A respected Author, Historian, Michael King, Some of the differences between Australia & New Zealand concerning reconciliation.... RECONCILIATION: THE NEW ZEALAND EXPERIENCE Michael King Like that of most New Zealanders, my knowledge of the contours and textures of Aboriginal life is profoundly superficial. This is both regrettable and odd, because our two countries, Australia and New Zealand, have undergone a considerable intermingling of history and culture in other respects. Occupations such as shearing and seafaring were for a long period trans-Tasman in character. New Zealand was a candidate for joining Australian Federation in 1901, although fear about how New Zealand Maori might be treated under an Australian federal government was one of the reasons New Zealand declined that constitutional opportunity. (It’s worth noting here that one of the New Zealand Acting- Prime Ministers of the time, Sir James Carroll, Timi Kaara, was Maori; it’s difficult to imagine Australia tolerating an Aboriginal politician at such a level of seniority in 1901.) In addition, I note that many of us here today have trans-Tasman family associations. I have an Australian brother-in-law, and nieces and nephews; Jackie Huggins tells me she had a Maori grandmother. Despite that degree of intermingling, however, like most New Zealanders I cannot claim any degree of familiarity with Aboriginal experience. I have met some Aboriginal people, such as Charles Perkins and Kath Walker; and, more recently, Ollie Smith and Jackie Huggins. But I have not had the opportunity to develop intimate and confiding relations with these acquaintances. I have read some books by Henry Reynolds on the violent interface between Aboriginal and Settler societies; Peter Read meditating on what implications Australia’s history of cultural encounter has for White Australians; and memoirs such as Sally Morgan’s My Place and Jackie Huggins on the life of her mother Rita Huggins. While they may not provide the ingredients for erudition, these encounters in life and in literature have left me with strong impressions: shock at the lack of respect with which Australian settler society in general regarded Aboriginal people and culture; distaste at so many recorded instances of outright racism, institutional and personal; astonishment at the number of early European explorers and settlers who perished in what were for them harsh environments, because of an unwillingness to seek help from the indigenous Australians who were already living in those places. As Peter Read has written, so many massacres, so many homes destroyed, so many children stolen, so many daily insults. I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the sadness. And yet, in the face of that, there is also the resilience and the forebearance of so many Abroriginal people in the wake of experiences that could so easily and legitimately have turned them in the direction of disillusion, bitterness and revenge. I have also had the experience of sitting at the dinner tables of White Australians, otherwise decent, responsible, well educated middle-class people, and hearing them speak of Aboriginal people in terms of such naked racism that I’ve been unable even to continue a conversation; and I’ve had the contrary experiencee of sitting at the tables of other White Australians who have become deeply troubled by what they know of the history of Settler-Aboriginal relations, and who want to know what they can do to express their goodwill towards their country’s Indigenous people and to help set things right for the future but who have little idea of what specifically they can usefully do to advance that objective. There’s one final thing I should say, perhaps, about personal attitudes that affect my view of this whole topic. Because I grew up in New Zealand and was exposed to a range of experiences very different from those encountered by most White Australians, I developed a particular stance towards the indigenous culture of my own country and, by hypothetical extension, to the indigenous cultures of other countries. I have no Maori ancestry, but my father and his family were brought to live in New Zealand by a Maori stepfather. I learned the Maori language so as to be able to work in partnership with Maori, first in journalism and subsequently in the writing of history. I have taken seriously my country’s ambition to be bi-cultural in character by trying to equip myself to move competently and sensitively on both sides of the bi-cultural frontier. I tell you this, not to say, like little Jack Horner, what a good boy am I, because being good had nothing to do with it. It was simply what I had to do in order to tread the personal and professional paths that my life has taken. That course was also a reflection of the fact that, as an historian of a country whose existence is in my very bones, I have always been interested in the whole of that countrys experience, not simply the Settler side of the equation. And in order to investigate the whole of that history, it was necessary to be as competent in dealing with Maori views and evidence as it was with non-Maori. With the personal dimension out of the way, let me turn to features of New Zealand history that have resulted in a different pattern of relationships between indigenous and Settler societies than that which evolved in Australia. I want first to simply list some of these features; and then to place them in a historical context. The most obvious, and the most important, it seems to me, are these: 1) The modern state of New Zealand was established with the signing in 1840 of a treaty between the indigenous people and the Colonial Government of Great Britain. This agreement, the Treaty of Waitangi, gave European settlers the right to colonise New Zealand in return for the indigenous Maori relinquishing sovereignty of the country but accepting the protection of the British Crown in certain key areas of their tribal lives. 