Ageing in an Increasingly Diverse Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Well within the span of older New Zealanders’ lifetimes, the country’s population has changed substantially from its bicultural roots consisting primarily of Māori (the Tangata Whenua and indigenous peoples) and a non-indigenous population of British settlers and their descendants to a multicultural nation with urban centres reflecting images of “super-diversity”. The complex inter-weavings of time and space, now characteristic of a globalized and transnational world, have brought many older New Zealanders (aged 65 and over) into frequent contact with a diverse array of cultures and ethnicities personified in the mobile immigrants now sharing their churches, neighbourhoods and shops. Older New Zealanders’ “then and now” comparisons confirm that while moving only through time, these older folk now live in “a different country” to that of their memories. Older New Zealanders often readily express significant “macro” concerns about the impact of large numbers of diverse migrants on New Zealand. However, their interactions with individual migrants often typify cosmopolitan moral ideals. Partially facilitated by more “free” time and a slower pace of life, older New Zealanders are often described by immigrants as more approachable, welcoming and predictable than their younger, hyper-mobile counterparts. Based on one year of ethnographic study in two New Zealand cities, this thesis explores older New Zealanders’ localized perspectives of sociocultural change over time and their quotidian interactions with immigrants - both fleeting and more sustained. These older New Zealanders’ experiences of their changing surroundings remind us that “ageing-in-place” does not avoid novelty nor negate contact with difference that may be new. This research recognizes older people as members of contemporary multicultural settings and presents them as steady “moorings” within the seas of change as the tide of mobile people has ebbed and flowed around them. If integration of immigrants is one essential ingredient for the success of new sites of multiculturalism in New Zealand, perhaps older New Zealanders are not the social and economic “liability” that discussions of population ageing would have us believe. Instead, as this thesis will argue, they are a quiet asset in their micro interactions.