Maori narrative: the oral tradition
Like all Polynesian peoples, the Maori, who began to occupy the islands now called New
Zealand about 1,000 years ago, composed, memorized, and performed laments, love poems, war
chants, and prayers. They also developed a mythology to explain and record their own past and
the legends of their gods and tribal heroes. As settlement developed through the 19th century,
Europeans collected many of these poems and stories and copied them in the Maori language.
The most picturesque myths and legends, translated into English and published in collections
with titles like Maori Fairy Tales (1908; by Johannes Carl Andersen), were read to, or by,
Pakeha (European) children, so that some—such as the legend of the lovers Hinemoa and
Tutanekai or the exploits of the man-god Maui, who fished up the North Island from the sea and
tamed the sun—became widely known among the population at large.
Oratory on the marae (tribal meeting place), involving voice, facial expression, and gesture, was,
and continues to be, an important part of Maori culture; it is difficult to make a clear distinction,
such as exists in written literatures, between text and performance. Nor was authorship always
attributable. And the Maori sense of time was such that legend did not take the hearer back into
the past but rather brought the past forward into the present, making the events described
contemporary.
Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, the Maori people, disastrously affected by
European “minor” diseases to which they had only weak resistance, appeared to be in decline,
and European scholars recorded as much Maori legend as they could, believing that the Maori
would die out and that their oral culture, highly figurative and often of rare poetic beauty,
deserved preservation. Some of this material was published; a great deal more was stored in
libraries and is studied today, not least by Maori students and scholars intent on recovering their
own cultural past.
Although Maori individuals and groups have become notable performers of various kinds of
European music, their traditional music also survives. To the 19th-century European ear, the
words of Maori poetry were impressive and beautiful, but the music was “tuneless and
monotonous” and tended to be ignored. It is, however, inseparable from the words and the
scholars Mervyn McLean and Margaret Orbell were the first to publish text and music together.
McLean and Orbell distinguished three kinds of waiata (songs): waiata tangi (laments—for the
dead, but also for other kinds of loss or misfortune), waiata aroha (songs about the nature of
love—not only sexual love but also love of place or kin), and waiata whaiaaipo (songs of
courtship or praise of the beloved). In addition, there are pao (gossip songs), poi (songs
accompanying a dance performed with balls attached to flax strings, swung rhythmically), oriori
(songs composed for young children of chiefly or warrior descent, to help them learn their
heritage), and karanga (somewhere between song and chant, performed by women welcoming or
farewelling visitors on the marae). Some chants are recited rather than sung. These include
karakia (forms of incantation invoking a power to protect or to assist the chanter), paatere
(chants by women in rebuttal of gossip or slander, asserting the performer’s high lineage and
threatening her detractors), kaioraora (expressions of hatred and abuse of an enemy, promising
terrible revenge), and the haka (a chant accompanied by rhythmic movements, stamping, and
fierce gestures, the most famous of these being war dances that incorporate stylized violence). In
every aspect of this tradition, the texts, which in pre-European times survived through
memorization, were inseparable from gestures and sometimes music. The most widely used
modern development of these traditional forms is the waiata-a-ringa (action song), which fits
graceful movements to popular European melodies.
Modern Maori literature
Until the 1970s there was almost no connection between the classical Maori tradition, preserved
largely as a historical record, and the development of a postcolonial English-language literature
of New Zealand. When Maori writers began to appear after World War II, they wrote in English,
and the most notable of them knew little or nothing of the Maori language. In 1966 Jacqueline
Sturm, wife of the poet James K. Baxter, became the first Maori writer to appear in a major
anthology of New Zealand short stories. By that time, Hone Tuwhare, the first Maori poet to
make a strong impression in English, had published his first book, No Ordinary Sun (1964). Witi
Ihimaera’s short stories, collected in Pounamu, Pounamu (1972; “Greenstone, Greenstone”), and
his novel Tangi (1973) seemed finally to establish Maori writers as part of modern New Zealand
writing. The Whale Rider (1987; film 2002) gained Ihimaera an international readership. Patricia
Grace’s narratives of Maori life—Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (1978), The Dream Sleepers,
and Other Stories (1980), Potiki (1986)—were very widely read, especially in schools as part of
a broad effort in New Zealand to encourage the study of Maori writing. And
Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983), winner of Britain’s Booker Prize in 1985, probably
outsold, both at home and abroad, any other book written during the postwar period. In the work
of these writers, the language is English, the forms (particularly in fiction) are European, and
“Maoriness” is partly a matter of subject, partly of sensibility, and partly (as in the case of
Hulme, who has only one Maori great-grandparent and who changed her given name from Kerry
to Keri) sympathetic identification.
