INTRODUCTION

This is a history of ideas about race which are taken for granted. It examines racial tropes applied to Mori and Aboriginal people: tropes so fundamental to our perceptions of them as people that they have become naturalized and normalized within both contemporary and historical understandings of Australia and New Zealand. In response to such normalization, this analysis interrogates racial thought at the time it was expressed as well as how it has subsequently been represented in national histories. The racial thought created in the early period of British connection with the indigenous peoples of the region, from the Cook voyages to the Treaty of Waitangi, is not merely of historical importance, but informs stereotypes which continue to hold great power in contemporary society. The racial categorization of the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand had broader consequences than the creation of stereotypes, however, with important material effects for both colonizers and colonized. The most fundamental of these effects was, and continues to be, understandings of land ownership and sovereignty. The most basic comparison in the race relations of Australia and New Zealand is that Mori were understood to be sovereign owners of their country while Aboriginal people were not. The most important contribution of this work is to examine the processes by which this happened. An examination of a visit by a Mori chief to early colonial New South Wales can illuminate, from the perspective of both imperial racial thought and historical scholarship, some of the issues addressed in this work. In the years before large-scale European settlement in New Zealand colonial authorities in New South Wales sought to establish relationships with Mori chiefs to allow access to resources such as timber and flax, and Mori chiefs, also keen to establish trading relationships, travelled to New South Wales with increasing regularity. In 1805 the Hikut chief Te Pahi travelled to the British settlement at Port Jackson, in one of the earliest Mori visits to the colony. His visit excited considerable comment in New South Wales colonial sources; New South Wales Governor Phillip Gidley King suggested to Sir Joseph Banks that his Manners are that of a well bred Gentleman allowing a little for the Country he comes from.1

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Te Pahis trip to Port Jackson was examined in Anne Salmonds Between Worlds, a major history of early race relations between Mori and Pkeh (European New Zealanders) by one of New Zealands most celebrated historical anthropologists. Her two volumes offered a whakapapa, or genealogy, for the New Zealand nation.2 In her chapter on the visit, Salmond created an impression that these early exchanges were a meeting of relative equals and were recognized as such by both parties, reflecting the largely positive portrayal of people such as Te Pahi in imperial sources. Salmonds treatment of Te Pahis visit demonstrates the complications and complexities of portrayals of indigenous people in imperial contexts. As well as offering a largely positive portrayal of Te Pahi himself, government dispatches and colonial newspaper sources paid particular attention to Te Pahis views of indigenous Australians, stressing his negative depiction of Aboriginal society. Salmond reproduced this material in her own work, stating that he was dismissive of the Aboriginals, expressing the utmost abhorrence at their going naked, and their want of ingenuity or inclination to procure food and make themselves comfortable. The New South Wales colonial newspaper, the Sydney Gazette offered this conclusion on encounters between Aboriginal people and the Mori chief: It cannot be supposed that Tip-pa-hes high relish for civilization would find an agreeable object of contemplation in the manners of a naked race, who have for so many years disregarded its advantages. Salmond offered the following assessment of this evidence: The idea of the Great Chain of Being was at work in this report, ranking one group of natives above another. Te Pahi and his sons, however, also clearly considered that as a people, they were superior to Aboriginals.3 While Salmond recognized the creation of racial hierarchy, she did not then question its operation or consider the implications of representations that Mori could be civilized while Aboriginal people shunned the benefits of European association. These concepts are of vital importance to the history of British connection to the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand, and as this work shall demonstrate they had important material consequences for Mori and Aboriginal people. Once we begin to question these statements and analyse the circumstances in which they were created, the idea that Mori and Pkeh met as partners and relative equals must also be questioned because notions of equality cannot be taken for granted within imperial situations. They were, instead, based on European representation of worth. No matter whether Te Pahi genuinely believed himself superior to the Eora people of the Sydney region, his words operated as part of a developing racial discourse in the Australian colonies which justified Aboriginal dispossession. To consider this seriously is to be reminded of the similarly contingent and contextualized nature of colonial representations of Mori. The idea that Mori and European met as equals needs

Introduction

to be tempered by an analysis of the role that the British imagined for Mori within wider imperial projects which encompassed New Zealand and Australia.4 A sense of the connection to Australia and the implications it might have for New Zealands race relations history is missing from Salmonds analysis. The unintended effect of her argument is to reiterate the type of racial hierarchies which these early texts created. Bringing Australia and New Zealand into a common analytical frame brings these considerations into focus. Donald Denoon and Philippa Mein-Smith briefly deal with this same episode in their History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, and their treatment of Te Pahis visit to New South Wales signals the analytical potential that a transnational methodology offers. Denoon and Mein-Smith recognized that Te Pahis negative assessment of Aboriginal people was framed by both his own cultural norms and his engagement with colonial ideas and events, and that the people he met had already been subjected to dispossession and decimated by disease. The pursuit of mana for Mori
derived from fighting and particularly from success in conquest, attitudes soon to be compounded by an accelerating engagement with Europe and its artefacts of guns and potatoes, which facilitated Maori strategies of warfare. These Maori visitors, in Sydney to learn about potato-growing and European technology, shared the European disdain for people whom they perceived as nomads rather than as warriors and agriculturalists.5

