Towering Landmark

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 549, 30 December 1949, Page 12

Towering Landmark

THE COMING OF THE MAORI, by Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck); Maori Puron. Fund Board: Whitcombe & Tombs.

(Reviewed by

Roger

Duff

N any branch of science, where time is continually adding to our knowledge, books serve as the landmarks of our progress; we are only aware that the last has sunk out of sight when a new one | looms up. Such is the case with research on the history of Maori culture. In 1924

Elsdon Best’s The Maori made us aware of the insignificance of most of our previous authorities. In 1929 we saw flash past, but on a byroad, Firth’s Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori; on the main road we could still see Best. How long Best has been disappearing it is impossible to say. We only know he is gone from the towering landmark that has suddenly sprung. up ahead.

From the immense and obvious advantages of its pedigree, Sir Peter Buck’s The Coming ot the Maori could

hardly avoid greatness. Few attempts have been made in our time to survey the complete circle of the unique culture which those Polynesians who became Maoris developed during a thousand years in New Zealand. The starting point was the accident (if we can so call a wise and prophetic selection) of the author’s invitation to deliver the Cawthron Lecture of 1925, and his choice of subject The Coming of the Maori. Te Rangi Hiroa’s superior qualifications for the task of interpreting Maori migrations were immediately obvious. As a Maori he possessed the inside view and the intimate knowledge of the language generally denied to his Pakeha fellow countrymen, while from his training in the objective methods of scientific: investigation he had acquired that power of critical judgment conspicuously lacking in earlier Maori attempts to interpret the culture history of their own people. The lecture was no sooner published than a new edition was required to expand a’ promising essay’ into a booklet. Fortunately the circumstances which then prevented Te. Rangi Hiroa from acceding to the demand, ensured that the essay appeared as the 500-page book of 1949, with the theme expanded beyond the migrations from the tropics to bring in the impact of the New Zealand landfall on the techniques of obtaining food, clothing and shelter, on the social and economic organisation, and on the religious beliefs brought from Polynesia. During the 20-odd years between the lecture and the book the author joined the research staff of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, to be-

come its Director, the world authority on the former culture of Polynesia, an Associate Professor of Yale University, a Knight. In New Zealand, also, rapid advances in our knowledge of the culture of the pre-Fleet and post-Fleet Maoris were mede, both from digging in the earth and the systematic study of museum collections. The Moa hunters materialised from the shadowy mist of legends as measurable bones, buried with imperishable adzes of stone, with necklaces and implements of moa bone.: Here was the occasion for the book and here was the scholar uniquely quali-

fied to write it. It can be said without hesitation that The Coming of the Maori is the best and most complete account of Maori culture yet written; with scarcely ‘more hesitation that it is the best book ever written on Maoris. Written with the part intention of being used a text book by B.A. students in Maori and anthropology, it should serve as the vade mecum of learned, as well as unlearned, students of the Maori. The style well shows that enviable ability, which the. author reveals in his speeches as ' well, of luring the

audience to follow him into steadily deepening water until the reader is swimming alongside his tutor without realising that his feet are off the bottom, Whereas European anthropologists often find in the study of other cultures a refuge from the trials of their own, it is obvious that Te Rangi Hiroa became an anthropologist because of his fitness to explain to the world a culture in which he was supremely adapted to participate. When Te Rangi Hiroa describes chieftainship one feels he would have made a great chief; when he writes of house or canoe building or twining cord or making nets we are certain that he would have been a master carpenter, an expert canoe builder, or rope maker. Indeed, my feeling, as I reflect on the author’s brilliant account of Maori culture, is that someone should write with comparable insight the story of Te Rangi Hiroa’s own career. For the author is a unique phenomenon among Polynesians or part-Polynesians; of Samoa, Tonga, Hawaii, Tahiti, the Marquesas or the Cook Islands, not one has produced a native scholar comparable with Peter Buck. The first part provides for the reader the most authoritative and sensible guid- ance yet available through the maze of popular confusions and misconceptions _on the coming of the Maoris. Our first shock is learning that the Maoris did ‘not come here at all. Various migra(continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) tions of South Sea Islanders arriving respectively one thousand, eight hundred and six hundred years ago fused and blended to produce the people and the culture we came to know as Maori. The author regards the South Island Moa hunters and the Maruiwi of the North as a single stock who arrived soon after, or with, Kupe from an undisclosed Polynesian homeland, to form the first wave. Like the immigrants of the Toi migration, two centuries later, their failure to introduce the kumara and other cultivated plants forced them to rely on fishing and fowling, and kept their population down. A section of these people migrated to the Chathams, where after centuries of isolation they became the Morioris, But the author does not use the recent and misleading term Moriori to refer to the earliest settlers in New Zealand; he calls them Tangata whenua, or pre-Fleet settlers. Did Melanesians arrive at this time? The author says no, and, in saying so, is the first Maori to tell his own people that an unsupported tradition cannot prevail over material evidence. "Thus a skeleton in its original resting place surrounded by adzes, ornaments and a blown moa egg speaks with more truth concerning the past than the living graduates of an accredited house of learning . . . . My criticism of some Maori sources of information may apPear severe at times... . but criticism coming from me cannot be said to be tinged with racial intolerance." Continuing the story, the arrival of the Fleet of 1350 represented the last migration from Polynesia to New Zealand. Unlike their predecessors, the Fleet arrivals introduced food plants, and the great growth of the North Island population dates from then. The Fleet and pre-Fleet settlers blended, on the whole, amicably. During the next four or five centuries the older and later settlers blended, greatly modified their culture to meet the new environment of temperate New Zealand and became the Maoris. The sections on material culture, social organisation and religion are of

the quality guaranteed by their authorship. In each chapter the emphasis is on the continuing movement of the imported items of culture, through their thousand years’ acclimatisation in New Zealand to the form in which Te Rangi Hiroa experienced them in childhood and early manhood. Whether it be the method of plaiting leaf strips, the niceties of social etiquette, or the pantheon of the gods, the author can show us the probable form of the basic elements in early Hawaiki and the infinitely varied modifications brought about by the colonists who moved out to such new land as New Zealand. The Maori reader should find inspiration and encouragement in this revelation of the richness, complexity and dignity of the culture developed by his ancestors in New Zealand; the Pakeha might well ask himself whether he has been able to develop a culture comparably unique and independent. The beok ends abruptly; there is no postscript, no call to the future, But in his Vikings of the Sunrise Te Rangi Hiroa closed with this variation of an old proverb, which might appropriately close this review: "The old net is laid aside. What new net goes a-fishing?"