HOW MAN CAME TO NEW ZEALAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 470, 25 June 1948, Page 16

HOW MAN CAME TO NEW ZEALAND

ers use the NZBS Broadcast to Schools to supplement classroom work are now hearing, between 1.45 p.m. and 2.0 p.m. on Tuesdays, the story of how man came to New Zealand, written by Roger Duff, the Christchurch ethnologist, who is at present studying at London University. Becayse the series is concerned largely with the Maori race, the Broadcasts. to Schools Department engaged two Wellington Maoris to assist in oe children whose teach-

dramatizing two of the programmes. The series, Which started on June 8, has already taken the children through the arrival of man in the South Pacific and the settling by the Polynesians of every island, great and small, between New Zealand and Hawgii and from Tonga to Easter Island. In the story of the voyage of the Polynesians from "Tahiti to Raratonga, Charles M. Bennett, of the War History branch of the Department of Internal Affairs; played the part of the hero Ru, singing Maori chants. In the next episode, on Tuesday, June 29, Kingi Tahiwi, of the Native Affairs Department, will tell the tale of the Polynesian discovery and settlement of New Zealand in the style of the old Maori story-tellers who handed down historical lore from generation to generation. Raft-voyagers’ Theory Early in the account of man’s arrival in this country (which is printed in the supplementary booklet issued to schools by the NZBS) Roger Duff refers’ to some of the theories of research workers. The Norwegian raft expedition from South America last year, he says, points only to a possible back door; but the front door of the Polynesian migra‘tions was clearly from the west, from Malaya and Indonesia. The so-called mystery of Easter Island does not impres modern scientists. They see no traces: of a drowned Pacific continent there, or a civilisation dating before the Polynesians. ‘\ How, he asks, were the Polynesians to know that down in the cold seas, 1,000 miles further from the Equator than

they had ever found land to exist, they would find our land? Does this mean that they searched the whole cold belt of the South Pacific until they ran on to New Zealand? .... Whether a few adventurous men found New Zealand by a drift voyage or by a voyage of exploration, they still had to return to Raratonga and Tahiti, to prepare a fleet of canoes to bring over their wives and families to settle in the new land. This means that they were better navigators, than any people had been to that time, because to find Raratonga from New

Zealand is harder than retracing the flight of a spent bullet to find the gun which fired it. Pre-Compass Navigation The first Polynesians to find New Zealand arrived well before the Battle of Hastings (probably about A.D. 950); ‘Toi and Whatonga were the leaders of others who arrived about 200 years later. The early people remained few in numbers because they failed to establish the kumara (or sweet potato). They killed off the moa and other birds and so were called Moa-hunters. Some of them found their way to the Chatham Islands to become ancestors of the Morioris. About 400 years after Kupe’s discovery there arrived the last and greatest fleet of Polynesian canoes-the Fleet of A.D. 1350. This was still 140 years before the sailors of Columbus, with the aid of the newly-invented compass, groped their way across the Atlantic to discover America. Of the people who occupied New Zealand during the long centuries before the Fleet, Maori tradition could remember little or nothing. In fact, the little that their traditions could recall we know now was false, namely, that a tall, thin, dark-skinned Melanesian people came here after Kupe’s discovery and occupied the land till the Fleet. The Maori called them Maruiwi, or Mouriuri-the man in the street still calls them Moriori. But where was the key to unlock the door of the past, and tell us who they really were? Moa bones provided the key and the bones of other extinct birds, which Maori tradition had forgotten because (continued on next page).

(continued from previous page) their ancestors of the Fleet had probably never seen them. We looked for old camps with these bones in the ovens and, mainly on the east coast of the South Island, found many of them. We calculated that these’ should reveal the relics of these unknown earliest people. The most exciting finds were near Blenheim where, in 1939, a 13-years-old pupil of a small country school unearthed the actual skeletons of the Moahunters themselves. The Moa-hunters were seen to be true Polynesians, just an earlier wave of the Maori people from Tahiti and Raratonga. They buriéd their dead with water-bottles made from moa eggs and they wore necklaces ‘of beads and pendants cut from moa bones. Few traces of the Moa-hunters have yet been found in the North Island but enough to prove that they lived there as well. ~ Mr. Duff ends his story by saying that Maori culture, as we knew it, developed in the North Island and was the result of efforts of the mixed descendants of the Moa-hunters ang the Fleet to adapt themselves to the new and vastly different environment of New Zealand. The Maoris became the most numerous, the most artistic, the most vigorous and most formidable of the Polynesian peoples. The final episode in this series will be broadcast on July 27.