These types of connections and comparisons precisely those which appear of marginal importance in the history of a nation are central to this study. The comparisons between the indigenous peoples of the two countries had important implications for the construction of race and the form of colonial and imperial interventions in their respective countries. Direct connections between Mori and Aboriginal people such as Te Pahis assessment of Eora society are sites for the distillation of hierarchies which are often only alluded to, where the operation of racial discourse and imperial projects in two countries come together to be expressed explicitly in the same imperial text.6

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The Tasman World

Here I view the varied sites of imperial intervention in Australia and New Zealand as constituting a Tasman world, building on an understanding of space which has begun to be utilized by a number of historians considering the history of New Zealand from a broader perspective than that offered in national histories. Investigating the history of Australia and New Zealand as a region continues the move towards applying transnational approaches to reframe history writing, moving beyond the centrality of the nation in historical scholarship and exploring histories across nations, regions or even globally. As Curthoys

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and Lake describe the term, transnational history seeks to understand ideas, things, people and practices which have crossed national boundaries.7 James Belich in Making Peoples described the early Australian and New Zealand sealing industry as ranging over this Tasman world, with the two countries unable to be distinguished as markedly separate places. Philippa Mein-Smith and Peter Hempenstall define the Tasman world as a working region defined by a history of traffic that connects Australia and New Zealand since Cooks voyages and the establishment of a beachhead in Sydney,8 and used the concept of the Tasman World to explore Australian and New Zealand shared histories and relations from 1880.9 They suggest that the most obvious area of difference between the two countries is in their relationships with indigenous peoples, but, with a focus on connections rather than divergence, this is not something that they explore in their work. The volume pays little attention to what these differences in race relations are, or what the implications of difference might be.10 I turn to examine those divergent relationships with indigenous peoples, looking at the way that the history of the region has helped shape the creation of race and identity in each divergent site. Applying the concept of a Tasman world to the entire period of early British imperial activity in Australian and New Zealand history I suggest that to discuss Australia and New Zealand as two distinct nations in the early colonial period may be to project backwards an understanding of the two societies which at that time did not exist. The fledgling white societies in various locations in Australia and New Zealand did not see themselves as separate, but rather as a part of the British Empire in the Pacific Ocean. They were a region of imperial activity, but also connected back to the imperial centre and other imperial and non-imperial sites. I am therefore, as Bernard Baylin has stated in relation to the Atlantic world, trying to trace the commonalities of experience in diverse circumstances as well as isolating unique characteristics that become visible only in comparisons and contrasts.11 So, how did this Tasman world develop? Throughout the timeframe covered by this study (and especially the initial period of British exploration and early settlement covered in the first half of this book) British understanding of the region was almost exclusively based on maritime travel, centred on the Tasman Sea. Early exploration by the British, of which the journeys of James Cook from 1769 are considered here, was conducted almost entirely by ship, with small amounts of land explored around ports where the ships called. Travel by land between early Australian settlements was difficult and dangerous over unknown country, whereas the journey to New Zealand was comparatively easy. The Tasman world developed unevenly, in a number of sites of imperial and colonial interest around the region. This work follows that imperial and colonial interest and thus reflects this uneven development. The documents considered are

Introduction

generally concerned with the north of the North Island of New Zealand, the east coast of Australia (particularly Sydney and its hinterlands), and Tasmania. The indigenous peoples encountered are local to these places, and the encounters are shaped by local factors, but the ideas generated from these meetings and about these particular indigenous communities might spread far further than the immediate sites of encounter. From the outset the Tasman world primarily operated as an economic space, as the New South Wales colony established in 1788 sought to exploit resources from New Zealand to defray the costs of the penal settlement and contribute important commodities to the empire at the same time as they colonized Aboriginal land. Patrick Wolfe has argued in his seminal essay Land, Labor and Difference that relationships between Aboriginal people and the British were centered on land with territorial expropriation foundational to the colonial formulations into which Europeans incorporated them. African Americans, by contrast, were desired for their labour, and thus the relationships between colonists and this ethnic group were centred around this economic role.12 In the period before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840, Mori relationships with colonists might also be seen to be centred on economic relationships, on labour and particularly on trade, as they became central to British extractive industries developing in their country. As Mark Hickford has explained, Mori were seen to have a propensity and capacity to engage in transactional conduct inter homines to participate in trade for commodities and land itself .13 Hickford places particular importance on the comparison with Aboriginal people in the development of ideas of Mori as having rights to land, particularly in the relationship between Mori transactions for land and the perceived lack of such propensity amongst Aboriginal communities. Certainly, Mori being seen as capable of, and interested in, transactional relationships, were not subject to the appropriation of land without processes of negotiation in this early period of imperial interest, which was the dominant theme of relationships between Aboriginal people and the British. Cooks voyages had repeatedly identified flax and timber in New Zealand as being suitable for the needs of British shipbuilding. Indeed, the Governor of the Norfolk Island outpost, Philip Gidley King, wasted no time sending ships to ascertain Mori knowledge of flax-weaving, eventually settling on kidnapping as his strategy to procure Mori expertise. As Keith Sinclair noted, however, it was the officers, free settlers and emancipated convicts, with their entrepreneurial spirit and pursuit of profits whose interest in New Zealand meant that it came to constitute an Australian frontier.14 From the beginning of the nineteenth-century Sydney merchants funded ventures to the coasts of New Zealand to establish flax, timber, whaling and sealing industries. Their success meant that until about 1830 imports from New Zealand, even excluding the value of sealing and whaling, were

