My friend Spencer, a New Zealand Maori, is what people used to call a good-time Charlie. He is famous, in a small way, for the number of parties he goes to and the way they liven up when he gets there. When I first met him, six years ago, he was running a restaurant near Charing Cross in London. The quick drink he had with his staff after work became a minor legend. People would cross the city at midnight to be there. If they were lucky, they might get away at four in the morning. Not everyone appreciates Spencer’s gregarious streak. The Syrian who owned the restaurant, for instance, called in the police when he inspected his depleted cellar. But Spencer believes in the value of a good time. He has faith in the party.
However, when I ran into him in New Zealand, in the summer of 1996, he wore a look of puzzled embarrassment I had not seen before. We were driving around Wellington harbour and he was describing, not for the first time, a trip he had just made to the South Island with his flatmate, Hughie. Fantastic hospitality down south, he assured me. Terrific wines—Cloudy Bay, Moa Ridge—great local beer, seafood, wild pork . . . ‘the works’.
He paused. ‘But things got a bit tricky down there,’ he said. ‘I was staying with Hughie’s family; and we were having a party. There were about a dozen of us; everyone was getting along fine.
‘Then I went to the toilet. And while I was in there, there was a knock on the door. And then this voice said: “You fucking Maoris . . . get out of our area.”’
‘What did you do?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ he said. ‘I was stunned. I just stood there. But I had nowhere else to go, so I went back to the party. I pretended nothing had happened.’
‘But who’d done it?’
‘It was weird. I went back into the room, and everyone was all smiles. “Cheers, Spence,” and all that. I talked to all of them over the next couple of hours. And I still don’t know which one of them it was.’
I was eleven years old before I ever saw a Maori. I grew up in Christchurch, a stolid, flat, prosperous town with, historically, only a tiny Maori population. Indeed, the marked absence of natives was one of the factors that inspired the Canterbury pilgrims to settle there 150 years ago. Their intention was to build an Anglican utopia, and in a way they succeeded. Christchurch was ‘the cathedral city . . . the Garden City of the Plains . . . the most English city outside England’.
There was little sign that we were in the South Pacific, and none at all that we were on the edges of Polynesia. English elms and willows bent in the hot summer nor’westers and in winter stood leafless in fogs penetrated by the headlights of Ford Prefects and Morris Oxfords. The tolling of Big Ben for the evening news on the BBC (‘This is London’) woke us (in a weird twist we barely noticed) every morning. Gilbert Scott’s cathedral and the university, the schools, the courts, the clubs, the council chambers had all been built in the proper nineteenth-century Gothic Revival manner, though the Catholics and the banks preferred the classical style. One night in 1868 the great Waimakariri river to the north rose and swept down on the town, leaving the frumpy Gothic buildings up to their bustles in water. But it sank back again, was embanked and channelled and has never since made an appearance in the drawing rooms of Christchurch; even its name, sprawling, like the river itself over a mile-wide shingle bed, was usually reduced to a curt Anglo-Saxon ‘Why-Mack’.
And of course there were no Maori. There was one on the shilling, and one on the twopenny stamp—depicted, I think, running through a swamp, carrying a parcel—but his business there, on the stamp and the shilling, and for that matter in the swamp, was unclear to me. There was the occasional article in our school journals on the Ancient Maori, but he meant no more to us than the Roman boy, with his tutor and slave, in our blue-covered Everyday Life in Rome.
Then one summer we went to Picton and there on the grass between the hotel and the sea I saw a group of about thirty Maori in traditional costume—a concert party. I can still remember my surprise at the sight of the red lipstick on the women’s dark faces and the unfamiliar harmonies of Maori plainsong, and recall how sharply the outlines of the hills seemed to stand against the sky. I was shocked, as children are, by this first incursion of otherness into my life.
But there was another feeling. For the first time I realized that even the solid Anglican city of Christchurch, with its fogs and elms, had not risen upon a vacancy. It was a superimposition. There had been something here before us, and—remarkably—it was still here.
When I was fourteen, my family moved to Hawkes Bay on the North Island. Here the question of race was not so remote. The Maori population in and around the twin cities of Napier and Hastings numbered several thousand. Oddly, this had very little effect on the community’s self-image. We were, we believed, a little Britain of the south, which just happened to contain two races living side by side. Maori and Pakeha (the Maori term for white people) worked together, played rugby together, intermarried and shared the same rights and interests. It was true that there had once been a war over land and sovereignty, but this was a century ago, and had simply proved our splendid and complementary qualities. The Maori distinguished themselves with their gallantry: their warriors leapt over parapets to take water to dying British soldiers and—in the same battle, or was it a different one?—sent ammunition to the British when they ran out, so that the fight could continue. The whites, in turn, were generous victors, enfranchising the Maori and setting aside seats for them in parliament. The colour bar erected everywhere else in the British Empire was unknown in New Zealand. We were proud of the fact that we, unlike any other white community in the world, called ourselves by the name given us by the indigenous people—Pakeha. No one even troubled to ask what this word meant; today a Maori is likely to tell you it means ‘rats’ or ‘fleas’ or some other troublesome pest, but it is probably a contraction of pakepakeha, a mythological pale-skinned people in Maori legend, heard singing as they float on driftwood down rivers in flood. We were even proud of the fact that our national rugby team always began their matches with a Maori haka, or war dance. It was another sign that we were, in the official phrase, ‘one people’.
The trouble with this ideology was that it did not quite fit the facts. Maori were not quite so carefree and happy-go-lucky as we imagined. On the contrary they seemed, to my newcomer’s eyes, to be aloof, tense and ill at ease. And they were poor—you saw them in town and immediately recognized the broken grilles and rusted mudguards of a ‘Maori car’ (old wrecks were always called that), the back seat crammed with kids. Most of all, they were elusive. Maori boys began secondary school in the third form but by the fifth had vanished; probably into some unknown Maori world of seasonal labour, or into the menacing gangs that had started to form in the state-housing blocks of Hastings.
Nor did we live ‘side by side’. Whites lived among Maoris (back then everyone added the English ‘s’ to the word) only in the poorest areas, or if they happened to be in Napier Prison. In any case, most Maori lived in their own settlements—Paki Paki, Bridge Pa or Fernhill—not far away, but just out of sight. Perfectly good roads led to these places, but no one I knew ever went there, and I could not think of a reason that would ever take me there either.
