Top Quotes: “The Penguin History of New Zealand” — Michael King
Ancient History
“In New Zealand the dinosaurs had perished 65 million years before, as they had elsewhere on the globe; but the sphenodons or tuataras who had been their contemporaries from Jurassic times persisted, in New Zealand but nowhere else, for reasons that remain obscure.
At least one environmental cataclysm affected New Zealand shortly before the beginning of human colonisation and may have had a bearing on some of the earliest bird extinctions. The Chinese chronicle Hou Han Shu recorded that, in the reign of the Emperor Ling Ti (168-189 AD), the sky was for many days ‘as red as blood’. This reference is corroborated by a Roman document, the Historia Augusta, which reports that some time before the Deserters’ War (186 AD) the sky was seen to ‘burst into flame’. Another historian of the Roman era, Herodian, lists strange portents seen in the reign of the Emperor Commodus (180–192 AD): ‘Stars remained visible by day, and others became elongated, seeming to ‘hang in mid-air.’
Such celestial displays could be consistent with the after-effects of a massive volcanic eruption. The only eruption known to have occurred on such a scale at about that time is that of the Taupo rhyolitic vent. This explosion, possibly the most powerful and destructive anywhere on Earth in the past 5000 years, emerged from the crater now known as Lake Taupo in the centre of the North Island of New Zealand. It was almost ten times as powerful as the better-known Krakatoa eruption in 1883 and is likely to have sent tsunami radiating into the Pacific, overrunning low lying islands and reaching the mainlands of Asia and America.”
“Carbon dating of the bones of kiore, the Polynesian rat, suggests that the creature may have become established in New Zealand as long as 2000 years ago. The contemporary decline of birds — the owlette-nightjar, for example, and one species of duck — appears to support the presence of rats at that time. Should these dates be confirmed and the supporting evidence verified, they would support an irrefutable argument in favour of an early Polynesian landing on the coast of New Zealand.
The only means of transport available to kiore was Polynesian vessels. The rats’ presence in the country so far ahead of organised human settlement, for which there is as yet no evidence, suggests that a discovering canoe landed in both the North and South Islands around 2000 years ago and then headed back to Island Polynesia, or that the occupants of a canoe remained somewhere in New Zealand at that time but failed, because of low numbers, single gender or lack of adequate resources, to establish a continuing colonising population. A third possibility is that a small founding group abandoned the country or was wiped out because of some unexpected natural disaster, such as the catastrophic effects of the Taupo eruption.
The inescapable fact remains, however, that to date no direct evidence has been found of a human occupation of New Zealand — no hearth fires, no tools, no human remains or the remains of creatures butchered by humans — earlier than the thirteenth century AD.”
“What would ensure the uniqueness of New Zealand’s landscape, flora and fauna was the fact that the country had been torn loose from Gondwana prior to the evolution of marsupials and other mammals. All its vegetation and animal life continued to evolve in the absence of such predators. And the places that mammals would take in the ecosystems of other countries — all other major land masses apart from Antarctica — would in New Zealand be filled by birds, insects and reptiles. Weta, giant crickets, grew into the largest insects on earth and hunted like mice. Some of the birds — giant geese and rails, species of duck, the kakapo parrot, some of the wrens joined the ratites as non-flying ground-dwellers. The largest raptor ever known, Harpagornis moorei or Haast’s eagle, weighed up to thirteen kilograms and developed a wing span of up to three metres; it preyed on giant moa, whose pelvic bones would be punctured by the eagle’s enormous talons. Of the moa, one species, Dinoris giganteus, was the tallest bird that ever lived, exceeding ostrich in both size and weight; others resembled ‘feathered forty-four gallon drums atop stumpy legs, their necks ending in absurdly tiny heads’. As ancestors of the Maori would discover, birds dominated this largely forested kingdom from coastal bush to inland ranges, and across grassy plain and alpine tussock.”
Settlement
“in contrast to everything else that these migrant people had lugged from island to island, the kumara had not come from the west. It was a vegetable from Central or South America, originating probably in Peru. This uncomfortable fact is susceptible to one of only two possible explanations: either voyagers from South America carried the vegetable into Polynesia (which was the theory of the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl); or Polynesians themselves sailed as far east as continental America and returned with the kumara to Island Polynesia. The latter theory is more likely. It is given additional weight by the fact that the coconut seems to have been taken from Southeast Asia to Central America, where it was flourishing in the time of Columbus — and the most likely explanation is that it was carried across the Pacific to the Americas by Polynesians. Apart from the kumara, there is no other unequivocal evidence of South American influence in Polynesia, and no trace of South American genes among Polynesians; but there is evidence that, by the first millennium of the Christian era, Polynesians were making extraordinarily widespread return voyages throughout the Central and South Pacific.”
“At some point in the past millennium, however, possibly around the fourteenth or fifteenth century AD, the era of widespread Polynesian voyaging ceased. This may have occurred because of the change in climate that produced colder, windier weather and rougher seas, or, possibly, because of a change in cultural priorities. And this literal and metaphorical alteration in direction left colonists on the margins of their cultural and geographical triangle, especially in New Zealand and Easter Island, isolated from other Polynesians. It may also have led to the abandonment of earlier settlements on Pitcairn, Henderson, Norfolk and the Line islands — which were viable only in an era of regular contact with other food and population sources. By this time, however, the great voyages of exploration had been accomplished, and the Polynesians had become the most widely dispersed people on the planet.”
“The Smith version of the Kupe story and its dissemination in the School Journal and other literature, and the title of the first widely read general history of New Zealand, William Pember Reeves’s The Long White Cloud (1898), all popularised and entrenched the notion that the Maori name for New Zealand had been and still was Aotearoa. After decades of repetition, Maori themselves came to believe that this was so. And, because shared mythology is ultimately more pervasive and more powerful than history, it became so.
In fact, in the pre-European era, Maori had no name for the country as a whole. Polynesian ancestors came from moto or islands, and it was to islands that they gave names. The North Island was known to them principally as Te la a Maui, the Fish of Maui, in recognition of the widely accepted belief that the land had been fished from the depths of the ocean by Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga. A smaller number of tribes knew the island as Aotea (though this was also the name given to Great Barrier Island) and as Aotearoa, most commonly translated, as in the Kupe story, as Land of the Long White Cloud, but perhaps more properly rendered as Land of the Long Clear Day or the Long White World. The second Maori King, Tawhiao, from Tainui, called his Kingitanga bank Te Peeke o Aotearoa, thus favouring Aotearoa as his preferred name for the North Island.
The South Island was known variously as Te Waka-a-Aoraki, the canoe of Aoraki (the ancestor frozen in stone and ice as the highest peak in the Southern Alps), and as Te Wahi Pounamu (the place of greenstone) and Te Wai Pounamu. Stewart Island to the south was Rakiura.
