<&>Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English Version One <&>Copyright 1998 School of Linguistics & Applied Language Studies <&>Victoria University of Wellington <&>side one <&>1:07 well strangely enough this book began a LONG time ago in nineteen seventy odd when i was voc travelling around the country as haare williams was just saying in our blue v dub with amiria and eruera stirling going to visit various marae and i began by <,> being very fascinated and struck by the differences in different parts of the country ngati porou nga puhi tainui laughs each part of the country each er takiwa seemed to have its own very special character and its own special history that people were talking about on the marae <,> so i started to wonder about the traditional maori society that we were being taught about at university and at school at that time which looked pretty much the same <{1><[1>from one part of the country to the other and that's where the book started <,> er it turned into something else in the process <{2><[2>laughs <&>2:00 <[1>yeah <[2>so at that stage had you written the <,> the <.>biogr biographical stories about eruera stirling and amiria or was this was that during that that that learning mentorship period as it were that you spent er with the stirlings yes i i think the questions emerged <{><[>er as i was spending all that time with amiria and then later working with eruera on his book eruera had a very profound influence on me not just as a person <,> and as a mokai but also as a scholar because he had ideas about the uses of knowledge and what it was for in the world and the responsibilities of knowledge that i <,> i was deeply er moved by <,> he thought that knowledge was something to do work with in the world and it wasn't for yourself it was to make things better er for the people that you cared about and for your own country and so the project as it emerged in my time with them was a a project of trying to discover MORE about <&>3:00 the beginnings of our relationships on both sides er <[>mm i was gonna ask you about both sides because so far to me you're speaking about one side of the equation as it were you were wondering as you went to the different tribal districts why the differences and so on and wanted to <.>g get right back to those historical roots so was it <,> was it logical THEN that the other side the the european side of things should should come into your thinking at that particular time what was THEIR their real history like one of the great things about eruera is that voc he always used to remember his whakapapa and his stories on both sides and he used to know poems from scotland and he knew all about his scottish background he was very interested in it too he he didn't see whakapapa as something that just applied on one side of his ancestry he was VERY interested in both and so as my questioning about te ao <&>4:00 tawhito began and i went back to those early accounts because i thought i might find out something about the difference different qualities of life <.>in in aotearoa at that time i suddenly realised that what i was doing was in fact excluding the other side of the equation which were the european observers themselves and as i got to know them a bit better i realised that in fact in many ways they were strangers to me and that because they were my own ancestors i was quite keen on knowing more about them at this stage were you becoming aware of the enormity of the of the project which you were undertaking er it was lucky i didn't begin to be laughs aware of that early on because otherwise i think i would have been very intimidated er no it just grew mm it grew in the way it did partly when i started working with eruera on his own er book because that was a teaching for the kaumatua and i began <&>pronounced as bekan began to think much more deeply about the relationships between maori knowledge matauranga wananga and <&>5:00 european academic knowledge and it was out of the midst of THAT wondering about that relationship i think that the book eventually took its shape er but that took a while so <,> during what period then anne did you actually pinpoint that i will look at via the european voyages and <{><[>i will do a er a comparison with with the the times of those different voyages compared with the times that the maori people were here what were they thinking and doing <.>whe <.>w when did you set those sort of parameters as it were <[>mm it was probably when i er dreamed up the title <,> and i can't even remember <.>w when that <.>n notion of two worlds popped into my mind it actually comes really from the ideas of te ao pakeha te ao maori er and the way people talk in maori about about these worlds these ao um and it was when i actually voc came up with that title and started working the logic of it through i decided i would try and find everything i knew <.>tha or thought i knew or thought i was <&>6:00 discovering about the maori world at that time i would try and find out parallel information about the europeans so that in future when people look back at the past in this country and they make <.>ev evaluations about the relationship between the maori world and the european world at that time they do it on the basis of good information at the moment i don't think they do that i was gonna to say do you think at this stage perhaps that there are shortcomings er interpreting what actually happened at those different times in those different eras yes i do because <,> you would probably i think agree with this that er in this country up until very recently we really had two historical traditions living side by side we've had the wananga tradition and tribal history korero tuku iho and on the other hand we've had european scholarly history and often that hasn't had much to do with the the korero tuku iho it started to in more recent years and so what i was um <,> thinking about was that if we were <&>7:00 going to look at the interactions between us because as on the <.