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worth more to the colonial economy than the production of wool in New South Wales.15 In 1840, whale and seal products exported from New South Wales came to the value of 224,000.16 Mori lifestyles and economies at key sites in New Zealand saw substantial change from this imperial interest in their resources. Claudia Orange has suggested that by 1840 the Bay of Islands regularly had some thirty ships at anchor with a complement of about 1,000 men.17 By 1820 there were semi-permanent communities of European sealers residing with South Island Ngai Tahu and Ngati Mamoe peoples, and chiefs from these communities began to make regular visit to New South Wales.18 Imperial attempts to regulate relations between Europeans and Mori led also to the enactment of Australian laws regarding activity in New Zealand. Claudia Orange observed that while initially New South Wales governors had a vague jurisdiction over New Zealand, and British policy in general was marked by a reluctance to intervene formally, the establishment of regulations and laws was considered necessary to prevent ill-treatment of Mori. Governor Macquarie, for example, issued a Government Order to mandate appropriate treatment and pay for Mori and Pacific Islanders working on British ships, and Samuel Marsden ensured Mori were aware of the Governments pledge to protect them. Statutes were passed in 1817, 1823 and 1828 attempting to improve law and order. These statutes are more important, however, for their recognition of Mori independence from the empire by declaring New Zealand to be not within his Majestys dominions.19 Despite the fact that New Zealand stood outside the empire, missionaries and New South Wales colonial authorities assured Mori that their interests would be protected, prompting Mori to appeal for their assistance when threatened. Thirteen northern North Island chiefs met at Kerikeri in October 1831 to petition the King for protection from a perceived French threat to annex New Zealand. The Elizabeths involvement in inter-tribal warfare in 1830 prompted a chiefly visit to Sydney for government assistance. James Busby was appointed as British resident in New Zealand in 1832. His first address to the chiefs on 5 May 1833 again stressed Mori independence. Busby stated that he was the Kings man but he was also profoundly connected to the Australian colonial administration, operating under the orders of the New South Wales Governor and being funded from the New South Wales colonial budget. Following threats from a Frenchman, Baron de Thierry, to declare a sovereign and independent state on land purchased at Hokianga, Busby initiated a meeting of thirty-four chiefs in October 1838 who came together to assert themselves as the United Tribes of New Zealand, signing a Declaration of Independence, which requested that the King be the parent of their infant state its protector from all attempts upon its independence.20

Introduction

Port Jackson not only functioned as a crucial political centre for Mori, but New Zealand also came to hold increasing interest for private colonists from both Britain and Australia in the late 1830s, with the establishment of the New Zealand Association in May 1837 in Britain which planned to implement E. G. Wakefields regime of systematic colonization, and New South Wales colonists making large land purchases. W. C. Wentworth, for example, claimed to have purchased eight million hectares on the South Island, a move that Roger Millis has concluded was in line with his similar if more modest exploits accumulating Aboriginal land in Australia which were absolutely cost free.21 A marked shift resulted in British attitudes towards New Zealand, discourses of protection becoming paramount where Mori independence had once been stressed, so that Maori capacity to exercise control over New Zealand affairs was now belittled. William Hobson was appointed as British Consul on leaving England in August 1839. In January 1840, as Hobson left Sydney for his new post, New South Wales Governor Gipps extended that colonys legal jurisdiction to New Zealand, and invalidated all land claims unless they were sanctioned by the Crown. Gipps also deemed Hobson to be lieutenant-governor over territory which he might acquire from Mori in the future.22 On 6 February 1840 assembled chiefs at Waitangi signed the Treaty which, as the British understood it, ceded their sovereignty over New Zealand to Britain. Until the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, therefore, New Zealand operated as a frontier of New South Wales. Yet despite the economic and political connections, the discourses of protection, negotiation and recognition of chiefly authority over the country were completely different from those applied to Aboriginal peoples in the colony itself. Australian Aboriginal people were not considered sovereign owners of their land and the British colonial authorities pursued no strategies of negotiation towards them. British settlement commenced and continued without their consent and without the purchase of land.23 Recognizing the connections and interrelations between British imperial endeavour in this Tasman world, this study examines the different racial ideas that were applied to Mori and Aboriginal peoples and which underpinned the divergent treatment of the indigenous peoples of this region.