In the Maori world all these names would persist in simultaneous usage until around the middle of the nineteenth century. From that time, some Maori and Maori publications began to favour Nu Tirani and its variants, transliterations of the words New Zealand and conveniently applying to all the islands that would make up the modern nation state of New Zealand (the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 and its 1835 predecessor, A Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand, used these forms). Apart from Tawhiao’s bank, operating in Waikato in the 1880s and 1890s, few Maori opted for Aotearoa. In the early years of the twentieth century, however, with the growing circulation and popularity of Stephenson Percy Smith’s version of the Kupe story, Maori use of the term Aotearoa to refer to New Zealand as a whole increased, especially in oral culture. By the twenty-first century it was entrenched as the Maori name for New Zealand, though many South Island Maori, favouring Te Wai Pounamu as the name for their own island, recognised Aotearoa as a name for the North Island only.”
“By the time that New Zealand Maori and the indigenous settlers of the Chathams came into contact with one another again in the early nineteenth century, thanks to European vessels, neither people had any surviving knowledge of the other nor of their common origins in East Polynesia and on the New Zealand mainland. As a result of this encounter, the Chatham Islanders began to refer to themselves as Moriori, their dialectal version of the word Maori (from ‘tangata maori’: ordinary people).
The Chathams culture had by this time diverged from that of Maori in several important respects. The islanders had a ‘level’ society, with no distinction between aristocrats and commoners; they had developed their own version of the Polynesian language; they had no horticulture, because the climate would not allow the root vegetables Polynesians carried with them to grow there; and, perhaps most significant, they had discarded warfare as a means of settling group disputes and substituted the practice of dual hand-to-hand combat, which would cease as soon as one party drew blood. Their material culture lacked the elaborations of so-called classic Maori culture, in particular intricate carving and a wide range of tools and ornaments; but was, in its pared-down simplicity, adequate to meet the needs of Chatham Islands inhabitants.”
“This saga with its lurid allegations of Moriori physical and mental inferiority’ was assembled from contaminated and unrelated fragments of so-called Maori tradition. It had no basis in history or ethnology. Yet it was, as noted previously, published in the Department of Education’s School Journal and distributed to every primary school classroom in the country. This action, supported by subsequent publications which repeated the story, coloured public perception of the indigenous Chatham Islanders for the next three generations.”
“Several factors contributed to the concentration of activities on more restricted areas of occupation. First, the demise of big game and the growth of population gave communities less incentive and opportunity to roam over large areas of the country. A diminution in the use of the original oceangoing canoes and their eventual obsolescence might have been another factor in this lifestyle change. Second, the very concentration on the more efficient exploitation of other food sources, especially gardening, required communities to become more ‘sedentary’ and more disciplined in the focus of their activities. Third, the practice that developed of preserving kumara tubers in storage pits (a process that had been unnecessary in a tropical climate) meant that communities had to remain with those pits, particularly in an era of larger population when competition for resources meant that less well-provisioned neighbours might be tempted to raid your larder. This last factor more than any other gave impetus to the rise and spread, from north to south, of fortified hilltops which came to be known as pa. They probably originated from a need to protect kumara tubers; but they persisted and became more important when population growth, competition for all resources, the pursuit of mana or authority for one’s own group, and a generally more martial culture meant that communities increasingly had to protect themselves from immediate neighbours or from marauding enemies from further afield.”
Europeans
“Fortunately for Maori, and thanks only to the relative isolation of New Zealand and the vicissitudes of history, the full force of Europe’s colonising ethos did not arrive in one vast ocean swell. Instead it was ripples of the waves from other centres of military, commercial and scientific activity that lapped New Zealand’s shore. And that, initially, was a phenomenon with which Maori could cope.
The first ripple, and with it the first opportunity to open a datable, chronological history of New Zealand, was an eddy of the commercial aspirations of the Dutch Fast India Company in the string of large islands north of Australia then known as the East Indies. On 13 December 1642 Abel Janszoon Tasman, commander of a two-ship company expedition, sailed over the western rim of the sea that would eventually bear his name.”
“Heading east from Mauritius, Tasman’s vessels had managed to miss entirely the southern mainland of Australia, but did brush the south and eastern coast of the island which the expedition called Van Diemen’s Land, after the governor-general of Batavia, but which would later be called Tasmania. There the crew found signs of human habitation but failed to see the ‘wild savages,’ who appear to have concealed themselves.”
“They abandoned the country on 6 January 1643 without having once set foot on it. Tasman took his expedition north and ‘discovered’ some of the islands in the Tonga group and others in the northern sector of Fiji. He eventually returned to Batavia via the northern coast of New Guinea. Having failed to step ashore on New Zealand, Tasman had no reason to suppose that it was the cornucopia of spices, precious metals and cloths that his principals in the Dutch East India Company had been seeking. Because of the supposed absence of exploitable and tradable resources, and the apparently intransigent character of the inhabitants, New Zealand would be left to its isolation by the envoys of Europe for more than a century.”
“An anonymous cartographer in the Dutch East India Company renamed Tasman’s line of coast ‘Nieuw Zeeland’ or, in Latin, ‘Zelandia Nova’. This was clearly intended as a matching name for ‘Hollandia Nova’, by which the western coast of Australia was at that time known (Holland and Zeeland being neighbouring Dutch maritime provinces). It was over the name Zelandia Nova that the newly recognised country appeared on European charts of the Pacific Ocean and the known world from the middle of the seventeenth century. By the late eighteenth century, this scratch of coastline would be identified variously as New Zeeland, New Zeland and, eventually, New Zealand.
With Tasman’s departure, the inhabitants of Zelandia Nova had no further recorded contact with Europeans for another 126 years, sufficient time for the Dutchmen’s visit to recede into the mythology of Ngati Tumatakokiri and to leave no impression at all on the oral traditions of other tribes. And since Ngati Tumatakokiri eventually disappeared without recording their recollections and understanding of what they saw in Taitapu in December 1642, those insights were lost to history for ever.
Nor was Tasman himself much better recalled three and a half centuries later by Pakeha New Zealanders or the descendants of his fellow countrymen.”
“More than 126 years later, however, there was an umbilically linked sequel. In Tahiti in July 1769, Lieutenant James Cook of the British Royal Navy completed his observation of the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun. He then opened secret Admiralty instructions to sail south until he either discovered Terra Australis Incognita or else ‘fall in with the Eastern side of the Land discover’d by Tasman and now called New Zeland’. Cook carried out these instructions. And his rediscovery of New Zealand was an encounter of a very different order from Tasman’s.
