Golliwog dolls for sale at Waiheke Island tourist gift shop shock customers

Saturday, 6 January 2018

A Waiheke Island tourist gift shop owner is defending stocking golliwog dolls.

African-American tourists shocked at the sight of golliwog dolls in a Waiheke Island gift shop are being reassured by the store's owner that the dolls aren't racist.

Pictures of the dolls and their $46 price tag emerged on social media this week.

Kat, the owner of Escapade Boutique, a tourist gift store on Waiheke Island that stocks the dolls, says she decided to start selling them shortly after buying the store two-and-a-half years ago. She declined to give her last name.

'They're known all over the world. The only people you have to be very quick to explain them to is black Americans,' she said.

* Sale of golliwog dolls at Pak'n Save an 'error'

* Store criticised for selling 'Gollies'**

'You just see the look on their faces and I get in quick and tell them they're not what you think.

'They started off as talismans in England. They were based off chimney sweeps and chimney sweeps were actually white people.'

Kat admitted some African-American visitors still have 'a bit of a look on their faces' after she gives her version of the dolls' origins.

However, she said there were 'more important things for people to get offended about'.

African-American tourists didn't understand that the toys were an 'English thing', she said.

Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy has previously said golliwogs are not harmless toys.

'They were born out of racism and represent an era that is best left in the past.'

Two years ago, Pak n' Save was forced to pull a golliwog toy from its shelves after a public outcry about the toy's origins.

Ferris State University's Jim Crow Museum in Michigan also lists golliwog dolls as 'racist memorabilia'.

The museum notes the creator of the dolls, Florence Kate Upton, based it on a black minstrel doll she played with in her childhood home in New York.

'Seated upon a flowerpot in the garden, his kindly face was a target for rubber balls,' Upton said in an interview.

'We knew he was ugly!'

Despite Upton's recorded comments, the explanation of the golliwog as a chimney sweep is commonly used in its defence.

Kat said her fellow Waiheke Island residents knew she stocked the dolls, but the 'vast majority' had raised no objection.

'As far as I'm concerned society has just gotten far too PC. We've lost so many great stories,' she said.

'There was another great story called Little Black Sambo who was a very pleasant little boy. But that story's not allowed now.'

Most who noticed them were just happy to see a toy from their childhood on sale, she said.

Golliwogs were among the most popular dolls she sold, but she also stocked 'white' dolls with blue eyes made by the same Australian manufacturer, she said.

'I don't care if people have a go at me about my gollis. I'm not going to stop selling them.'