Half a World Away

Today I was trading notes with a friend who spent some time in New Zealand. Before ever we left, he and I had talked a little about his time there, spent exclusively on the South Island. Interested though I was back then, it was an entirely different conversation this second time. Once again, being there makes all the difference. The abstract concept that I had mentally filed and labelled 'New Zealand' a year ago has been erased, and in its place are memories of a real country.

I never did find the time in South America to come back to the topic of New Zealand on this blog, so I hope you'll indulge me in a little reverie and soapboxing now.

Two images come immediately to mind when I think back on our time in NZ - especially on the South Island - that were constants in an otherwise ever-changing landscape. Firstly, the braided river systems. Wide stretches of rockstrewn flatlands through which trickled a few inches of water. Every time we drove over a bridge, we saw another one. The second, was the permanent company of birds of prey which hovered over every road we travelled like an Unholy Spirit. Both of these images bring me back immediately to the sensation of motoring though thousands of kilometers of breath-taking New Zealand beauty, and I once again experience the sense of mission and common purpose that seemed to travel with us during those weeks and months.

I'm happy to say, once more, that nostalgia plays no part in these memories, because nostalgia suggests some element of regret. And we regret nothing about NZ - not even saying goodbye when the time came. We had an unforgettable time there, made some new friends (I will email Dee - I really will!), and in 12 weeks we got to almost every angle of those amazing islands. We got, if I can be so mercenary, what we came for.

That said, I can't pretend to really understand New Zealand in any profound way, because I didn't get to understand any New Zealanders very well. They are a welcoming, hospitable people who nevertheless retain a degree of reserve that differentiates them from Australians. This is emphatically not a criticism, just an observation from somebody who has acquired the Irish habit of assuming everybody wants to be his best friend. 'Reserve', to an Irishman, is something one does to a hotel room.

It could be that the difference between Australians and New Zealanders (and in a very tenuous way the difference between the treatment meted out to the Aboriginals and the Maori) can be partly explained by the kind of people who travelled from these islands to those ones, around 150 years ago, to populate the new colony. If Australia was the dumping ground for the criminal class, New Zealand was the Ark that would carry those who wished to leave the iniquities of Britain and found a new Better Britain in the south seas. Christchurch, for example, was founded by an association presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury and whose advertising...

(taken from here)

...sought diligent labourers who could be vouched for by their local clergy. It was altogether a different way of making up the numbers than the policies that were been pursued in Australia. And this goes some way towards explaining why the percentage of Irish in New Zealand has always been much lower in New Zealand than in Australia, English and Scottish being the two dominant colonising cultures. Many generations have come and gone of course, and gold rushes in particular must have changed the composition of the population, but I feel that something of that original conservative and religious character remains around the South Island in general and Christchurch in particular (remember those absurdly long school uniform skirts!?).

But here's the kicker: I suspect that it was because of that streak of religious conservatism that New Zealand established practices that today would be considered the work of liberals. New Zealand was famously the first country in the world (yes, the whole world) to give women the vote. It was also the first, as far as I know, to set up something like social security. It was, in short, a great big open-air social experiment, and Kiwis knew it and were proud of it. They were driven not by a modern radical spirit, but out of a modern application of widely-shared christian values. That coin's other face showed itself too, for example in a relatively late acceptance of legalized homosexuality (1986) - seven years before Ireland, it should be noted, but still tardily at odds with NZ trail-blazing in other matters.

And of course I can't help but wonder whether this deliberately worthy approach to social mores, informed as it was by christian charity, might not have shielded the Maori from some of the worst excesses seen in Tasmania and mainland Australia. Don't get me wrong - the Maori had it bad and for a while it looked like they and their culture wouldn't last. But since 1867 New Zealand provided for Maori representation in parliament. It was only four seats to be sure, a sop with little political power, but it was four more than in any Australian colony, and these crumbs were enough to feed the political ambitions of certain sections of the Maori community, Apirana Ngata perhaps the most famous of these, his bust on prominent display in the foyer of the House of Parliament in Wellington. Mere gestures like those four seats, even if made cynically and in a paternalistic spirit, are made in any case because there is public support for the ideals that they feign. And once institutionalized, they can grow in significance over generations until they finally become what they first only pretended to be.