When I was seventeen, I had a summer job in the abattoir at Whakatu, near Hastings, where up to thirty thousand lambs were slaughtered each day. The workers, seven or eight hundred of us, were mostly Maori, though the foremen and the staff in the administration block were white. I was set to work on the ‘bung bench’ with a gang of five others, all Maori. Our job was to sluice the lamb intestines, which would then be made into sausage skins, or, I was told, condoms—a lowly occupation in this hierarchy of blood and knives and flaying.
I became quite friendly with one of my workmates, Teddy Rau, a boy of about my own age. For four weeks we worked together, and, with our hands full of still-warm intestines, we talked—mostly about sex. He could never tell whether girls liked him or not and was in a state of stifled envy of his cousin, who had several girlfriends at the same time and had even had sex with one of them, on the Gisborne railcar while it was crossing the Mohaka Viaduct.
One night, at the end of summer, some weeks after I had left the abattoir, I went to a dance in Napier with my new girlfriend. We were out on the dance floor, and suddenly there was a terrific blow on my back, just below the shoulder blades. I staggered and nearly fell, but turned to find myself face to face with Teddy Rau. There were two other Maori standing behind him. He stared at me with a blank expression. I looked back, too surprised to speak. I had a momentary notion that the blow started out as a friendly slap on the back, but somewhere in the air between us the open palm changed into a fist. Neither of us knew why; nor did we say a word. Teddy left the dance, and I never saw him again.
A second memory, from that same summer. It was a routine afternoon at Whakatu, but I had missed the bus home after work. The slaughterhouse—a grimy five-storey brick building—stood in a small township of mostly Maori inhabitants, and the narrow horizons of life there, the stench of meat and tallow, and the thought of the surf crashing on the beach at Napier, made the heat oppressive. While I waited, a Maori woman and a young child came past. She had a handsome face, but looked furious, as a sixty-year-old woman well might after a long walk in the hot sun. The child—probably her grandson—was no more than four and was dawdling behind, poking a stick into a ditch. Ignoring my presence, though I was only a foot away, she turned and snapped out three words, like the flick of a whip: ‘Come on, Nigger.’
Nigger! A word I no more expected to hear than I thought to see a cross burning on a lawn. I could not tell whether it was a nickname or a casual term of abuse, nor which was worse. Back in the 1850s the word put in a brief appearance, and as tensions rose over land it began to crop up in settlers’ diaries and letters. During the wars in the 1860s and 1870s it flourished openly across newspaper columns and in public speeches. But then it edged out of sight, out of the national vocabulary. Despite the casual condescension of whites—every schoolboy had his fake Maori accent and his Maori jokes—I had never heard it used by a white New Zealander.
These two incidents—the blow on the back, the ugly word overheard—were too fleeting and cryptic to cast any shadow over my acceptance of the received version of race relations. We were an example to the rest of the world, right? Two races, one people, hard-working whites, happy-go-lucky Maori, a tapestry of light and shade . . . we all believed that. But received versions often have deeper functions—as alibis, perhaps, or spells. As an alibi, this one told us that there were no dark secrets in our past; as a spell, it gave us a pleasant sense of superiority over other white communities—Australians, South Africans, Americans.
In the early 1970s, I went abroad for the first time. Most New Zealanders, leaving school or university, suddenly open their eyes and see where they are—in a small country at the edge of the world. Then they leave as fast as they can. I did the sort of things we all did on this mandatory world trip: helped build a house in Colorado, fell ill in Benares, fell in love in London, where I served gin to glum businessmen in a pub near Victoria, taught French in a riotous and dingy school off the Caledonian Road. After two or three years overseas, most of us return, and so did I. But not for long. Eighteen months later, I was away again, this time to Australia and California. Antipodeans can spend years like this, wavering between hemispheres, unsure where to settle.
During these years away I became aware that racial changes were afoot. Maori protests began, mostly over specific pockets of land that had been seized by the authorities in the recent past or were under threat. Thousands of Maori marched from the far north to the capital, Wellington, five hundred miles away, demanding an end to land appropriation. Later, when I happened to be back in Auckland, I watched in amazement as army trucks rumbled across town, carrying hundreds of police to evict local Maori from a site which seemed not only to be lawfully theirs, but to be the tiny remnant of what had once been promised them in perpetuity.
At the same time, new books appeared that completely rewrote the history of the wars. They argued that Maori had never actually been defeated in battle, but were tricked into surrender, or simply swamped by more and more British soldiers, many sent straight from service in India. After the Indian Mutiny, the attitude throughout the empire towards its subject peoples became much harsher. Even the Maori briefly became ‘black vermin’. By the mid-1860s, there were more imperial soldiers in New Zealand than in England or any other British territory.
Suddenly, a hundred years later, the Maori wars began to look very different to us—they became a tale of broken treaties, land invasions, burning churches and tortured prisoners. One settlement of two thousand unarmed, pacifist Maori was attacked and sacked, the men sent into exile, women raped, lands forfeited. The New Zealand ideology of race—our alibi and spell—appeared to be cracking. Even the most hallowed national legends were now embarrassments. At school we had heard of the Maori chief Te Ori Ori who was wounded taking water to a dying British soldier. We were not told that after the battle Te Ori Ori was flung into a prison hulk in Auckland harbour for six months, or that the New Zealand minister of war made a point of forbidding straw mattresses for the wounded.
In 1981 I left again, and this time I did not return for fifteen years, except on occasional flying visits. From the vantage point of a London newsroom, I watched more radical changes unfold. New Zealand became a global byword for the spirit of free enterprise: even more strikingly than Thatcher’s Britain or Reagan’s America, it grasped the free-market nettle. The welfare state was dismantled, and most state assets—transport, banks, post offices, forestry—were auctioned off. A huge disparity in wealth began to open up.
Not surprisingly, race relations grew worse. National day celebrations of the founding Treaty of Waitangi were disrupted. Huge claims for reparation were put forward by Maori: after all, if national assets were being sold off, why should they be excluded? By 1995 the country was in an interracial uproar. Flags were trampled, buildings occupied, courts disrupted. Children who set fire to a school were described admiringly by their Maori elders as ‘warriors of our people’. There were threats of terrorism, of burning forests and bombing dams. The Queen herself was manoeuvred into making an unprecedented apology for historic wrongs. New Zealanders I met in London would debate whether the country would turn into another Bosnia or merely an Ulster. A hundred and twenty years after the colonial conflict had ended, the little word ‘war’ was heard once more in the land.
The Maori demands for reparation and decolonization and sovereignty were conventional enough; the burning flags and barricades a predictable symptom of unrest. Yet when I read the reports (and even, back home on flying visits, when I wrote them) there always seemed to be something missing. It was as if, after each outburst, a silence fell and people thought: ‘That’s not what we really meant. That isn’t really what we want.’
