REVIEWS 175

Te Rauparaha: A New Perspective. By Patricia Burns. With translations by Bill Parker and an appendix by A.A. St. C.M. Murray-Oliver. A. H. and A. W. Reed, Wellington, 1980. 346pp. Maps and illustrations. N.Z. price: $29.95.

TE RAUPARAHA was, without a doubt, one of the great chiefs of the nineteenth century. His long life—which is unusually well documented in both Maori and Pakeha sources—was a dramatic one, spanning a period of great change. In the early 1820s he led his tribe in a remarkable migration from Kawhia to a new home on the (where other northern tribes were later to join them), and to victory in numerous clashes with the peoples of the southern and the northern . As an old man, he faced a new invasion of 'systematic' Pakeha colonizers, and a new government. Mistrusted by the settlers from the start, he confirmed their worst suspicions at the Wairau 'massacre'; the resulting outcry became even shriller with FitzRoy's effective pardon of the Maoris, and was not silenced until Te Rauparaha was seized and detained (without trial) by Grey a few years later, in the hope of demoralizing the southern 'rebels'. Te Rauparaha, clearly, is a biographer's dream. Dr Patricia Burns, a Well- ington writer, has already won a prize with this book, and Reeds are to be con- gratulated on their splendid production of it: the consistent care with Maori names, the clear, attractive type-face, the judicious choice of photographs and other illustrations. But beyond this, it is hard to be enthusiastic. Those who come fresh to this period of New Zealand history will doubtless find much interesting information; but there will be many readers who will be disappointed. The sub- title promises a fresh look at Maori history. Instead, Dr Burns has confined her re-interpretation to an insistence that it is time to discard the early colonial image of Te Rauparaha as a 'sinister, treacherous savage', since he was, unless provok- ed beyond endurance, a peaceful person. It is seventy years, of course, since Te Rauparaha's earlier biographer, Lindsay Buick, condemned the as the 'aggressors' at Wairau, warned his readers against those settlers who in the 1840s sought to represent the chief 'as the incarnation of all that was cruel, treacherous, and unspeakably wicked', and noted that Te Rauparaha 'welcomed rather than resented the coming of the white man'. But Dr Burns also re-examines Te Rauparaha's pre-colonial career. She argues, for instance, that he had no initial intention of conquering the Kapiti Coast tribes, among whom he hoped to settle peacefully, and who sealed their own fate by their unprovoked aggression at Papaitonga. Nor was he contemplating hostilities against Ngai Tahu on his first visit to Kaiapohia—until the home people treacherously slaughtered a number of Ngati Toa chiefs, notably Te Peehi. Above all, however, he was friendly, even protective, towards the Company settlers who so disliked and feared him, and he refrained, even after his humiliation at Grey's hands, from at- tacking Wellington. Whether or not one accepts these interpretations—and taken together they come dangerously close to apology—the question has to be asked whether they do much to advance our understanding of Te Rauparaha himself, of Ngati Toa history, or of our early race relations. And it is hard to see that they do. Dr Burns has relied heavily on—and scrupulously acknowledged—the work of other writers. This is not to say she has ignored the primary sources—on the contrary, her bibliography indicates an extensive search through them—but it does seem to have discouraged her from abandoning the narrative approach of earlier recorders of tribal history. She has put in everything that happened and, one must 176 REVIEWS conclude, has failed to make sense of much of it. The forty-six chapters, all short, some mere fragments, many with quaint titles, several comprising sections that are barely related to one another, seem evidence enough that she did not know what to do with her material. And there is much in the text to make one feel uneasy: the references, for instance, to Te Peehi as the hereditary 'ruler' of Ngati Toa, to competitive gifting and feasting as 'hospitality', to a dispute over an eel stream as a 'triviality', to the Haowhenua conflict between Ngati Raukawa and Ati Awa as a 'tragedy' for Te Rauparaha because it split Ngati Toa (though, like any tribe, they were not accustomed to thinking of unity as a desirable state), to the 'shocking blow' of Te Peehi's loss to Te Rauparaha (who, on the contrary, was doubtless delighted to see the end of him), to most of the lands listed in the notorious New Zealand Company deeds as 'belonging' to Te Rauparaha; and, in general, a rather alarming tendency to take Maori evidence about land claims and sales at face value. But what is most disappointing, it seems to me, is her failure to tackle head-on the sorts of questions which a biographer might be expected to ask: how Te Rauparaha coped with his rivals within the tribe, how he conducted relations with other 'allied' chiefs, how he handled disputes, especially over resources and over land, in the changing, ever-tricky circumstances of the 'allied' and later the Pakeha occupation of , what limits there were to his authority, how he viewed the new religion and its missionaries, whether he changed—or set out to change—the institutions of his society in any way, how far his 'great enterprise', in the long run, was a success. Some of these issues are dealt an occasional glanc- ing blow, but they are not central to the book.

ANN PARSONSON

University of Canterbury

The Letters of A.R.D. Fairburn. Selected and edited by Lauris Edmond. Oxford University Press, , 1981. 272 pp. N.Z. price $31.95

FEW COLLECTIONS of the letters of prominent New Zealanders have been published and only one I can recall of those by a writer—D'Arcy Cresswell—so the appearance of an edition of the letters of A.R.D. Fairburn ought to have been an event in our literary history. Regrettably, this book falls far short of any acceptable standard of scholarship. I doubt whether I have ever noticed as many errors in what is supposed to be a serious work. The editor, Lauris Edmond, makes innumerable errors in her footnotes and elsewhere, mistakes of the most elementary kind. We learn that the University of New Zealand was dissolved in 1957 (p. 196) which it was not; that the University Senate passed a resolution in 1937 forbidding staff to publish political statements (p. 103) which it did not, and that J.C. Beaglehole was sacked for infringing this—although, in fact, his temporary position at the Auckland University Col- lege had been terminated four years before this non-existent resolution had not been passed. Nor did Martin Sullivan extend this 'ban' to the students, although he had censored Phoenix four years earlier. All this is nonsense. What actually happened in 1937 was that the Senate voted against a motion favouring free speech. We learn such non-information as that F.W. Doidge was the Speaker of