The end of the middle ground

 

Historian Vincent O’Malley’s latest book The Meeting Place considers how Māori and Pākehā got along, and learned from one another, in the period before 1840.

There were, he argues, many forms of “mutual accommodation, as both Māori and Pākehā sought to interact with one another in ways which did not require fundamental sacrifices as the price of participation.”

But the nature of cultural exchange on that “middle ground” would change dramatically after the signing of the Treaty, as he explains in this extract.

 

In the north of New Zealand at least, 1814 marked the point at which something approximating a fully functioning middle ground had emerged.

The trigger for this development was the arrival of a permanent missionary population, which encouraged a resumption of shipping visits to the region some five years after the Boyd affair had all but put an end to such contacts.

Māori had become more able to retaliate against European transgressions but at the same time had been served a painful reminder of the consequences of such direct action. Access to the Pākehā tools and technology they craved could not be forced but would only be obtained through sustaining peaceful relations with the newcomers.

And at the same time, Europeans, newly acquainted with the ability of Māori communities to seek utu for their own depredations, became more willing to negotiate for access to the goods and services they sought themselves.

Both peoples had learnt something of one another — what made them tick, what was likely to cause offence, and what might please.

All this took time, of course, and each had been on a steep learning curve since 1769. But by 1814, the basic lessons had been learned, and the circumstances proved favourable to the emergence of new forms of accommodation.

It was not that those lessons were forgotten after 1840 so much as these coming to be viewed as increasingly irrelevant to many Pākehā living in the new colony.

The advent of the British government changed everything and nothing. It changed nothing in the sense that autonomous Māori communities continued much as they always had. It changed everything because the arrival of a new player complicated existing relations between Māori and Pākehā, interposing itself between the parties.

That could be seen, for example, in the way in which previously fluid and flexible land deals came to be given finality through the mediation and intervention of the Crown.

More significantly, the survival of a middle ground had always been predicated on a kind of rough-and-ready balance of power between the parties. But with the British government came organised settlement — systematic colonisation — and huge increases in migrant numbers that in time would render Māori a small minority in their own land.

As newly powerful Pākehā started to throw their weight around, the middle ground turned to dust. Suddenly, British sovereignty began to mean something — it meant the ability to impose compliance with British laws, customs and culture.

Māori who had invested great hopes in a future society built on mutual accommodation and new ways of interacting that drew upon both cultures found themselves up the creek and without a paddle — at least until the tide started to turn ever so slightly from the late 20th century.

Demographics, more than anything, decided the ultimate fate of the middle ground. White women — once so rarely seen in New Zealand as to cause something of a sensation among Māori communities who encountered them for the first time — had by 1840 become a common sight in some parts of the country.

At the Bay of Islands, they constituted around one-tenth of the adult European population, and with the numbers steadily increasing there and elsewhere, the time when Pākehā men routinely married into tribes as a form of alliance and protection was coming to an end.

In some areas, Māori communities were soon inundated by the tide of incoming settlers. But in many other areas, and especially in the central regions of the North Island, Māori remained dominant for some time to come.

And meanwhile, even in those places where largely autonomous Pākehā townships had started to emerge, the phase of reliance upon Māori did not altogether end quickly.

Indeed, in some respects it intensified, and throughout the 1840s and into the 1850s many settlers were to a large extent reliant upon Māori-grown produce for their sustenance, besides Māori labour to construct their homes, roads, bridges and schools, and Māori defence from potentially hostile rival iwi. This kind of need for Māori assistance endured even in New Zealand Company settlements plagued with conflicts over land.

It was only as Pākehā communities became more self-reliant over time, and less dependent upon Māori for assistance in a myriad of ways, that a more assertive approach became feasible.

So long as both Māori and Pākehā had things which the other party desired but could not obtain by force there remained every incentive to sustain peaceful relations most of the time. As settlers started to perceive that balance of power shifting in their favour by the 1850s, some urged a more vigorous approach to getting what they most wanted from Māori — especially when it came to land.

The middle ground was rapidly ebbing away, and though a case could perhaps be made for its survival in a few small and more isolated rural communities, in most places mutual accommodation had given way to unilateral Pākehā aggression by the 1860s.

At Kaipara, the rangatira Paikea had first welcomed the newcomers by declaring that they had much to teach Māori and in turn might learn a thing or two from the tribes. But Pākehā were increasingly interested in teaching Māori a lesson as to who was in charge, which culture and civilisation was assumed to be superior and which an inferior and doomed one.

Previously barely concealed expressions of contempt for Māori came to the fore at the same time. It was no coincidence perhaps that in 1858 the total number of Pākehā resident in New Zealand exceeded the Māori population for the first time.

There was a certain safety in numbers when it came to vilifying and abusing one’s former hosts. Donald McLean observed in 1861 that “[t]he offensive terms ‘bloody Maori,’ ‘black n—–,’ ‘treacherous savage,’ are frequently applied to them; and, though uniformly kind and hospitable to all strangers, they are themselves often treated with cold indifference, and sometimes with contempt, when they visit the English towns”.

For rangatira accustomed to treating visiting Pākehā with great hospitality, the abuse and scorn now rained down upon them when they travelled to Auckland or other towns was felt bitterly. Iwikau Te Heuheu told Governor Browne that “when an English serf visited the Maories, he was treated like a Chief; but if a Maori Chief of the highest rank visited Auckland he was treated like a slave by all except the Governor and a few officials”.