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Public Ideas, Printed Texts and Racial Thought

The focus of this study is the making of race in this Tasman world through an analysis of a series of printed texts spanning the period from first contact through to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. I have focused on printed texts in an attempt to trace the development of racial thought in the public domain, examining the generation of ideas designed for others to read and which the authors clearly hoped would influence public thought and action. The circulation

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of accepted, or at least justifiable, ideas about race and their connection to imperial projects in the region is my area of investigation. While this work concentrates on the connections between Australia and New Zealand, the documents studied also include comparisons with the Pacific, North America and South Africa, which are considered as they arise. I am thus engaged, as Alan Lester has characterized it, in a historically embedded form of discourse analysis.24 Catherine Hall has outlined the important role of the intellectual and of published texts in shaping social change in early nineteenth-century England, at a provincial or local level as well as nationally. By the 1840s, Thomas Carlyle could claim in his Hero as Man of Letters, that the writer was our most important modern person, and that what he teaches the whole world will do and make, making him the soul of all. These public men did not focus purely on conceptual issues but hoped for the practical application of their ideas, to try to influence public action through the circulation of their work. They were concerned not only to work at a high level of abstraction but to apply their new theories to the concrete realities of their society. Writers, from national figures to the organic intellectuals of the middle class, saw it as their task to translate new codes of behavior into everyday life, whether they were dealing with the spheres of the economic, the political or the cultural.25 This study is quite tightly bound around four key bodies of documents. Each group of documents is the focus of two chapters. The first group is the journals of Captain James Cook and his crew from their three Pacific voyages of 176970, 17725, and 177680, which form the basis of Chapters 1 and 2. The British encountered both Aboriginal people and Mori during these voyages, writing the first significant ethnographic description of Mori and revising and extending William Dampiers account of Aboriginal people. The documents created from Cooks voyages are some of the most important texts of exploration and empire; they were immensely popular when published and have been of considerable interest to historians since. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the connection between voyaging and empire, investigating the importance of first contact situations to racial constructions and reconstructing the strategies employed by both the British and indigenous people to try to manage early encounters. My analysis places particular emphasis on the discourses of imperial possibility contained in these journals, where voyagers assessed the potential of the various places visited for British imperial purposes, as well as making judgements about the relationships indigenous people had to their land. Following the establishment of the first British settlement in the region at Port Jackson in 1788, Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins published his journal of affairs in the penal colony, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (the Account) in 1798 and 1804; this is the subject of Chapters 3 and 4. Collins, one of a number of First Fleet Officers who published reports of the

Introduction

early years of settlement, was the original judge-advocate of the colony and Secretary to Governor Phillip. The Account included significant ethnological information relating to both Mori and Aboriginal people, with Collins himself observing and documenting the lives and cultures of the Eora people of the Sydney area, and including in his text a report of the information gathered about Muriwhenua Mori life when two men were kidnapped and detained on Norfolk Island. The Collins text was a very influential one, considered to provide a definitive account of Aboriginal culture by later writers such as W.C. Wentworth.26 While the journals of officers such as Watkin Tench have been republished for a popular contemporary audience, Collinss Account continues to be used by scholars as an important source of knowledge about Aboriginal life at the time of the first British settlement.27 Chapters 3 and 4 cover the earliest attempts by colonists to establish ongoing relationships with indigenous peoples, and initial action to open up resources for the utilization of the empire. Samuel Marsden was also an important figure in the early Australian settlement, being the second colonial chaplain in New South Wales, and Marsdens work is the focus of Chapters 5 and 6. From his arrival in Port Jackson in 1794 he ministered to the convict and settler population of Parramatta and various settlements on the expanding frontier of white territorial control. He was profoundly influential in the development of early British relationships with Mori, encouraging a succession of Mori visitors to his Parramatta farm. He founded the first mission to New Zealand in 1814, making seven visits to the mission station in the Bay of Islands before his death in 1838. My reading of Marsdens colonial career in Chapters 5 and 6 focuses on texts which were written either by Marsden or about him. In these chapters I consider the role of religion in different colonial situations, and how Marsdens position as both colonist and missionary shaped his opinions on race. The final body of texts I consider in Chapters 7 and 8 is that produced by the British House of Commons Select Committee into the Treatment of Aborigines in the British Empire, conducted from 1835 to 1837, known as the Aborigines Committee. The Select Committee considered the treatment of indigenous people and forms of imperial intervention in Australia and New Zealand in the context of Britains global imperial endeavours. Chapters 7 and 8 consider the relationship between racial discourse and humanitarianism and the connections and tensions between the centre and periphery of empire. The Report of the Aborigines Committee is the most significant example of British humanitarian thought in relation to both Australia and New Zealand, and I argue in these chapters that this metropolitan document bears the imprint of ideas about indigenous peoples created on the edges of British imperial activity. The divergent perspectives offered by witnesses from Australia and New Zealand shaped the varied futures that the Aborigines Committee imagined for Aborigi-

