Paul Moon
Paul Moon is the author of Touring Edwardian New Zealand, published in June 2022, and Professor of History at Auckland University of Technology. His research focuses mainly on nineteenth-century New Zealand and the philosophies of colonization.
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A Handbook of the Dark Origins of Colonialism
In November 1902, the Thomas Cook travel agency published a guide to what New Zealand had to offer, mainly to British tourists to the country. This remarkable part, with the cumbersome title NNew Zealand as a tourist and health resort. A Handbook for the Hot Lake District, the West Coast Road, the Southern Lakes, Mount Cook, Sounds, etc.provides an extremely rare insight into the nature of New Zealand at the dawn of the Edwardian era, and how this fledgling state wanted to parade its trappings to foreign visitors.
The handbook pointed out that New Zealand’s towns and villages were clean, new and charming, but it was in the hinterland where the ‘real’ New Zealand – wild, exotic and ‘Maori’ – existed, waiting to be discovered by the intrepid traveller. The country was depicted in the manual as a prosperous, ambitious and happy state in the South Pacific, made unique by its landscape and its romanticized indigenous people. And in one of the manualDue to the many bursts of enthusiasm, New Zealand was labeled the eighth wonder of the world. An aspect of New Zealand that was heavily emphasized in the manualis the great attention given to the country’s ‘algainizing’ and ‘healing’ waters in lakes, rivers and thermal springs – depicted as the ‘sanatorium of nature’.
But despite all the praise for the country’s present and future, manual unintentionally captured in vivid detail the tail of a New Zealand that was rapidly disappearing. The upheavals of the previous four decades, including wars, the confiscation of land from the Māori and the ensuing widespread poverty and dispossession of the indigenous peoples, were all carefully painted over in colorful hues that emphasized the beauty and leisure opportunities the land offered. .
There were frequent violent clashes with Māori during this period – clashes in which 2,000 had been killed and millions of hectares of Māori land had been appropriated by the Crown. At the time of the handbook’s publication, New Zealand’s population was 863,364, of whom 43,143 – about 5 percent – were Māori. All but 2232 people lived on the North Island, and in some locations the number of Māori was negligible (Southland, for example, reportedly had only two Māori in the region).
The annual number of immigrants to the country by then exceeded 30,000, with nearly 80 percent coming from Australia and Britain. Of the country’s 820,221 non-Māori population, about a third were born abroad, and the trend of a growing native population continues. Life expectancy was 54 years for men and 57 years for women.
A rendering of Māori in this era was produced by the educator Henry Hill. It encompassed so many of the popular (and patronizing) attitudes that were prevalent in the country at the time. “There is something fascinating about the Maori race,” he wrote in 1902. “As a people, they win the sympathy of every lover of mankind. Brave, generous, thrifty, courteous and unstable, these are their characteristics when they are turned to themselves. left, but under the higher influences of civilization they are progressive, intelligent, appreciative and ambitious… I have little to give credit to this fading but noble race of men… The modern natives have gotten into the habit of dressing in the fashion of the settlers, of eating similar foods, and of living in similar homes, which many think are in themselves evidence of advancing civilization.’
But Hill also wrote gloomily how there was “hardly a more pathetic face than the Maori woman, ambitious, homeless but not homeless, indifferent to opinion, to responsibility, to home. To gossip, smoke and pass the time in a frivolous conversation, occur everywhere native passersby can be found When not engaged in cultivation, which she tends out of sheer necessity, she can usually be found smoking her pipe on the ‘village green’, indifferent to the home, and apparently without the ambition to make her environment better. She has no home as the settler sees fit.”
It seemed that the Māori were on the brink of extinction as a result of a combination of disease, expropriation, war, and the state’s indifference to their well-being. From a population of perhaps 100,000 when Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand in 1769, the number of Māori by the early Edwardian era had plummeted to about 40 percent of that figure, with no significant signs that this descent could or would be arrested.
The belief that the Māori were in danger of extinction was widespread and firmly entrenched – so much so that a monument was even erected in Auckland to commemorate this impending doom. So in the Edwardian era, Māori were still seen by some as a relic of an earlier era in the country’s history, and an era that was reaching its end point.
A slightly abridged excerpt from the introduction to Traveling around Edwardian New Zealand by Paul Moon (Bateman Books, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide.