Last Wednesday (December 14) was simply one of the best days of my life.

We got to see our youngest daughter take her long walk across the stage at the Dunedin Town Hall to get capped in her Degree in Social Work, the same degree our eldest gained a few years back.  

My heart swelled with pride and my eyes overflowed with tears to see her years of immense effort pay off.

I try to live in the moment as much as possible, but I couldn’t help letting my mind drift back to, how did this happen, 32 years before when I took that same walk myself.  

My, how things have changed. I’m not talking about the personal hair loss or weight gain, rather the makeup of those getting capped and the nature of the ceremony itself.

I’m pretty sure I’m right when I say that back in 1990 there were more young men than young women walking across that stage, but I could be wrong in that. Either way, the gender balance weighs heavily in favour of women now.  

However, what I am absolutely certain of is that there were far, far more Māori and Pasifika folk gaining their degrees last week than back in my day; and what a wonderful thing that is.

Back when I was capped, the ceremony, like the University (and like our nation in many ways), was a very Eurocentric thing. The ceremony I attended on Wednesday was an event truly of a maturing Pacific nation, with its own unique mix of inputs from our part of the world, such as waiata being sung from the audience for many Māori graduates, alongside important traditional elements such as the gowns and mortar-board hats and the Latin dirge gaudeamus igitur, the origins of which date back to the 13th century.

Watching those magnificent young people graduating in all the shades and colours of our country filled me with hope that the racial insults, ignorance and ideology that I hear from so many mostly of my age and older, will die out and that the Aotearoa New Zealand of the near future will itself graduate, like the young ones last week, into a brighter, far more educated future.