"HE TAUGHT US TO VALUE OUR OWN HISTORY"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 221, 17 September 1943, Page 7

"HE TAUGHT US TO VALUE OUR OWN HISTORY"

A Tribute to James Cowan,

by

A

M.

AMES COWAN, who died the other day, full of years and achievement, should be honoured by New Zealanders, because he taught them, as no other writer has done, to value the history of their own country., Our wistful mothers who taught us to call old England "Home," were admirable pioneers, but their background remained English. Everything English was best. They tried to make this country another Britain. Their children and grandchildren had to learn to be New Zealanders, to root themselves in the soil, absorb its past and dream of its future. In a long list of books and newspaper articles without number, James Cowan helped them to understand that past. There may have been greater Maori scholars; there has never been anyone who combined his wide and deep knowledgewf the Maori people with his literary style. The public has a short way with the battle between the "scientific’ and "literary" schools of historians; it just doesn’t read the scientific. James Cowan, like his contemporary Trevelyan in England, belonged to both. He had a proper reverence for facts, and could make the past live. It wasn’t only that he knew Maori. He knew the Maori. He had hundreds of friends among them. Working often on the spot, he studied and wrote their songs, their lore, their tales of adventure and battle long ago. He re-fought fights with many a European and Maori veteran of our wars.

No one has approached him as a chronicler of those conflicts, and frontier life in this country. To those who said we had no exciting pioneer and frontier history, he gave the best answer in his own true tales of bush and coast. New Zealanders brought up on tales of Red Indian warfare found from James Cowan that following the trail in the Urewera country required the same skill as in the backwoods of America -there were similar hardships and perils. When after perilously long delay, the Government decided in 1918 to have en official history of the Maori Wars written, James Cowan was commissioned for the work. This was by far the best choice. He had been brought up on the site of Orakau, while the Armed Constabulary still patrolled the Waipa frontier, and had absorbed the Maori tongue and Maori history from his earliest years. He knew veterans like the Mairs and Preece, Roberts and Goring, and many a bonny fighter on the other side. When he undertook the history, he visited every battlefield and interviewed many more survivors. He even got @ a story from the last survivor of that disastrous red-coat charge at Ohaeawai, way back in 1845. The result was a two-volume history of priceless value, packed with information and delightful to read. There is enough romance and adventure in this history to point the way to a library of imaginative books. As New Zealanders develop their national consciousness, they will surely go more and more to this unique quarry.