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nal people and Mori, represented in a shift away from Aboriginal people and towards Mori as the hope for the redemption of British imperialism in the Tasman world. This shift towards New Zealand in British humanitarian plans for the empire is traced in Chapter 8 through the establishment of New Zealand as a British colony on the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February 1840. I consider the continuities and transformations within British representations of Mori in the light of the beginning of a colonial relationship through an analysis of the instructions issued to William Hobson, the British Consul in New Zealand, by the Secretary of State for the Colonies Lord Normanby. The documents underpinning this study were produced by a range of imperial agents who were central in moulding British understandings of Australasia, both at home and in the colonies. They are relatively evenly spaced across the timeframe. The documents are foundational texts: they are important records in the development of the colonial archive of knowledge about the two countries and I have chosen to consider them for that reason. In addition, they all have their own comparative sensibilities; with the authors having, or being able to draw on, experiences with the indigenous populations of both countries. I am concerned to follow the way that the authors themselves thought of the differences between Aboriginal people and Mori and the impact this had on colonial endeavour in each country. The texts examined in this work aimed to translate abstract ideas about race into the everyday world of imperial and colonial relationships. Europeans applied ideas about race they had brought with them from metropolitan settings to specific imperial encounters. These encounters on the ground in turn shaped ideas about race that circulated on the frontiers of empire, in colonies, and in the metropole. A close study of printed texts which represent the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand demonstrates the creation and development of racial stereotypes. The writing, reception and circulation of printed texts helped to define the grounds for debate about race, developed initially from a wide variety of racial signifiers, which, with repeated usage, became increasingly entrenched and difficult to undermine until such time as they came to appear natural. I examine the connections between racial thought and state power, examining the way that divergent racial representations influenced the development of various forms of imperial power. The racial imagery in these texts draws on a broader range of signifiers than a simple reduction to skin colour. Roxann Wheeler has highlighted the complexity of racial thought in the period of first contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the region.28 Wheeler concluded that skin colour was not the primary signifier of human difference until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and that even then individuals responded variously to nonwhite skin color.29 Indeed, in these texts, while skin colour is important to the develop-

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ment of racial ideas, especially at moments of first contact or early encounters, other physical characteristics are also important, as are modes of dress or undress, aspects of material culture, perceptions of political and social organization, and depictions of the presence of religious understanding. Economic relationships are also of crucial importance, especially in light of the significance of the stadial theory of Scottish thinkers which focused, as George Stocking has observed, on the conditions of social and economic life subsistence modes, the division of labor, and the institution of property.30 Stadial theory, according to P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, not only explained human difference but also provided a model into which the flow of information about overseas societies could be incorporated, helping Europeans to make sense of the new people they encountered, including those met in Australasia.31 John Gascoignes important work on the impact of the Enlightenment in the colonization of Australia argued that with no long-established institutions to contend with, the spread of the Enlightenment could be particularly pervasive and often unnoticed because it generated less conflict than in the Old World, drawing parallels with America, but the point could also be applied to the region as a whole.32 George Stocking has further noted the development of the discipline of political economy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This entailed an increasing emphasis on discourses of class and a move away from earlier geographical or climatic understandings of race which had been characteristic of the eighteenth century. A new emphasis was subsequently placed on the importance of the discipline of labour to overcome the natural world, an emphasis which is apparent in the documents I consider in the second half of this study.33 These ideas, brought from the imperial metropole, were applied to the indigenous people met in the Tasman world, to develop theories about the people and their societies, and influenced the formation of imperial and colonial relationships within the region. The same ideas were brought to different places and applied to different peoples. The insights into the nature of imperial connection through the idea of networks, webs or the logic of circulation help focus a study around the movement of people or ideas about what may now appear as discrete territorial entities with rigid boundaries.34 Alan Lester has suggested that communications between colonial sites allowed representations of indigenous people in one part of the world to act as precedents, guiding imageries of subsequently colonized people elsewhere.35 In the case of Australia and New Zealand, when ongoing British interaction with Mori and Aboriginal people was established at approximately the same time, the webs of connection between knowledge in Australia and New Zealand were iterative.

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Race and Identity in the Tasman World

Identity and History Writing

Common discourses of race were brought to the Tasman world and applied to indigenous peoples in the region concomitantly with imperial intervention in the two countries. These shared histories, however, are not generally recognized within national historiographical traditions. Mein-Smith and Hempenstall have stated that the national histories ignore each other, and Donald Denoon has suggested that shared histories in Australasia operate as a repressed memory.36 New Zealand historians have had to be more attentive to Australian connections than their Australian colleagues, given that early white settlers generally journeyed to New Zealand via Australia and Mori also made trips to Australia during their early imperial relations with the British, but serious consideration of the connections between the two countries remains limited. Th e New Zealand historian Keith Sinclair was the most cognizant of these shared histories before the work of James Belich, declaring in his 1959 A History of New Zealand that the early European history of the country is substantially the tale of an Australian frontier.37 Kerry Howes 1977 work Race Relations, Australia and New Zealand: A Comparative Survey 1770s1970s is the exception to the usual disconnection between histories of race relations in the two countries.38 Howe attempted to undermine the idea that the apparent success or otherwise of Mori and Aboriginal people in dealing with colonizers was determined by racial hierarchy, but his analysis suffered from a tendency to replace race with culturally deterministic explanations. More recent collections bringing together Australian and New Zealand history have published essays from both national traditions together but have generally not attempted comparative analysis.39 Keith Sinclair did analyse the history of race relations in the two nations as part of his broader analysis of race in settler colonies in the British empire in his 1971 article investigating why New Zealands race relations were better than those in other settler societies.40 While Sinclairs certainty about the superiority of race relations in New Zealand has been questioned, his comparative approach to race relations has received little attention in subsequent years. In part, this reflects an interesting tension in Sinclairs own work; while he was cognizant of these connections they did not unsettle his confidence in the primary analytical importance of the nation nor did they call into question his vision of the historians role in the nation building process. This study, however, attempts to take a transnational approach to considering the way racial thought was developed and applied, as well as how it continues to impact of identity through considering these national historical traditions. As Ian Tyrrell has written, not only must the national not be assumed, but it is important to recognize that nation itself is produced transnationally.41