What we do know—the salient facts—can be marshalled quite easily. New Zealand has a population of 3.4 million people, of whom 400,000 are Maori. They are part of the Polynesian race that emerged from South-East Asia three or four thousand years ago and spread across the Pacific Ocean, reaching their furthest outpost, Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) between AD 1000 and 1350. There they formed about fifty iwi (tribes) which were frequently at war with one another.
The first European to sail into view was a Dutchman, Abel Tasman, who departed hastily after a bloody encounter in 1642. The inhabitants, he thought, had ‘rough voices and strong bones, the colour of their skin being between brown and yellow, they were full of verve, and wore their hair pulled back in a bun in the Japanese manner’. He called the country Staten Landt, wrongly believing it to be part of a greater southern continent, and it was an Amsterdam map-maker who later named these mountainous islands after a muddy Dutch province in the North Sea.
Then, in 1769, came Captain Cook. And in the following fifty years, shoals of other whites came in his wake—whalers, traders, missionaries and finally settlers. The islands were recognized as an independent nation in 1835, but only five years later, when five hundred or so Maori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand became a British colony.
Under the treaty, the chiefs conceded ‘sovereignty’ to Britain, and Britain guaranteed something called tino rangatiratanga to the chiefs. It seems probable that neither side knew what the other was talking about. To the Maori, ‘sovereignty’ meant, at best, some remote principle that might protect them from invasion by the French. But to the British, the Maori concept tino rangatiratanga—’the full power of chieftainship’—meant little more than authority within the tribe.
Despite the variety of interpretations—and they pour out today faster than ever—a few fundamentals are clear. One of the purposes of the treaty was to save the Maori from the calamities that had swept over other peoples ruled by Europeans. A humanitarian mood reigned in the Colonial Office in London: it was the heyday of abolition, and the bullying and butchery that had taken place elsewhere were not going to happen in New Zealand. At Waitangi, the British came ashore with promises they meant to keep.
Twenty years later, these promises were all broken. Instead, the British brought invasion, war and the confiscation of land. The treaty was abandoned, remembered only as a curious, romantic frontispiece to the country’s history. The idea that anyone should feel bound by it scarcely entered people’s heads. It was, said the chief justice in 1877, a ‘simple nullity’.
And then, surprisingly, a century later, it came back to life.
At first no one could make it out. It was Waitangi Day 1971—and the usual ceremony was being held in the far north. Naval vessels fired a salute to honour the accession of the Queen; there was a ceremonial Maori challenge and then the usual speech praising the ‘tapestry of light and shade’, the two races side by side. A bugler sounded Sunset Call, and, in an unconsciously accurate piece of symbolism, the lights on the Treaty House were extinguished, and the naval vessels were lit up in the bay.
At these 131st anniversary celebrations the then finance minister, Robert Muldoon, ‘Piggy’ to the nation at large, was in the middle of his speech when there was a disturbance. A woman stood up behind him, shouting, waving her arms and repeating a phrase again and again. Muldoon faltered. People craned to see what was happening. Even among the naval guard of honour, standing rigidly to attention around the flag, eyeballs rolled sideways slightly—far enough for the guard to be taken by surprise when a group of young Maori rushed the flagstaff, hauled down the naval ensign and set fire to it. A scrum of police, navy cadets and Maori tussled over the flag, which was eventually rescued and returned, scorched, to its proper place. The young Maori, wearing green wreaths and black clothing, began a slow handclap that drowned out further speeches. Then a squall swept in, and the rest of the ceremony was cancelled.
Nobody really understood what had happened; no one was even sure what the woman was shouting. ‘Honour and freedom!’ some newspapers reported. ‘Honour the treaty!’ said others. Apart from that, there was a puzzled silence in the press. It was as if this was the first time anyone had actually shouted in New Zealand: no one knew what to make of it. Only Muldoon got the message. He turned and glowered at the protester. ‘That,’ he grated, ‘is a very dangerous woman.’
Twenty-five years later, there can be no one in the country in doubt as to what was shouted that day (‘Honour the Treaty!’). Everything has changed. The dangerous woman has been listened to. A ministry and tribunal have been set up to ensure the Treaty is honoured. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been paid in compensation. Maori now enjoy new rights in property, forestry, fishing, mining, education, broadcasting and culture. And yet the anger has not abated. Maori spokesmen are demanding more than a billion dollars’ worth of land reparations. The Treaty of Waitangi has become a weapon in the struggle to turn New Zealand back into Aotearoa—Land of the Long White Cloud.
I felt the full depth of the Maori grievance quite by chance, when I went back to Christchurch last year. I had not been there for twenty-five years, but I wanted to see the country from the flat, stolid, white city of my childhood.
‘Twenty-five years?’ people said. ‘You’ll find it terribly changed.’
But when I arrived, late on a rainy Sunday afternoon, it seemed eerily unchanged. A few shiny high-rise buildings had touched down in the centre, but otherwise there was the same deep sabbath calm, the same sense of razor-keen snobbery in the better suburbs—Fendalton and Merivale—and the same magical wood of English oaks and Scots pines near the centre of town. Scenes from childhood are generally supposed to seem smaller when revisited in later life, but this rule does not apply to woodland, for the trees quietly keep pace with the years. The avenues and copses of Hagley Park and St James Park seemed, if anything, deeper, taller and darker than I remembered.
On my second day there, I went with friends to see an exhibition of late nineteenth-century portraits of Maori. Some of these were rather fine paintings, but the tone was valedictory. The chiefs and the women of rank were depicted as noble, stoic, resigned, the senators of a dying race. It was widely believed at that time that the Maori, whose numbers at one point sank to thirty thousand, were doomed to extinction.
Leaving the gallery I walked across the lawn and found myself in a part of the Botanical Gardens I did not remember. And there I found a circle of standing stones: a cromlech, a henge. It made me laugh at first—it was not very impressive, although a circle of black pines added a kind of Caledonian sternness to the concept. But then I wondered how such a monument, twelve thousand miles from Britain, in a country in which such things had never been built, must look to Maori eyes.
We had brought our laws and institutions and planted them in the country. We had introduced our trees, grasses, thrushes, blackbirds—even the English hedgehog snuffled in Christchurch back gardens. But until I saw the henge of yellowish stones, I had not realized how deeply driven into the turf were the claims of Englishness. Not only had we taken over the present and rewritten the immediate past, we were ready to annex the part of the landscape where imagination and prehistory touch. This circle of stones, no more than a garden folly in one light, seemed also to be another way of telling the Maori, absent-mindedly and as if without malice, that they were not really there.