Less than a generation earlier, most Pākehā in New Zealand had lived largely at the sufferance of their host tribes. By the late 1850s, that was no longer the case, and the curses and insults levelled by some Pākehā were felt deeply by a society still vitally concerned with issues of mana.

Officials widely attributed Māori support for the King movement after 1856 to the “hatred of race which prevails in some portion of the European community against the Natives”. It was becoming apparent to many Māori that Pākehā were frequently no longer interested in a relationship with them based on mutual reciprocity and respect — if indeed they ever had been.

Under these circumstances, many rangatira felt that it was just a matter of time before their own subordination was made complete unless some positive measures were taken to defend against such an outcome.

And yet, although a few chiefs such as Te Heuheu advocated “the total separation of the races, and the ultimate expulsion, by force, of the Europeans”, far more continued to hope for a return to a mutually beneficial relationship. Some Māori fought alongside British troops against their own kin in pursuit of such a goal.

And the viewpoint espoused by Te Heuheu remained very much a minority one, even within those Kīngitanga-supporting communities that were eventually obliged to take up arms in defence of their lives and lands.

That point was summed up vividly when classic Māori symbolism was employed during a meeting held at Pukawa in 1856 to consider selecting a Māori king. Just as one speaker inside the meeting house was in the middle of a fiery oration advocating the expulsion of all Pākehā from the country, a member of the assembly quietly got up and, without a word, went round and blew out all the candles, plunging the whare into total darkness.

The clear implication was that a world without Pākehā would be a world without light, and when the speaker suggested the candles be lit once again he was informed that it had been a very foolish thing to extinguish them in the first place, prompting howls of laughter at his expense.

Following British victory in the New Zealand Wars between 1860 and 1872, there was no longer any threat of the lights going out. War in the North Island and gold rushes in the South Island over a similar timeframe resulted in a rapid increase in the non-Māori population by the mid-1870s, a process described by historian James Belich as “swamping”.

But the continuing decline in the Māori population, combined with a more vigorous policy of assimilation aimed at eradicating Māori culture, and serious socio-economic disruption resulting from the impacts of confiscation and the Native Land Court, saw the future of Māori as a distinct people under serious threat.

For many Pākehā, the presumed demise of Māori was the inevitable corollary of their contact with a vastly superior civilisation. As early as 1856, the Wellington provincial superintendent, Isaac Featherston, had told a gathering: “The Maoris . . . are dying out, and nothing can save them. Our plain duty as good, compassionate colonists, is to smooth down their dying pillow. Then history will have nothing to reproach us with.”

Others believed that even the smoothing of the pillow was an unnecessary gesture. A.K. Newman, for example, held that “the disappearance of the race is scarcely a subject for much regret. They are dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race.”

Even those Pākehā who believed that there was some hope for Māori, due to the higher place occupied by them on the Victorian racial hierarchy than many other Indigenous peoples, considered it axiomatic that the key to their survival was their rapid and complete adoption of European lifestyles. Māori culture would have to die in order for its people to survive.

Proponents of this viewpoint tended to overestimate the willingness of Māori to become brown Europeans. They mistook selective Māori adaptation of aspects of Pākehā culture of the kind described earlier for a wholesale willingness to abandon Māori culture altogether.

Both Māori culture and its people proved more resilient than many Pākehā might have imagined. That each survived in some form reflected Māori fortitude (and enhanced immune systems) more than anything. Although by the early decades of the 20th century at least some Pākehā had started to show an interest in appropriating Māori motifs for their own nationalist ends, they did so from a position of considerable dominance.

The middle ground was long gone, and Māori were instead expected to straddle the two cultures on their own, at least until an increased awareness and acceptance of Māori and their culture and history began to take root in Pākehā society from the 1970s onwards.

A new modus operandi for Māori and Pākehā relations in the 21st century may, though, draw at least in part on some of the lessons learned from the encounters that took place before 1840.

There is an old Māori saying about walking backwards into the future, “Ka mua, ka muri.” Demographic and economic trends point to the potential for a new middle ground to flower in the years ahead.

From the bedrooms and boardrooms of modern Aotearoa is emerging a Māori population that is growing at a much higher rate than Pākehā numbers, and one which is again beginning to wield considerable economic clout for the first time in many decades. Hapū and iwi, newly recapitalised through the Treaty settlements process, are once more becoming major players in the New Zealand economy.

New forms of accommodation may emerge out of mutual self-interest because both Māori and Pākehā — the people who helped to create and define one another in the first place — again find things of value in each other that cannot be obtained by other means.

In this way, the past might truly be ahead of us, and a new meeting place between the peoples could reveal itself.

 

Extract taken from The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642–1840 (BWB, $49.99).

Vincent O’Malley is a leading New Zealand historian. His works include The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000 (BWB, 2016), The New Zealand Wars/Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa (BWB, 2019) and The Invasion of Waikato/Te Riri ki Tainui (BWB, 2024). Voices from the New Zealand Wars/He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa (BWB, 2021) won the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Award for non-fiction; that same year Dr O’Malley received a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement. In 2023 he received the Royal Society Te Apārangi’s Humanities Aronui Medal. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he is also co-founder of HistoryWorks.

E-Tangata, 2025