WITH LITTLE PREJUDICE

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34119, 3 April 1976, Page 10

WITH LITTLE PREJUDICE

Mahoe Leaves. By Thomas Moser. First published, Wellington, 1863. Capper Press. Reprint. 104 pp. N.Z. price $5.50. (Reviewed by Ashley Spice) Journalists are often regarded as a lesser breed than historians, and the pieces they write for a newspaper as inferior to historical works. But these light-hearted pieces first written for a Wellington newspaper in the early 1860 s give a much more vivid impression of the condition of the Maori people, and of the nature of their relations with the pakehas around 1860 than a more considered historical work. The characters who appear in the sketches are fictitious, but the author’s claim that they are true to life is so far correct that some traits of Maori character which have persisted to the

present day can be seen in Moser's characters. A condescending, patronising tone sometimes creeps into Moser’s writing, and this may grate in modern times. But Moser clearly did better than most early pakeha New Zealanders in divesting himself of unfavourable, hostile preconceptions about the Maori. The prejudices revealed in the book’s pages are for the most part prejudices that Moser's experience probably justified. Besides, if Moser is critical of the Maoris at times and mocks some of their ways, he is more bitingly critical and scornful of the ways of some of the colonists, and some of the missionaries with whom the Maoris had contact. Perhaps a little comparatively harmless prejudice can be forgiven when it comes packaged with such gems as Moser’s description of the feast at which rice was stirred up with sugar in a canoe using a spade as a spoon, of Parnapa mending his shoes or shuffling his papers or (best of all) of Jeremiah holding court to hear a charge of adultery. The confusions of the case are the high point of the book.