Zone of the Marvellous

by Martin Edmond

  The stranding of the Lord Worsley left Māori leaders at Te Namu torn between their responsibilities to the passengers under the laws of hospitality and the obligations that they had towards their own people: this atmosphere of tension and ambivalence, unresolved by either outright hostility or complete friendship, formed the background to Horopapera’s revelation. He was of the party who felt the Europeans off the Lord Worsley, along with their goods, should be given safe passage to the nearby city of New Plymouth. When the Lord Worsley had been five days on shore, Horopapera said, I was one night seized with an affliction and felt as if someone were shaking me. I heard a voice saying, ‘Who is this sleeping? Rise up! Rise up!’ I then became porewarewa (that is, under the influence of spirits). He had somehow to reconcile loyalty to the teachings of the missionaries with his concern for the plight of his own people; or to put it another way, to reconcile his Māori and his Pākehā sides.

  Nevertheless some of his devotees were followers of Riki not Ruru; and the movement he inspired was generally seen by Europeans as a bloodthirsty cult in which unregenerate Māori corrupted the good teachings of missionaries to serve their own savage ends; the aspect of identification with a people exiled in, or from, their own land was not appreciated by those who were in the process of legal or illegal confiscation of that very land. Many Pai Mārire were made prisoner in the wars of the 1860s and transported to the Chatham Islands, off the east coast of the South Island. Some fell under the influence of another biblically inspired prophet, Te Kooti Rikirangi, whose Ringatū religion incorporates aspects of Pai Mārire, including the upraised hand – ringa-tū – that gives the church its name. This gesture, which some allege was meant to deflect bullets away from the faithful, in Ringatū becomes an act of homage to God.

  The Good and Peaceful religion founded by Te Ua persists in some areas of New Zealand to this day, as does the example of the passive resistance offered to land grabs by Te Whiti and Tohu at Parihaka. In the same way Te Kooti’s Ringatū faith endures and has in some parts of the east coast of the North Island assimilated beliefs of Jamaican Rastafarianism, whose adherents also identify their exile in Babylon with that of the Jews of the Old Testament. There are suggestions, too, that adherents of Te Atua Wera live on in the north, while a later Māori movement, the Rātana Church, made an historic pact with the New Zealand Labour Party that secured the four designated Māori seats for both church and party during the middle years of the twentieth century. A more shadowy prophetic movement, Māramatanga, which arose from the same roots as the Rātana Church but which has Catholic affiliations, also persists strongly today in the central North Island of New Zealand.

  BY THE TIME MĀORI identified themselves as Tiu European thought had moved beyond the classification of Polynesians as biblical Lost Tribes and decided instead they were most likely Aryans, perhaps from the Caucasus, perhaps from North Africa, perhaps even from Mesopotamia. This quaint-seeming notion was widely held in the second half of the nineteenth century and had eminent partisans well into the twentieth; even today it is not entirely outdated as the theories of contemporaries Barry Fell and R. A. Lochore attest. The word Aryan means Lord; it was used to designate kingship in ancient India and passed into English in 1601 with its original meaning intact. Its use as a racial and linguistic term begins in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century; and much of the mythology that has built up around this largely mythical base derives from the work of hyperpolyglot William Jones.

  Jones in his 1786 book The Sanscrit Language suggested that Classical Greek, Latin and Sanskrit share a common root and might also be related to Gothic, Celtic and Persian languages. The revelation of a common source – now usually known as proto-Indo-European – for these disparate languages set off a wave of speculation that attempted to locate cultural as well as linguistic roots in ancient, especially Indian and Central Asian, cultures. Max Müller, the Lutheran son of a German romantic poet from Leipzig, translator of both the Upanishads and the Rigveda, suggested that Indian, that is Aryan, models lay behind the gods of Greek and Roman antiquity. He thought those gods were in part personifications of natural forces and in part the result of what he called mythology: a disease of language. Gods might have begun as words for abstract ideas that, over time, became imagined as personalities. Zeus was not a Cretan king but a memory of the word dyaus, meaning radiance. Müller derived from the same source deva, deus, theos as generic terms for a god.

  Müller was never entirely comfortable with Darwin’s theory of evolution and yet he seems to suggest here that some sort of evolutionary process operated in the development of religion as well as language. Other scholars sought the same kind of progression in the development of societies. Sir John Lubbock believed that the study of contemporary savages could throw light on … the condition of early races which inhabited our continent, that is Europe. The new comparative method, pioneered in linguistic study and then applied broadly to many other fields of human endeavour, including customs, material culture, religion, myths, legends and oral traditions, was used with a kind of intoxicated glee to construct grand genealogies of culture and race, with finds from one field applied uncritically to support theories in others; but the primary means by which the Aryan Māori was traced were linguistic.