From Christchurch I went, on a bright day in midsummer, to Wanganui, a town on the west coast of the North Island. It was late morning—some Maori teenagers were hunkered down on benches in the main street; a few whites drifted from shop to bank and bank to shop. A wide brown river flows through the town, and I went down to a small park on the river bank, between the courthouse and the rowing club. Moutoa Gardens is just an acre or two of mown grass shaded with old trees and studded with war memorials. So it would be easy to miss the one oddity that it had to offer—a stone pedestal about six feet high, inscribed with the word ballance, but supporting the remnants of a pair of marble boots.
John Ballance was an obscure colonial premier, and his broken marble boots were the only sign that for seventy days in 1995 Moutoa Gardens was the centre of New Zealand’s growing racial conflict. That May, hundreds of Maori occupied and barricaded the park. The streets nearby echoed to the sound of haka, the Maori war challenge. Cars driven by whites were threatened and sometimes attacked. At first, the Maori demanded simply that the park be returned to them; then the demands grew wilder. All public land in the district must be handed over. Whites must pay rates to Maori. Maori sovereignty must be established over the region, indeed over the whole country.
Hundreds of Pakeha cheered outside the courthouse when the eviction order was granted. But on the eve of a massive police operation to break up the demonstration, and breathing defiance till the last, the occupiers slipped away, taking the statue of John Ballance with them. The old colonialist had been visible throughout the siege, a twelve-foot hostage looming above the cooking fires and haka groups. For the first few days the statue remained unharmed, but then it was decapitated; the head was replaced with a pumpkin—not a round orange pumpkin, which might have transformed it into a friendly Hallowe’en ghoul, but one of those grey varieties the same colour as the stone. This gave the figure an air of sinister inanity.
This idiot moonface appeared in all the newspapers, and came to symbolize both this occupation and all the others which sprang up across the North Island at the same time. On the night before they struck camp, the rebels, under the eyes of the police surrounding the park, managed to chop Ballance up and cart him away with them.
I wondered what he had done to deserve this special treatment. Or was he just unlucky to be caught behind enemy lines? Ballance, a Maori leader in Wanganui told me, was a mass-murderer. She said he had sent flour laced with arsenic to the tribes living upriver. He had committed genocide.
This was a terrible charge, and I was not inclined to believe it. It did not seem to fit in with even the darkest facts of the country’s history.
‘How do you know this is true?’ I asked.
‘We just know.’
‘But how?’
‘Well,’ she said reluctantly, ‘it’s in the Taylor diaries.’
Taylor was a clergyman in Wanganui in the mid-nineteenth century, and his diaries survive in the town library. But when I read the manuscript that afternoon, there was no mention of Ballance at all.
‘What do you think?’ I asked a white man sitting on a bench beside the river. ‘Ballance and his arsenic—it sounds like a bad business.’
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘Ballance was a good man. He did a lot of good for the Maoris.’
This was a phrase guaranteed to make my antennae twitch. A lot of people—old family doctors, big landowners, magistrates, local policemen—are said to have done ‘a lot of good for the Maoris’. It is one of those phrases that is invariably followed by a denunciation of Maori ingratitude, sloth, stupidity . . .
I did not have to wait long.
‘Oh,’ he said artlessly, when I asked what he thought of the occupation. ‘We’re all racists in Wanganui now. The Maoris are just a pack of lazy, black—well, no, we don’t mind the local ones protesting and what have you, but the outsiders coming in and stealing, making trouble and giving the town a bad name . . . ’
He fixed me with a wounded expression: ‘Write something good about Wanganui,’ he commanded. ‘Write about our lovely new velodrome in Cook’s Gardens.’
He gazed over at the park and its war memorials.
‘We used to get along fine with the Maoris,’ he said. ‘We never saw any difference between them and us. My boy, he had a Maori pal when he was a kid, and one day his gran said to him: “How’s that little black friend of yours?” And he didn’t know who she was talking about. That’s how colour-blind we were!’
In Auckland I went to a wedding, a Maori-Pakeha wedding. It’s worth emphasizing that ever since the two races encountered each other, there has been one constant: sexual attraction. Even the war years were marked by alliances and marriages, from the governor and the household of the Maori king downwards.
The wedding was a smart affair. There were a Maori bishop and a knight on the bride’s side, and the groom, a middle-class Pakeha, had friends from the art world and advertising. Actresses turned up at the church in racy convertibles; I even glimpsed a top hat or two. The reception was held in rooms at Cheltenham Beach, soft, buttery lighting inside and, outside, the Hauraki Gulf with its necklace of islands and mountains. Just as the champagne corks began popping, a cruise liner emerged from behind the nearest headland, as if part of the general ebullience, and sailed past, filling the windows.
Then the speeches began. After the first, from the bride’s side, five or six middle-aged Maori women, dressed in purple and wearing the sort of hats that aunts wear to weddings, were suddenly on their feet in different parts of the room, singing a song, a waiata, their hands moving in time. The Pakehas’ eyes gleamed: the Maoris were being marvellous!
This is what Maori do, have always done: the women sing after a speech. There is something Attic about Polynesian culture: following a significant action or address, a chorus springs up and comments in song. There is nothing portentous or self-conscious about the performance. On the contrary, it is charmingly perfunctory and usually ends in laughter. Later, I asked one of the women what that first song had said.
‘Oh, I don’t know what we sang . . . I don’t remember,’ she said. But a typical wedding waiata might praise the speaker or marriage or life in general:
Love is not only
a thing of today–
from our ancestors
it has been passed to us, to us!
Further speeches from both sides followed. One of the speakers, a tall Maori of about forty, with a brilliant, slightly condescending smile, broke into English as he finished: ‘For the benefit of our Pakeha guests, I have just greeted this house, those who have lived here before and who are now dead. And I acknowledge that body of water, the Waitemata, and I greet the mountain behind us, Rangitato . . . ’
This is something that Maori also do, the mihi, the tribute to the house, the dead, the landscape. It certainly provided a sharp contrast to the speaker before him, a young Pakeha friend of the groom’s. This man’s speech went as follows: ‘Er, good on ya, mate. You’ve got yourself a pretty good sheila there. Aw . . . I’m no good at this. But, anyway, you know, er . . . love ya both [gives the thumbs-up]. Yeah, nice one!’