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Comparison of their own race relations with those in Australia constitutes an important facet of Pkeh New Zealand identity. The traditional version of this held that New Zealand was populated by a better type of indigenous people, who were treated better by the white settler population, than was the case in Australia. This superior record of race relations was due to the fact that Pkeh themselves were supposedly a better type of people than the convicts who settled Australia. Erik Olssen has described this as a touchstone of Pkeh identity, that New Zealand colonists as well as Mori were considered superior: The convict past and the violence and turbulence of their history made Australians different.42 The concept of Pkeh having treated Mori better remains a powerful, if generally implicit, trope of New Zealand national identity. The colonial sources on which histories of early race relations are based can be used to suggest equality through their often positive portrayal of Mori. Unlike Australian historians, who now often question the negative portrayal of Aboriginal people in colonial texts, national historians in New Zealand are, understandably perhaps, less likely to interrogate the creation of positive depictions. The concept is bolstered by the contemporary importance of the Waitangi Tribunal, which since 1985 has worked to settle the historical grievances of Mori iwi against the Crown.43 Australians, on the other hand, generally ignore any sense of a shared past with New Zealand. Certainly we tend to shun serious recognition of New Zealands race relations situation, where the acceptance of indigenous land rights and cultural life along with the Mori political presence within the nation make for a very uncomfortable comparison with the situation for Aboriginal people. The idea of distinctiveness in national histories is also based on a lack of engagement with imperial histories, and specifically the history of the British empire, with which these two countries are so entwined. Imperial histories can offer a different perspective on the development of racial discourse and what may appear to be the unique treatment of indigenous people within a national history. C. A. Baylys Imperial Meridian, described the various strategies applied to indigenous people during the second British empire. Indigenous systems of land ownership were transformed from their own communal arrangements, being codified into fee simple and directly alienable property tenures. The colonial state worked as indigenous landed elites, those magnates who had already achieved prominence in their own societies, while domesticating and settling nomads, slash and burn agriculturalists, even peasant farmers.44 Baylys insights can assist understanding of the divergent racial representations and treatment of indigenous peoples in the Tasman world and the way in which representation was related to the operation of colonial state power.

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Race and Identity in the Tasman World

Recognizing Indigenous Agency

Ann Laura Stolers Tense and Tender Ties advocates for a comparative history which focuses on specific exchanges, interactions, and connections that cut across national borders without ignoring what state actors do and what matters about what they say.45 She suggests undertaking research that begins with peoples movements rather than with fixed politics. There can be a tendency to focus too greatly, however, on movement, to place less emphasis on those people who are less likely to move across national boundaries, in particular indigenous peoples. A focus on movement, be it of people, ideas or objects, should not undermine a concomitant focus on the original people of the sites that imperial agents travelled to. While we can trace the shifts in metropolitan racial thought in the documents considered in this study, I will demonstrate that ideas about race were not simply projected onto indigenous people but were molded by indigenous strategies in the face of cross-cultural encounters. Bronwyn Douglass work examined the specific historical circumstances which created early encounter texts. She stressed that many of the descriptions of racial characteristics in texts such as those from the Cook voyages textualize a particular conjuncture of indigenous agency with European prejudice and experience: the indigenous factor is pivotal, disturbing or reinforcing prejudice, contributing to experience, and leaving countersigns in the texts.46 Ranajit Guhas seminal essay The Prose of Counter-Insurgency similarly focused on the agency of the colonized or subaltern subjects to create events and instigate rebellion as well as to shape the nature of imperial representation, arguing against representations of rebellion as a sort of reflex action or assumptions that indigenous people responded in a passive way to the imposition of colonialism.47 Guhas focus on the agency of indigenous peoples to create and shape events is matched by Eugene Irschicks Dialogue and History which stressed the dialogic relationship between colonizer and colonized in the creation of knowledge about indigenous peoples. He argued that the creation of knowledge was not a simple imposition by a hegemonic colonial power but an ongoing process of negotiation by groups exercising varying degrees of power. While he presumed that both domination and exploitation occurred on a constant basis in imperial spaces, he argued that repression helps to create new knowledge. This approach suggests that a history sensitive to indigenous agency can be created even in a study focused on elite documents. Irschicks work analysed what he called key epistemological moments in a similar methodological approach to that which I have taken in this study.48 Such insights impel a serious consideration of the nature of indigenous reaction and resistance to the European presence during both the imperial and colonial periods. They encourage reflection on the nature of indigenous interac-