In a six-month-long circumnavigation of the country in the barque Endeavour, a converted North Sea collier, James Cook met with Maori on dozens of occasions, on board ship and in their settlements ashore. He even sailed 20 km up the Waihou River at the head of the Hauraki Gulf and into the interior of the country. Thanks to the presence of the Tahitian ariki Tupaia, who had boarded the Endeavour at Raiatea and learned sufficient English to communicate with the ship’s master arid crew, Cook was also able to communicate with the New Zealanders and thus allow a transfer of information in both directions across the same cultural divide that Tasman, with disastrous consequences, had been unable to bridge. As Anne Salmond has noted, ‘not only did the Europeans have extensive opportunities to observe Maori life in different parts of the country, Maori people of various tribes had the first opportunity to examine Europeans at close quarters — to trade with them, to fight with them, to become infected with European diseases and to work out strategies for dealing with [them]’.”
“Cook’s relations with Maori were, on the whole, as cordial and mutually respectful as he could make them. On the first two voyages, in particular, he had been determined to act as an ‘enlightened’ leader. There were misunderstandings, and there were further shootings; and in 1773 ten crew members of the Adventure, the vessel accompanying Cook’s ship Resolution, were killed and eaten at Grass Cove on Arapawa Island in Queen Charlotte Sound. When Cook learned of the episode and returned to the Sound on his third voyage, he did not respond punitively, believing that the cannibalised men may themselves have acted provocatively. He was told by Maori who took part in the killing that one of the sailors concerned had taken an adze from a would-be barterer, but offered nothing in return. The owner of the adze had then seized some food from the sailor, who retaliated. Thus was generated what became a mortal fight. It was typical of Cook that he took the trouble to find out what actually happened and, when he had done so, to act with restraint.”
“Unlike Tasman, Cook became and remained a hero in both the land of his birth and in at least two of the countries whose coasts he had charted, Australia and New Zealand. In the latter, more of his placenames were retained than those of any other European navigator or surveyor, and to those would be added the attachment of his own name to the country’s highest peak (known to Maori as Aoraki), to the strait separating the North Island from the South, and to hundreds of other minor geographical features, communities, suburbs, streets, schools and hotels. Banknotes and consumer products too would bear his likeness.”
“Vancouver’s 1791 expedition had an unforeseen consequence: the discovery of the Chatham Islands, which would eventually become part of the fledgling state of New Zealand in 1842. Vancouver in the Discovery was accompanied by the brig Chatham commanded by Lieutenant William Broughton. As the two vessels headed away from New Zealand towards a rendezvous in Tahiti, they became separated by a severe storm. The Chatham was blown further east than its designated course, and early on the morning of 29 November 1791 the crew sighted the northwest corner of Chatham Island.
Broughton ordered the ship to sail eastwards along the island’s northern coast while he mapped and named its features. By late morning they were off the small harbour known as Kaingaroa, and Broughton decided to go ashore with eight men in the ship’s cutter. There, on that northern Chathams beach, they met a group of Moriori men and attempted to barter cloth and beads for Moriori tools and ornaments. A misunderstanding ensued and, when Moriori appeared to become threatening, Broughton’s men fired muskets and killed a local man, Tamakaroro. Broughton and his men returned to the safety of their ship and sailed on to Tahiti, and thence to the northwest coast of America.”
“Moriori were a peaceful people who had, generations earlier, outlawed warfare. They believed that it was they, not the visitors, who had been responsible for the violence. At a subsequent council of all Moriori on Chatham Island, it was agreed that future visitors would be greeted with an emblem of peace. And when the next European vessel arrived a decade later, a sealer out of Port Jackson in New South Wales, Moriori, according to one of their chroniclers, ‘laid down their spears and clubs … and placed one end of a grass plant in the hands of the captain’. The man who performed this ceremony also ‘made him a speech of welcome [and] threw over him his own cloak.’ This became the standard Chathams welcome for visitors until 1835, when two Maori tribes took terrible advantage of the custom and colonised and enslaved the islanders.”
“Oddly, some of the most negative episodes in the course of these early cross-cultural encounters may have worked to New Zealand’s long-term advantage. The deaths of Europeans on Tasman’s, Marion du Fresne’s and Cook’s voyages were among the factors that led the British Government to establish its new penal colony in New South Wales in 1788 in preference to New Zealand. Australian Aboriginal people were assumed to be less martial than Maori, less organised and vigorous, and therefore easier to control in the operation of a colonial enterprise. This decision protected Maori from a concerted attempt at foreign colonisation of New Zealand for a further 50 years and gave them time to better adjust to the implications – the advantages and the disadvantages of what would initially be a small European presence in their country. And their country it was to remain, unequivocally, until February 1840.”
European Settlement
“The first Europeans actually to live in New Zealand were seamen who jumped ship from vessels out of Sydney in order to escape from despotic captains, leaky ships or lives which had been characterised up to that point by crime or misfortune (most appear to have been un-discharged convicts on the run). These individuals, who came to be known as Pakeha Maori, joined Maori communities in the Hauraki district, the Bay of Islands and Murihiku, and soon after in other parts of the country, took Maori wives, begat Maori offspring, lived according to Maori customary law and within the kinship network of mutual obligations. In some cases they took Maori moko or tattoo. Maori insulated them from the circumstances they wanted to turn their backs on. They gave Maori the benefit of whatever expertise they had in the arts of horticulture or animal husbandry, and they were available to act as mediators and interpreters when Maori communities were confronted with would-be traders, explorers or missionaries.”
“The sealers’ attention then turned to the Chathams and the sub-Antarctic islands, where the carnage continued — 8000 skins were taken from the Bounty Islands in 1807, and 250,000 from the Antipodes between 1806 and 1810. ‘Such was the rush to these new bonanzas’, wrote Rhys Richards, “that several marooned gangs got left behind and forgotten: one on the Snares for seven years, another on Solander Island in Foveaux Strait for four and a half.” This was exactly the circumstance in which Alexander Selkirk was abandoned for four years on one of the Juan Fernandez group of islands, giving Daniel Defoe his inspiration for Robinson Crusoe.”
