionel Terry, and it pains me to be writing about him again. If you’re unfamiliar with him, these are the facts: Terry was an Englishman who arrived in Aotearoa at the turn of the 20th century. He was an anti-Semitic racist who wrote turgid poems and letters espousing his views, that he then published and distributed as pamphlets. When his lobbying to get parliament to ban Chinese and East Asian immigration failed, he shot and killed Joe Kum Yung in Wellington’s Haining Street to bring his views about race “under the public notice”. In other words, he’s one of the biggest dickheads to tarnish the history books of Aotearoa.