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4. Smoothing the Pillow of a Dying Race: A. A. Grace

State Policy Throughout the period covered in this book assumed that the Maori race was under threat of extinction and that measures to ensure its survival were necessary. Even the anti-humanitarian Domett held that the fierce application of colonial law to Maori was for their ultimate benefit as the only way the race might survive. This consciousness of imminent threat shaped educational policy, especially in respect of the Native Schools that aimed to equip Maori children with skills basic to survival not in their traditional society but in the modern one busily being manufactured in the colony. The sense of danger to Maori coexisted with a belief that they were, by savage standards, intelligent, adaptable and capable, if properly educated, of making the transition to modernity.¹ If the mainstream view was that that transition would carry them no further than domestic service or menial labour on farms, more enlightened Pakeha held that Maori might eventually achieve greater equality. At Te Aute College, where Apirana Ngata received a rigorous classical education, John Thornton held that Maori leaders should be educated to compete in the professions with Europeans. Even the Native Schools with their much more limited objectives for Maori education were not without idealism. Looking back on the late nineteenth-century Native School system, A. G. Butchers endorsed the view that the aim was to restore Maori self-respect because, should it 'become irrevocably lost[,] all hope of social and political equality with the invading pakeha would be at an end'.²

There were, of course, much harsher views of Maori of the kind Patrick Brantlinger quotes from the Wellington Independent from 1868, calling for Maori to be hunted down and slain.³ But this call came at a time of direct racial conflict during the New Zealand Wars. page 111Thirty years later the theme of extinction is still present in an 1899 poem, 'Maoriland', by Arthur Adams, but a tone of pathos has replaced that of vengeance. Maoriland is a land 'where all winds whisper one word, "Death"!' The last of the old Maori warriors are succumbing because their world cannot be assimilated into modernity. There is no need to hasten their departure by violent means; they fade of their own accord:

— though skies are fair above her,

Newer nations white press onward:

Her brown warriors' fight is over —

One by one they yield their place, Peace-slain chieftains of her race.⁴

By this time, with settlement securely founded in New Zealand, the notion of the dying race has acquired several meanings, roughly corresponding to the speaker's disposition towards the fate of those it signifies. The notion expresses the complacent assumption among white New Zealanders that Maori will fade as a living race to be replaced by a mythical version of their past, suitable for romantic art and tourist postcards. It conveys the mournful conviction that the ancient 'type' of the Maori is fading away and needs to be memorialised, as when H. P. Sealy reflects on the value of C. F. Goldie's paintings of Maori subjects: 'The old Native heads should be much prized, as the type is rapidly passing out altogether, and will soon be obsolete'.⁵ It evokes the view that Maori will survive by adapting to European ways under suitable leadership. The first number of the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine reproduced two Maori portraits, one of 'the venerable Patara Te Tuhi [who] is characteristic of the old school of Maori rangitira', the other of Mr. A. T. Ngata, M.A., 'a young native of to-day, highly educated and as thoroughly up-to-date as the most advanced Pakeha'. According to the essay in which the portraits appear, '[t]he two represent Old and Young New Zealand in juxtaposition; the older order gradually changing and giving place to the new'.⁶ Ngata's scholarly success and sense of mission for his people offered 'a splendid example of the innate capabilities of the Maori race under the influence of European education'.⁷ He is commended for turning away from the old Maori ways, represented nobly by Patara, towards an enlightened modernity which aimed at page 112improving not only Maori sanitary habits but also morality and religion. While Patara represents those 'fine old warriors [who] are passing away into the Reinga, the gloomy spirit-land', Ngata suggests the only means of race survival: 'it is to such men as Apirana Turupa Ngata that the remnants of the native people must look for their preservation from ultimate extinction'.⁸ The situation was in fact considerably more complex. Sitting for Goldie's study, 'Patara Te Tuhi: an Old Warrior', Patara modelled the dress and aspect of ancient nobility; he himself had been editor and principal writer of the Kingite newspaper, Te Hokioi e RereAtu Na, and in 1884 had travelled to England with the Maori King Tawhiao, where he visited Alfred Grace.

Patara was a very self-conscious 'savage'. A photograph of Goldie and Patara during the painting of the study is reproduced in the Illustrated Magazine. It shows the latter having a cup of tea with the painter, his boots and trousers showing beneath his cloak.⁹ In the story that Grace wrote in response to the visit of Tawhiao's party, 'The King's Ngerengere', the Maori party take delight in shocking the natives of England. One of the Maori party alarms the English by a mock display of pukana, rolling his eyes and sticking out his tongue, and the narrator explains to his servants that the 'black men' coming to dinner are 'very superior', considered by some 'the noblest savages in the world'.¹⁰ The story upsets the usual hierarchy of cultural knowledge with the English more ignorant than the visitors, who enjoy making fun of the English fear of savagery. However, it is the narrator who possesses truly superior knowledge byway of his familiarity with the codes of both cultures and his ability to interpret them to his readers. At one level a comic rendition of Maori quaintness, the story also shows Grace's ability to generate observant cultural commentary out of the misinterpretations attendant on Maori transactions with non-Maori; here the Maori subjects with their combination of dignity, sangfroid and subversive humour gain the upper hand. They act out the exaggerated expectations of savage behaviour for their own and the reader's amusement.

