by Michael King
The Penguin History of New Zealand
Michael King
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2003
Copyright © Michael King 2003
The right of Michael King to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.
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ISBN 9781742288260
Contents
Preface
Prehistory: to 1000 AD
1. A Land Without People
Settlement: to 1850 AD
2. Seeds of Rangiatea
3. The Great New Zealand Myth
4. Landfall
5. First Colonisation
6. Te Ao Maori
7. Distance Perforated
8. The Arrival of Europe
9. Maori Engage the World
10. God and Guns
11. A Treaty
12. Tangata Tiriti
13. Tangata Whenua Respond
Consolidation: to 1950 AD
14. New Settlers Take Control
15. A Time of Turbulence
16. A Functioning Nation?
17. Maori Lifeways
18. Party Politics Begins
19. Baptism of Blood?
20. Farmers in Charge
21. Maori Survival
22. Depression and Recovery
23. Conformity and Non-conformity
24. At War Again
Unsettlement: post-1950 AD
25. Cracks in the Plinth
26. Land under Pressure
27. A Revolution Begun
28. Return of Mana Maori
29. A Revolution Confirmed
Posthistory
30. Configurations Old and New
Further Reading & Acknowledgements
New Zealand with Provincial Boundaries Map
North Island Map
South Island Map
Tribal Location Map
Governments of New Zealand
For
Lewis King
Spiro Zavos and
Peter Munz
Who fed and enlarged an appetite for history
Always to islanders danger
Is what comes over the sea
ALLEN CURNOW
A nation is bound together not by the past, but by the stories of the past that we tell one another in the present.
ERNEST RENAN
New Zealand’s fertile plains were the last that Europeans found before the Earth’s supply revealed itself as finite. Our relationship with them has been completely unsustainable … [We] have exploited these islands’ richest ecosystems with all the violence that modern science and technology could summon … [We] must live with the rest of nature or die with the rest of nature.
GEOFF PARK
Preface
New Zealand history sometimes seems extraordinarily compressed and close at hand. From the study in which I write, I look out on Maungaruawahine and Ruahiwihiwi, hilltop pa that still bear the imprint of the men and women of Ngati Hei, who fortified them. Over the range behind us is the sandbar where Roger Green discovered an East Polynesian pearl-shell lure, the only authenticated artefact that ancestors of the Maori brought with them from their island homelands in the Pacific. Up the inland end of our estuary is a wooden boom built in the days when kauri logs were floated down the valley for collection and transport to sawmills on the Waitemata.
Then there are the people. In my student days I knew Tom Seddon, born in 1884, who in childhood had enjoyed the company of his father’s friend George Grey. So I had shaken the hand of someone who had shaken the hand of Sir George Grey, Governor of New Zealand at the time of the Northern Wars. And Grey had shaken the hand of Hone Heke. Much later I knew Whina Cooper, whose father, Heremia Te Wake, had been born two years before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. These proximities gave me the feeling, if not quite the reality, that I was but one generation removed from the most momentous events of nineteenth-century New Zealand history; and that made those events seem all the more vivid and close to my own lifetime. Writing this book has confirmed that feeling.
A few words are in order, perhaps, to say what The Penguin History of New Zealand is and is not.
It is not an encyclopaedia that attempts to tell the story of every district and hamlet and to name every famous New Zealander from All Blacks to the first European child born in Waipukurau. A compendium of those proportions is being assembled by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage for transmission alongside the ministry’s online edition of The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. It was not my intention to duplicate those ventures.
Instead, this volume provides an overview for understanding the unfolding of New Zealand history as a whole over the near-millennium that the country has been occupied by humankind. In particular it identifies the myths that have shaped New Zealand cultures and provided them with cohesion and coherence. It examines too what happens when those myths are challenged. It reveals how societies are conditioned not so much by events as by group memories of events. And it confirms that the basic needs driving human history are the search for secure places in which to live, eat, shelter, reproduce and practise cultural or spiritual values.
It is currently fashionable to speak of the ‘histories’ of a country, as if there are many versions of national history (which there are) and many ways of approaching such histories (which there are), and as if they were all of equal value and validity (which they are not). This book is unashamedly a history of New Zealand in the sense that its narrative has been conceived by and passed through the mind and sensibility of a single historian, and in the sense that it identifies some explanations – the hows and whys of history – as more plausible than others.
The text does, however, draw on a range of sources, Maori and Pakeha, male and female, privileged and unprivileged. And it draws on the work of fellow historians who have preceded me into the field and into print. The most important of those sources and colleagues are named with respect and gratitude in the acknowledgements.
One further major point needs to be made.
While I have relied often on the work of colleagues, this book is not written for other historians. Much of what I say and the manner in which I say it will be familiar terrain for professional peers. Instead, this volume is directed at curious and intelligent general readers, Maori and Pakeha, who are not historians. It focuses on things which such readers in the twenty-first century ought to know – and, perhaps, need to know – about the history of their country. For this printing of the book, revisions have been made and new material added.
Michael King
Coromandel Peninsula
Part I: Prehistory
Chapter 1
A Land Without People
In Queen Charlotte Sound on 17 January 1770, Joseph Banks, naturalist on James Cook’s first expedition to the South Seas, caught a last vibration of primordial New Zealand – a land where bush grew to the water’s edge and trees were filled from ground level to canopy with copious bird and insect life:
This morn I was awakd by the singing of the birds ashore from whence we are distant not a quarter of a mile, the numbers of them were certainly very great who seemd to strain their throats with emulation … [Their] voices were certainly the most melodious wild musick I have ever heard, almost imitating small bells but with the most tuneable silver sound imaginable.
