It's history, but not as we know it

Judith Binney has devoted her life to unravelling New Zealand's history and helping people to understand our stories. Picture / Greg Bowker

She describes it as "probably the hardest journey on earth - to know another people". Historian Judith Binney is talking about the missionary Thomas Kendall's struggle when he came to New Zealand in 1814. But the description, reframed in her re-issued biography of Kendall as "an effort 'to cross the beach' and enter the imagination and knowledge systems of a people who he had come to know and respect", could also be applied to her.

In the front room of her Mt Eden home, encircled by a clamour of contemporary and historical artwork and photographs, Binney says she is still somewhere in the middle of the beach. "It's a journey I began and, I would say, will never finish."

Recovering from a hip-replacement operation a week earlier, a consequence of chemotherapy for cancer diagnosed in December 2003, Binney is eager to get back to her path.

"I'm feeling fine and I'm walking and I throw away the crutches on July 12 and I really believe that's going to happen."

But the illness has taken its toll, delaying her giving evidence to the Waitangi Tribunal last year regarding Urewera land claims and forcing her a month ago to resign her position as a tribunal judge.

For Binney, Kendall's struggle is about coming ashore on strange land and discovering people are there and an unknown and dangerous terrain is in between. "It is negotiating that terrain and crossing it successfully and entering the world of people who actually live there."

Binney's negotiation began in earnest in 1963-64 with her MA thesis on Kendall. In hindsight, she says a recurring theme of her work is individuals at odds with their society or their times - "quite a few have been of that kind of tension".

But she was also deeply influenced by the late Sir Keith Sinclair, who taught her history at Auckland University beginning in 1959.

"Keith made me think the most important thing in New Zealand history at that time was to explore Maori and Pakeha relations, which no one was writing about much."

Sinclair's poem, Memorial to a Missionary gave the title for her book, Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall. "Father he left us a legacy of guilt ... We know St Paul, but what in that dreaming hour, In that night when the ends of time were tied - and severed, Again so ever - did he learn from the south?"

In Kendall's case, the guilt comes from getting too close to the people he sought to convert - having an affair with his servant girl Tungaroa and trading guns for the friendship of Hongi Hika and other Maori chiefs.