Twelve Questions: Dave Veart

Dave Veart was won over to archaeology after reading about it when he was sick as a child. Photo / Nick Reed

Auckland archaeologist and heritage expert Dave Veart tells the history of New Zealand through food and toys in his books First Catch Your Weka and Hello Girls and Boys!

1. Does New Zealand have much history to dig up?
New Zealanders are often surprised by the fact that we have a history. Peter Wells describes us as an 'ahistorical society'. We exist in a sort of bubble of the present. It's always intrigued me that we don't encourage interest in our history. What's unique about New Zealand is that it's the last major piece of land on the planet to be settled by humans. We're at the end of a huge millennial experiment of colonising the planet and you can still clearly see what happened from the arrival of the first Maori and then with large scale European settlement.

2. What's the most interesting dig you've seen?
There was an excavation in Devonport when they were building a carpark for the new naval museum. It was a tiny site that contained the whole sequence of human settlement in New Zealand. The first layer of hangi had clay pipe stems from people sitting around, post-European settlement, having a smoke and chucking their broken pipes into the fire. Under that were more hangi. Then there was a tsunami event, possibly the eruption of Rangitoto. Under that was another hangi where people were eating moa. It just goes to show, a great place to live is a great place to live whether it's 500 years ago or last week. Location, location, location.

3. If you had a time machine, where would you go?
Auckland in the 18th century. You've got what has been called a proto-city with the largest concentration of Maori in New Zealand at the time. You've got the great rangatira moving from pa to pa, like the medieval kings and their courts. The big gardens are all functioning and there's widespread settlement. I'd like to go back and hover above it at a safe distance and see those gardens in action, the waka on the beaches, the big pa sites and their defences.

4. When did you first become interested in archaeology?
When I was 10 I was very ill in bed for three months with nothing to do but read. When I ran out of books my father gave me Gods, Graves and Scholars: the Story of Archaeology. I'm amazed that I ploughed through it - it's pretty dry. But at the time I thought, 'Wow, that's what I want to do!' I was the first member of my family to actually go to university, I think, and in New Zealand in the 1960s archaeology wasn't a job that anyone had heard of, so I ended up doing law. I had one of the shortest legal careers in New Zealand. I managed 10 days. I really hated it.

5. How did you end up becoming an archaeologist?
I was teaching in the East End of London at this tough school for kids. I really enjoyed dealing with kids who were at the bottom end, trying to get them enthused. As a bit of light relief I volunteered on archaeological sites, sorting and drawing pottery and coins. I became really interested in the stories you could tell from objects. That's what my books do as well. Give me a pile of artefacts and let's see what story we can tell from them. So I came home, did an anthropology degree and worked in the Historic Places Trust archaeology unit doing lots of digs on sites being developed in the 1980s, mostly in South Auckland. I then did heritage management for the Department of Conservation for 25 years.

6. Has Auckland done a good job of looking after its heritage?
Yes it has. But we can always do better. A colleague once said Auckland has two things that set it apart - volcanic cones and villas. The problem is that Auckland is growing at an enormous rate. We've just got to look at other places that have managed to protect their heritage during rapid growth, like Istanbul, where heritage is one of its biggest tourist attractions. A lot of New Zealanders don't realise that we've actually got something that tourists are really interested in.

7. How would you describe your childhood?
Quite a wild one really. I've tried to capture that in my toy book. Growing up in the baby boom 1950s was much like New Zealand 100 years ago when children outnumbered adults by about 10 to 1 and were basically running wild. Tribes of kids armed with homemade shanghais would go around firing at birds, windows and churches. In 1936 the Evening Post reported that 7000 ceramic insulators had been smashed on telegraph poles around Wellington and there was a call to control the sale of elastic to children. They reined kids in by raising the school leaving age, appointing truancy officers and the rise of organised sport and boy scouts. When I was writing the toy book I sat down and made a shanghai using skills I hadn't used in 50 years. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

8. What can toys tell us about ourselves?
The fact the world's biggest Meccano club was in Auckland in 1927 tells us something about our society then. Meccano allowed mostly boys to act out the building of New Zealand infrastructure that was going on around them. They were winning world competitions. One boy made this incredibly complicated model of an industrial butter churn. You don't get more New Zealand than that. Everyone else is making tanks and typewriters but he makes a butter churn.

9. What happened to the New Zealand toy industry?
Our toy industry flourished after the government banned imports in World War II. They'd worked out that toys produced lots of jobs for returning soldiers for very little imported material. They handed over the old American army camp in Panmure to Tri-ang Pedigree who made dolls, toy trains and a huge range of toys. The whole industry collapsed when government protection was removed in the 1980s. A Lincoln toys manager said with the arrival of Rogernomics 'we just locked the door and sent the workforce home'.

10. What did your parents teach you?
A fascination with my fellow humans. I learned how to tell stories from my mother, who could make a trip to the dairy a bit like Homer's bloody Odyssey. I learned that someone who claims to be an authority over you has to earn it. That probably comes from the fact that both my parents were in the army in World War II and my grandfather fought in World War I. It has got me into trouble over the years - pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Sometimes you've just got to do that.

11. Are you a spiritual person?
I feel very much part of this enormous wave of humanity that's flooded across the earth over the last 100,000 years. Each of us sits on the tip of a breaking wave of the thousands of people who went before us and we generate our own little waves with our children.

12. Are you hopeful for our future?
Against all evidence I am eternally optimistic for humanity.

• Dave Veart talks about toys at Auckland Art Gallery on Sunday May 17 at 1.15pm as part of the Auckland Writers Festival.