But, increasingly through the 1980s, there was a tendency to politicize Maori issues in literature,
something seen clearly in Ihimaera’s The Matriarch (1986) and in some of the later fictions of
Grace, where the misfortunes of the Maori are laid, sometimes angrily, at the Pakeha door. A
reaction against this came from Maori novelist Alan Duff—author of Once Were Warriors
(1990; film 1994)—who argued that the Maori must take responsibility for their own failures and
find the means to correct them and who spoke somewhat scornfully of his fellow Maori writers,
saying that they sentimentalize Maori life. This polarization within the Maori literary community
continued with the publication of Grace’s Cousins (1992) and Ihimaera’s Bulibasha (1994) on
the one hand, both of which present positive images of a people who were damaged by
colonialism and racism but who are fighting back, and with Duff’s What Becomes of the Broken
Hearted? (1996) on the other hand, in which salvation for the Maori is again seen as lying within
integration, education, and acceptance of individual responsibility. Duff’s controversial view was
taken further in his autobiographical Out of the Mist and Steam (1999), in which his abusive
Maori mother seems intended to be seen as typical while his bookish, intellectual Pakeha father
represents a path of escape from the cycle of violence, failure, and despair. In the 1990s, after
more than two decades of marriage and as the father of two daughters, Ihimaera publicly
acknowledged his homosexuality; this added a further dimension not so much to his work itself
but to the way it is read and the kind of interest taken in it.
A different form of politicization has come from Maori poets, some of whom rediscovered,
partly through academic study, the classic forms of Maori poetry and returned to them in the
Maori language. Since there are only a few thousand fluent speakers of the language
(government statistics from 2001 said something over 10,000 adult Maori claimed to speak the
language “well” or “very well”), this has been seen by some as an exercise in self-limitation,
while to others it appears to be a brave assertion of identity; anthologies of New Zealand poetry
now include examples of these new poets’ work in Maori with translations into English. Of the
Maori poets writing in English, Robert Sullivan is the one whose work attracted the most
attention at the turn of the 21st century.
Maori character and tradition have also found expression in the theatre, in plays written
predominantly in English but with injections of Maori. Among the best of these works are Hone
Kouka’s Nga tangata toa (published 1994; “The Warrior People”) and Waiora (published 1997;
“Health”).
Pakeha (European) literature
Modern discussions of New Zealand literature have not given much attention to the 19th century.
Immigrant writers were Britishers abroad. Only those born in the “new” land could see it as New
Zealanders; and even they, for most of the first 100 years of settlement (1820–1920), had to
make conscious efforts to relocate the imagination and adapt the literary tradition to its new
home. It is not surprising, then, that the most notable 19th-century writing is found not in poetry
and fiction but rather in letters, journals, and factual accounts, such as Lady Mary Anne Barker’s
Station Life in New Zealand (1870), Samuel Butler’s A First Year in Canterbury Settlement
(1863), and, perhaps most notably, Frederick Maning’s Old New Zealand (1863).
The best of the 19th-century poets include Alfred Domett, whose Ranolf and Amohia (1872) was
a brave if premature attempt to discover epic material in the new land; John Barr, a Scottish
dialect poet in the tradition of Robert Burns; David McKee Wright, who echoed the Australian
bush ballad tradition; and William Pember Reeves, born in New Zealand, who rose to be a
government minister and then retired to Britain, where he wrote nostalgic poems in the voice of a
colonist. They were competent versifiers and rhymers, interesting for what they record. But none
of the poets stands out until the 20th century, the first being Blanche Edith Baughan (Reuben,
and Other Poems [1903]), followed by R.A.K. Mason (In the Manner of Men [1923] and
Collected Poems [1962]) and Mary Ursula Bethell (From a Gardenin the Antipodes [1929] and
Collected Poems [1950]).
Post-World War II
Poetry
A Book of New Zealand Verse (1945; rev. ed. 1951), edited by Allen Curnow, is usually held to
mark the advent of New Zealand literature’s “postcolonial” phase. It was Modernist, nationalist,
and critically sophisticated, and Curnow’s long, elegant introduction set a new standard for the
discussion of local writing. Curnow’s own poetry, though not immediately as well received as
that of his contemporaries Denis Glover and A.R.D. Fairburn, had intensity, precision, and
formal control that theirs, for all its lyric ease and vividness of local reference, could not match.