Today in New Zealand Maori culture is strong. There are problems for sure, but the situation is incomparable to that of the Australian Aboriginal. Anne, whom we met at a Wellington Bookcrosser meeting, told me that Maori in Australia (and there are many) find communicating with Aboriginals there to be as hard as talking with Martians. Some Maori idealists of Anne's acquaintance returned from missions in the Oz outback bitter and even racist.

As I suggested in an earlier blog entry, the Maori themselves were certainly better prepared for Europe's arrival, thanks to their agriculture and all that it led to in terms of social structures and complexity. This social and cultural similarity with Europeans meant that in times of war the Maori were able to fight back and in times of peace there was a great deal of intermarriage. But it was the nature of those who came to settle their lands too, which had an influence on the fate of the Maori, cushioning what might have been a mortal blow.

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Back in Europe now, and trying to cushion the blow of returning to normal life (a term I can't take seriously), we can't help but look for signs of change and growth in ourselves but especially our kids. Yesterday, Sara demonstrated her new ability to pick things out on our globe here at home. She found all the countries we had been to with relative ease, immediated heading south of the equator, and generally showing a certain ease with the planet that she simply didn't have before we left. Letizia told her to put one index finger on New Zealand and the other on Ireland. Wow! She couldn't get over how far away these two points were from each other - they couldn't possibly be further. It's half a world away. And yet for as long as those braided rivers continue to trickle through my thoughts, and the birds of prey haunt my memory, it will always feel very, very near.

Now, before I disappear up my own artistry, here's a demonstration of how NOT to perform the haka, which I made to the collective embarassment of my family and the combined ridicule of three tables of Japanese tourists in a Rotorua hotel:



Em - that's me on the right, in case you weren't sure.

We Stink. Again.

Look out for the smell of rotten eggs! This is the advice given to everyone going to Rotorua, as if we were all brought up with malfunctioning fridges stuffed with unused eggs. I for one had no idea what rotten eggs smelled like, though after a week in Rotorua I know now. The warning are so stark and alarming that when you actually get there you end up wondering what the big deal was all about. Sure there's a bit of a whiff in the air, but nothing too overpowering. Of course after 6 months on the road our sense of smell has probably diminished somewhat a little. (And the commonplace about deficient senses being compensated by others has proved to be nonsense. My sense of humour, for example, is as poor as ever.)

A week is a long time in politics they say, but it's a fleeting moment in Rotorua (see??!!). Even in bad weather, the list of things to do is longer than the time you have to do it. The essence of the place might lie in the springs, mud and volcanic walks that together provide the famous aroma. But Rotorua is also home to a vibrant Maori culture that is very happy to share itself with visitors (well, rent itself out really), and there are a number of extreme activities that can be enjoyed or endured there. Zorbing (covered in a previous post) was invented in Rotorua, and is the only place in NZ that I know of where you can do this.

After 8 weeks in the South Island, with hardly a Maori face in sight, we were expecting to get a closeup view of New Zealand's indigenous culture right here. One of our first actions on arriving in Rotorua was to book ourselves in for an evening of Maori song, dance and food - the famous hangi (a method of cooking using heated volcanic stone and mounds of earth). There were many such events competing with each other, and we went with the recommendation of our motel host. It was run in a nearby hotel, and included transport to and from. From the outset of the evening, it was clear that this was going to be the kind of get-together that I would warn tourists visiting Ireland against. The vast majority of the audience appeared to be bussed in directly from Japan. And I learned more about the European travel woes of the Queenslanders with whom we shared a table than I did about Maori life and attitudes. It was the equivalent of a sightseeing bus tour through Maori culture, but you know, once in a while a open-top bus tour is a good start when getting to know a new place.

It didn't bother this particular musical snob that the singing was backed up with a gently strummed guitar - who would walk out on a trad musical session when somebody pulls out a 'foreign' instrument like a bouzouki or a banjo (I'll admit to getting antsy when a piano accordion is produced, but I'm of one mind with Gary Larson when he depicts that particular instrument as Hell's equivalent of the heavenly lyre). And I quite liked it when the poi dancers picked on Letizia and dragged her up on stage to learn a little about this most graceful of Maori activities. Letizia, being of a shy disposition, was not particularly happy about it at all, but she acquitted herself very well in front of her family, the Queenslanders and the small Japanese city. And if I may say so, she showed that an Italian woman can sway her hips was every bit as much allure as any Polynesian.