The speeches continued. A surprising number of the groom’s friends wanted to put in a word, but it seemed they had nothing to say. They stumbled for the most part towards the facetious, a sort of boastful inarticulacy. Why, I wondered, did the white New Zealanders, well educated and well travelled, want to prove that they had no store of words to draw on?
It is often said that a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the Pakeha has fuelled Maori grievances. But so has its opposite—the hauteur of a people who have lived in a country for a thousand years and can overlay every part of the landscape with names in their genealogy; a people who can address mountains. The first time I ever set foot in a Maori household (I was twenty-one, visiting a student friend out in the country), I mentioned a sheer table-topped mountain we had passed a few miles back.
‘Does it ever get snow on the summit?’ I asked.
‘Not often,’ my friend’s mother said. ‘And when it does, the people around here say, “Look, Rangitawaea has put on his cloak.'”
I must have looked blank. ‘Rangitawaea?’
‘Oh, his great-great-great-grandfather,’ she said, nodding towards her son.
This seemed to me impossibly grand, a five-thousand-foot mountain becoming, under certain dispositions, one of your forefathers, and I assumed that I had stumbled on an unusual shard of family pride embedded in that remote and sandy corner of the country. But most Maori know their past and their surroundings in this way. When I looked out the window from the wedding party across to Rangitato, the low symmetrical volcano beloved of Auckland’s tourist brochures, for a moment it looked more solemn and grave than it ever had on the postcards.
On the morning after the wedding I went to the district court in south Auckland, a suburban sprawl of about half a million people, predominantly Maori and Polynesians living in state housing. In the rest of the country, south Auckland is a byword for wickedness and squalor. I had been there before, late one night, riding in the back of a police car cruising the streets of Otara and Otahuhu. Two hours passed before the police radio crackled into life: ‘Male Maori teenager wearing Bugs Bunny T-shirt being pursued: has assaulted complainant at Mobil service station and stolen his leather jacket.’ That was the sole outrage against law and order committed in south Auckland on a hot Friday night in midsummer.
In the courthouse, I watched the weekend harvest coming in. The nation’s coat of arms hung on the wall: a cloaked Maori and a white maiden with a marked resemblance to Britannia gazed at each other across emblems of toil and prosperity—fleeces, anchors and so forth. Below this image sat their modern equivalents: a stout woman, in judge’s robes, looking impassively at the stream of young brown faces in the dock.
Their crimes are mundane. X has stolen a packet of chicken breasts from Pak N’ Save. Y has kicked over a motorbike parked in Otahuhu’s main street. Z has stolen a car from a dealer’s yard (his explanation: ‘I wanted a car’). The New Zealand police force was established in the land wars in the 1860s as the Armed Constabulary, and its main function was to catch Maori. Looking around Otahuhu District Court today, it seemed it still was.
Yet something was wrong. For a start there was a surprising number of no-shows.
‘Call Samson Kerepa.’ A pause . . .
‘No appearance, Ma’am.’
‘Charles Putai?’
‘No appearance, Ma’am.’
‘Ricky Ngatai?’
‘No appearance, Ma’am.’
‘Aotolo Patolo?’
‘No appearance, Ma’am.’
‘Jason Bolter?’
‘No appearance, Ma’am.’
Even those who have turned up do not seem to be fully present. Some stare rigidly into space; others wave and grin at friends in the gallery. One young man of about twenty with a dark, vulpine face is in a peculiar state which I cannot quite read. He is gazing round from the dock like someone who has just joined a party, but he is also hyperventilating—sucking in air through his teeth and breathing out fast, with a sound like ‘faarrrck’.
‘I beg your pardon!’ says the judge.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says, as if to say, if that’s what you want.
Trembling on the brink of revelation here is the belief that has penetrated Maoridom, right down to these jobless teenagers— that all of this, from the coat of arms to the majestic operation of the law, is a con-trick. The words hang unsaid in the air: ‘OK. I pinched a packet of chicken breasts, or maybe a Ford Fiesta. But you stole our country.’
I left Auckland and drove through the Waikato, the heartland, the centre of New Zealand’s huge dairy industry. I must have been on this road thirty or forty times in my life, but today, in the light of what I now know happened here, it had taken on a different appearance. This is the place where the worst aggression and confiscations took place, acts for which the Queen herself has apologized—perhaps the first time in a thousand years of English monarchy that a sovereign has signed a document that refers to ‘the crimes of the Crown’.
Property known to be stolen looks different from that which has been lawfully acquired. The handsome farmhouses, the endless green paddocks stocked with black-and-white cows are outwardly the same, but they have also now been translated to the uneasy region between right and wrong. They are, in police parlance, ‘the proceeds of a robbery’.
The value of these proceeds is still being debated. It was a strange experience to sit in the office of the minister of justice in Wellington and ask what he thought of the main front-page story in the evening paper. This outlined compensation claims by local Maori for the greater part of the capital city itself. Eighty per cent of the suburban areas, where most of the city’s 400,000 people live, and many important sites in the centre, had, it was said, been wrongfully acquired.
The minister became testy. ‘People get excited,’ he said, frowning at the phenomenon of public emotion. ‘But these claims will be dealt with in the normal way. There’s nothing unusual about this at all.’
There did seem to be something unusual to me. Here we were, in the heart of a modern law-based state—beyond the minister’s windows rose the pillars of parliament; the Supreme Court was over the way, the US embassy down the road, the Dominion Museum, the stadiums and schools around the capital—and all of it, every stone, stood on shaky ground.
I was driving to Gisborne, to see the replica of Captain Cook’s barque, the Endeavour, which was circumnavigating the country. In Auckland and the Bay of Islands thousands of people had lined the wharves eager to pay twelve dollars for a tour of the ship, but now a controversy had blown up. Gisborne is a town of about thirty thousand people, half of them Maori. The more radical among them were demanding that the vessel leave the country. It was not welcome, they said. Attempts might be made to sink it. The crew would not be safe if it came ashore.
The grounds of the Maori argument were predictable: Cook was not, in their eyes, the disinterested, stargazing navigator fondly memorialized by whites, but the first robber-colonialist. As soon as he struck land, where Gisborne now stands, he started shooting Maori—a fact overlooked in commemorations of this moment. ‘We’re sick of you Pakeha jumping for joy every time Cook’s name is mentioned,’ one activist was quoted as saying in a newspaper.