2) All Maori men were given the right to vote in New Zealand parliamentary elections from 1867. Some Maori men, those who owned property individually rather than tribally, had had that right since 1852. 3) Maori have had four seats reserved for them in the New Zealand Parliament since 1867. That number has been increased in recent years to seven reserved Maori seats; and the total number Maori in the New Zealand House of Representatives is currently twenty out of a total of 120 MPs. 4) All Maori women have had the vote in national elections since suffrage in New Zealand became universal in 1893. 5) Maori has been, since 1987, one of the country’s two official languages. The other, of course, is English. Making the reo official was partly a symbolic move to increase its status and hence its prospects of survival; but it also means that all governmental or official business can be conducted in Maori if people so wish for example correspondence with government departments, court proceedings, speaking in Parliament, answering examination questions, and so on. There is also now a publicly funded education system at pre-school, primary and secondary levels in which pupils can be taught in Maori; and three Maori universities. 6) Since a series of landmark Court of Appeal decisions in the late 1980s, the Treaty of Waitangi has had judicial force in relevant contexts; and a large number of recent government acts, from areas as diverse as education to conservation, have clauses which require the Crown and those acting for the Crown to give effect to the principles of the treaty. 7) In addition, the Waitangi Tribunal, established in 1975 and a decade later given retrospective powers back to 1840, adjudicates on Maori grievances with the Crown involving the loss of land, or economic and cultural resources. So far a large number of claims are stacked up waiting resolution. But two major ones involving most of the South Island and a large part of the central North Island have been settled, with allocations of money and assets involving around a quarter of a billion dollars in each case; and there has been a major settlement of Maori fisheries claims, although Maori themselves have yet to agree on how the fisheries assets should be divided up among coastal and inland tribes. 8) The two major land settlements that have been made, with the Tainui tribes in the North Island and the Ngai Tahu people of the South Island, have both involved apologies from the Crown for actions in which agents of the Crown breached the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi, or violated other constitutional or ethical understandings. It may interest the present Government of Australia to know that, as a result of these apologies, the sky has not fallen in; nor have the apologies generated an outbreak of anarchy or further unanticipated claims against the Crown. 9) The most important effect of all these recent measures, those taken since the 1980s, has been, in the words of one urban Maori leader, Ranginui Walker of Whakatohea, to turn the negative experience of being Maori into a powerfully positive one. These measures have also laid the foundation for what everybody is agreed has been a renaissance of Maori culture or, in Maori terms, a restoration and expansion of mana Maori. Let me now put some of these events and measures into wider historical context. While some of them are, no doubt, to the credit of the people who conceived and achieved them, they are all to some extend the product of a set of conditions and circumstances which apply in New Zealand and may not apply elsewhere in Australia, for example. One of those circumstances is that while Maori culture and society are essentially tribal in character, the language and the protocols and customs of the culture are known and comprehensible to Maori from one end of the country to the other. Hence there has always been the possibility and, at various specific times, the reality, of Maori being able to take initiatives on a national and pan-tribal basis. Secondly, the highly martial, competitive and adaptable nature of traditional Maori society has meant that Maori were always treated with a degree of respect by Europeans, from the time of the first encounters between the two peoples in the eighteenth century. Remember that the first European expedition to sight New Zealand, that of Abel Tasman in 1642, failed to set foot on the country. One has to have serious doubts about Tasman’s leadership and navigational skills. First he headed for the mainland of Australia from Mauritius and missed it completely, brushing only the southern coast of the island that was eventually named after him. Then, when he secured his two vessels in what is now Golden Bay in the north-east of the South Island, Maori canoes rode out to the anchorage and their crew blew pukaea or war trumpets at the intruders. Tasman, wanting to reciprocate in a friendly manner, ordered