Psycho Chicken Crosses the Road
Created | Updated Nov 18, 2004
New Zealand; The Longest Possible Journey - Part Four
Aotearoa - Land of the Long White Cloud
New Zealand is a new country. And I mean it. We think of the US as new, but that's only really new in its current guise. New Zealand is quite literally brand spanking new - still in the cellophane and everything. To bring that home, a little fact that I was gob-smacked by and still find hard to juggle with: just one thousand years ago, the only mammal on New Zealand was a bat. And that had a note from its mum. New Zealand was a nation of birds. They ran it exactly how they wanted it, because there wasn't anything else to share it with. This accounts for the slightly warped way in which things evolved around here. Trees and flowers totally unique to New Zealand; flightless birds - you don't need to fly when there's nothing on the ground to attack you. Unlike its neighbour to the West, where every second critter packs a poisonous punch, the most dangerous creature on land here is a wasp. What's the point in being evolutionarily equipped to attack mammals when there aren't any?
It's at this point that opinions start to vary though, as I was about to discover. In the first 5 days of my trip I heard 3 distinct and contradictory stories regarding the colonisation of New Zealand.
Most agree on one thing - that around one thousand years ago, a chap named Kupe (apologies if I get names and spellings wrong here, I'm going from memory) wandered past what is now known as New Zealand. He might have stopped off, he might have just sailed on, but he did clock the place and think, my, what a pretty island. Now the Maoris maintain that Kupe was Maori and that a short time later he returned, bringing many canoes full of his people to settle paradise. They named it Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, and they lived happily ever after. Well, until the Europeans showed up anyway...
An alternative and not so politically correct version is that the Maoris stumbled upon Aotearoa a few years later. They landed in their new paradise but instead of finding a virgin country for them to colonise, they were greeted with open arms on the beach by a race of people who had been there just long enough to settle. Kupe's people.
Kupe's people were peace loving farmers. They greeted their new visitors with the finest hospitality they could afford. There was plenty of Aotearoa to go around after all. The Maoris rewarded this hospitality by slaughtering them and taking their lands. Over the years, the Maoris waged bloody war with their former hosts, eventually herding them to the point where they were only found on the small Chatham islands off the South coast, occasionally nipping over in their war canoes to give them a good kicking to keep them in touch. The last full-blooded member of this race is said to have died just before Europeans arrived.
Interestingly no Maori can tell you where they come from. They have a word for their homeland, but no one can point to it on a map. They can tell you their genealogy to seven decimal places and even the name of the canoe their ancestors arrived on, but not where it departed from.
History thereafter gets a little clearer owing to our quaint European tendency to write things down, although specific events are still arguable due to our quaint European tendency to be biased as hell. By the early 19th Century European ships were arriving on a regular basis in New Zealand. They came to trade with the Maoris, mostly in the native woods such as Kauri (which was excellent for shipbuilding) and the rich resources which were present in this virgin land. By 1830, the beautiful Bay of Islands was permanently crowded with visiting ships. Trade in muskets and gunpowder made the ever present wars between neighbouring Maori tribes more deadly and bloody than they were before, reducing the area to a permanent war zone. Disturbed by reports of this lawlessness and the dangers her merchants faced there, Britain dispatched a man named James Busby to sort things out.
When he arrived he had the unenviable task of making the warring Maoris sit down and discuss their problems. This was tricky because, while they all had muskets and no fear of using them, he had no weapons at all and I get the idea he was far from welcome. Despite this tricky position, he did good work as a mediator and, by 1835, he'd managed to get 35 North Island chiefs not to kill each other just long enough to sign the Declaration of the Independence of New Zealand.
Five years later another diplomat arrived from Britain. But Captain William Hobson was not sent to help the Maoris talk to each other; he was sent to claim New Zealand for Britain.
Hobson brought with him a treaty, which Busby revised to make it a little less one-sided, and translated into Maori. It was a good job someone had spent some time making up the written Maori language beforehand as, traditionally, there hadn't actually been one beyond the carving used to keep track of genealogy and legends. On the 6th of February, 1840, 43 tribal chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi which, in essence, claimed New Zealand as British but also asserted that both Maori and non-Maori peoples should enjoy equal rights and live and work together in peace and co-operation. Debate rages to this day about the content of the treaty, notably in the Maori translation which was taken around the country until some 500 chiefs had 'signed' the treaty. To this day, New Zealand has two official languages : Maori and English; and two official names : New Zealand, and Aotearoa.
These days the site at Waitangi is all National Trust land. What stands there is essentially a flagstaff which is supposedly where the treaty was signed and two houses. One is a European house and the other a traditional Maori meeting house, or Te Whare Runanga.
It has to be said that despite its historical significance, the European house is singularly unremarkable. Its less than sympathetic restoration and transformation into a tourist attraction hasn't helped. The Maori house, on the other hand, is nothing short of a spiritual haven. Unusually for a Maori meeting house (which would normally be affiliated to a specific tribe) the one at Waitangi is lined with carvings representing all the tribes of New Zealand side by side. At the apex of the gable stands a carving of the man who (no matter which version of the story you believe) started it all. Kupe.
The atmosphere inside the house is extraordinary. The guide instructs you to remove your footwear before entry and then, sat cross-legged inside the house, he tells you the history of the place. Much more intimate and enjoyable than walking around a dull white-painted house reading from the sort of sepia toned cards and photographs that these places are inevitably full of. While the European history has been reduced to factoids, bullet points and waxwork recreations; the Maori side of the story is still being passed on in the traditional manner - by word of mouth.
Aotearoa - Land of Small Museums
Waitangi was the first of a strange trend I came across; the incredibly small museum. Almost every town in New Zealand has a museum. It might just be a few cards and exhibits about the origins of the town itself, or it might be more than that, but it will always be housed in nothing more than an average sized house and inevitably employ a bored elderly lady on the counter, who will give you a booklet and sell you postcards and stamps; always with a smile.
The town of Russell, just across the water, has one too, but not much else...