When I reached Gisborne at about noon, the Endeavour had not yet arrived, so I went to the Maori settlement below Kaiti Hill. There I had a friend I had met in Auckland, an economist named Nicky Searancke who had spent years researching her tribe’s land and fishing claims and who was about to go to Oxford to do a doctorate. She explained that the situation had grown more complicated. A dispute had broken out between Maori who wanted to welcome the ship and those violently against it. A compromise had been reached. The crew would be welcomed on the marae—the traditional Maori meeting place—at Kaiti, but at the same time would be confronted with the Maori perception or memory of Cook’s landing.
The Endeavour was due to dock at about one-thirty p.m.; while we were waiting, Nicky showed me around the marae and led me into the meeting house itself. There are about a thousand of these wharenui—’great houses’—scattered across the North Island, some little more than bare halls standing in a paddock, but others immense: carved or darkly painted cathedrals of Maori life. The one at Kaiti is the largest and one of the most famous in the country. Inside, out of the midday glare, there was a meditative gloom. Nicky pointed out the main features, the carved ancestral figures lining the walls, intersected with flax panels woven in a kind of calligraphy that recorded the lives of certain local women and families; the rafters were painted to signify important Maori constellations. We were in a room of words and stars, and, most importantly, of ancestors.
It would be hard to overstate the importance of genealogy in Maori society. The more recent ancestors were gathered in rather reduced circumstances, in oval-framed sepia photographs clustered on the end wall. But the further back they receded, the greater and more glowering the carved figures along the side walls became. This geometry of the past is almost the exact opposite to ours. Our parents and perhaps grandparents may loom over us, but then there is a sharp dwindling into anecdote and anonymity. Maori ancestors, in contrast, grow larger and more important the further back they are, ending up in solid immensities—a range of hills or a constellation of stars. The two geometries never converge, and this is one source of difficulty between the races. Pakeha quite simply do not believe that Maori really care about the past in this way, just as they don’t feel responsible for the actions of their own, indistinct forefathers.
Lost among the stars and ancestors, I missed the arrival of the Endeavour. This was a pity—I had meant to go to the top of Kaiti Hill and see its sails appear on the horizon, to think of it drifting towards an unknown eighteenth-century coast, or perhaps even succeed in imagining it through Maori eyes—as a great bird that had detached itself from the clouds, or a mobile island manned by goblins. But by the time I reached town, the barque was already on its way up the river, sailing, as it were, past its own consequences—fish factories, car parks, the Millburn cement silo.
There was a big crowd on the wharves, though scarcely a Maori to be seen. The ship docked, and a brief municipal welcome followed. There was a flash of mayoral chain, a town crier in bright blue knee-breeches rang a handbell and shouted ‘Oyez’, waved his tricorne hat and gave the crew the freedom of the port. Then they were all marched off to the marae.
Cook had arrived at almost that exact spot on a Monday afternoon in October 1769. He departed three days later, leaving six or seven Maori dead. He had wanted to load the inhabitants with presents and ‘all imaginable kindness’ but he could hardly let his crew be attacked or robbed with impunity. The Maori for their part could not allow the newcomers—even if they were goblins—to come ashore and ignore the essential rituals of approach. The result was a strange confusion of uneasy embraces and panicky gunfire.
Two hundred years on, watching those same rituals unfold at the marae (and with the memory of the town crier still fresh in mind) it seemed amazing that the two races had ever managed to communicate at all. The twelve thousand miles that once separated them were weirdly compacted in the fifty yards that lay between the sailors off the replica Endeavour, held up at the gateway to the marae, and their Maori hosts, watching them from in front of the meeting house.
First came the challenge, the wero, in which three men chosen for their agility and fearsome appearance advanced towards the gate, uttering hoarse, single cries, their faces contorted. The best description is by Cook himself: ‘His gait was singular,’ he wrote, ‘nor can I compare the manner of his lifting his legs to any thing better than that of a cock sideling to his Antagonist on the Sod.’ Then followed a tense business with a green branch and a spear being laid down before the visitors, after which the challengers retreated, with the same gestures and strangely lifted steps, in reverse.
Then came the karanga, the call to the visitors to approach, made by an old woman on the porch. This is a call not only from the living to the living, but also between their respective dead. No one I know has ever heard it without the hairs on the back of their neck standing up.
Finally the visitors were ushered forward and seated on one side, and the Maori speeches began. The order of ceremony here, as at the wedding, required that after each speech a song or waiata would be sung. But when the second speaker had finished and sat down, a swarm of young men came forward. A frisson went through the crowd.
‘It’s Ruaumoko!’ Nicky said in my ear.
‘What is Ruaumoko?’ I asked.
‘One of our haka,’ she said. ‘The big one.’ Most people will know the haka, if at all, as the war dance performed by the All Blacks before a rugby international. But that is only fifteen footballers, mostly Pakeha, scattered in a hasty arc over the lush turf of Twickenham or Cardiff Arms Park, performing a manoeuvre they’ve been practising for a week or two in their hotel car parks. A real haka, done by forty or fifty Maori on their home marae, as well as being fierce and ‘horrid’—the word invariably used by the first European witnesses—is a set of violent and minutely synchronized actions which accompany a chanted poem, perhaps three or four hundred years old and susceptible to several levels of interpretation, sacred and profane.
Ruaumoko, composed in the eighteenth century, is a classic haka of the East Coast. It invokes the power of the earthquake god—someone never far from one’s thoughts in this part of the island. It is performed only on special occasions. As the Maori men advanced, stamping their feet and chanting, the crew of the Endeavour looked rather shaken.
‘Actually, it’s all about sex,’ said Nicky. ‘Phallic superiority. “We are better men than you. This is our country. Watch how you behave,” is what it’s saying.’ From her tone, I understood that it is both an insult and an honour to have Ruaumoko unleashed on you.
It took me some time to find an English text of Ruaumoko. It couldn’t be translated, I was told; it was not for publication. Eventually I tracked down a translation published in 1943. This turned out to be the sacred—and bowdlerized—version. ‘This,’ said a prim footnote, ‘should satisfy all but deceased Maori elders who held the key to this old masterpiece of the phallic cult.’
Hark to the rumble of the earthquake god!
Tis Ruaumoko who stirs and quakes!
Au! Au! Au e ha! .
It is the rod of Tungawerewere,
The sacred stick given by Tutaua to Uenuku . . .
Cleaving the twin peaks of Hikurangi . . .
A gift of the gods! The wonder of men!
I showed the Maori text to a Pakeha scholar of the language. ‘Ah,’ he said, adjusting his glasses. ‘Ruaumoko! Let me see . . . “Over whose hips does the seminal fluid splash?” . . . Golly . . . “The orgasm like the shudder of the biting dog”. Do you know, I really think it might be better to get an elder from the tribe to do this for you . . . ’
I left it there. I was interested in the words primarily as a contrast with what had happened next on the marae, after the haka was finished and it was time for the visitors to reply.