“Like sealing, ocean whaling, which at first involved British vessels and later French and American ones, began to affect New Zealand in the 1790s. Unlike sealing, it peaked in the 1830s. It was to service this enlarging “fleet’ that the settlement of Kororareka developed in the Bay of Islands, making the bay the first major arena for prolonged and intensive Maori-Pakeha interaction. In 1830, for example, as many as 30 ships were at anchor in the port, with crews totalling 1000 men, of whom as many as 300 could be ashore at any one time. The presence of these sailors, and the need for ships to replenish their supplies, led to Maori growing vegetables and pigs for sale and offering prostitution, and to an ever-enlarging number of riff-raff Europeans on shore providing alcohol and tavern entertainment. It also led to a growing amount of disorderly conduct, with no police force or indeed any system of law and order to protect life and property. Such circumstances led to Kororareka becoming known, with perhaps only slight exaggeration, as the ‘Hell-hole of the Pacific.’ Charles Darwin, visiting the Bay of Islands in the Beagle, in 1835, described its English residents as ‘the very refuse of society’. French navigator Dumont d’Urville reported similar conditions in Port Otago in 1840, ‘the Maori much degraded, the men undermined by alcohol purchased by coercing their wives and daughters into large-scale, very visible prostitution’.”
“Local Maori men worked alongside Pakeha, hunting whales in season and in the off-season growing vegetable crops for these small colonies and for trading. Maori women lived with or married European shore whalers, an association that founded some of the most prominent Maori families of the future — the Braggs, Solomons, Barretts, Loves, Keenans, McClutchies, Halberts, Manuels, and many others.
The impact of shore whaling was also more widespread than that of ocean whaling and of sealing. It had a considerable impact on Maori life on the East Coast of the North Island, in Taranaki, on both sides of Cook Strait and Kapiti and Mana islands, and on the southeast of the South Island. Communities there were introduced to European clothing, European technology in the form of tools, new varieties of domestic plants and animals, clinker-built boats, European-style housing and the English language — and, of course, to intermarriage.
Having said that, it needs to be stressed that the values and protocols of such communities remained largely Maori, that most descendants of mixed marriages identified as Maori, and that the whaling-based communities could not have been there at all if the local Maori chiefs and tribes had not permitted their presence. They were part of a gradually growing symbiotic relationship between Maori and Pakeha. Pakeha investors and workers gained access to raw materials for an industry that was highly profitable for the owners; Maori gained access to paid labour and to those aspects of European technology and culture that it suited them to have — and, on the whole, they did so without compromising their Maori cultural identity.”
“An early attempt to exploit Maori expertise in the preparation and working of flax occurred in 1793, when Lieutenant-Governor Philip King had two Northland Maori, Tuki Tahua and Ngahuruhuru, kidnapped and taken to Norfolk Island to train convicts in these skills. The experiment failed, however, because neither man knew anything about preparing flax, which, as products of their own culture, they considered was women’s work.”
“Marsden left three lay workers at Rangihoua: Thomas Kendall, a schoolmaster, justice of the peace and self-appointed leader of the station; William Hall, a carpenter; and John King, a shoemaker and ropemaker. Marsden instructed them to institute a ‘civilisation first’ policy — that is, to instruct Maori in horticulture, agriculture and trade, in European manners and morals, and then seek to make them Christian. These three men and their families were unable to work together harmoniously, and were, in Marsden’s judgement, guilty of a range of offences, including trading muskets with Maori, drunkenness and, in Kendall’s case, adultery. At one point, in the course of his mission, Kendall confessed that the ‘sublimity’ of Maori ideas had ‘almost completely turned me from a Christian to a Heathen ..’ This was not the purpose for which Marsden and the CMS had placed him there.”
“In the years that followed, alarmist reports from Busby alleging the ‘accumulating evils of permanent anarchy’ and ‘depopulation’ as a result of tribal wars arrived at the Colonial Office in London at the same time as petitions from Sydney and New Zealand traders — all asking the British Government to intervene more strongly in New Zealand affairs to ensure safety and stability in the interests of British subjects and of Maori. There was also at this time in London disquiet that a private firm, the New Zealand Company — brainchild of the heiress-abductor and former convict Edward Gibbon Wakefield — was about to implement a plan for the formal colonisation of the country and set up some form of government of its own.
As a consequence of these concurrent concerns, the British Government, on the advice of its officials in the Colonial Office, decided to act. A naval officer in fragile health who had previously been to New Zealand, William Hobson, was despatched from London in August 1839 with instructions to take the constitutional steps necessary to establish a British colony. He was told to negotiate a voluntary transfer of sovereignty from Maori to the British Crown, so that there might be no doubt under international law about the validity of the annexation that would follow.”
“These men were part of the same movement which had agitated for and brought about an end to slavery in the British Empire. Their concern for the welfare of Maori was genuine and profound. As time passed, however, and those same officials learned of the New Zealand Company’s private-enterprise plan to colonise parts of New Zealand, the emphasis changed. By 1839, as Claudia Orange has noted, the Colonial Office was no longer contemplating its original plan, a Maori New Zealand in which European settlers had somehow to be accommodated, but instead ‘a settler New Zealand in which a place had to be kept for Maori’.”
“Subsequent signings with local chiefs took place at Waimate North and the Hokianga in February, and later in nearly 50 other locations in the North and South Islands. Hobson proclaimed British sovereignty over the whole country on 21 May 1840, before the signings were complete, making New Zealand a dependency of New South Wales, and a year later New Zealand’s own charter came into effect, making the country a separate colony of Great Britain.”
“In 1840, however, the document served its original purpose. It enabled William Hobson, as the representative of the British Crown, to proclaim British sovereignty over the country and bring it into that family of nations known as the British Empire. Whether the Treaty meant more than this at the time is debatable. Hobson would have been utterly unable to govern the country, with a mere £4000, 39 officials and eleven ‘alcoholic’ New South Wales police troopers, had Maori not given their consent. At any time Maori could withdraw their consent, as they did on various occasions in the 1840s and 1860s, and the civil and military authorities were unable to establish or fully regain control of those parts of the country where ‘rebellions’ had occurred.”
“The number of Pakeha living in New Zealand in 1830 had been just over 300. Most of these settlers had come from Australia, some of them ex-convicts seeking to escape their penal pasts and some traders working for Australian-based timber and flax operations. A smaller percentage included those who had jumped ship from vessels originating in Britain, the United States and France. The population of missionaries and their families came largely from England (the Anglicans and Wesleyans) or from France (the Catholics). The total number of Pakeha settlers in 1840 was a little over 2000. By 1858 they would outnumber Maori by approximately 3000: 59,000 to 56,000. And by 1881 there would be around 500,000 of them. What caused this massive removal of population from one side of the world to the other?”
“Had Hobson not already acted three months earler, this settlement might have resulted in part or the whole of the South Island being annexed by France. As things transpired, however, organised French colonisation was confined to this small community (only 53 settlers in all) on Banks Peninsula.”
“Company prospectuses and allied advertising many lies about the nature of the new country (describing Wellington, for example, as a place of undulating plains suitable for the cultivation of grapevines, olives and wheat); by the time the truth was revealed, colonists had arrived and were unlikely to turn around at once and depart. And they were arriving in billowing numbers: Wellington had 2500 European settlers by 1841, and 4000 by 1843.”