  Two notable figures in this quest were Abraham Fornander, an American judge living in Hawai‘i, and Edward Tregear, the New Zealand scholar and public servant who in 1885 published his book The Aryan Maori. Tregear, a Cornishman, had worked as a surveyor and fought against Māori in the wars in the 1860s before returning to surveying; he knew Māori language and it was largely on linguistic grounds that he advanced the notion that Māori descended from warlike, pastoral Aryans; and that their language preserved the speech of their forefathers in an almost inconceivable purity. These uncivilized brothers of ours have kept embalmed in their simple speech a knowledge of the habits and history of our ancestors, that, in the Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic tongues, have been hidden under the dense undergrowth of literary opulence. Some scholars today still search Polynesian languages for a word for rice in the hope that this will prove a southeast or south Asian origin for the people.

  Tregear’s work was honoured in the mother country but derided in New Zealand, in particular by Nelson lawyer A. S. Atkinson, also an amateur linguist, who cruelly spoofed Tregear’s theory in a scholarly journal. It wasn’t hard to ridicule: Tregear’s book featured on its cover a picture of a Māori warrior and a shaggy, horned bull – he had derived Māori tara, courage, from the Latin taurus. Yet his ideas remained current into the twentieth century, particularly in the work of John Macmillan Brown, professor of English history and political economy at Canterbury University College and later chancellor of the University of New Zealand. Brown was also the maternal grandfather of poet James K. Baxter. He travelled widely in the Pacific and his major work on Polynesian origins, Maori and Polynesian (1907), seeks to prove, by comparative philology, that Polynesians were indeed of Aryan origin.

  Polynesian languages, Brown thought, were an amalgam of several different Aryan tongues, reflecting different routes into the Pacific: some, driven east by Mongolian influxes, had come through South East Asia; some had travelled through Micronesia; a third migration passed over the Bering Strait into the Americas before sailing west to Easter Island. Initially he thought this amalgam had been formed in Indonesia but later, after the discovery in 1911 of Tocharish or Tocharian, a primeval Aryan language, in a manuscript found in Chinese Turkestan, Brown decided he had found the key to the question of origin: Polynesians came from Europe many thousands of years ago … the main features of the Polynesian tongue … go back to the old stone age in Europe … philological students of Latin and Greek and the modern European languages must study Polynesian in order to see the type from which these sprung.

  These extraordinary claims were made and taken perfectly seriously; Stephenson Percy Smith, along with Edward Tregear the founder of the Polynesian Society, believed he had
established a chronology for the migration from his study of Polynesian, especially Rarotongan, genealogies. The departure from India had taken place about 450 BCE and the people were not simply Aryan, they were Caucasian too – whatever that meant. One of Smith’s disciples, R. Studholme Thompson, classified Māori and Polynesians as belonging to the Alpine section of the Caucasian race and located their primeval home in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, not so very far from where Robert Graves thought Atlantis had been. Even Sir Peter Buck, the eminent Māori scholar, anthropologist and a medical doctor, was dismayed when, in Hawai‘i in the 1930s, he was refused United States citizenship because American law did not recognise Polynesians as Caucasians.

  POLYNESIANS ARE NEITHER Aryans, Jews nor Caucasians and their affinities in culture, language and race lie with the peoples of South East Asia; this was recognised by the early explorers and taken as a matter of course. Magellan’s Malaccan slave Enrique could converse with the peoples of the Philippines; the Tahitian Tupaia could talk to Māori; Cook himself remarked that a South East Asian provenance for Polynesian peoples was most probable. So what happened to this rational enlightenment view in the nineteenth century? One suggestion might be that the loss of the fabled Great South Land from the imagination of Europe was compensated for by the invention of a fabled people; with the added advantage that Māori and Polynesian were then inducted into the European family of nations and became if not exactly us, then at the very least like us. Their reinvention as ourselves became an aid to, and a provocation for, strategies of colonisation in the Pacific.

  This aid and/or provocation was however entirely lacking on the other side of the Tasman Sea, where it was asserted that there was no affinity between the Aboriginal peoples and the European colonists; not only that – perhaps the original people were not really there at all, or not in the sense of possessing any kind of humanity that could be recognised by English law. Here is J. L. Nicholas, who sailed with Marsden to New Zealand in 1814, on Aborigines:

  The wretched and improvident habits of these people, and their total ignorance of the art of cultivation, and of any of the means which contribute to raise the existence of human beings superior to that of brutes, must leave them considerably behind the natives of New Zealand … The people of this continent appear totally incapable of exercising their reasoning faculties … To this I may add the total inaptitude they evince for imitation, as well as their disinclination to manual labour, which leads them to subsist on the most loathsome fare … Wandering about in a state of nudity and starvation, they have seen, without profiting in the smallest degree by it, the example of European industry before their eyes for the last thirty years; and it appears from the accounts of the late Captain Flinders … that the character of the natives is equally abject in every part as in that which is colonized.

  Nicholas, who in this passage was attempting to show that Māori and Polynesian peoples could not have originated in Australia, does not mention and perhaps did not know that Flinders was accompanied on his circumnavigation by Bungaree, whose assessment of his own and kindred peoples would have been quite different from the general view of the European population at Port Jackson that Nicholas is voicing. But we can’t know because Bungaree wasn’t asked.

