Three Hundred Years Ago

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 181, 11 December 1942, Page 3

Three Hundred Years Ago

HE happiest women, George Eliot said, have no history; and some cynic has said the same about nations. It is certainly the case that most nations, like most people, have more history than is good for them, and more than most of them want. But New Zealand has none at all, It is almost ludicrous to think that this week three hundred years ago there was no such place as New Zealand on any map or in any civilised mind, and that it floated into knowledge then quite by accident. But it looked so bleak and so forbidding, and of so little value or interest to anybody, that Tasman, though he was on the look-out for worthwhile worlds, sailed away and almost forgot it. Yet here we are in 1942 roaring like sucking doves, and a little louder, and preening ourselves this very week because we alone in all the world have a Social Security scheme in operation that Britain counts worthy of imitation. It is a reasonable excuse for some huffing and puffing and it would be sanctimoniously mock-modest not to use it. But the real lesson of the Tasman celebrations is that we have so little to forget. We have done so well so far largely because we have had nothing to undo. After all, it was not merely Tasman who forgot New Zealand. The whole world did, and even when Cook held it up again 127 years later hardly anybody would look at it. No, we have no history--a hundred pages of white settlement, an authentic entry or two by whites during the preceding three hundred pages, and before that legends only. We cannot even say with certainty when the first brown men came, or who or what they were: we know merely that they were here ahead of Tasman, and have some evidence that they were five hundred years ahead of him, and perhaps a little more. Kupe we have somehow ed ourselves entered Wellington a thousand years ago, and we almost believe that Te Aru-tanga-nuku was a hundred years ahead of him, and Hui-te-Rangiora two hundred years. But we don’t know for certain; and we think we know that whoever lived in New Zealand in those remote times, if anybody did, disappeared and left nothing behind. We are chickens just emerged from our shell, and if we have shown some precocity in learning to crow, it is our beautiful new world that has stimulated us,