“While the New Zealand Company settlements contributed only about 15,500 settlers to New Zealand’s founding population, they were disproportionately influential on account of being there first and establishing the ethos of their cities, three of which, with Auckland, would become and remain the ‘main centres’ and provide the foundation for the system of provincial government introduced in 1853. Christchurch, for example, would remain visibly English in character and appearance, and in the manners of its citizenry, for its first 100 years. And Dunedin, with its street names drawn from Edinburgh, its public buildings in stone and brick, and its scattering of Queen Anne towers, was still unmistakeably Scottish more than 150 years after its foundation.”
“Benjamin Shadbolt, transported in 1846 from Oxfordshire to Tasmania for burglary, won his ticket of leave in 1853, migrated to New Zealand in 1859 with sufficient capital to become, within a short period, a sawmiller, farmer, shopkeeper and publican on Banks Peninsula. By the time he died in 1862 at the early age of 57, he was a respected horse breeder and local body politician. His immediate descendants suppressed, or were never told about, the convict chapter of his life, which had enabled him to break out of rural poverty in England.”
“There was certainly far more mixing of ethnic and religious ingredients on the colonial frontier than there was at ‘Home’. Dr John Shaw in A Gallop to the Antipodes described his continual surprise at the manner in which people were living in New Zealand in the 1850s, apparently without many of the prejudices or preconceptions common to British people in Britain. He was also favourably impressed by the success of the ‘mixed-race’ communities around shore whaling stations.”
“Between 1831 and 1881, the Pakeha population of New Zealand had increased by 50,000 per cent. Of the 400,000 immigrants who came to the country, 300,000 remained there, while the number of births over the same period accounted for another 250,000 people. The character of New Zealand was changed forever. Those who had to relinquish ground, literally and metaphorically, for this influx of ‘foreign’ people were the first New Zealanders, the indigenous Maori. And, in relinquishing ground, they would lose it.”
“Most Maori had welcomed European settlers when they first encountered them. Because of tribal competitiveness, rangatira saw Pakeha as a means of consolidating local power: they would be a potential source of muskets, trade goods and useful advice, intermediaries in negotiations with other Pakeha, and enlarge the mana of the sponsoring chief, kainga and hapu. Many chiefs spoke with pride of ‘their’ Pakeha. As John Owens has pointed out, the achievements of the pre-1840 era of Maori-Pakeha cooperation — in economic development, race relations and social controls — had been considerable. It is likely that Maori who signed the Treaty of Waitangi expected these conditions to continue, ‘with emphasis on the small-scale community and the pressures of unwritten custom rather than the controls and legislation of [a] central government. Divisions, based … on race, class and sect would have had little meaning.’ The large-scale immigration beginning in the 1840s brought a shift in perspective, however. The Ati Awa chief Te Wharepouri told William Wakefield, brother of Edward Gibbon, that he had participated in the sale of land to the New Zealand Company expecting about ten Pakeha to settle around Port Nicholson, one for each pa. When he saw the more than 1000 settlers who stepped off the company’s first fleet of immigrant ships, he had panicked. The spectacle would have seemed like an invasion of extraterrestrials. It was beyond anything that Wharepouri had imagined.
Previous European settlement had taken place on Maori terms, with Maori in control of the process. Slowly, in the 1840s, Maori close to European coastal settlements began to realise the extent to which their identity and customs might be swallowed up by this mighty tide of strangers. Maori oratory of those years began to employ proverbs about the power of saltwater to contaminate freshwater (a nice metaphor, this, because Pakeha flesh was reputed to taste more salty than Maori), and the propensity of the kahawai for devouring the mullet.
It was from this time too that Maori began to display an increasing vulnerability to European-introduced diseases such as influenza and measles. As each new boatload of immigrants arrived, there was the possibility that they carried with them pathogens from the most recent strains of diseases prevalent in Britain or Europe.”
“The most fertile seed for conflict in all this was mutual misunderstanding over what constituted land ownership. For European buyers it was a signed deed. For Maori it was a variety of factors, including inherited rights, rights obtained by conquest, and rights of occupation and use. Maori sometimes refused to recognise the validity of sales to Europeans which had been conducted with other Maori who were not authorised to act on behalf of the hapu or tribe as a whole, which were the result of trickery, or which had not resulted in subsequent occupation and settlement.”
“It was a fraudulent land deal which lay behind the first armed clash between Maori and Pakeha after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, and the only one ever to take place in the South Island. The major player, again, was the New Zealand Company. Captain Arthur Wakefield held a false deed to land in the Wairau Valley on the southern side of Cook Strait (he had bought it from the widow of a whaler who claimed in turn to have bought the land from Te Rauparaha of Ngati Toa). When a group of Nelson settlers, including Wakefield, attempted to clear Maori off the land in June 1843, fighting broke out and 30 Europeans were killed, along with about half a dozen Maori. The dead included Arthur Wakefield, who was executed by the Ngati Toa chief Te Rangihaeata in return for the death of his wife Te Rongo, who was also Te Rauparaha’s daughter.
The Governor, Robert FitzRoy, who had succeeded Hobson after the latter died of a stroke in September 1842, held that the greater blame for the ‘massacre’, as the Nelson settlers called it, lay with the settlers themselves, because the land in question belonged to Ngati Toa.”
“James Belich, in his major revisionist analysis of the New Zealand Wars, argues that — in every sense that mattered — Heke and Kawiti won the Northern War. They were never defeated in any of its set-piece battles against imperial troops at Puketutu, Ohaeawai and Ruapekapeka (although Hokianga Ngapuhi succeeded in taking Heke’s pa at Te Ahuahu). Few of their men were killed (about 60, to the imperial forces’ 300). And Maori had succeeded in tying up the British forces in exactly the way they had sought to: ‘By building new pa in isolated locations, the Maori were able to channel military operations into economically unimportant areas. A British force attacking a new pa could not simultaneously attack Maori base areas.’”
“Major Mould of the Royal Engineers made detailed reports on the Maori rifle pits and trenches. The effect of those reports was seen in the use of trench warfare in the Crimea in 1853, and, of course, even more so in World War I, where the machine-gun made underground defences a necessity.”
“By 1860 the European population in New Zealand surpassed that of Maori for the first time, and it seemed to some leaders that the very survival of Maori people and their culture might be under threat.”
“Among the New Zealand birds that disappeared in the nineteenth century were the piopio, native quail and Stephens Island wren. The latter, the only known example of a perching bird which lost its power of flight, was once common all over the country. Kiore wiped it out on the New Zealand mainland and on other offshore islands. It hung on on Stephens Island until 1894, when the Government built a lighthouse there and installed a lighthouse keeper. The keeper brought a cat, and almost every day the cat brought a wren to the keeper’s door. In little more than a year the entire species was exterminated by this one cat.”
