Michael O’Leary

Parekura Horomia – ‘Kia Ora Chief’, by Wira Gardiner (Huia Publishers, 2014), 448 pp., $45

If there was ever an Apt Phrase Award about its subject in the title of a book, then this biography of Parekura Horomia, with its ringing ‘Kia ora, Chief’, would have to be in the running for top prize. However, I would also add that there is an equally appropriate catchphrase provided by ‘the Chief’ himself, in the way he readily greeted people with ‘Kia ora, everybody!’ For Horomia may have been the Chief, but he also stood with the ordinary people from whom he came. In the book, Gardiner invokes Māori politician Hekia Parata, when she worked for the ‘Chief’: ‘She remembered that he would give the same speeches over and over again, and they seemed to be well received every time – even on the third and fourth hearings, not unlike the time-honoured Monty Python skit: ‘Who’d a-thought 30 years ago …!’ [Read more…]

Nicholas Reid
Ko Te Whenua Te Utu: Land Is the Price by M.P.K. Sorrenson (Auckland University Press, 2014) 344 pp., $49.99; Beyond the Imperial Frontier: The contest for colonial New Zealand by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2014) 280 pp., $49.99

Professor Emeritus M.P.K. Sorrenson is one of the people most qualified to write ‘Essays on Maori history, land and politics’, as his collection Ko Te Whenua Te Utu is subtititled. For over 30 years a leading light in the University of Auckland’s history department, he was also for 25 years a member of the Waitangi Tribunal, weighing submissions and contributing to those voluminous reports which, in his Epilogue, he calls New Zealand’s ‘largest exercise in public history ever undertaken’ (p. 299). Considering the matter of whether Pākehā can ever validly write Māori history, Sorrenson concedes in his introduction that ‘the most outstanding Maori history written in recent years’ was written by a Pākehā, Judith Binney. Nevertheless, being himself of mixed Māori and Pākehā descent, Sorrenson also claims to have a ‘personal motive’ in his long scholarly engagement with Māori politics and land ownership, ‘since I had been nurtured on stories of the alienation of the last remnants of my mother’s Maori land’.

Ko Te Whenua Te Utu comprises 13 essays, public lectures and commissioned reports, which Sorrenson has written over more than half a century, between 1956 and 2011. The earliest, from 1956, is ‘Land Purchase Methods and their Effect on Maori Population, 1865–1901’. It is modified section of Sorrenson’s MA thesis, and argues that the loss of land and disruption of the social cohesion of tribes were major causes of the decline in Māori population in the late nineteenth century. The most recent, from 2011, is ‘Folkland to Bookland’, examining the career of the nineteenth-century bureaucrat F.D. Fenton (first chief judge of the Native Land Court), who likened the loss of Māori customary tenure of land, and its transference into personalised title, to the loss of the ‘commons’ in Tudor England. [Read more…]