‘For all its exuberance and beauty,’ one of Banks’s successors would write, ‘[that] dawn chorus was a mere echo of what could have been heard four hundred years before, for by 1770 around half of New Zealand’s bird species were already extinct. Gone were the great booming calls of the moa (which we know about from their convoluted, bony tracheas), the screaming, mewing and cawing of a billion seabirds (which even in Banks’s day were banished from the main islands), and the unknowable sounds of the native ducks, giant geese, and yard-high flightless rails, native crows and giant harriers.’
These creatures were gone, along with the flightless wrens and the giant eagles, because the first human inhabitants had carried with them to New Zealand rats and dogs, and the ability to hunt and to make fire. And further extinctions would be triggered by the very visit that allowed Banks to hear that still-impressive remnant of the dawn chorus. Norway rats infested Cook’s barque Endeavour and found their way ashore wherever the ship attached itself to land by rope or gangplank. These cunning carnivores, loosed onto a bird population that had evolved without mammalian predators, would initiate another round of carnage that would take further virtuosos out of Banks’s avian choir – piopio, kokako, saddleback and others. Thirty-two New Zealand bird species disappeared after the arrival of New Zealand’s first human inhabitants; another nine would follow as a result of European animal introductions.
Had any events preceding human invasion been as catastrophic for the country’s flora and fauna? Certainly natural disasters – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, the advance and retreat of ice ages, the rise and fall of parts of the country above and below the sea – all these had taken a toll over geological time and had a crucial bearing on what creatures survived and what characteristics evolved to make their survival more likely. 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.
If the essence of environmental history is, as some claim, the imprint of the natural world on human society, then the Taupo eruption could qualify as the first recorded event of the historical era in which New Zealand made an impact on the wider world.[1] There was, however, no contemporary knowledge of where the volcanic phenomena originated. Nor can we be sure that there were witnesses to the cataclysm in the land of its occurrence – no evidence of occupation, in other words, nor stories based on it.
One other piece of evidence relating to this period intrigues by its ambiguity. 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. And it is in the latter period, when occupation and evidence coincide, making it possible to build narratives, that the human history of the country must begin. Everything that occurred before that – the formation of the land, the evolution of its plants and of its bird, animal and insect inhabitants – falls into the categories of prehistory or natural history. And, thanks to the sciences of geology, palaeontology and palaeobiology, it is possible to establish the sequence and chronology by which a fragment of the supercontinent of Gondwana became the islands of New Zealand, which humankind began to colonise around 800 years ago.
Maori, first human inhabitants of the country, had two mythological stories to account for its existence. In the first, Mother Earth was ripped from the embrace of the Sky Father:
Ranginui was joined in amorous embrace to Papatuanuku. Within this clasp the world was in perpetual darkness and the nakedness of Papatuanuku was covered with vegetation that thrived in moisture. The sons of Rangi and Papa lamented the conditions in which they were forced to live between their parents. Eventually they resolved to act. Tumatauenga suggested that the parents be killed. Tanemahuta objected. It would be sufficient, he said, to prise them apart and let Ranginui stand above and Papatuanuku lie below.
All but one son agreed and took turns at trying to effect the separation. None succeeded until Tanemahuta placed his shoulders against the earth and his feet on the sky. Slowly he straightened his body and the parents began to give way. When he had succeeded, the children of Ranginui and Papatuanuku
knew light for the first time. And the children of Tanemahuta – the trees, birds and insects of the forest – were able to see and breathe. The earth remained a nurturing mother, but the sky became a stranger to them.
The son who had objected to the separation, Tawhirimatea, was angered by the pain to which his parents had been subjected. He followed his father into the sky and from there begot his own offspring: wind, rains and storms. These he unleashed on Papatuanuku and the children of Tane, disfiguring the land and uprooting trees and plants. Tanemahuta meanwhile went on to shape the first woman out of earth and to breathe life into her. Then he procreated with her and produced a line of men-like gods and god-like men.
This story, which Maori shared in broad outline with Polynesians in other parts of the Pacific, answered basic questions about how the earth and the elements came to be and the relationship of humankind to them. It was the starting-point of the genealogy that began with the void, led to Ranginui and Papatuanuku, continued through named ancestors and the lines of living believers and persisted through future descendants. It revealed that the gods – the elements – were born of the earth and the sky, and that humankind was born of the gods – a satisfactory metaphor for the source of life. It was one of a number of cultural strands that provided coherence and cohesion for pre-Pakeha Maori society and exhibited some of the textures of that society’s imaginative life. It was complemented by another story, also derived from wider Polynesia, to account for the specific existence of the North Island of New Zealand:
Maui-tikitiki-a-Taranga wanted to go fishing with his older brothers, who refused to take him. So he hid under the bottom boards of the canoe and did not reveal himself until the vessel was far out to sea. The brothers were annoyed by this and wanted to return him to shore, but by this time the land was too far away. So they began to fish, and after a time they filled the canoe with their catch. Now Maui produced his own hook, the barb of which was made from a fragment of his grandmother’s jawbone. The brothers refused him bait so Maui struck his nose and smeared the hook with his own blood. He lowered his line and almost immediately hooked a fish of great magnitude. The only way he could haul it up was by reciting a chant to make heavy weights light.