Towards the sunrise

In an updated history of southern Māori, archaeologist Atholl Anderson draws on whakapapa to tell a tale of survival.

- BY SALLY BLUNDELL

IT came first, as in a dream, to those bemused 'onlookers', 57 men in four double waka who stared at the Endeavour as she ghosted past Kaikōura in February 1770.

That first spectral encounter, as described in archaeologist Atholl Anderson's newly revised The Welcome of Strangers, will be repeated three years later, when the HMS Resolution enters Tamatea (Dusky Sound), bringing "sensations and experiences of a different world to those few Māori who met the first of the ship people".

At 82, Atholl Anderson (Kāi Tahu) has spent most of his career delving into those sensations and experiences, applying his archaeological and ethnographic skills to tease out the movement of people at the edges of cultural, social and economic change.

The Welcome of Strangers is an updated version of his 1998 book of the same name with more photographs, an opening chapter on tribal history and more recent research on Ngāi Tahu (or Kāi Tahu) whakapapa. The title is from a comment in 1847 by explorer Thomas Brunner who, on reaching a village on the West Coast, "received the welcome of strangers in a bountiful supply of fern-root, preserved wekas, and fish".

It is a comprehensive story of Māori migration into and down through Te Waipounamu (South Island) up to the early 1860s. It tells of the arrival of small groups and hapū, not as an orderly line of succession, but as a broader southern shift beginning with Rapuwai in the early 14th century, less as a coherent iwi, Anderson writes, than as part of a general movement of people from Taranaki, including Waitaha, Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri and Ngāti Wairaki.