Curnow eventually became, with James K. Baxter (a younger poet whose merit Curnow was
quick to recognize), one of the country’s dominating poetic presences.
By the end of the 1950s—when his second and more comprehensive anthology, The Penguin
Book of New Zealand Verse (1960), was about to appear—Curnow was already a major figure on
the literary landscape against whom younger poets felt the need to rebel. The decade of the
1960s, however, was dominated by Baxter’s poetry and charismatic presence. Baxter was a very
public and prolific writer whose Collected Poems (1979), which appeared after his death (in
1972 at age 46), contained more than 600 pages; it was said that possibly three times as many
additional poems remained in unpublished manuscript. He was effortless and natural in verse—a
modern Byron—while Curnow was all conscious skill and contrivance. It was in the year of
Baxter’s death that Curnow began publishing again, extending his reputation at home and,
through the 1980s, establishing a reputation abroad. Curnow received many awards, culminating
in the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, a rare honour he shared with such poets as W.H. Auden,
Robert Graves, and Ted Hughes.
Other poets whose work came to the fore during the 1950s and ’60s include Kendrick
Smithyman, a poet almost as prolific as Baxter but whose poems are much more densely textured
and oblique; Fleur Adcock, who emigrated to London and established herself among respected
British poets; C.K. Stead, who, in addition to his role as poet, earned an international reputation
as a literary critic with<script
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New Poetic (1964); and Vincent O’Sullivan, who, like Stead, was an academic as well as a poet
and a writer of plays and short stories.
Among the poets who became known in the 1970s and ’80s were several whose
work showed, at least as a general tendency, a shift away from British and toward American
models of Modernism and postmodernism. Two of the most talented were Ian Wedde, whose
energy, formal inventiveness, and stylistic charm in the use of spoken language extended the
range of New Zealand poetry, and Bill Manhire, a witty understater and unsettler of reality.
Others also appearing then
included Murray Edmond, a dour but resourceful pupil of the American school; Elizabeth
Smither, whose poetic world was sharpened by her sense of ironies and contradictions; Anne
French, who made gossip into high art; and Leigh Davis, a poet and literary theorist who gave up
poetry for higher finance. Lauris Edmond, who began publishing in middle age, was an anomaly
among these poets, riding high on the feminist tide of those two decades but writing in a more
conventional poetic style that set her apart from her publishing contemporaries.
Gregory O’Brien was among the more notable poets who marked out a space for themselves in
the 1990s. O’Brien, who was also a painter, sometimes illustrated his semi-surreal poems with
matching iconography. Other poets were Jenny Bornholdt, a warmhearted, clever observer of the
everyday; Andrew Johnston, also a witty poet, who gave language a degree of freedom to create
its own alternative reality; and Michele Leggott, the most scholarly of this group and the one
who took the most, and most directly, from American postmodernists such as Louis Zukofsky.
Fiction
In postwar fiction the central figure was Frank Sargeson. He had begun publishing stories in the
1930s, attempting to do for New Zealand what Mark Twain had done for America and Henry
Lawson for Australia—find a language in fiction that represented the New Zealand voice and
character. That Summer, and Other Stories (1946) gathered together the best of his early stories,
and it was followed by the experimental novel I Saw in My Dream (1949). Although both these
books were published in London, Sargeson was seen by New Zealand writers as something of an
inspiration—a man committed to full-time writing and to the “life of literature” in New Zealand.
Among his most notable younger protégés were Maurice Duggan, whose
stories<script
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p=234;key=true;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=412777;misc=1297867976052"></script> brought a new
level of sophistication into New Zealand fiction, and the novelist Janet Frame, whose fame was
to outstrip that of her mentor. From her first novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), Frame’s work was
internationally respected though never widely popular. However, with the publication of her
three-volume autobiography (To the Is-Land [1982], An Angel at My Table [1984], and The
Envoy from Mirror City [1985]) and its adaptation (written by Laura Jones; directed by Jane
Campion) into the movie An Angel at My Table (1990), Frame’s work received much wider
attention, attracting interest both because of that part of it that draws upon her younger years,
when she was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic and locked away in mental hospitals, and
because of its technical experimentation and linguistic inventiveness.
Sargeson himself continued to write throughout the postwar period. While respect for his
historical importance, both as a short-story writer and as a mentor to younger writers, continued
to grow, interest in his novels (such as Memoirs of a Peon [1965] and Joy of the Worm [1969])
had waned by the turn of the 21st century. His three-volume autobiography—Once Is Enough
(1973), More Than Enough (1975), and Never Enough (1977)—is, however, a lively trilogy
equal to Frame’s in interest and in the quality of the writing.
