Test-tube nation

A new account of societal thinking in early New Zealand finds a mix of Māori influence, Enlightenment ideals and God.

- BY CHRIS MOORE

History can be a fascinatingly messy business. Exploring the past isn't simply a matter of joining the dots and filling in the blanks to produce a neatly manicured narrative. As Erik Olssen shows in his engrossing new book, there are few black and whites, especially when dealing with a colonial past. Olssen, a social historian and former head of Otago University’s department of history, defines his book - the first in a planned trilogy - as a “marriage of social and intellectual-cultural history”. It's a detailed examination of the particular European conceptual and political belief systems at that moment in our shared history. It doesn’t hero-worship or demonise. Neither, Olssen writes, serves an understanding of New Zealand’s past or its significance for the present.

James Cook's first landfall in Aotearoa in 1769 serves as a prologue, as Olssen creates an epic canvas inhabited by an occasionally bewilderingly diverse cast of characters. This is not a book to dip into lightly, as it takes you down unfamiliar roads, but its lucidity constantly engages and informs.

If Act leader David Seymour's Treaty Principles Bill contained one redeeming feature it was that it focused New Zealand's attention sharply on the past, present and future of the relationship between Māori and Pākehā. Olssen, in presenting his perspectives on how this association first emerged during the decades from 1769 to 1860, adds his voice to a continuing informed conversation.