A handbook from the dark origin story of colonialism
In November 1902, the travel agency Thomas Cook published a guide to what New Zealand offered, mainly to British tourists to the country. This remarkable volume, with the cumbersome title New Zealand as a Tourist and Health Resort. A Handbook to the Hot Lake District, the West Coast Road, the Southern Lakes, Mt. Cook, Sounds, Etc., provides an extremely rare insight into the nature of New Zealand at the start of the Edwardian era, and how this fledgling state wished to parade its attributes to overseas visitors.
The handbook pointed out that New Zealand’s cities and towns 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 Handbook as a prosperous, ambitious, and happy South Pacific state, made unique by its scenery and its romanticised indigenous population. And, in one of the Handbook’s many bursts of enthusiasm, New Zealand was labelled as the eighth wonder of the world. One aspect of New Zealand that was heavily emphasised in the Handbook, is the considerable attention devoted to the country’s "all-healing" and "medicinal" waters in lakes, rivers, and thermal springs — depicted as the "Sanatorium of Nature".
Yet, for all its praise for the present and future of the country, the Handbook inadvertently captured in vivid detail the tail end of a New Zealand that was fast disappearing. The upheavals of the preceding four decades, including wars, the confiscation of Māori land, and the ensuing widespread poverty and dispossession of the indigenous population were all carefully painted over with colourful hues emphasising the beauty and leisure opportunities that the country offered.
There were often violent confrontations with Māori in that period — confrontations that had left 2000 dead and millions of acres of Māori land appropriated by the Crown. At the time of the Handbook’s publication, New Zealand’s population was 863,364, of whom 43,143 — roughly 5 per cent — were Māori. All but 2232 of the Māori population lived in the North Island, and in some locations the number of Māori was negligible (Southland, for example, had only two Māori reportedly living in the region).
The annual number of immigrants to the country exceeded 30,000 by this time, with almost 80 per cent arriving from Australia and Britain. Of the country’s 820,221 non-Māori population, around a third were born overseas, with the trend of a growing domesticborn population continuing. Life expectancy was 54 years for males, and 57 years for females.
One view of Māori in this era was produced by the educationalist Henry Hill. It encapsulated so many of the popular (and condescending) attitudes prevalent in the country at this time. "There is something fascinating in the Maori race", he wrote in 1902. "As a people they win the sympathy of every lover of humankind. Brave, generous, thriftless, courteous, and unstable, such are their characteristics when left to themselves, but under the higher influences of civilisation they are progressive, intelligent, appreciative, and ambitious . . . I have little but praise to bestow upon this fading but noble race of people….The modern natives have acquired the habit of dressing in the fashions of the colonists, of eating similar food, and of living in similar houses. Many think that these are in themselves proofs of advancing civilisation."
But Hill also gloomily wrote how there was "hardly a more pitiful sight than the Maori woman, ambitionless, homeless though not houseless, indifferent to opinion, to responsibility, to home. To gossip, to smoke, and while away the time in frivolous conversation, are common wherever native pas are to be found. When not on the cultivation, which she tends from sheer necessity, she is usually to be found smoking her pipe on the 'village green,' indifferent to home, and apparently without the ambition to have her surroundings improved. She has no home such as the colonist deems a necessity."
There was every appearance at the time that Māori were on the cusp of disappearing, due to a combination of disease, dispossession, war, and indifference by the state to their welfare. From a population of perhaps 100,000 when Captain James Cook arrived in New Zealand in 1769, the number of Māori at the start of the Edwardian era had plummeted to about 40 per cent of that figure, with no significant sign that this descent could or would be arrested.
The belief that Māori were heading towards extinction was widespread, and firmly held — so much so that there was even a monument erected in Auckland to commemorate this imminent demise. Thus, in the Edwardian era, Māori were still being seen by some as a remnant of an earlier epoch in the country’s history, and one that was reaching terminal point.
A mildly abridged excerpt taken from the Introduction to Touring Edwardian New Zealand by Paul Moon (Bateman Books, $39.99), available in bookstores nationwide.
