Talie on the Moriori

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 471, 2 July 1948, Page 10

Talie on the Moriori

FPRANK SIMPSON is to be congratulated on his excellent series of Monday night talks from 2YA The Story of the Moriori. The many listeners who have hitherto known of the Chathams only as the place the depressions come from will now be unable to hear a weather report without paying the tribute of a passing sigh to the former inhabitants of these istands. The Morioris seem to have lived in the kind of golden age lauded by the sterner New England philosophers, since neither climate nor the ‘availability of food was conducive to lotus-eating. Driven from New Zealand some 600 years ago, they settled down to a frugal but peaceful existence. War among the tribes was early outlawed, and individual disputes were settled relatively amicably with a type of quarter-staff. Into this Thoreauesque community plunge first the sealers and whalers, later the invading Maoris, and by the eighteen-sixties, when the slow machinery of democratic government in New Zealand sets in progress legislation to save the Moriori, help was too little, and came too late. The disturbing effect upon me of this story of an inoffensive people’s enslavement and extermination owes something

of course to Mr. Simpson’s skill in the telling, but even dispassionately considered, these events are historically too close for comfort, and a dreadful warning of the folly of prematurely turning meres into line-sinkers.