South Island Maori achievements

Press, 5 December 1981, Page 16

South Island Maori achievements

The Tattooed Land. The Southern Frontiers of the Pa Maori. By Barry Brailsford. Reed, 1981. 262 pp. $39.45.

(Reviewed by

John Wilson)

A personal note seems the appropriate way to begin a review of this handsome and compendious volume. Some years ago I made my first visit to Taranaki and spent many days visiting the sites of old Maori pas, fascinated and excited to find such remarkable and obvious evidence, on the face of the land itself, of man's prehistoric occupation of New Zealand — terraces, storage pits, and the ditches and ramparts of defensive works. This book comes as a gentle rebuke to South Islanders like myself who believed it was only in the north that extensive and obvious prehistoric earthworks were to be seen. While the South Island was never as densely populated as the North by the Maori of the classical period — the author prefers to use the term “Pa Maori” for the period — this island was securely taken possession of and bears the imprint still of the labours of the pre-European Maori. The number and range of earthworks of different sorts on South Island sites which are described in “The Tattooed Land” may well astonish many readers; if the volume were no more than a descriptive catalogue of those sites, and of what is still apparent on them, it would be a useful corrective to the more usual impression many people have of the Maori occupation of the South Island. The different modifications to the land surface which are described in the book include house terraces, defensive works, kumara gardens, and canals to facilitate the taking of ducks and eels. Much of the evidence in the book is drawn from surveys and more detailed archaeological investigations of the sites of these many earthworks, much of the work of survey and investigation having been done in the course of the southern earthworks project of the Christchurch

Teachers' College which was begun in 1972 and has come to handsome flower in this book.

But the author has gone beyond the work of the survey to draw information for this book from two other sources — the traditional Maori accounts of the South Island’s pre-European history, and the reports and observations of early European visitors to the South Island. The book is much more complete and authoritative for standing on these three different “legs.” The volume is, in effect, two books interleaved. One is the descriptive catalogue — a “gazetteer” — of the important South Island earthwork sites. The other is a more conventional book which describes life on the South Island in pre-European times and also provides a narrative account of the arrivals and fortunes of different tribes or groups in the South Island, including the rivalries and conflicts to which successive arrivals gave rise. The books are interleaved to the great advantage of each. Knowledge derived from locating, surveying and in some cases excavating the earthwork sites, summarised in the sections accompanying the accomplished maps and sketches for each sitei has enabled the author to present a descriptive and narrative account which is fuller and more accurate than any account based solely on Maori tradition, or information derived from the writings of early European visitors, could ever have been. At the same time, the maps and descriptions of the sites themselves become more intelligible if they are studied and read in the context of more general material about how the Maori lived on the South Island and, at least in the case of sites at which important events occurred, about how Maori history unravelled in pre-European times. Although interleaved, and to some extent parallel texts held within the same binding, the two separate “books” are cleverly distinguished through a simple

device. The pages which make up the “gazetteer” of earthwork sites have margins of an appealing and appropriate ochre colour. The author has been wellserved by the designer of the book. There are, however, occasional inexplicable lapses from this practice, notably as the text moves further south. Pages which should have been given coloured margins have not been. But indeed, the author himself seems more hesitant in the southern regions and the suspicion must be strong that he is less familiar with the sites there and perhaps with the traditions of the areas as well. The book works through the reader accumulating impressions from both the narrative material and the descriptions of the sites which give the reader, finally, a vivid, full and accurate picture of Maori life on the South Island in the period, roughly, 1600 to 1840. The life was clearly harsh, eked out in circumstances of, sometimes, shortages of food, of debilitating effort, and of disease. It was a life marked also, though, by considerable achievements, not least the growing of kumara in places not hospitable to the crop. The gardening skills of the Maori were nothing short of extraordinary and the descriptions of some of the gardens which can still be identified must arouse respect. So must tiie digging of canals in the Wairau Lagoons near Blenheim to facilitate the taking of flapper ducks and eels. The greenstone and argillite technologies, too, were sophsticated and advanced for stone-age man. But just as he has sometimes been hesitant to impose the narrative order his material cries out for, so the author has been sometimes over-cautious about drawing conclusions from or summarising concisely the wealth of information he has assembled. His fear was, perhaps, professional scorn or rebuke from archaeologists, for he is an historian first and amateur archaeologist second, and archaeology has always been a more rigorously scientific pursuit than history. But the book, in balance, gains rather than loses from its author being an amateur, if experienced, rather than professional archaeologist. This is not the book a professional archaeologist would — or could — have written. The" information it contains is more accessible to the general reading public than it would have been had it been presented within the restraints of the scientific discipline of archaeology. This accessibility is enhanced by the generous use of illustrations — maps, modern photographs and line drawings, and sketches and paintings from the early years of European contact, both colour and black and white. "The Tattooed Land” is emphatically a book which those with any pretension to an interest in the South Island’s past must have on their shelves, however daunting its price. It requires and rewards careful study, rather than a single reading, and will need to be on hand whenever particular areas are to be visited. It invites exploration of sites (a pursuit I had erroneously believed possible only in the North, Island) and also inculcates the respect — even reverence in some cases — with which the sites should be approached and trodden on.