his own trumpeters to reply. In Maori eyes a challenge to battle had been accepted. Consequently when the Dutchmen lowered a boat it was set upon by Maori and four of its crew members killed. One was taken ashore and probably eaten in a ritual act of contempt for the invaders, which led historian James Belich to announce that the first of many European imports consumed in New Zealand was a dead Dutchman. James Cook followed nearly 130 years later, on the same voyage that resulted in the European discovery of the east coast of Australia. He quickly recognised the Maori strategy of challenging strangers so as to encourage themselves, discourage an adversary, and make their own survival more likely. He commented after watching such behaviour over a fortnight: We now begin to understand these people and are much less afraid of them. This martial prowess, and the recorded deaths of four of Tasman’s crew, ten of Cook’s on his second voyage (they were cooked and eaten), and 26 Frenchmen led by Marion du Fresne, had an enormously important consequence for the unfolding of colonial history in the south-west Pacific. They precipitated the British Government’s decision to establish the new penal colony in 1788 in New South Wales rather than in New Zealand. And the primary reason for this decision was that Australian Aboriginal people were assumed to be less martial than Maori, less socially organised, and therefore easier to control in the operation of an entirely new colonial enterprise carried out far from the home base of Britain. The existence of the convict settlements at Port Jackson, and later at Norfolk Island and Hobart, did have profound effects on Maori, and on development of the embryonic nation of New Zealand, however. They protected Maori from direct colonisation at a time when the agents of colonisation would not have been especially enlightened or humane. And as bases for sealing, whaling, and timber and flax gathering operations, these Australian colonies gave Maori a period of fifty years in which to become accustomed to the peripheral presence of Europeans in their lives and to adjust to that presence on their own terms. They also gave Maori an arena in which they could watch the operation of a European colonial enterprise as spectators and not participants. And many Maori chiefs and commoners were accommodated, sometimes as guests of honour, in the houses of Samuel Marsden and successive governors of New South Wales. Indeed, these men believed that by offering hospitality to Maori, they would succeed in making Europeans more welcome in New Zealand for missionary and trading activity. It was likewise a fortuitous but fortunate conjunction of circumstances that led to the British Government making its formal decision to colonise New Zealand in the late 1830s. For by that time the officials of the Colonial Office who drew up the instructions for the annexation of New Zealand were members of the evangelical movement within the Anglican Church, the same movement and the same people that had brought an end to slavery within the British Empire. Lord Normanby, Secretary of State for the Colonies, insisted that Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson (Hobson was, initially, lieutenant to the Governor of New South Wales) was to negotiate a willing transfer of sovereignty from Maori to the Crown, and to protect Maori interests in the colonising activities that would follow annexation. At one level, given what was known and understood about Maori martial prowess, these measures practical and prudent. But at the same time they were also an outgrowth of the most benevolent instincts of British humanitarianism. And the treaty which was spawned by these instructions, although amateurishly drafted and full of knots complex enough to employ generations of future lawyers, was nonetheless clearly the product of genuinely good intentions. It is the existence of the Treaty of Waitangi, and the ability of Maori to clearly establish breeches of its letter or spirit, that gives them a lever to wrest from the Crown concessions, apologies, and the return of land, cash and other resources in compensation for those breeches. If I were to summarise why, in my view, the Maori of New Zealand are in a strong position in comparison with other colonised indigenous people, I would highlight the following factors: 1) The nature and resilience of Maori culture highly assertive, competitive and able to incorporate elements from other cultures in ways which strengthen rather than weaken their own values and protocols. 2) The fact that Maori are a significant proportion of the total New Zealand population (over fifteen percent and growing at a faster rate than non- Maori). 3) Fortuitous constitutional arrangements, especially the Treaty of Waitangi and the Waitangi Tribunal. 4) The goodwill of most Pakeha New Zealanders, who want to do the right thing by Maori, to see them equitably and equably incorporated as part of modern New Zealand society; and the forebearance of most Maori in the face of periodic misunderstanding and discrimination. It’s not up to me to suggest what, if any, of these elements are relevant or applicable to conditions in Australia. I simply lay the New Zealand experience before you. Thank you for your attention, and for your patience.
Posted on: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 20:09:11 +0000
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