The 1960s saw the rise to prominence of two young novelists, Maurice Gee and Maurice
Shadbolt, neither of them much interested in technical innovation, both writing traditional, solid,
realistic novels giving New Zealanders a more comprehensive view of themselves and their
society than fiction had previously
offered. For a long time Gee’s best work was considered to be his Plumb trilogy—Plumb (1978), Meg
(1981), and Sole Survivor (1983)—which tells the story of the Christian leftist George Plumb (based on
Gee’s grandfather) and the subsequent fortunes of his children and grandchildren. His later novels,
however—including Going West (1992), Crime Story (1994), and Live Bodies (1998)—show a further
extension of his range and ease as a novelist, social historian, and moralist. Shadbolt’s background and
interests were also of the political left. The typical central character in Shadbolt’s early work is a product
of a working-class background who finds himself among writers and artists, is involved in love affairs and
marriages, but is always concerned about politics, especially the politics of what it means to be a New
Zealander. Strangers and Journeys (1972) gathers together and restates all the<script
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key=true;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=412777;misc=1297867976067"></script> themes of his early work, after
which Shadbolt found a new subject in 19th-century Maori-Pakeha relations (also explored by Stead in
his novel The Singing Whakapapa [1994]). Shadbolt’s attention focused especially on the 1860s, the
period of the New Zealand Wars, fought between European colonists and the Maori over control of
land. His three novels on that subject—Season of the Jew (1986), Monday’s Warriors (1990), and The
House of Strife (1993)—are possibly his best.
Other notable novelists of the postwar period include Bill Pearson, whose one novel, Coal Flat
(1963), gives a sober, faithful, strongly written account of life in a small mining town on the
West Coast of the South Island; David Ballantyne (Sydney Bridge Upside Down [1968] and The
Talkback Man [1978]), the “lost man” of those decades whose work deserves more readers than
it has had; and Ronald Hugh Morrieson, whose bizarre, semi-surreal, and rollicking stories of
small-town life, The Scarecrow (1963) and Came a Hot Friday (1964), were largely ignored
when they were published but have since been hailed as unique and valuable. Sylvia Ashton-
Warner, by contrast, wrote an international best seller, Spinster (1958), a success unmatched by
her later novels, but her fine autobiography, I Passed This Way (1979), is the personal record of a
brilliant “natural” both as a writer and as a teacher.
Drama
In the 1960s Curnow, Baxter, and Sargeson had all written plays of literary interest but no great
public success; the 1970s and ’80s, however, saw significant development in the writing and
production of New Zealand plays. Bruce Mason, whose one-man show The End of the Golden
Weather (published 1962) had been performed hundreds of times all over the country, continued
to write and saw the best of his earlier plays with Maori themes—The Pohutukawa Tree
(published 1960) and Awatea (published 1969)—given professional productions. Mervyn
Thompson wrote expressionist plays mixing elements of autobiography with social and political
comment (O! Temperance! and First Return [both published 1974]). Greg McGee probed the
surface of New Zealand’s “national game,” rugby, in the hugely successful Foreskin’s Lament
(published 1981). Roger Hall wrote clever comedies and satires of New Zealand middle-class
life—Middle Age Spread (published 1978), which was produced in London’s West End, and
Glide Time (published 1977). O’Sullivan’s Shuriken (published 1985) used a riot by Japanese
soldiers in a New Zealand prison camp to illustrate how understanding and sympathy fail to
cross cultural boundaries. Drama, the<script
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major literary genres to get started in New Zealand, developed rapidly in the 1980s, and new
playwrights (Stuart Hoar, Michael Lord, Hilary Beaton, Renée [original name Renée Taylor],
and Stephen Sinclair, for example) were finding producers, casts, and audiences as never before.
The turn of the 21st century
The short story continued to be an important form for New Zealand writers through the last
decades of the 20th century. One of its best modern exponents was Owen Marshall (The Lynx
Hunter, and Other Stories [1987], The Divided World [1989]); O’Sullivan (Survivals and Other
Stories [1985]) was another. O’Sullivan published both poetry and fiction (though Hyde and, to
some extent, Frame, had done the same before), and this practice of writing across genres
became a feature of the 1980s and ’90s. Two well-known novelists, Fiona Kidman (A Breed of
Women [1979], Paddy’s Puzzle [1983], True Stars [1990], Ricochet Baby [1996]) and Marilyn
Duckworth (Married Alive [1985], Rest for the Wicked [1986], Pulling Faces [1987], A Message
from Harpo [1989], Unlawful Entry [1992], Leather Wings [1995]), also published collections of
poems. Smither, best known as a poet, published several novels, including Brother-Love, Sister-
Love (1986). Wedde extended his range from poetry to the novel with Symmes Hole (1986).