I wish the same could be said for my ability to perform the haka. As soon as Letizia was allowed to return to her place, the male performers came down into the audience in search of 'volunteers' to learn this warrior posture dance. If you follow rugby, or you read this blog regularly, then you know what I'm talking about. Ka mate! Ka mate! Ka ora! Ka ora! Tenei i tangata, puhuruhuru! A menacing chant accompanied by much foot-stomping, thigh-slapping, eye-popping and tongue-protrusion. A quasi-musical performance likely to put the fear of a painful death into anyone watching (a bit like the aforementioned piano-accordion, now that I think of it). Maori people, on the whole, are beautiful to behold. The woman possess an appeal that is hard to convey but easy to appreciate. The men are tall, muscular and hard to argue with. This is how I ended up on the stage, alongside my haka mentor, squinting against the spotlights. It's hard to imagine a greater mismatch than this woolly-jumpered stick man set along side a man who clearly started life as a an enormous pair of pectoral muscles around which a human was generously constructed. I watched and tried to keep up as the warrior showed me the basics, but the results, far from being fierce and frightening were perceived by my watching (and filming!) family as oscillating between high comedy and low farce. All I had to show for my efforts at the end of the evening was a little tiki that I was given before leaving the stage (which I think I still have), and two badly bruised thighs (which I definitely still have).

We did lots of other fun and unusual things in Rotorua, which I won't bore you with right now (though I reserve the right to return to), including a trip to a mud spa, and a half-day wandering around the original Rotorua bath houses, now an excellent museum. In this last place, we learned that Rotorua is New Zealand first major tourist attraction and has been welcoming geothermal pilgrims for more than 125 years now. My guess is that more people have been to Rotorua than have had occasion to smell actual, real-life rotten eggs. In fact if humans were even close to being truly rational beings, people would be warned to check their eggs, and throw out any that smelled like Rotorua.

Troublesome Treaties

Since we've left Ireland almost 6 months ago, the Irish people gave Bertie Aherne an early bath, albeit indirectly, and now have rejected the Lisbon Treaty as well. The best political commentator I know (that's you Jim if you're reading) predicted a year ago or more that Bertie would finally have to go if and when the economy started to splutter, and I'm in no doubt that he was right on this. I wonder if the fact that it continues to splutter, belch and occasionally fart is partly responsible for the treaty's rejection as well. In any case, the Irish had the opportunity to decide whether the Treaty was a good idea or not, and their voice was duly heard, even it it's hard to tell what it's saying.

The Lisbon treaty was negotiated and redrafted over years by expert civil servants and lawyers, translated into every official European language by dedicated teams of polyglots, and debated for months by various national parliaments and the Irish electorate. The Treaty of Waitangi (1840) by contrast was drafted in 4 days by three men (and not one of them a lawyer), translated badly by a missionary, and debated by a subset of Maori chiefs, none of whom really had the authority to sign it on behalf of their people, and for whom many of the concepts of modern statecraft meant nothing. But sign it they did, and in so doing transferred sovereignty of the islands of New Zealand, considered at that point to lie in the hands of the United Tribes of New Zealand, to Queen Victoria of England.

That the United Tribes of New Zealand was non-existent in any functional sense didn't seem to matter. There was no political union under Maori - the Maori name for New Zealand (Aotearoa) was unlikely to have been used by Maori, and was probably a romantic invention of European missionaries. The very word Maori was only coined by Maori as a way to distinguish themselves from the Pakeha (Europeans), and means simply 'ordinary' or 'normal'.

That key words from the treaty like, em, sovereignty for example, were translated badly (and inconsistently with previous English/Maori documents), was overlooked or ignored.

British motives behind the treaty are interesting to look at. It's easy to imagine the Treaty as the product of rapacious imperialism, but the kind of people behind its creation (James Stephen, Lord Glenelg) were those who pushed successfully for an end to slavery in the British Empire. Conditions for the Maori had become particularly difficult since whalers had started operating from New Zealand's shores, and it was felt that something had to be done to protect and conserve New Zealand for the Maori. But the unseemly haste, which made the treaty such a flawed document, was driven by baser motives: a race against time to prevent The New Zealand Company from seeing though its plans of 'Systematic [private] Colonisation' of the islands. And the way in which colonisation was seen through was far from the 'New Zealand for the Maori' sentiments nurtured by the Treaty's creators and sponsors. Settlers and Crown authorities often interpreted the treaty in ways that favoured Pakeha over Maori, or else disregarded the provisions of the Treaty entirely.

