A Vanished Race

Kaea, Issue 1, 1 December 1979, Page 30

A Vanished Race

“The Maoris, now unhappily a vanishing race in spite of the attempts at preserving them made by the New Zealand Government, came to that country some four or five centuries ago from Hawaii and Samoa. The women, often remarkably beautiful, retain many ancient customs, such as tattooing the lower lip and chin, and delight to wear their elaborate national costume..

This extraordinary account appeared in an English magazine published in 1938. Called Women of All Lands, the magazine was subtitled “Their charm, culture and characteristics”. The article continues: In spite of the special districts in which they live being akin to the reserves of Africa and North America, this partial segregation has not had its usual paralysing effect. The Maoris have inherited a higher courage than other Polynesian races. They live in a better climate. They do not have to struggle with either tropical inertia or with the sense of predestined doom which tortures the few remaining Hawaiians of pure blood. The tragic colour-bar has never been applied to Maoris, so they have none of the inverted pride or bitter inferiority complex which isolates so many Indian, African and island races ... the women,

strong, slight and graceful, live very much the lives of the present-day Hebridean crofters. They weave instead of knit. They bathe in the hot springs where an egg boils as quickly as in a saucepan rather than in the open sea. Further on in the piece we learn that: Though inclined to become plump early in life, the Maori girl possesses a fine physique, and keeps herself healthy by hard work and strenuous sport. Canoeing is a favourite exercise and all Maoris are excellent swimmers. Of their cultural activities, we discover : The happy Maori loves her traditional dances, and will seize any opportunity for displaying them to visitors Twirling tassles held in the hand seem to play an important part in these dances. Another startling revelation: It is not until about the age of eight, when she begins to wear clothing of any description, that she enters upon the more serious work of life.

And what of their future?

The Maoris are essentially an agricultural people, with no inclination towards or aptitude for commerce. In this sense they will never become brown-skinned “Europeans” as have the negroes of the United States, and there is no future for them except on the land .... This psychological or racial inadaptability is emphasised by the status of women. While all too often the women of a coloured race, living side by side with white people, have attempted to mould their charms upon those of their white sisters, the Maori women have built their lives upon the traditions of their ancestors. They live away from the towns and cities of modern New Zealand on their tribal compounds .... Naturally we were very excited when a copy of this magazine fell into our hands (it was sent to us from a second-hand

bookshop in Britain), for it seems to prove the existence of two Maori cultures: the one we all know, plus another we found very difficult to account for.

We sent our photographer out to explore. His instructions were to find representatives of this strange culture and capture them on film. According to the magazine they lived on “a special reserve at Rotorua on the East Coast of North Island”, but despite the active assistance of Ngati Porou no such reserve could be found, and they’d never heard of Rotorua. So we must apologise that there are no photographs of these peculiar people. It would have been quite a scoop to show pictures of women who managed to look remarkably beautiful and healthy even though they must have been suffering third-degree burns from bathing in all those boiling hot pools, or of their stark-naked daughters swimming or paddling their canoes off to primary school each morning.

We wondered if the Government had succeeded in preserving a few specimens. But phone calls around the museums revealed that they had no preserved Maoris in stock, either smoked or bottled. They knew of a few heads but these dated back much further than 1938.

So what happened to this mysterious race? There are several theories. Perhaps these “Maoris”, having paddled here from Samoa four centuries ago, have moved on and now live in the Hebrides; perhaps they learned commerce and became brown-skinned Europeans after all; perhaps the Government’s attempts at preserving them came to nothing compared to the racial inadaptability of their backward womenfolk and they did indeed “vanish”.

Another theory, so unlikely that it hardly seems worth mentioning, is that English journalists in the 1930 s were rather ignorant of New Zealand and thought they were writing about us\ How fortunate that such ignorance does not exist today ....