NZ Post Book Awards

Although my book was not a winner on the night, I thought I should share a couple of images from the NZ Post Book Awards held this week. The judges noted that 62 books were entered in the general non-fiction category - more than any other - so it was very gratifying for The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642-1840 to be recognised in the top four. The judges commented in their general remarks that this was a 'fine and illuminating example' of history writing. In their detailed comments on my book they stated that:

The hopeless miscomprehension and miscommunication of initial encounters between Māori and Pākehā at times bordered on the darkest of tragi‐comedies, but it was inevitable – although not inevitably well recorded in our history books – that as time went on comprehension, communication and eventually mutual accommodation would come to pass. It was not simply a case of Maori bending to the will of Europeans, but of both finding what Vincent O’Malley calls a meeting place where cultural cross‐pollination took place – at least until the post‐Treaty period. O’Malley tells his story with great eloquence, marshalling multiple sources and navigating them with the sense of nuance we want in a historian. Unlike the other three general non‐fiction finalists, he did not have access to living figures to flesh out his book, but nonetheless does so with skilful use of period quotes. O’Malley himself indicates the value of such a book for the New Zealand of today when he writes at the end of the “potential for a new middle ground to flower in the years ahead”.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sexual Frontier - Contrasting Māori and European Attitudes towards Sex and Nudity in the Colonial Era

Image
In pre-contact Māori society young unmarried men and women had a high degree of sexual freedom. With the exception of a few high-born women who were ceremonially bethrothed, pre-marital sex was considered socially acceptable, though blatant promiscuity was frowned upon and a certain level of discretion expected.   Sex was considered a normal and healthy part of every day life, with no particular taboos around it. Copulating couples were depicted in carvings and bawdy stories and waiata concerning sexual exploits or the size of men’s penises were common. Te Puawai o Te Arawa, 1905, 1/1-003279-G, ATL That relative openness extended to same-sex relationships, of which there is ample evidence from waiata and other traditional sources. Tutanekai, for example, who famously swam to Mokoia to be with Hinemoa, was also known to have had an initimate male companion known as Tiki. (By contrast, in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy death was the mandatory penalty for anyon...
Read more

'I am an Irishman': Irish and Māori Historical Connections

Image
Just as exceptionalism has formed an enduring strand of American historiography, New Zealand history has its own variant of this. In New Zealand’s case, this rests largely on the notion that the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 between representatives of Queen Victoria and more than 500 Māori chiefs represented a unique experiment in benevolent and humanitarian imperialism. Allied to this is often the notion that subsequent relations between the indigenous Māori tribes and incoming settlers were, after a few early hiccups, vastly superior to other white settler dominions. For much of the twentieth century Pākehā New Zealanders liked to boast that their country had the ‘greatest race relations in the world’. It turns out Māori had a different story to tell concerning the history of their relations with the newcomers. In recent decades New Zealand historians have played their own part in deconstructing these myths. Most historians now acknowledge that the Treaty of Waitangi had much ...
Read more

A Stain Upon History: The Ngatapa Massacre, January 1869

Image
Imagine this: somewhere between 86 and 128 people, captured or surrendered at the end of a siege, are stripped naked, lined up against the side of a cliff, and summarily executed without trial by government forces. Couldn’t happen here, many people would probably say. But it did, and the story behind the worst massacre in New Zealand history deserves to be more widely known. In July 1868 Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki and nearly 300 other mostly East Coast Maori escaped from the Chatham Islands (Wharekauri) and made their way back to the mainland. This group, known as the Whakarau, had been held at Wharekauri since 1866. None of their number had been tried, and the government admitted that they were being held as ‘political offenders’ while arrangements were made to confiscate their lands back home. Judith Binney suggested that Te Kooti had been included among those illegally imprisoned at Wharekauri because he was regarded as a threat by rival traders back in Gisborne (Turanga). Te Koo...
Read more