The very fact that there was a treaty at all is another indication of the difference between the fates of Australian aboriginal and Maori societies (no - I'm not through with this topic yet). A treaty was required because New Zealand, unlike Australia, was not deemed to be Terra Nullius by the British. It was occupied and defended in a way that Europeans could related to. Farming was well established, and a continuous state of war between tribes, with alliances chopping and changing regularly, meant that the technology and organisation available to Maori for their first contacts with Europeans was enough to keep them at arms length for quite a while.

Tasman arrived in 1642, lost four sailors to Maori spears, and buggered off. A full 127 years passed before the next European explorer, James Cook, passed by, and despite his famous ability to negotiate with locals, and the advantage of a Polynesian language speaker on board, still managed to get into several skirmishes. Although the Maori came off worst in these clashes, the belligerence of the natives was reported back to London and surely had some influence on the selection of New South Wales over New Zealand as a suitable place to set up a penal colony. And that relative proximity of a British outpost in Sydney just 10 years after Cook's voyage allowed the Maori to build up a relationship with London gradually. Sixty years passed between the settlement of Sydney and the Treaty of Waitangi, during which there was much trade and exchange of people, and the gradual establishment of private whaling stations on New Zealand coasts.

For the first New Zealanders, almost 200 years passed between first contact with Europe and final colonisation. Compare that with 10 years for the Eora people of Sydney, and consider also that Australian colonisation took place without a treaty, and with complete and total disregard for the First Owners of Australia. No provision was made for the protection of their rights or property, as happened in New Zealand. Although technically subjects of the Crown, those who attempted to repel the invasion of their lands were officially considered on a par with enemies of the state. This ambiguity in law left the Aboriginals to the tender mercy of settlers, by whom they were considered at best competition, and at worst, vermin. I've already mentioned the fact that Australian aboriginals were still hunter-gathers, given Jared Diamond's reasons for why this was so, and outlined how this left the Aboriginal less prepared, technologically and socially, for invasion and sustained warfare. This lack of preparedness, the speed of colonisation, and its ferocity, meant that Aboriginal societies in Australia (and in the case of Tasmania, even the population itself) were destroyed. And it's not at all clear to me if they will ever recover. It was an exact analogue of what happened to the Moriori of the Chatham islands, except in this case the both the aggressors and the vanquished were Polynesians. The Maori suffered terribly but were able to defend themselves better and their society was not dealt quite the same killer blow and in the case of Australian aboriginals.

Through a mixture of base and noble purposes, the Treaty of Waitangi was more or less thrust upon the Maori, but I wonder what would have happened if it had not? The fates of other Polynesian peoples, under the "broad sweep of history" that Jared Diamond describes in Guns, Germs and Steel which I blogged about recently, was varied and ranged from absolute annihilation to a retained and functioning independence. There's no safe assumption that things would have been any better for the Maori without Waitangi.

The unity of Europe was conceived with noble reasons - to end the wars that had raged between the constantly switching alliances of European tribes, to protect itself from external aggression, and to create and environment suitable for mutual prosperity (some of which seems remarkably similar to the situation that pertained amongst Maori before Waitangi). Europe has rejected unity attempted in the past by horse, sword and panzer, until it's more recent acquiescence to the pen. The Treaty of Lisbon, written in dense legalese and referring to many other previous treaties, may have been effectively just as open to misinterpretation (and misrepresentation) to Irish voters as Waitangi was to the Maori. It might have been put in force over the heads of all EU countries other then Ireland. I'm happy we had our opportunity to vote on it, but I think that the arguments for the treaty was made very badly indeed, and I'm not sure sure that we'll be any better off for having rejected it.

Wellington Fits Like a Glove

The Southern Cross bar on Abel Smith Street is large - it must hold as many as 200 drinkers when full, and many of them sit outside when the weather permits or (in the case of smokers) when the law insists. It's the outdoor voices that you can hear the most from our apartment. But from six floors up, the distance is sufficient to filter out all content, just leaving the carrier signal, a white noise that is distinctly human in its cadence but devoid of even a single recognisable word. Tomorrow morning, that's how these conversations will be remembered even by those who are engaged in them now. I'm hearing 8 hours into their future.

I love the noise. I love being back in the city. The only thing you could hear in our Christchurch house was Willard the cat occasionally mewing and the canary next door whistling the first two lines of Happy Birthday To You. That was very peaceful and welcome for a while, but by the end it was the constantly murmured rosary of city life that I was praying for.

I love Wellington. I love the fact that we exit our apartment practically onto Cuba Street which feels a bit like Newtown in Sydney. Undeniably smaller, but unmistakeably urban and confidant. Using my recently developed Index of School Uniform Skirt Length (which I recognize is borderline perv, but I am a Man of Science, dammit, and data are data) I can report that the atmosphere in Wellington is much less austere than Christchurch. I love the fact that there are too many museums and places of historical and political interest here, and that I will have to choose carefully the ones I plan to visit. I love that at the end of every day here so far I feel I've seen something worthwhile and only added to the list of things to be seen before we leave.

Let me give you an example of a day well spent. Letizia went to get her hair done today, something that ladies (and especially Italian ladies) will know is the kind of service that one can only safely look for in a town that you either know very well, or trust based on its appearance of sophistication. Together with Nina and Sara, I toured the parliament house and executive wing and then crossed the road to see the decomposed remains of an original Maori version of the Treaty of Waitangi (the 1840 'agreement' between Queen Victoria and the collected heads of the various Maori tribes that brought New Zealand into the British Empire as a colony - a document held in such disdain by Maori that the National Archive provides a wooden bowl of water outside the Constitution Room where it is displayed room, so visiting Maori may symbolically decontaminate themselves after viewing it).

This evening, after chilling out at home for an hour, we went to the Opera House to see a superb performance of Cats. Well I'm assuming it was superb. A man can only be expected to devote a minimum of attention to the appreciation of music, when he is watching a troupe of lithe actresses, dressed in figure-hugging body stockings, crawling around the stage on all fours. Oh look, people clapped a lot. I clapped a lot. It was all good.

And this was a typical day for us here in Wellington. Not every day involves leotard-clan feline impersonation of course, but at the end of the day, when we relax back 'home', there is generally a feeling of having seen something worthwhile. Accompanied as ever by the satisfying background music of people with more stamina and fewer responsibilities than us having a good time into the wee hours.

In point of fact, as I write this I've noticed that the noise has faded away. It must be damn late. And there's lots more to do tomorrow. Goodnight, and pleasant dreams (purrrrr).

How not to be a Racist

When Europeans first went sailing around the globe, and bumped into (or more accurately, collided with) other more primitive societies, they asked themselves the question "How is it that we have the ships, guns, horses, writing and all the other trappings of civilization that allow us to conquer those others who have little of none of these advantages?". In the absence of any scientific explanation of how Man came to spread himself over the earth, Europe explained its success in terms of racial superiority, or believing in the 'right' God, or both. Five hundred years later, the same science that developed the ships and guns finally delivered the answer to that question.

It has been the consensus for some time now, and expressed in an accessible way by writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, that all currently living members of the genus Homo are, genetically speaking, brothers. We are Homo Sapiens sapiens, distinguished from our ancestors (say some) by our faculty for language, and we probably first appeared in Africa about 100,000 years ago. If you read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel you'll find a patiently paced description of the "broad sweep of history": the initial many colonizations of the globe by Homo Sapiens sapiens, and the more recent one that led to the Eurasian conquest of the rest of the planet (the result of which is clearly visible both here in New Zealand and back in Australia).

If you don't read Diamond's book, let me try to lay out its thesis in a nutshell. It was Europeans' guns, ships, germs, horses and political/societal size and sophistication that led to its victory over North- and South-Americans, SE Asians, Polynesians, Africans and Australian Aboriginals. These are the self-evident proximate causes of conquest. The ultimate causes lie in Eurasia's early transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming. The production of excess food created a positive feedback loop with increased population densities - the more food, the more people, the more labour, the more food. This led to a necessary stratification in society: chiefdoms and kingdoms - a means by which strangers living in close proximity could co-exist more or less in peace, with the kingdom acting as arbiter, and central point of trade. (Smaller societies, based around the tribe structure, kept the peace and managed trade through personal ties and reputation: Everyone knew everyone else, perhaps even related.) Stratification led to a specialised craftsman class, freed from the direct production of food, able to invest energy inventing better tools, methods, metallurgy and so on. This was the initial vector whose trajectory finally brought literacy, science and technology.