“In the country’s early years as a Crown colony, sheep were by far the most favoured animal for farming: wool was easily transported and exported; meat could not yet be refrigerated; and the grass intake of one cow would feed eight to ten sheep. By 1858 the country had 1.5 million of them, at a time when the human population was just over 115,000. The sheep population had risen to 13.1 million by 1878.”
“Grey evolved a system of hui for the discussion of land sales to the Crown — a procedure that recognised the communal nature of tribal ownership and gave all interested parties in the negotiations an opportunity to participate. Land bought in this manner was then on-sold to settlers at a profit to the Crown, the major method by which Grey generated government revenue. In this period some 30 million acres of land was acquired from South Island Maori, in circumstances which would be challenged by Ngai Tahu in subsequent years, and three million in the North Island.
Grey also appointed resident magistrates in Maori areas to apply the law of the land with the help of Maori assessors. He subsidised mission schools and some Maori agricultural schemes (with money to construct flour mills, for example) and built several hospitals specifically for Maori patients. And he leamed the Maori language and persuaded Maori authorities to commit their legends and traditions to writing, some of which he subsequently published (for example, Ko nga mot-eatea me nga hakirara o nga Maori in 1853, and Ko nga mahinga a nga tupuna Maori in 1854). His collected papers, which eventually found their way to the Auckland Public Library, would turn out to be the largest single repository of Maori-language manuscripts in the world. Grey’s understanding of Maori custom in the course of his first governorship enabled him to achieve successes that would have eluded other governors or politicians.”
“Grey had an autocratic temperament. And when, despite his own infidelities, he suspected his wife of forming an attachment with another man, he refused to speak to her for 36 years.”
“He died in a London hotel in 1898, a year after reconciling with his long-separated wife, Eliza.”
“The two spheres interacted without either side being dominant and Maori were in complete control of their own tribal territories. Most Europeans, however, regarded this state of affairs as temporary. They took it for granted that the Maori population would continue to decrease while that of European settlers increased; and that Maori land would progressively become available to Europeans for agricultural development.
Maori too began to fear this outcome. It seemed to some chiefs that tribal culture and tikanga (customs) might be in danger of permanent extinction unless active steps were taken to preserve them. For some, a prerequisite for such preservation was a ban on further sales of Maori land. A series of meetings held in the North Island in the 1850s promoted this strategy, along with the idea that Maori should combine their mana in a Maori monarch. This movement, inspired by Te Rauparaha’s son Tamihana and his cousin Matene Te Whiwhi, arose in part from the fact that the presence of Europeans had helped to create a sense of ‘Maoriness’. It arose too from a belief that the key to the power of Europeans lay in their unity under the British Crown. If Maori could achieve a similar unity under their own king, it was argued, they would be able to match European confidence and cohesion, retain their land and preserve customary law and traditional authority. In other words, if significant numbers of tribes were able to coalesce, they would be less susceptible to divide and rule strategies on the part of Pakeha colonists.
With this object in view, the elderly and ailing Waikato chief Te Wherowhero was selected first Maori King in 1856 at a representative gathering of tribes at Pukawa on the shore of Lake Taupo. He was formally installed in the position in 1858 at his ‘capital’ at Ngaruawahia and took the name Potatau. In the eyes of most European colonists who read about this ceremony in their newspapers, it was an act of Maori disloyalty to the British Crown, as was any expression of allegiance to a Maori monarch. In the eyes of supporters of the King movement, or Kingitanga, however, the mana of the two monarchs would be complementary.”
“The major engagements and dozens of skirmishes of the Waikato War had been responsible for over 1000 Maori and 700 European deaths. Worse than this price, however, Waikato Maori were punished by the confiscation of 1.3 million hectares of land, which further crippled and embittered the vanquished tribes. This action also secured for the New Zealand Government, as it was intended to do, the land with which to reward the militia troops and settle new colonists. What was taken was selected more for its fertility and strategic importance than for the owners’ part in the so-called rebellion: some tribes in northern Waikato who had remained loyal to the Government lost land along with those who had not; and the group that had been perhaps most bellicose in both the Waikato and Taranaki wars, Ngati Maniapoto, lost nothing (the Government showed little interest in the precipitous hills and valleys of their rohe until it wanted to push the main trunk railway line through there in the 1880s).”
“Nationally, the Maori population dropped from 56,049 in 1857–58 to 42,113 in 1896. As such figures became known they contributed to a widespread belief — among Pakeha and Maori — that Maori as a people and as a culture were headed for extinction.”
“Under the Vogel scheme of whole or partially paid assistance, immigrants flooded into the country: around 100,000 between 1871 and 1880. Over half came from England, about a quarter from Ireland, and slightly fewer than that from Scotland.”
“As a consequence of the immigration influx, the non-Maori population of New Zealand had soared to more than 470,000 by 1881. By that year too, the Maori population had dropped to 46,000, and it would continue to decline as a result of disease and low fertility for most of the next two decades. Immigration peaked in 1874, when there were 34,000 assisted migrants, a number that has never since been exceeded. In the mid-1880s, however, those who were New Zealand-born became the majority of the population, and from that time population growth would result more from natural increase than from immigration.
As an integral part of the Vogel programme, transport and communications in New Zealand were revolutionised in the 1870s and 1880s. A telegraph cable had been laid between the North and South Islands in 1866. Ten years later a further line connected New Zealand to Australia, and from there to the wider world.”
“The very persistence of tribal feeling had worked against the continuation of ‘nationalist’ experiments such as the Kingitanga (though the Kingitanga survived, largely as the responsibility of Tainui tribes).
Persistence of tribal feeling as the very essence of Maori identity prevented Maori from acting as a pressure group commensurate with their numbers. Even though four specifically Maori seats were created in the national Parliament in 1867, extending the franchise to all Maori men, tribalism and regionalism prevented the members from acting in concert to promote common Maori objectives (as did the fact that most of those early Maori MPs were not proficient in English, and few Pakeha members spoke Maori).
Despite such diversity, most Europeans, unless they had married into Maori families, rarely distinguished one Maori from another or one tribe from another — a fact especially evident in cartoons of Maori of the period. Maori were simply ‘Native’ in official language; those of part-Maori descent were almost always identified exclusively with that side if their features or colouring were even slightly Polynesian in character.
One of the reasons for this was that most Pakeha living in, say, the four main centres were by this time unlikely to come into direct contact with Maori, and even in a provincial centre such as Hamilton Maori appeared only to sell vegetables door to door and did not live in the town.”