>m on a marae all the interesting things happen in the middle that's where all the excitement is that's where the action is that's where things are shaped that's where the future is emerging it's the place the pae you know where er everything that's important is going on i think it's the same in <.>the in the history of this country and if we keep our historical traditions totally separate and no you know the scholarship NEVER tries to figure out what's happening in the middle ground then i think we're the poorer for it i would have thought that a lot of the written material which came out those early european voyages of de surville and marion du fresne and <.>c and cook and er and the others that that that written material would have been fairly fully researched by now did did did you and your researchers in fact find other information that hadn't come to light the cook material was really exhaustively gone through by er beaglehole who was a very great <&>8:00 scholar er the french material has been worked on yes and john dunmore's done a very fine job with that material but we found that we needed to go and have a look at all the journals to discover them in some cases to translate them so because they hadn't been accurately translated and <.>my my ambition with the european material was to find every surviving document every single one whether it's a map a chart a journal a letter a log wherever they were in the world that's what made the project pretty big <{><[>at least on that side well i think we er no doubt there are still things hidden away but we had a very good scratch around and we we did find stuff that hadn't been worked on before and but the thing that's fascinating is that once you start bringing the the korero tuku iho side in the whole story changes <,> you have a whole new set of questions to ask of the material on the european side too and actually the story becomes a lot more exciting i think <&>9:00 <[>did you succeed but why why hadn't those areas been picked up before by by your historical um predecessors as it were i think maybe people had felt er intimidated in in approaching tribal history in any kind of way at all even those areas which are quite openly accessible that are in documents that er are voc debated in the maori newspapers a lot of people can't read <.>th those documents of course and that's a problem er and maybe <,> in many cases people didn't think it was reliable information or they didn't think it was particularly important that's where i would differ from them well on on one side then you were doing this <.>e extensive research in world archives <{><[>looking at the documentation the maps and so on of the european explorers now what about in the other world how were you how were you ferreting out this material from te ao maori <[>mm well there were a number of um <.>th the the ironical thing about all this is that it turns out that it's much easier to find the material in europe because of all the scholarship that's <&>10:00 been even though it's on the other side of the world it's easier for a scholar here to actually track it down than it is sometimes to find material in maori that's sitting in archives just in your own backyard cos often it hasn't been catalogued or indexed because it's only very recently we've had maori speaking archivists who can actually understand what's in there and put it on an index card so sometimes you trip over things by sheer accident <,> um there's amazing amount of material in maori sitting in the libraries of this country <,> and a lot of it has never been looked at it's a tragedy anne i think so voc because <.>w when you start reading some of that material in maori it is beautiful and it has revelations <.>i in it you know about the past so what sort of things were you coming out with what <.>s what sort of things were you finding that hadn't brought brought into the world of light before well i suppose the most conspicuous example is the one that turned up last which is the one er that i managed to slip into the book <&>11:00 right at the last second which was mohi turei's um <,> korero about waka pakepakeha er and an arrival obviously off off the east coast of a strange large vessel that was being er rowed or he just uses the word hoe so you can't quite tell what he meant er by these pale skinned misty looking albino like er people and that one it turned out i tracked it back to um pipi wharauroa the voc maori newspaper that was published in gisborne and they were actually arguing over the origins of the meaning you know of the words maori and pakeha and elders from all over the country were writing in having A DING DONG debate fantastic stuff and there was mohi turei who at that stage was about eighty er VERY distinguished as we all know a great authority er he'd been the scribe for pita pawhiti from a taperenui whare wananga on the coast and he <&>12:00 was a voc source of great um information on tribal history pai tia horou tatahi tina so he he was virtually saying then that <,> there could have been another perhaps this european voyager who predated captain cook for instance and tasman and <.>the and the other accepted european er er voyagers well that's the inference you can <{><[>take from his account what he was <.>w the way it came up in this debate was people were arguing about the origins of the term pakeha and a guy from tuhoe wrote in and he gave a certain account and someone from tokomaru bay wrote in and absolutely rubbished it called it paki waitara and all sorts of things <&>12:37 <[>mm