While I've been recovering from a piece of minor surgery I've spent a bit of time reading Philippa Mein Smith's A Concise History of New Zealand.
Like most Australians I guess, I see New Zealand as like a younger sister. They are near us, they were founded by the same British colonialists, they speak the same language, they share a history of displacement of their original inhabitants. Like younger sisters everywhere, they are similar to us, but a bit nicer. Their people are a bit friendlier, their race relations a bit less oppressive, their politics a bit more consensual, their climate policies a bit more realistic. Not a lot more, just enough for Australians to look on in envy.
Mein Smith's book gives us some idea of why this might be so. For a start, New Zealand's history of colonisation does not include a 'convict stain'. British Australia started life as a prison colony and former convicts and their descendants formed a large part of its population throughout the 19th century. Of course, what was thought of as the 'convict stain' - the defective heritage of being descended from criminals - was a lot of hogwash. Most of the convicts were simply poor people who committed petty crimes to survive and fell foul of the absurdly punitive British justice system. There was also a smattering of proud Irish nationalists. Given their freedom and the economic opportunities of a new land, they proved no more defective than anyone else. Yet the prison beginning did mean that the colony began in brutality. Our origin story and our folk history includes chains, flogging, hard labour, escapes to the wilderness and impossibly harsh penal settlements like Norfolk Island and Macquarie Harbour.New Zealand has long sold itself as a template for successful race relations, with Maori and Pakeha living alongside one another in harmony and respecting one another's cultures and right to be there. Like all marketing strategies this picture involves truth liberally seasoned with lies. The history of Maori-Pakeha relations has a lot of similarity to Australia's. Maori were dispossessed, sometimes violently and always with the support of the British law, they were impoverished and their population crashed. Yet in relative terms, none of this was as dramatically brutal as in Australia. In Australia the Aboriginal population at its low point was around 10% of its pre-European level and all their land was expropriated bar some areas of desert no European wanted. Some Aboriginal peoples were completely eliminated, most had their societies destroyed, and 'protection' regimes saw almost all removed from their own country even if no-one else moved in to take their place.
By contrast, at its low point the Maori population was a bit over 40% of its pre-European numbers, and many of them still lived in more or less intact Maori communities on Maori land, albeit their land holdings were tiny and they were desperately poor. The history of how this came about is fascinating.
When Europeans met Australian First Nations they saw something they had no way of comprehending. There was no shared language to enable communication and hundreds of languages to learn, and Aboriginal social structures were not immediately visible. In addition, many Aboriginal people didn't wear clothes, and were on the move. This led the Europeans to view them as uncivilised, nomadic savages and to treat them as barely human. This provided the excuse (and excuse it was, since for those who cared to ask there were soon Europeans who managed to bridge the gap) for massive dispossession and mistreatment.
By contrast, when Europeans met Maori they saw something they understood. They had met Polynesians already in their slow expansion across the Pacific. Polynesian languages were similar enough that their Polynesian crew members could act as interpreters, and the Maori all shared the same language. The British also understood, at least in outline, the nature of Maori governance - hierarchical communities with recognised chiefs and settled villages which were comprehensible in terms of European norms. The Maori were also much more militarised than their trans-Tasman counterparts and one of the first pieces of European technology they adopted was the musket, traded for flax with the Australian colonists and first used in a series of brutal inter-Maori wars in the 1820s and 1830s as various chiefs tried to use this new technology to establish dominance over rivals.
The treaty is somewhat ambiguous and this ambiguity is heightened by the fact that the Maori and English versions are not the same. In any case, for most of New Zealand history the treaty had little impact - it didn't prevent the Maori wars which raged through the 1860s and into the early 70s, and in the aftermath, when more orderly processes were returned, a New Zealand court declared it to be 'a complete nullity'. Yet the process of dispossession continued to require at least a fig-leaf of legality, with a Land Court adjudicating transfers of Maori land. Often the Maori had no choice but to sell, and the prices determined by the court were a small fraction of the land's market value, but it was far from the open slather of Australian land theft.
It was only in the 1970s that the Treaty started to be taken seriously again as a legal document, and the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1981 (chaired by a Maori judge) started a long process of restoration and compensation that has since gone at least some way to repairing a century or more of damage. New Zealand race relations have improved dramatically as a result - lots of places now have dual Maori and English names, including the nation itself, and Maori words are increasingly becoming day-to-day language.
New Zealand is not yet a paradise of race relations. There is ongoing inequality, and many injustices are still to be righted. Nonetheless there is a lot Australians could learn from our nicer sister. Think for instance of the Australian reception of the Uluru Statement from the Heart with its demand for Voice, Treaty and Truth. None of these demands have been genuinely accepted by the Australian government - it rejected out of hand the idea of a constitutional 'voice to parliament', electing to work instead towards a legislated advisory committee which First Nations people point out has been tried and failed more than once. It has taken no steps to start the treaty and truth-telling process. New Zealand, by contrast, had a treaty signed in 1840 which it revived and put into law in the 1970s, and it has had dedicated Maori seats in parliament throughout its history. The sky has not fallen and New Zealand remains a peaceful, prosperous nation.
Colonialism was never pretty. Indigenous people were dispossessed and oppressed in the interests of the colonisers. In the worst cases, like Australia and South America, there was genocide. In the less worse, like Aotearoa-New Zealand, there was war and dispossession. All have left a legacy of injustice and inequality which still remains unfinished business in those societies. But if you want a model of how to begin, don't look to Australia, with its continual gaslighting of Indigenous people and ongoing dreams of colonial completion. Perhaps, though, look across the Tasman. They have not solved it, but at least they are trying.
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