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tion, and how indigenous peoples cultural imperatives shaped their responses to the European presence on their land. John Gascoigne has noted the importance in Australia, as in other places, of how local circumstances meant that some aspects of Enlightenment ideology received greater emphasis than others.49 I would argue that diverse indigenous communities help shape these local circumstances in a way that is important to recognize. This requires attention to the influence of pre-colonial social structures, economic practices, and mentalities on British empire-building.50 While imperial histories now focus on flows of ideas, peoples, objects and practices, this should not be at the expense of those who are local to the sites that imperial agents moved to and across. The stakes of an appropriate recognition of indigenous agency in imperial and colonial histories are high, for if indigenous people are not seen as active agents then they are in danger of appearing frozen at the time of first contact, without the capacity to react or change. If judgements are made according only to western standards, and there is not a concerted attempt to understand precolonial cultural structures, then the actions of indigenous peoples throughout imperial and colonial encounters can seem to be without logic or without importance. As Tony Ballantyne has recognized, failing to provide due recognition of indigenous peoples, their strategies, reactions, accommodations and persistence, allows historians to see the British as always being the primary historical actors, unfettered and unchanged by the communities they interacted with and ruled over.51 Ballantyne has expressed concern at the lack of interest in pre-colonial indigenous cultures in new imperial histories, which he feels has weakened analysis. This work attempts to redress this imbalance with a sustained consideration of the role of indigenous agency in responding to imperial and colonial incursion. It considers culturally-embedded responses by indigenous people as an important part of imperial and colonial relations. Stressing an active indigenous role in the encounters which shaped the language of race as well as colonial projects is not designed to imply that indigenous people were somehow complicit in their own colonization, or that imperial and colonial regimes were not embedded in relations of power. Such an approach, I would argue, helps undermine the view that Europeans were the only active agents in colonial relations, or indeed the opposite perspective that indigenous peoples were able to act somehow outside of the power relations of imperial systems. Taking clear account of indigenous agency brings a focus back to the imperial periphery as a site with real influence on the development of racial thought and colonial projects. Stuart Banner, in his work on land, settlers and indigenous peoples, described how his scholarship had led him to re-evaluate assumptions about movement from metropole to periphery in imperial and colonial relations:

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Race and Identity in the Tasman World Accounts of the relationship between colonies and imperial capitals often seem to assume that policy decisions, including those regarding land policy, emanated from the centre out to the periphery that decisions in London or in Washington dictated what would happen in the colonies. After spending some time trying to figure out why events transpired so differently in otherwise similar places, Im persuaded that, if anything, the opposite was the case that is, that conditions on the periphery, especially the actions and the characteristics of indigenous people, and the ways they were perceived by early white settlers, generated local policies that were later incorporated into decisions made in London or Washington.52

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Resistance and the Question of Violence

I argue that it is not just movement itself but the ideas and discourses surrounding mobility which help shape race and identity, especially in the Australian context. While imperial and colonial agents were the ones traveling across the world to find and colonize new lands, the mobility of indigenous people became a powerful signifier of human difference. In Australia, movement became a key focus of European views of Aboriginal people and their relationships to land. By the end of the period under consideration the notion of Aboriginal people as wanderers had perhaps become the dominant way that Europeans conceptualized Aboriginal lifestyles. At the same time the overwhelming view of Mori was of warriors, as people with the capacity for resistance and tendency to resist, and to resist through violent means. This view, I argue, was formed on the first afternoon of contact between James Cooks Endeavour crew and Mori, and proved particularly influential in shaping both views about Mori and the way the British related to them in the period covered by this work. Views of Mori as warriors also help shape visions of New Zealand history which are examined here.

The view of Mori as warriors alerts us to a particularly important aspect of resistance as discussed in this study, which is the crucial role of both contemporary and historical readings of the importance of violence, as well as the place of violence in our understandings of resistance. A central contention here is that violence especially as it relates to depictions of the defence of land is crucial to the creation of racial images and the formation of imperial projects, and that initial categorizations of an indigenous population either as a warrior race or as unoffending people create tropes which allow, or deny, later recognition of aggressive resistance. I also argue that it is aggressive resistance which is recognized as legitimate, both in colonial texts, and in their analysis within national historiographical traditions. Other forms of resistance, including strategies of withdrawal, refusal to engage with the colonizer, and the continuation of cultural practices and social organization even in the face of considerable difficulty and risk, are not recognized as resistance and perceived instead as either recalci-