The 20th Century
“For a long time the official attitude to problems of Maori health and welfare was to ignore them. There were, in effect, two New Zealands at this time: the Pakeha one, served and serviced by national and local government administration systems; and Maori New Zealand, served by a native schools system and little else, but ignored except when national or local government wanted to appropriate land, income (dog taxes, for example) or manpower. Maori were unable to obtain housing finance until the 1930s. Maori owners in general were unable to borrow money for land development. Land taken from Maori for public works would not be returned when the public use was over. Few doctors saw Maori patients, hospitals rarely took them and most did not want to. The Auckland health officer, in whose district the bulk of the Maori population lived, stated in 1911 that Maori health should be of concern to Europeans — but only because the unchecked spread of Maori diseases could lead eventually to Europeans contracting them. ‘As matters stand,’ he wrote, ‘the Native race is a menace to the wellbeing of the European.’”
“When the national Parliament had instituted four Maori seats in 1867, one of the factors that made this measure acceptable to Pakeha MPs was that it gave the North Island a more favourable balance of seats in relation to the South Island, where gold rushes had ensured a population explosion and consequent disproportionate increase in the number of seats there. In some respects this was an enlightened move, giving adult Maori males universal sufferage twelve years ahead of pakeha men and making New Zealand the first neo-European country in the world to give votes to its indigenous population (it would be another 95 years before Australia did the same). But had those seats been allocated on a population basis, as the non-Maori ones were, Maori would have had fourteen or fifteen. Initially the new electorates were established as temporary ones, reflecting the widely held belief that the Maori population would barely survive the nineteenth century. But they were made permanent in 1876 and, towards the close of the twentieth century, increased in number on — at last — the basis of population.”
“The world’s third great plague spread along the trade routes out of China in the late 1890s and eventually killed more than 10 million people, most of them in Asia. The disease reached Sydney in 1900, where there were 303 cases and 103 deaths that year.”
“The Boer War was also in part responsible for the degree of nationalism that decisively ruled out the possibility of New Zealand’s federating with the Australian colonies in 1901.”
“Another effect of the South African War was to create in New Zealand a sharper interest in the broad questions of national and imperial defence. Richard Seddon, who developed a plan to federate Hawaii, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and the Cook Islands into New Zealand, was allowed by the British Government instead to annex the Cooks in 1901 and Niue in 1905 — a gesture which could be interpreted as British gratitude for the country’s contribution to the South African War. Seddon wanted Samoa too, but New Zealand’s assumption of responsibility for part of that territory would have to await the defeat of Germany in World War I.”
“On 15 August a 1400-strong advance party of troops sailed for German-occupied Samoa The operation was successful and the New Zealand commander accepted a German surrender in Samoa on 29 August. It was the first Allied occupation of German territory in the war.”
“Back home, the prevailing jingoism and the pain experienced by bereaved families combined to generate intense hostility towards those suspected of being shirkers or disloyal. People of German descent were treated badly — butchers’ shops were wrecked, barbers forced to close their premises and, in Christchurch, the bells of the Lutheran church were smashed. Many Continental European immigrants, especially the Dalmatians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were interned as aliens. Even the Tainui Maori leader Te Puea Herangi was ostracised because of distant German ancestry.”
“Te Puea had been born at Whatiwhatihoe in the King Country in 1883, a granddaughter through her mother Tiahuia of the second Maori King, Tawhiao. She achieved prominence within the Kingitanga when she led the campaign against the conscription of Waikato Maori in World War I. Her claims to leadership as a member of the kahui ariki were greatly strengthened by her sharp intellect, quick wits, high degree of articulateness in Maori and near-ruthless determination to achieve the goals she set herself.
All these qualities were in evidence when she established Turangawaewae Mara at Ngaruawahia from 1921. In the late 1920s the coincidence of her need for further resources with Coates and Nata’s plans for Maori cultural and agricultural development brought her into fruitful contact with the governmental and Public Service network, which Waikato had shunned since her uncle King Mahuta had sat on the Executive Council representing the Maori people (1903–09). From the late 1920s Te Puea was a national Maori figure, Turangawaewae began to take on the character of a national mare, and she had access to the resources of the state with which to achieve her objectives and heighten her mana (though some conservatives in Waikato referred to her disparagingly as ‘Mrs Kawanatanga’ on account of her association with politicians). Ngata’s land development scheme was the most dramatic example of this process — it offered a means by which Waikato Maori communities could subsist on their own territory, mainly through dairy farming, and conserve their traditional living patterns. In association with this security she consolidated a calendar of Kingitanga hui in the 1930s and 1940s which gave these communities activities to plan for and look forward to the year round.
Like other successful local Maori leaders, Te Puea was an innovator who appealed to precedent. It is difficult to judge the extent to which she chose this role or the role assumed her. What is clear is that, having decided on a course — moving to Ngaruawahia, building a meeting house, re-establishing carving and rivercraft, returning to farming — she would always find justification in tradition, most often in the whakatauki or proverbs of Tawhiao. Even when breaking with tradition — by standing and speaking in public, for example — she always made it clear that her own actions should not be taken as grounds for discarding tikanga. When she devised new programmes — such as raising money by concert tours or by inviting political participation in her hui held to open Mahinarangi meeting house in 1929 — she cloaked them with traditional Maori ceremonial so as to arouse, quite deliberately, nostalgic memories of past tribal achievements.
Te Puea’s natural aptitudes — in particular her perceptiveness about tactics and the quick-wittedness with which she wrong-footed rivals — were strengthened by her mastery of the arts of delegation and organisation. Her meticulous keeping of records ensured that she was always well informed, and often better informed than her rivals. She knew instinctively when to persist in one tactical direction and when to alter course. She was adept at extending her own talents and compensating for the skills she lacked by recruiting lieutenants to act for her in specialised ways. Her use of Maori and Pakeha mediators made valuable paths for her into both worlds to an extent she could not have achieved on her own. And at points where people were no longer useful or let her down she was rarely handicapped by sentiment: she simply discarded them.
The immediate consequences of Te Puea’s leadership can be judged by comparing the legacy she left with the conditions she inherited. She began tribal work in 1910, when Waikato were largely fragmented and demoralised. In 40 years of relentless effort she found ways for them to return to a system of rural-based extended families and communal patterns of living, influenced by traditional leadership and with a calendar of distinctively Maori cultural activities. In addition to these more general goals, she was largely responsible for the considerable measure of Pakeha acceptance that the Kingitanga had won by the time she died in 1952. She has been called ‘possibly the most influential woman in our political history’ and it would be difficult to dispute this assessment.”