There were various speakers—the Mayor of Gisborne, the captain of the Endeavour, a spokesman for the ship’s corporate sponsors and so on. Between the second and third of those, something unexpected happened. There was a shuffle of feet and then some of the crew, grinning and elbowing one another, came forward. Some bright spark among them had thought of a riposte. They began to sing:
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
What shall we do with a drunken sailor?
What shall we do with a drunken sailor,
Early in the morning?
The protocol on a marae is strict, and the order of speakers and choice of songs are the subject of endless discussion. That day in Gisborne we were gathered to exorcise a grievance generations old—Ruaumoko was a sign of the solemnity of the occasion. And in wandered the Drunken Sailor with his silly grin.
It is easy for Pakeha to make mistakes on a marae, especially if they are trying to do things in a Maori way. These solecisms are generally forgiven and, judging from the wintry smiles on the faces of the Maori hosts, ‘The Drunken Sailor’ would be forgiven, or at least overlooked. Yet I was struck, once again, by the gulf in language and ceremony that yawned between the two races. It is an odd kind of gap: it is not caused by indifference, or contempt or ignorance, although Maori often accuse whites of all three. In the next speech that afternoon, I came closer to understanding its real nature.
The speaker—the corporate spokesman—was nervous, and stumbled over his words: ‘Speaking as a New Zealander of, of European distraction,’ he said, his voice quavering, ‘this afternoon I feel the pain of . . . the shocking things . . . that happened to your ancestors . . . ’ And in that quaver, I thought I heard the faint, strange, background radiation that hovers through this whole story.
‘The fact is,’ a lawyer had told me over lunch a week before, ‘we love the Maoris.’ I was startled: this was the sort of thing people used to say thirty years ago but never say today. Not because it is a lie, but because it might be true. And if it is true, then it puts us in a worse light than ever. For it is one thing to attack and dispossess a people you dislike or fear—the impenetrable Aborigines, for example, or the Zulu—but quite another to do the same to a race whom you profess to ‘love’.
Is it possible even to speak of ‘racial love’ in the twentieth century? Only with some discomfort, although its opposite, ‘racial hatred’, makes a sprightly entry into any conversation. Yet in the 1840s it was possible: ‘You are the very counterpart of Englishmen,’ said Governor Grey to Maori chiefs in 1848. ‘In love and mutual trust, the two races will be lost in one.’ Most early Pakeha observers concur: the Maori were brave and chivalrous, but also industrious and clever. In the mid-1840s Maori literacy rates were as high as in any country in Europe. In 1842 a missionary wrote: ‘Their cry was the same in almost every place we staid at—”Books, books! Give us books, lest we perish!”’
This was the race we entered a treaty with, then attacked and stripped of its heritage.
I was struck by the number of Pakeha, from the minister of justice down, who insisted that they did not feel any guilt for the past. It was like a mantra: ‘We don’t feel guilt, we won’t feel guilt, we mustn’t feel guilt.’
That night I slept in a motel a few yards from the beach where Cook and the Maori first encountered each other and I found an image forming briefly in my mind. I saw two figures, a Maori and a Pakeha, locked together in what from one angle was a loving embrace, but from another was a wrestler’s grim stalemate. The white’s hands covered the Maori’s eyes, a Maori hand was thrust across the white’s mouth. One was unable to see, the other unable to speak. This ambiguous dream-embrace seemed to sum up much of the past contact between the two races. It has been a long clinch, from which they are only now, with difficulty, disengaging.
In Wellington I went to see Doug Graham, the minister of treaty settlements. He is the man in charge of one of the most detested policies towards Maori, the ‘billion-dollar cap’, a take-it-or-leave-it, full and final settlement for all the wrongs, great and small, that Maori have suffered. A billion dollars, it turns out, is not enough: four days’ worth of the Gross National Product cannot erase a century and a half of deep wrong. Oddly enough, among Maori, his standing was higher than that of most white ministers. He is a rare bird among politicians, a Pakeha who has learned his way around a marae and can call on rhetoric equal to the occasion. I wanted to see him not so much about compensation but about another issue agitating Maori minds—the second great asset they lost, their own political power, tino rangatiratanga.
Nobody today is quite sure what this means. At a gathering of thirty thousand Maori in Rotorua, it seemed to mean picking up litter and taking lost children to the lost children’s tent. At the other end, it means wild visions of a separate Maori state—even proposals to disenfranchise all Pakeha, allowing them to stay on, taxed and policed, as guests of Maoridom. Between these extremes are some perfectly sober propositions. Tribal control of expenditure is one—at present, a tribe or iwi needs ministerial approval to spend more than two hundred dollars. New constitutional models are being devised, setting up, for example, a separate Maori lower house to propose legislation to a bi-racial upper house. What all the exhortations and plans have in common is a determination for the Maori to regain some control over their lives. New Zealand can no longer remain a little Britain in the south. In some explicit way it must become a Maori nation again.
‘We’ve taken all the power and kept it for a hundred years,’ I said to the minister. ‘When are you going to give some back?’
‘If you mean tribal control of spending—of course, it’s absurd they haven’t got it. If you mean a national body that can speak for all Maori—excellent. But if you mean an upper house with a power of veto—it’s never going to happen.’
‘Why call it a power of veto? Why not think of it as a power of approval?’
‘We’re not even thinking about it.’
‘But it’s not going to go away, this question. Every Maori I talk to says the same thing. They want their own source of power.’
‘It’ll never happen.’
I persisted: ‘What about the meeting at Hirangi in April? Five thousand Maori—chiefs, conservatives, radical separatists. They called it a constitutional convention.’
‘Never happen,’ the minister said.
A state’s first instinct is to preserve itself entire. But there are tricky calculations to be made. Give them too little autonomy, and they will fly off in anger; give them too much, and the game is up.
As it happens, there once was an independent Maori state within white-ruled New Zealand. It was about ten thousand square miles of wild country in the central North Island. Its ‘capital’ was a place called Te Kuiti—the inverted commas represent the poverty and hopelessness of the people who, defeated and impoverished by Pakeha confiscations, had gathered in Te Kuiti around the Maori king. One of these was a guerrilla leader called Te Kooti. He was not a very successful general—he never won a battle, although he did escape about fifty ambushes and for years led government troops on a ludicrous dance around the country. But he was also a great poet, a prophet and a builder of dozens of wharenui, the ‘great houses’ in which Maori found a redoubt as their old world disappeared under the grass of white farmers.