  The contempt commonly felt by white settlers for local Aborigines arose at least partly from guilt at the damage colonisation had already caused to the population. Smallpox ravaged the Sydney area in the first year of settlement and then spread inexorably beyond, even into areas that had never seen Europeans; this ghostly absence of people from the land became one of the factors in the notorious application of an ancient legal fiction to the continent. It is sometimes assumed that the doctrine of terra nullius was proclaimed by the British Crown at the outset of Australian settlement but this is not the case. Rather it evolved gradually through the Sydney courts in the decades after Nicholas wrote, that is, the 1820s and ’30s.

  Behind the term terra nullius is a related notion, res nullius, meaning without residents. During the era of European colonisation the doctrine of res nullius gave legal force to the claiming and settlement of lands occupied by people among whom no system of laws or ownership of property was held to exist: they were there but they were not resident there. Terra nullius was sometimes also applied to uncultivated land: that is, since the indigenous people were not using the land, those who could cultivate it had a right to claim it as their own. Indigenous Australians were known to inhabit the continent but were thought, in some cases clearly erroneously, not to cultivate. A court judgment in Sydney in 1827 decided that Aborigines were subject to English law only when a dispute arose that concerned both settlers and themselves; otherwise, it was thought, tribal law would provide a sufficient remedy. Further decisions in 1829 and 1832 reinforced this view; but the founding document of the fiction of terra nullius lay in a proclamation by New South Wales governor Richard Bourke in 1835.

  When John Batman first settled at Port Phillip Bay, he attempted to buy the land from Aborigines by means of a treaty. Batman’s treaty, signed with the Wurundjeri people on 6 June 1835, proposed purchasing a large tract of land around present-day Melbourne and another smaller piece at Geelong. In exchange, he gave the eight chiefs whose marks are on the treaty a quantity of blankets, knives, tomahawks, scissors, looking-glasses, flour, handkerchiefs and shirts. Governor Bourke, whose jurisdiction then extended across all the eastern part of Australia, was alarmed at the implications of any treaty, since it presupposed legal rights on both sides. He speedily and effectively quashed Batman’s deal with a proclamation issued by the Colonial Office and sent to the governor on 10 October 1835. Its publication meant that from then on, all people found occupying land without the authority of the government would be considered illegal trespassers. The proclamation of Governor Bourke implemented the doctrine upon which British settlement was until then implicitly based, reinforcing the notion that the land belonged to no one prior to the British Crown taking possession of it. Thus it could neither be bought or sold, nor assigned, nor otherwise acquired, except via the Crown. A similar strategy of reserving land to the British Crown would be implemented, and enforced militarily, in New Zealand.

  Although many people at the time recognised that the original occupants had rights in the lands (this was confirmed in a House of Commons report on Aboriginal relations in 1837), the law followed Bourke and almost always applied the principles expressed in his proclamation. The first decision of the New South Wales Supreme Court to make explicit use of the term terra nullius followed in 1836, but terra nullius itself was not endorsed by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council until more than fifty years had passed, in 1889. A little less than a century later Justice Blackburn ruled, in the Gove land rights case (1971), that before European settlement Australia had been terra nullius. The case was brought by the Yolngu people, who were attempting to prevent bauxite mining on their lands; they asserted that since time immemorial they had held a communal native title that had neither been extinguished or acquired. Blackburn demurred; he said that native title was not part of the law of Australia and went on to add that even if it had existed, it was now extinguished.

  Paradoxically the Gove case opened the door to the establishment in 1975 by the Whitlam Government of land rights in the Northern Territory and ultimately to the Mabo decision of 1992, which overturned the doctrine of terra nullius. In New Zealand, at about the same time, the dangers Bourke had foreseen in signing treaties with indigenes were confirmed when the Treaty of Waitangi was recognised as part of the law of the land. Meanwhile, back across the Tasman, the overturning of the doctrine of terra nullius was immediately followed by legislation curtailing its effect. Aborigines are still not free from legal constraints in their attempts to prove they are who they are and that land rights should be granted them. As recently as March 2008 Alan Wolf, a Tasmanian, was denied an indigenous fishing licence because, according to state law, he is not Aborigine. Wolf had his Aboriginality confirmed by a Federal
Court judgment in 1998 and before an Administrative Appeals Tribunal in 2002; the prime piece of evidence in the 1998 case was a letter showing that the Wolf family descends from an Aboriginal woman named Pleenperrner, aka Mother Brown, and a sealer by the name of James Brown.

  Both federal and state governments in Australia apply a three-point test for Aboriginality – descent, self-identification and communal recognition – but the state of Tasmania also requires that such claims be supported by written evidence in the state archives. It is the lack of such evidence that led the Tasmanian Office of Aboriginal Affairs to decide Mr Wolf has not been able to provide sufficient evidence of Aboriginal descent. In a Kafkaesque twist, in such cases as that of Alan Wolf the onus of proof lies with the applicant. And what trust, anyway, could be had in the archives of a state whose avowed purpose once was the, albeit unsuccessful, extermination of the indigenous population? The Tasmanian people, and indigenous Australians in general, remain mired in legal fictions by which they have been held for much of the lucky country’s unhappy history not to have existed at all.