Richard Boast

The Waitangi Tribunal in the Context of New Zealand’s Political Culture and Historiography

One of the most elaborate systems of investigation into any nation’s colonial past is New Zealand’s Waitangi Tribunal, first set up in 1975, and which has now issued over 100 major reports on all aspects of the history of Maori interaction with the colonial state. The Waitangi Tribunal also exemplifies some particular features of the legal history of the Treaty of Waitangi, which in New Zealand has become seen as semi-constitutional text which forms an internal standard for legal investigations and for negotiation of redress. Current developments in New Zealand are highly consistent with long-established state practice, where relationships between the state and Maori have always been a matter of legal and political importance. Although the Waitangi Tribunal has some features in common with truth commissions in other countries, in many ways it is quite different from them.

A Simple Nullity? The Wi Parata case in New Zealand law & history. By David V. Williams

University of Göttingen and the Lower Saxon State Museum in Hanover. In conjunction with the exhibition, a symposium, with the title of the book under review, was convened over four days, organised by the book’s editor. According to Stephen Little, the academy’s director, the purpose of the exhibition was ‘to celebrate the brilliant cultural and spiritual lives of these indigenous peoples as they existed before the first contact with Westerners’ (p. vii). For Hermann, this volume (and presumably the symposium itself) was an opportunity for a wide range of international scholars ‘to scrutinize social interactions [between Europeans and Islanders] to imagine how these played out in the past and still do today’ as well as to ‘look at structural interactions of cultural orders, with a view to the context-sensitive meanings resulting from these’, with an end result in which ‘we gain far-reaching insight into how cultural traditions change through time’ (p. 1). It is not clear to what extent the symposium itself fulfilled these objectives since it seems from the two closing contributions (by historian Peter Hempenstall and anthropologist Aletta Biersack) that this volume includes only a selection of the symposium presentations. Of the 18 papers included here, very few refer to the objects in the exhibition, and only five concern Pacific locations which were the sources of the artefacts. Moreover, only six make reference to or use of the associated works of Cook and the Forsters (naturalists on the second voyage). Of these contributions most directly related to the occasion, probably of most interest to Pacific historians would be Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin’s reconstruction of how and why the exhibited objects collected by Cook and the Forsters made their ways into German institutions (pp. 20–37) and Gundolf Krüger’s discussion of Georg Forster’s ‘reflections on war in Aotearoa, Tahiti, and Tonga (1772–1775)’ (pp. 107–22). In her introduction, Hermann cites anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’s Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981) as ‘a key touchstone’ for the present volume, crediting Sahlins and his book as pointing ‘clearly to a paradigm shift in anthropology – the transition from a structural anthropology that was not concerned with history to a historical anthropology’ (p. 2). Serious consideration of Sahlins’s theoretical arguments is manifest in the ‘Epilogue’ (pp. 323–50) by Aletta Biersack, arguably one of the pioneers in the ‘paradigm shift’ claimed by Hermann, but while several authors make use of various works by Sahlins, the ‘key touchstone’ book is cited by only one contributor – Lamont Lindstrom – in an interesting analysis of time concepts and landscape naming practices on Tanna, Vanuatu (pp. 141–56), creatively stimulated by Cook’s report of the gift of a small pig there in 1774. The wide topical range of the papers can be illustrated by citing two: David Hanlon’s consideration of current archaeological vs local mythical interpretations of the stone structures Lelu and Nan Madol on Pohnpei (pp. 41–55) and Martha Kaplan’s analysis of the new significance of water in Fiji, currently a fad luxury item in faraway New York (pp. 221–34). In some cases we have, as authors show, some documentary evidence of how early European voyagers interpreted events they witnessed, and we are given those authors’ interpretations of what Islanders have told them the current versions of similar events or ‘customs’ signify to them. If we grant validity to such interpretations at both ends of the time continuum, we might reasonably say that change has occurred, but understanding just how and why this happened, let alone any hope of identifying more general processes at work, remains sketchy.

New Zealand Legal History and New Zealand Historians: A Non-meeting of Minds

This article is about New Zealand legal historiography. This is a thriving, if relatively new sub-field of New Zealand historical studies - a new kid on the historical block as it were. For it remains the case that the law has not penetrated very deeply into the consciousness of historians who teach in the history departments (as opposed to we historians who earn our daily bread in the law schools: although our interests are no less historical and historiographical, we do find ourselves distracted by having to teach complicated courses on the law of real property or equitable obligations to crowded classrooms of law students).