One evening at sunset, I stopped at Te Kuiti, now a farming town on the main trunk line, and went into the grounds of the first great house he built. An old red van pulled up and the Maori driver watched me with, I thought, some suspicion (over the past few years there have been sporadic arson attacks by Maori and whites on one another’s property) but then he drove away. As he left, I saw in the back of the van the same row of little dark heads that I remembered in the rusty old cars of Hastings in the 1960s. While I stood before the locked door, admiring its carved lintel in the dusk, I had a presentiment: that the Maori were going to win their fight to reassert themselves and reshape the country.
I was not sure where this conviction came from: it may have simply been the glimpse of the big family in the old red van. Maori are younger and more fertile than the rest of the population, and as their numbers grow, they will wield more power. On some projections, they will constitute nearly half the population by 2045. As the Maori population climbs, the argument goes, so it will be better represented in the legislature, and the demand for separate chambers—for autonomy—will simply fade away. There have already been a few Maori cabinet ministers; and at present a party dominated by Maori has a powerful but junior role in the coalition government. It has already used its new power in surprising ways: it pushed, for instance, to retain the historic links with Britain, preventing moves to end New Zealand’s judicial connection with the Privy Council in London. It is a firm snub to the Pakeha that the Maori should feel that five old men, driving from the House of Lords to Downing Street, should be a better guarantor of their rights than New Zealand’s own Court of Appeal.
But Maori power, according to radicals, is not just a matter of counting votes. Some Maori are eager for confrontation on a wider front (witness this year’s assault on the America’s Cup, when a Maori student took a hammer to a yachting trophy). One of the most chilling moments of my time in the country was talking to a gently spoken, silver-haired lawyer, Moana Jackson, about Hastings where we had both grown up in the 1960s. He agreed that race relations then were bad.
‘What’s your definition of good race relations?’ I asked.
‘When the two races never meet,’ he said.
He paused. ‘There’s no need to be scared,’ he said. ‘We are not vindictive people. We’ll treat you better than you treated us.’
There is undoubtedly a strong tide running in favour of the Maori at the moment, before which the white New Zealanders are strangely acquiescent. But it is full of ambiguous currents, and is driven by goodwill as well as aggression. The old saying—that over time a country assimilates its conquerors—still applies. If violence and death did come, both sides would surely draw back shocked, like swimmers colliding, because many Pakeha want to see the country change, and are drawn to the Maori world for the qualities their own seems to lack. Whites used to boast about a fraction of Maori blood in their veins; now they are learning to speak Maori and proudly recount their visits to a marae. Even the most reactionary white will stop in his diatribe and tell you how well he personally gets on with Maori. Not getting on with the Maori suggests you are uptight, stiff, unnatural, and the Maori are seen as the opposite of all that. They are thought to be at home with themselves, and at home in the country.
A friend of mine, an actor called Bruno Lawrence, died not long ago. He was not buried in the local cemetery; the Maori allowed him to be buried in theirs. This was an unheard-of distinction, whispered in tones of awed envy. Bruno Lawrence to lie among the Maori dead! How much better could you get on with Maori than that?
Semi-darkness, an hour before sunrise. A crowd of people, some shivering, are standing in a belt of pine trees. A scythe of rain cuts out the hill across the fields, and a single dark shadow moves along the road towards us and gradually takes shape as a second crowd. The two crowds converge, pause, then come through the gate towards us, one man calling, the others giving the refrain. This is the opening of a new marae, on the wild east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula.
Perhaps a thousand people have gathered here this morning; pinpricks of headlights are still coming down the hill towards the coast. As the procession reaches the new meeting house, the crowd sheltering under the pines comes forward to watch the proceedings, and I am surprised at how many Pakeha are among them. The ritual lifting of the tapu commences; the house is circled, then ministers lead the way inside, with hundreds pressing in after them, while hundreds more stand outside listening in the rain to the prayers, haka, speeches and waiata that follow in the usual order. Most of the Pakeha have no idea what is being said or sung. A thousand people will soon eat breakfast—cereals, sausage rolls, club sandwiches, chops, pineapple, melon—in a huge marquee which billows upwards and outwards in the wind.
Race relations in this area are not especially good. Over the hill in the town of Coromandel there are two pubs: ‘Maoris in the bottom pub, rednecks in the top pub’ was the formula I was given. Here in the marquee that seems hard to believe. It is now broad daylight, and a red ensign raps in the wind above the meeting house, where speeches and singing are starting again. The cooks are coming outside for a smoke; the teenagers are heading down to the beach. The opening will last three days, and hundreds of people will come and go as they please during that time. As we leave the tent and make our way back to the paddock where the cars are parked, another question occurs to me. What would be an equivalent event in my own community? Where would you find this easy exchange among complete strangers, the palpable sense of feeling at home in a place you have never seen before? It seems absurd, but the only thing that comes to mind is a radio talk show. On Friday evenings there is a nationwide phone-in on a single subject: rugby. Rugby and any topic pertaining thereto. When did screw-in studs replace nail-on studs? Are the Waikato Chiefs swinging the ball out wide enough? Why aren’t any Super Twelve games being played in Timaru? Should the national anthem be played in provincial games against Northern Transvaal?
The switchboard is always lit up. The voices pour in, animated, happy to be together on safe ground. I’m not all that interested in rugby but in the stark farmhouse where I’m staying I tune in too because I like the show’s atmosphere of community.
Yet there is something unreal and diminished about the voices coming through the night. This is not really the community, but an escape from it. There is something over-eager and hopeful, something almost childish about them. Something is missing in the Pakeha community: when today’s Maori offer visionary models of society, white New Zealanders can no longer point confidently to a superior model. The civic imagery of modern New Zealand is almost comic: here and there across the landscape rise gimcrack images, dopey colossi. At Te Kuiti, opposite the ancient carved meeting house, a huge concrete shearer fleeces a huge concrete sheep. Near the volcanic cone of Mount Ruapehu stands a giant fibreglass vegetable (the worlds largest carrot!). Elsewhere you can see a massive cow, a lobster, a salmon and an apple; there is even a four-storey-high kiwi fruit.
By contrast, the new Maori marae, with its red gable and figurehead, seems solid, four-square and mature. It is a strange twist in the tale, I think, as we go through the shelter belt of pines, that to such a place as this—in one sense a redoubt against the victorious invaders—so many Pakeha should now be making their way, if only to see what, in winning, they have lost.