Fiona Farrell, whose novels include The Skinny Louis Book (1992) and Six Clever Girls Who
Became Famous Women (1996), moved back and forth between fiction and poetry. And Stead,
whose political fantasy Smith’s Dream (1971) went through many reprints, continued to write
both poetry and fiction in the 1980s and into the next century. Many of his novels were published
simultaneously in New Zealand and Britain, including The Death of the Body (1986), The End of
the Century at the End of the World (1992), Talking About O’Dwyer (1999), Mansfield (2004),
and My Name Was Judas (2006).
Notable in the final decades of the 20th century was the number of literary biographies and
autobiographies published, as if New Zealanders had become eager to record and to read about
the creators of their national literature. There were full biographies published of Fairburn,
Sargeson, Baxter, Duggan, Glover, and Frame, as well as of the novelist and short-story writer
Dan Davin. In addition to the autobiographies of Duff, Frame, Sargeson, and Ashton-
Warner, Shadbolt (2 vol.), Duckworth, Lauris Edmond (3 vol.), the poet Charles Brasch, and the
poet and novelist Kevin Ireland also published accounts of their lives.
Also frequently remarked upon was the<script
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younger women novelists writing in, and largely about, New Zealand while finding a major
publisher abroad. These include Elizabeth Knox, whose novel The Vintner’s Luck (1998) won
international acclaim, as well as Catherine Chidgey, Charlotte Grimshaw, Emily Perkins, and
Sarah Quigley.
A new element entered New Zealand literature in the writing of recent immigrants, particularly
those from the Pacific Islands, as in the case of the Samoan novelist Albert Wendt (Sons for the
Return Home [1973], Leaves of the Banyan Tree [1979], Black Rainbow [1992]). But also among
these immigrants were some who came, or whose parents came, from places in Europe where the
primary language was not English and the culture was not British or British-derived. Writers
such as Renato Amato, Riemke Ensing, and Kapka Kassabova, born respectively in Italy, the
Netherlands, and Bulgaria, drew inspiration from such places. Amelia Batistich wrote about
immigrants from Croatia, and Yvonne du Fresne wrote about those from Denmark; though
Batistich and du Fresne were born in New Zealand, both wrote about places where family
connections remained strong.
New Zealand's indigenous population, the Maori, have a rich oral tradition of creation myths, stories of
adventurous voyages, tribal legends, and customary practices. The Maori also had a well-developed
artisan culture, which featured elaborately decorated houses, canoes, and entranceways to fortified
villages called pa. The beliefs and practices of the indigenous
population have profoundly influenced contemporary literature,
art, music, and motion pictures in New Zealand. The Piano
(1993), an Academy Award-winning film directed by Jane
Campion, features Maori-European relations in the early years
of European settlement in New Zealand. Once Were Warriors
(1995), with a screenplay by Maori writer Riwia Brown, depicts
the strain of urban life on one Maori family. Some of the
country's most prominent artists use Maori motifs and
symbolism in their painting, photography, sculpture, and
pottery. New Zealand's internationally known opera singer,
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, is Maori, as was one of the country's
most successful groups, the Howard Morrison Quartet. Some
of the most popular songs in New Zealand are Maori songs,
sometimes translated into English. A distinctive New Zealand
literature took some time to develop. It was not until the 1930s,
when New Zealand experienced a particularly harsh economic
depression, that a growing sense of national identity produced
some internationally acclaimed writers. These include Katherine Mansfield, Ngaio Marsh, Sylvia Ashton-
Warner, Frank Sargeson, and Maurice Shadbolt. Maori writers such as Keri Hulme, Patricia Grace, and
Witi Ihimaera have become influential contributors to the distinctively New Zealand literature of the late
20th century. Hulme won Great Britain's Booker Prize in 1985 for her novel The Bone People (1983)
about Maori life in New Zealand during the second half of the 20th century. The New Zealand film industry
is also gaining international recognition. New Zealand-made films have featured prominently in festivals in
England, France, and the United States. New Zealand actors, such as Sam Neill, in recent years have
had roles in major Hollywood productions such as Jurassic Park (1993).