The domestication of animals, and their subsequent living in close quarters with man (very close, according to what Australians say about New Zealanders ;-) ) led to the co-evolution of epidemic diseases, and partial human immunity in farming populations. Most of the fatalities in subsequent collisions between Old and New Worlds were due to disease rather than warfare.

So that's a very basic description of the connection between the switch to farming and its consequences in terms of the proximate causes of Eurasian conquest.

So the question now can be reduced to: how and why did Eurasians switch to farming earlier than their global cousins? Those disposed to race-based answered will have the opportunity here to insist that Eurasians were simply smarter than their cousins. This is an easy solution but there is no reputable evidence for this. Diamond's gives an extremely comprehensive answer that can be reduced to one word: luck. Culo. Bald, unearned fortune. The more extended answer, in three words, is location, location, location. The fertile crescent and the Yangtze and Yellow rivers where agriculture first began, were home to the great bulk of those wild cereals, roots fruit and animals that firstly lent themselves to domestication and secondly provided enough calories in a single 'package' to compete with and displace hunter-gatherer modes of existence. While Man experimented globally with farming, Eurasia was by a wide margin the best-equipped laboratory (and also has a geographical axis that was best disposed to a transmission of newly domesticated crops, animals and techniques).

Maori vs Australian Aboriginal

Some peoples suffered more than others during the Eurasian conquest. Few fell apart quite as much as the Australian Aboriginal. In a later post, I'll finally try to make a comparison between what happened here in New Zealand to the Maori, and what happened in Australia, based on what I've seen in both places and what I've been reading since hitting the road. This much is clear to me: there's no need to lean on race as an explanation.

If some day, science finds that Europeans are genetically so different from Australian Aboriginals as to indicate that we do not come from the same stock - that we are effectively different species - then the government of Australia will have a very difficult ethical issue on its hands. How can you apply Man's law and confer human rights on a race other than the human one? But it would make some things simpler for the likes of you and me. It would give rational expression to that part of us that looks at the state of the Aboriginals today and asks "what the hell is wrong with them anyway?".

Luckily for moral philosophers and Aussie lawmakers, there is no such challenge to face. The rest of us have to get our heads around a more complex, but ultimately more satisfying, answer to silence that persistent suspicion that they are not like us.

MTV (Maori Television)

[Updated May 30th to sort out cut&paste problems in first paragraph]

When you switch on the telly for the first time in New Zealand, you'll find that one of your viewing choices will be in a language that you have probably only heard before on the rugby pitch, when the All-Blacks perform their famous haka. The Maori language is like nothing I've ever heard before, and strange to a European ear. But when James Cook (there he is again) made contact with the people of New Zealand in 1769, he had on board somebody who could understand these men, and could make himself understood. That man was called Tupaia, a Tahitian chief picked up during the first part of the Endeavour's voyage. The reason that Tupaia understood the Maori is because the Maori, like Tahitians, are Polynesians, and speak languages that come from the same sub-family of Austronesian. The Polynesian people swept eastwards across the Pacific from 1200BC until 1000AD, starting from Taiwan and inhabiting island after empty island, eventually doubling back to find Earth's last big true Terra Nullius, New Zealand. And they did it a good six to eight hundred years before Cook passed by.

When you first enter the country, even at the airport, you see the Maori language all around you. Like Ireland, official signage is always bilingual. Like Ireland, certain terms in the one language have found their way into the other. Most white Kiwis will know what mana is or what whakapapa means - not just words but even Maori concepts form part of New Zealand's shared vocabulary. The cross-fertilization works both ways. After Cook had moved on, and traders and whalers moved in, the Maori needed to expand their own language to deal with things they had never seen before, and they used transliterations, just like we've heard in the Chinese language a few months ago. For example hipi renders the idea of the then-unknown sheep and pata sounds like the foodstuff that the Maori had never know, due to the lack of large mammals on the islands: butter. (I have no idea where Lake Wanaka got it's name...)