“The major constitutional development of the post-war years went almost unnoticed at the time by the public at large. On 25 November 1947, the New Zealand Parliament finally ratified the Statute of Westminster, which gave the country complete autonomy in foreign as well as domestic affairs. In one sense this was no more than formal recognition of a position that had existed since World War I. But the measure had considerable symbolic value. New Zealand was no longer a colony, nor a ‘dominion’. It was a fully independent member of the British Commonwealth. That it had taken so long to get the statute before the New Zealand Parliament (all the other dominions had ratified it earlier, most of them in 1931) indicated how reluctant New Zealanders were to take this step and how imperial feelings persisted into and through the years of World War II.”
The Late 20th Century
“The cause of marine conservation and the movement to ban nuclear weapons from the South Pacific were boosted in July 1985 when agents of the French secret service (the DGSE) bombed and sank the Greenpeace organisation’s flagship vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour. The ship had been about to sail to Moruroa in French Polynesia to protest against continuing nuclear testing by the French on that isolated atoll. The effect of the DGSE’s intervention, however — the first act of state-sponsored terrorism in New Zealand — was to increase substantially Greenpeace’s local membership and enlarge support for the anti-nuclear movement, already galvanised by Labour Prime Minister David Lange’s proclamation that New Zealand would prohibit the passage of nuclear-armed or -propelled vessels through its territorial waters. The French Government subsequently paid New Zealand compensation for the bombing.”
“New Zealanders had long been told they would never get TV because their country was overly endowed with mountains and valleys. Despite the geographical problems, transmission had begun in Auckland in 1960 and nationally in 1961.”
“A steady and increasing rate of Maori urbanisation would mean that in the second half of the twentieth century Maori and Pakeha would come into widespread contact with each other for the first time since the 1860s.”
“In. 1936 only 11.2 per cent of the national Maori population had lived in urban areas. By 1945 this had risen to 25.7 per cent, and by 1996 to over 81 per cent. Maori had become, in little more than a generation, an overwhelmingly urban people.”
“This was also the period when many families living in cities ceased to have active links with their iwi and hapu, and lost all live connection with the Maori language, the practice of Maori ritual and the observance of tikanga Maori. The language was in a relatively healthy state in the early 1930s. By the 1970s it was in serious danger of extinction as elderly native speakers died and were not replaced by younger ones. The policy of not speaking Maori in schools, requested by Maori parents and school boards in the 1860s, had done some damage to the transmission of the culture, but not nearly as much as that caused by the later breakdown of family and tribal links in the post-war years. In addition, there was a tendency for those of grandparent age to view the future of the language — and of Maori culture itself — with pessimism. À commonly heard saying of the time was, ‘You’ll have better prospects if you korero Pakeha.’”
“Born Josephine Te Wake at Te Karaka on the Hokianga Harbour in 1895, Whina was the daughter of a leading Te Rarawa chief, Heremia Te Wake. From him, she inherited mana, considerable ability and an expectation that she would assume a leadership role among the Kai Tutae and Ngati Manawa hapu of Te Rarawa. After education at Whakarapa Native School and St Joseph’s Maori Girls’ College in Napier (where Sir James Carroll paid her fees), Whina was in succession a teacher, a storekeeper and a farmer in the northern Hokianga. She took her father’s place after he died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. By the late 1920s, based at Panguru, she was known as the most forceful community leader in the district. When Apirana Ngata was seeking local tribal support for his land development scheme, Whina was an obvious ally, and she introduced and supervised the scheme in her area. She extended both her expertise and her influence as a result of a second marriage in 1935 to William Cooper, a Ngati Kahungunu friend of Ngata who had represented Maori on the royal commission investigating Maori land in 1927.
After Cooper’s death in 1949, Whina observed the large number of Maori abandoning rural districts for the cities and decided to move to Auckland to become involved in voluntary welfare work. She patrolled hotels, looking especially for Maori parents who were not coping with alcohol or who were neglecting their families. In 1951 she was elected first president of the Maori Women’s Welfare League, which was set up that year by the Department of Maori Affairs on the initiative of Rangi Royal, a senior welfare officer. Whina held the position for six years.
After establishing local branches throughout the country, and making a considerable impact with the education of Maori mothers in such matters as child-rearing and household budgeting, Cooper turned the league into the only national Maori forum then in existence, and into the major non-political pressure group for representations to governments on Maori issues (both these roles would later be subsumed by the New Zealand Maori Council, set up by the Holyoake National Government in 1962). She was also especially active in securing adequate Maori housing in Auckland, in building urban marae and in fundraising for voluntary welfare programmes, especially those organised by the Catholic Church.
In 1975 Whina Cooper established Te Roopu o te Matakite and led the Maori Land March from Te Hapua in the far north to Parliament in Wellington, dramatising a national Maori determination not to lose further land to Pakeha or Crown ownership. She remained a prominent Maori protest figure in the 1980s and 1990s, still adopting new causes and formulating representations to ministers of Maori Affairs as she approached 100 years of age.”
“The report’s most successful outcomes were the setting-up of the Māori Education Foundarion to help pupils through secondary and tertiary education, the extension of trade training facilities for Māori, and the provision for hostel accommodation and pre-employment courses for young Māori new to city life.”
“The combined effect of the activities of all these groups was to focus media attention on Maori issues in a way that had never occurred previously, gradually to radicalise such establishment organisations as the New Zealand Maori Council, Maori parliamentary representation and the mainline churches, and to bring about major changes in the operations of such government departments as Education, Social Welfare, Justice and Maori Affairs. Kohanga reo or ‘language nests’ were set up for pre-schoolers, one-year teacher training courses were established for Maori speakers, public funds became available for the first time for the renovation of marae buildings, legal aid was offered for Maori offenders, and the Race Relations Act 1971 outlawed discrimination and established the Race Relations Conciliator’s Office to promote public education on ethnic issues, deal with complaints about discrimination and to mitigate racial and cultural conflict.”
“Another far-reaching policy change affecting Maori resulted from the restructuring of the state sector. The 1986 State Owned Enterprises Act had given the Waitangi Tribunal power to adjudicate on the status of land being transferred from government departments to SOEs. The following year, in a case arising out of this process, the Court of Appeal ruled that ‘the principles of the treaty override everything else in the State Owned Enterprises Act, and these principles require the Pakeha and Maori treaty partners to act towards each other reasonably and with the utmost good faith’.
This decision, and subsequent references to the Treaty of Waitangi grafted onto other bills and amendments to previous Acts, such as those governing health, education and conservation, gave the Treaty an explicit place in New Zealand jurisprudence for the first time. They also represented an acknowledgement by Parliament that the Treaty had not been simply a mechanism for transferring the sovereignty of the country from Maori to the Crown, but that it was now recognised as providing a framework for the present and future relationship of Maori and the Crown, the two Treaty partners.”
