Moon story

Tu Tangata, Issue 26, 1 October 1985, Page 31

Moon story

Prof. Titonui Series

Do you remember being taught in school how the first man to find New Zealand was Abel Tasman (despite the fact that the place was already swarming with people)? Or how the first person to climb Tongariro or discover Lake Taupo was such-and-such, a Pakeha, even if he needed Maori guides to show him?

These days children learn a more accurate version of Aotearoa's history. But those old attitudes still exist in some quarters, and never was there a more blatant example than when the Americans landed on the moon.

When Neil Armstrong took his giant step for mankind in 1969 the world went wild. “The first man on the moon!” screamed the headlines, and the Americans felt mighty pleased with themselves. But what Armstrong didn't know then, and what has never been officially admitted since, is that the Americans were not the first. In fact the first man on the moon was you guessed it a Maori.

This may seem an extravagant claim to make, but it's obvious really and as we so often find, the evidence of both Maori oral tradition and modern scientific discoveries work together to prove the point.

For example, we all know that the US moon expedition was more than simply an adventure. It was undertaken as a quest for knowledge: those astronauts travelled a quarter of a million miles up into space and brought back quantities

of moon rock for scientific analysis. Sound familiar? It should, for didn't Tane do exactly the same thing in our own myth?

Some of us, having heard the story from our grandparents, may have thought it was just that a story, a magnificent myth but a myth nonetheless. But the objectives of the Appollo space programme just emphasise the essential truth of the story of Tane’s epic journey to the heavens in search of the whatukura. Not only that, but his battle with Whiro even shows that Reagan's “star wars” ideas are hardly original either. Which just goes to prove the old whakatauki pakeha

“There’s nothing new under the sun" (or in this case, on the moon).

And what did the first American astronauts discover when they landed on the moon? They were able to confirm that the surface consists of rocks and ash-like soil and is covered with huge holes like craters. These phenomena have been explained away in a number of ingenious theories signs of ancient volcanic activity, the impact of meterites over the millenia, and so on.

But any Maori can tell you that ash, rocks and holes in the ground can mean only one thing hangi pits. The whole surface of the moon bears witness to what must once have been a flourishing Maori population. Some of those craters are huge, suggesting that hakari were prepared for thousands of moon-dwelling Maoris at a time.

Of course, at this stage of our knowledge a lot of questions remain unanswered: there are no bones; there is no air to breathe; no water to drink and apparently no signs of life. Why this should be we can only guess for the moment. Perhaps the Maori population on the moon was so large that they breathed all the air and drank all the water and then died of some lunar disease which caused their bones to crumble away leaving no trace for future astronauts to find. Perhaps, like Captain Kirk and his crew, they felt the urge to “boldly go where no man has been before” and forsook the moon in search of new planets to conquer and colonise. Mars, the red planet, would have held an obvious fascination for them perhaps we may one day meet up with our distant cousins on Mars. Who knows?

So I urge the scientists of the western world to stop congratulating themselves on being the first, and to stop looking for clever theories when the most obvious answers to their questions are right under their noses.

But this kind of argument tends to land me in trouble, so I’d better conclude this article and go. Beam me up, Rona!