Take all these things together - Maori Television, a single Maori language respected with dual signage, a keen sense from white New Zealanders (Pakeha) of Maori culture - and you get an outsider's feel for the difference between the situation of the Australian aboriginal and the New Zealand Maori. The Maori suffered under colonization, make no mistake. At one stage during the late 1800s most whites believed - many with regret - that this was a people doomed to extinction. But they survived conquest better than the Australian peoples, and adjusted with greater ease into an essentially European political framework.

Why?

At the moment, I'm reading another, older Jared Diamond book called Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond offers an explanation for what he describes as the "broad pattern of history": how Europeans (or at least Eurasians) came to conquer the rest of the planet, rather than Africans, Native Americans, or Australians. I'll wait till I finish the book before trying to summarize it on this blog, why the fates of the Maori and the Australian First Owners have differed so much.

For now, let's look at another related New Zealand story that Guns, Germs, and Steel relates. The book starts with a discussion on the spread of the Polynesians across the Pacific. This is because that movement serves as a kind of Human History in a Nutshell, a small isolated example of what happened globally when anatomically modern Man spread from Africa to almost every corner of Earth. The islands that they conquered or filled varied enormously in climate, size, isolation and domesticatable plants and animals. Over the two millennia of exploration, the inhabitants of each of these islands tended to lose their cultural memory, forgetting where they had come from and simply adapting to conditions on each of the islands. The starkest lesson that can be gleaned from these adaptations lies in the story of the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands.

When they settled in New Zealand, the people who came to be known as the Maori brought with them some domesticated crops (the earliest Polynesians were already farmers). Some of the crops they had didn't thrive in the colder climate even on the North Island, but others did and the Maori people came to depend on agriculture more and more, especially after they hunted the larger flightless birds on New Zealand to extinction (the Moa being the most well-known example). By the time New Zealand was fully colonized by the Maori, they were organized into territorial tribes. At any moment in time, some tribes were at war with each other, while others cooperated (a perfectly normal state of human affairs). Some time before 1500, a group of Maori left NZ and settled the Chatham Islands, 800km East of where I'm sitting now in Christchurch. Life on the Chathams was not the same as where they had come from - it was too cold even for the few crops that remained to the Maori. But it was abundant in seafood. The Chatham Islanders reverted to a hunter-gatherer way of life and while this was the right choice (indeed their only choice) for survival in these conditions, it was the wrong choice geopolitically and it sealed the Moriori's fate.

In order to survive on an island that could support no more than 2000 people, they developed a strategy for dealing with conflict that excluded outright war. It wasn't strictly pacifist - you could still take a stick to your neighbour in a ritual fight. But once you drew blood, that was as far as you were allowed to go. There was no food surplus, nor way of storing it, that would in any case have provided for maintaining even temporary armies. There were precious few natural resources that could have provided for weapons. If the Chatham Islanders had kept up their Maori ways, they would have wasted what the islands had to offer, and died out.

When contact was next made with the Moriori people, by whaling and sealing ships around 1800, the word was brought back to the Maori in New Zealand of islands that were bountiful and inhabited only by a group of people who had no concept of weapons or war, and simply no idea how to defend themselves against outside aggression. A total of around 800 Maori chartered a European ship, and went to settle the Chathams. Those of the unfortunate Moriori who escaped slaughter tried repeatedly to negotiate their way to peace (it was all they knew) but merely ended up as the slaves of the Maori. The consequent genocide was practically complete in 1933 when the last full-blooded Moriori died.

By recounting this story I am not criticizing the Maori - what they did was in complete accordance with what they would have expected to suffer if they were defeated in war themselves. Nor am I saying that the Moriori are to be commended for their pacifism - their lack of defence was not a principled stand as such, but simply due to the fact that as a people they had forgotten how to fight. The real tragedy as I read it, is the fact that neither side understood that they were brothers, separated by just a few hundred years. And the immediate lesson that I take from it is that, if you extrapolate out the 2000 years of Polynesian colonization to the 40,000 years of the movement of modern Man, you are left with the similar conclusion that every one of the current wars raging on the planet right now is a war between brothers. That is not a liberal, bleeding-heart opinion. It is, to steal a phrase from Stephen Jay Gould, a contingent fact of history.