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trance or an incapacity for change. My first chapters argue that understandings of Mori as a warrior race came to dominate understandings to the point where violent resistance was expected in New Zealand. Aboriginal people, on the other hand, were described as unoffending, which, when combined with representations of their inappropriate land use, meant that even moments of violent resistance were not recognized as defence of land. These depictions have proved so powerful that they continue to influence the national histories of Australia and New Zealand today. Mori resistance, be it actual physical resistance or the threat of it, is taken for granted in New Zealand historiography. In Australia recent debates about the nature and extent of frontier conflict demonstrate that the idea of Aboriginal resistance remains something that requires proof, and indicate the persistence of depictions of Aboriginal people as passive in the face of their dispossession. Other views of agency and resistance in Australia, however, encourage a broader reading of Aboriginal action which tries to take account of culturally specific responses. Lynette Russell argues that dominant works on resistance are shaped by Anglo male values and that conceptions of Aboriginal resistance in Australian historiography have been held to a relatively narrow and unnecessarily restrictive meaning.53 Crystal MacKinnon has stressed that there are two types of Aboriginal resistance that need to be recognized. The first is that resistance which is more likely to be recognized by historians, resistance which is directed externally towards the oppressor. Less overt and less confrontational resistance must also be recognized, MacKinnon argues, and this includes forms of resistance that exist for the Indigenous community which help to build communities and provide the basis of other action.54 Violence is important, however, not only to European understandings of resistance and the creation of national histories, but also as a strategy of colonial control. Michael Taussig outlined how the culture of terror pervaded colonialism, and described in great detail the violent methods used by colonists and traders in colonial sites, which became spaces of death.55 Nicholas Dirks highlighted the connections between violence, or more direct forms of conquest, and knowledge, or the cultural project of control. Dirks stressed that cultural intervention and influence were not antidotes to the brutality of domination but extensions of it.56 Baylys work is instructive on the crucial role of the military and the use of aggression in imperial governance. He described governance in British territorial possessions as colonial despotisms, characterized by a form of aristocratic military government which emphasized hierarchy and racial subordination.57 This reflects a shift within the historiography of the eighteenth century which has seen new emphasis placed on the importance of violence as Britain has been re-imagined as a military-fiscal state. Lawrence Stone has suggested that a key role of the imperial state was to monopolize as much as possible of legitimate violence. It is thus responsible for internal peace and external security.58

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Race and Identity in the Tasman World

I attempt to examine these varied forms of colonial control together, looking at the role of violent domination and particularly the way it shaped forms of knowledge production in colonial settings. During the Cook voyages displays of superior weaponry were used to intimidate, and Cook hoped kidnapping would help teach indigenous people about the friendly intentions of the explorers. At the close of the eighteenth century David Collins described how colonial authorities believed kidnapping would further British knowledge of indigenous populations and their resources, and if hostage taking did not also subdue resistance then it was hoped that military retaliation would. Later, Samuel Marsden was involved in the violent repression of both convict and Aboriginal groups while working to curb white violence against Mori. Finally, the Aborigines Committee struggled to justify violent interaction in all British colonial possessions and to maintain their hope of the moral redemption of the colonial project while stopping frontier conflict. The question of violence, its legitimate use, and its consequences, stood at the heart of imperial projects in the Tasman world.

Discourses of Sovereignty

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The representations of indigenous peoples with perhaps the greatest material effects for both colonizer and indigenous populations were the developing discourses of sovereignty in the Tasman world. As Tim Rowse has argued, sovereignty is the central issue in the colonization of Australia, and, I would argue, the same holds true for New Zealand also. Even if not one indigenous person was ever killed or injured by violence in the service of conquest, Rowse argued in a paper delivered at the height of the History Wars, there would remain strong grounds for indigenous grievance and for colonists shame and sorrow. Violence was, and is, incidental to the really important story that British people assumed sovereignty in Australia without Aboriginal consent. This, Rowse asserted, is an uncontradicted story dependent not on any story of colonial settlement.59 A critical theme of this study is how Aboriginal sovereignty was disregarded by the British while Mori were understood as sovereign owners of their country. From the time of first contact British colonists began constructing discourses about indigenous relationships to land; including discussions of population density, perceived notions of property ownership, political organization and defensive capability. These discourses, heavily infused with both racial imagery and Enlightenment notions of human development, were critical to the design of colonial projects and ongoing relationships with both Mori and Aboriginal people. This study suggests that notions of Mori as a sovereign people were developed in the first few days of contact with James Cooks Endeavour crew, as the voyagers perceived Mori to have communities structured by hierarchical relationships, to be prepared to defend land and to work it appropriately through agricultural pur-

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suits. Recognition of Mori sovereignty meant that British colonial projects had to be structured and pursued in a manner different from those followed in Australia. The Treaty of Waitangi, the document that signalled formal British colonization of New Zealand, recognized Mori as sovereign owners of the country while transferring that sovereignty to the British Crown. Australia, on the other hand, was initially assumed to be sparsely populated with indigenous people who did not change the landscape and were understood to offer little challenge. Later representations of Aboriginal people would highlight their wandering relationship with land, where a nomadic lifestyle was said to rule out systems of property ownership. These discursive constructions were, however, undermined by the recurring Aboriginal insistence of their own relationship with the land, which continued undiminished despite British settlement. British colonial authorities took different paths to colonial control in the Tasman world, based on their readings of the characteristics and capabilities of the indigenous peoples of the region, readings which were heavily imbued with racial thought. These racial discourses were neither inevitable nor natural, they did not and do not unproblematically reflect realities or facts but are instead the creations of the specific historical circumstances of imperial and colonial intervention in these two countries. While these racial discourses may not reflect reality they did, and still do, have material effects in the two countries, and constitute the major difference in relations between the indigenous and nonindigenous populations of Australia and New Zealand.

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