History can be a fascinatingly messy business. Exploring the past isn’t simply a matter of joining the dots and filling in the blanks to produce a neatly manicured narrative. As Erik Olssen shows in his engrossing new book, there are few black and whites, especially when dealing with a colonial past.
Olssen, a social historian and former head of Otago University’s department of history, defines his book – the first in a planned trilogy – as a “marriage of social and intellectual-cultural history”. It’s a detailed examination of the particular European conceptual and political belief systems at that moment in our shared history. It doesn’t hero-worship or demonise. Neither, Olssen writes, serves an understanding of New Zealand’s past or its significance for the present.
James Cook’s first landfall in Aotearoa in 1769 serves as a prologue, as Olssen creates an epic canvas inhabited by an occasionally bewilderingly diverse cast of characters. This is not a book to dip into lightly, as it takes you down unfamiliar roads, but its lucidity constantly engages and informs.
If Act leader David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill contained one redeeming feature it was that it focused New Zealand’s attention sharply on the past, present and future of the relationship between Māori and Pākehā. Olssen, in presenting his perspectives on how this association first emerged during the decades from 1769 to 1860, adds his voice to a continuing informed conversation.
The book, which took 25 years to write, has a continuous vein of reason and reasonableness running through it. Olssen prefers to recognise and represent rather than condemn and judge. “My purpose has been to attempt to understand people who lived in a world which, while continuous with mine, was very different. This book, in short, is about Tangata Pākehā, people of European stock changed by their encounters with Tangata Māori and their land, just as they, too, are changed.”
The reason behind the first steps towards partnership was entirely pragmatic. The first Europeans in Aotearoa depended on Māori to survive in an alien environment. Māori settlement patterns determined where the Pākehā newcomers settled.
In turn, a number of Māori leaders saw the European concepts of law, justice and Christianity as a way of ending the bloody cycle of civil wars fuelled by utu (revenge). Māori also embraced a world opened up by the whalers, missionaries and merchants. They joined the crews of whalers and commercial vessels sailing to and from Sydney, where they established a small community. Māori leaders dined with governors of New South Wales, while others became successful commercial entrepreneurs and traders.
Olssen also sees other forces at play. Cook, Joseph Banks and many of the individuals who followed in the Endeavour’s wake were profoundly influenced by Europe’s 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason, tolerance, scientific inquiry and individual liberty. Diderot, Rousseau and Hume were fundamental figures in the shaping of New Zealand. Mix this with the French and Scottish Enlightenment and you have potent ingredients for the emergence of a new society.
“The history of New Zealand,” Olssen writes, “became entangled with the ferment of ideas generated by the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, both of which stressed the ability of humans to use reason to manage the world and improve themselves and their society.”
Two other factors moulded early New Zealand attitudes. The first was the evangelical Christianity that underpinned the work of the Church Missionary Society and the Wesleyan Missionary Society during the first half of the 19th century. The second was a humanitarian commitment by the individuals behind the rising tide of European settlers, the majority of whom came from the British Isles determined to create a “better Britain”, with the vision of building a new society that would embrace, involve and elevate the indigenous people. Naturally, these values were accompanied by a commitment to expanding European wealth and dominance in the world.
The picture was not entirely benign. The whalers, sealers and loggers probably never read Rousseau or Hume, nor were particularly inspired by the spirit of the Enlightenment. There were episodes of rapaciousness, exploitation and confrontation. There were misunderstandings and intolerance. But Olssen also points to the essential humanitarianism hardwired into the new nation’s identity.
“European historians have portrayed indigenous peoples as passive recipients or victims of colonisation. But some who had lived in New Zealand recognised the central importance of Māori agency, arguing that the Māori had controlled the terms of the encounter throughout the period addressed in this volume and beyond.”
Whether New Zealand has reached its “eureka” moment in its experimentation is debatable, but as Olssen shows in his complex but absorbing history, the first early, unsteady steps had been taken by an infant society.
The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand 1769-1860 by Erik Olssen (Auckland University Press, $65 hb)