Survival as advocated by the Illustrated Magazine sounds very like extinction from another point of view, but the belief in adaptation did not always mean loss of separate identity or of racial pride. Butchers observes that the Native Schools prepared their students 'for successful contact with the foreign social organization which was clearly destined in a very large measure, if not wholly, to supplant their own'. Yet he page 113means by supplanting here not the disappearance of the people or their distinct racial consciousness; rather, he says that the schools envisaged that 'only in proportion as the Maoris were enabled to effect a more or less successful adaptation to the new civilization could they be expected to regain and maintain their original pride of race'.¹¹

The dying race concept also reflects what was felt to be demographic observation, which seemed to confirm that the once flourishing race was in fact declining. The task of the pakeha was to 'smooth the pillow of the dying race'. This observation was not supported by demographic fact as recorded in census data, but it had considerable purchase within settler culture.¹² James Belich observes that the dying race theme 'persisted to 1930, a generation after census evidence showed conclusively that Maori were on the increase'.¹³ The notion often involved an expectation that by inter-breeding the Maori race would die out to be amalgamated into a hybrid New Zealand race: British, but containing an element of the people who had adapted to the land over generations. As Brantlinger observes, 'New Zealand is one of the few places in which the recommendation of miscegenation as a solution to racial decline seems to have become fairly common.'¹⁴ The purpose of miscegenation, however, was not to revive the race but to assimilate it.

The dying race theme is also invoked by Ngata in a poem written in 1892 (see chapter 9) to describe the fading of customs and traditions as Maori struggled to adjust to the modern Pakeha world. Here also the meaning of the term is shifting and ambivalent: it may register the contemplation of irretrievable loss; it may indicate the prospect of successful adaptation to a new world, both alien and inescapable.¹⁵ It does not necessarily mean the abandonment of traditional Maori ways. Ngata sought to adjust to an alien present while reviving the memory and practices of a familiar past, resisting the sentimental pathos of Pakeha usage of the dying race theme. He even welcomed the decision by parliament to allow Maori troops in World War I to engage in the traditional Maori activity, combat, rather than garrison duties, having championed the move against government reluctance because of fears of contributing further to the decline of the race:

I say that the objection to the ablest of the Maoris leaving New Zealand because their race is a declining one is sentimental … the race has declined largely because it gave up fighting … page 114your civilisation requires fighting with brains, it requires special equipment for the battles of life. It took more than half a century for some of the warrior tribes to accommodate themselves to the new conditions. They pine away, they die, largely because there is no fighting.¹⁶

The most telling literary use of the dying race theme is found in the stories and sketches of Alfred A. Grace, which were widely distributed in the 1900s, popular in Australia and Britain as well as New Zealand, and where the theme supplies the title of one of the collections, Tales of a Dying Race (1901). Alfred Augustus Grace as Nelson Wattie recounts was born in 1867, youngest of twelve children of a missionary family who lived among the Tuwharetoa tribe of the Taupo region. His father, Thomas Grace, a missionary with the Church Missionary Society, 'had progressive views on Maori autonomy and a genuine concern for their welfare'.¹⁷ Grace, who was educated at preparatory school in London, St John's College in Sussex and at Cambridge, distanced himself from his father's puritanical background, but he took from it a considerable knowledge of Maori language and culture. Unlike most Maoriland writers, Grace had actual experience of Maori life. His familiarity with Maori is demonstrated by the visit of the Maori King, Tawhiao, and his party to Grace's home in England.

From 1887 Grace lived in Nelson, working as a journalist and writing stories and poems where Domett had made his mark as a journalist forty years earlier. An officer in the New Zealand Regiment of Field Artillery Volunteers, Grace was an enthusiastic subject of empire, he saw no conflict between colonial patriotism and British identity. In his introduction to the Poems of William Hodgson, published in Nelson in 1896, while celebrating the colonial poet he defines colonial nationalism:

Not a New Zealander by birth, William Hodgson was a type of the Colonist par excellence. His adopted country became his fatherland, and, 'forgetting any other home but this,' he never regarded the land of his birth with thoughts of regret. It is upon the resoluteness of such men as William Hodgson, and their loftiness of purpose, that the greatness of Britain's colonial Empire has been founded.¹⁸

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Although Hodgson comes to see New Zealand as his home, this implies no severance of his ties to empire. Empire-building and learning to love the new place are coterminous. Empire plants colonies and the colonies take on their own character, not as mere replicas of the original but as offspring with their own organic life. As H. A. Talbot-Tubbs puts it in the 'Introductory' to the first number of The New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, 'There comes a time in the history of every colony — at least every colony of British origin — when the new country ceases to be a mere appendage of the old. The offshoot sends down roots of its own into a soil of its own, and finding there sufficiency of nourishment, no longer draws the sap from the parent stock.'¹⁹ This process produces in turn sibling rivalry as the various colonies vie with each other to demonstrate the success of their civilising achievements. Grace's language becomes almost biblical as he enumerates the virtues, plenitude and possibilities of New Zealand, while advocating the need for more expenditure on both the imperial and the local military forces to prepare against any threat to the British Empire from European powers:

This Colony which in point of natural resources is second to none of the British Colonies south of the line; costing our fathers endless toil to subdue it and cultivate it that we might enjoy the fruit of their labours; fertile to an extent that is incredible to the European; well stocked with cattle and sheep; … its forests abounding in splendid timber; in short, a country capable of supporting some ten millions of people, and actually containing upwards of 600,000.²⁰

Grace complains about the inadequate size of the territorial forces but he indicates no anxiety about a continued threat to the colony from Maori. Two decades earlier, Domett's experience of Maori militancy in the Nelson region had prompted his vigorous campaign on behalf of settler rights and priorities against what he saw as imperial favouritism towards Maori. Grace evidently feels that such threats now lie in the past and his attitude toward Maori is consequently more relaxed and, within the limits of his colonial mentality, favourable. It is France, and Russia with its 'Tartar' cruelty,²¹ that he is directly concerned about, fearing that they will attack Britain and seize the rich prizes of colonies like New Zealand.²² External threat here consolidates the imperial bond.

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In 1895 Grace's Maoriland Stories appeared. A biographical note at the back of his Hone Tiki Dialogues (1910) recounts that the volume was well received by critics and the public and observes that this success prompted Grace to pursue the Maori theme: 'As the Maori tales in the book met with the heartiest welcome, the young author decided to give his attention to the unworked literary field which the Native race presented. He set himself two tasks: firstly, the portrayal of the contact of the white and brown races, and its resultant effects; secondly, the Maori as he was before the Pakeha influx.'²³ The first part of this programme proved more successful than the second. It is when dealing with the 'decadence' of the period following the Pakeha influx and with the period after contact but before extensive settlement that Grace most memorably represents Maori.

Grace also returns to the precontact period by way of renditions of Maori myth and legend. 'All but four' of Folk-Tales of the Maori (1907) 'treat of the Maori in his aboriginal state, and have been handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation'.²⁴ Of the rest, 'three belong to the period when contact with the white man was beginning; and one is included for the purpose of showing that even at the time of writing, when an imperfectly assimilated civilization has done so much to ruin a fine race, there exist members of it whose minds are still as primitive and simple as were those of their ancestors'. Folk-Tales belongs to a genre which supposedly gave access to ancient Maori ways and Grace recommends the stories as demonstrating that within a primitive race dwelt a capacity for feeling and thought akin to that of the ancient mythologists. Here he recalls Domett's position but, for Grace, the myths and tales do not merely preserve the living records of a dying race, they offer a kind of archaeological site in which the unspoiled aboriginal forms of racial consciousness may be discerned within the imperfect contemporary ones.

The purity and simplicity of the primitive mind are admirable qualities to contemplate in retrospect. They do not, however, allow those exchanges with the impure present which contribute to the liveliness of Grace's tales of adaptation. Grace's development of this line of representation was received with notable enthusiasm by editors, publishers and readers. He had found a theme of general interest and a suitable mode — combining pathos, erotic interest and subversive humour — in which to present it to a receptive audience.

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Maoriland Stories includes 'Reta the Urukehu' set in the early contact period when Europeans have arrived but have not yet profoundly altered traditional ways of life. The beautiful Reta still belongs to a largely unspoiled Maori world full of both nobility and tragedy. However, the dilemma which leads to her self-sacrifice is provoked not only by the unchecked power of the traditionally minded chief, Te Heuheu, who pursues her but also by his resistance of the newly asserted Christian rules surrounding marriage. 'The Chief's Daughter', set somewhat later, opens with an artist, Craig, using the opportunity of a Native Land Court sitting in a picturesque spot by a lake to paint from Maori models. He has the whole range of types at his disposal: the tattooed warrior, the hag, the matron, the lithe youth and 'the beautifully rounded, graceful girl'.²⁵ Not surprisingly, it is the last type that occupies his, and Grace's, attention in the story. Hinerau, the beautiful daughter of the chief, Tama-arangi, falls in love with the painter and pursues him with a guileless determination that eventually overwhelms his scruples about taking advantage of her innocence and thereby ruining her, as many such maidens had been ruined before. The resulting alliance, secured by the overwhelming of Craig's resistance by the force of love, is presented as entirely happy. The plot recapitulates that of Ranolf and Amohia as an interracial romance. Grace writes with greater economy than Domett and without the ponderous speculation, but in this story he does not move beyond the entrenched belief that Maori attractiveness is a function of their simplicity, their frank expression of desire, and their invitation to the passions — all associated with their traditional culture. What 'maidens' in particular have to offer is erotic charm, emotionality and pliancy towards the European male. Hinerau moves Craig to put aside his inhibitions, but he remains the superior European for whom Maori are part of nature, part of the grand scenery of Maoriland, albeit more responsive to him than the mountains that frame her story.

In 'Hira' Grace's representation of an affair between a white man and a young Maori woman substitutes gothic horror for bemused endorsement of the liberating effect of Maori maids on white men when the jilted lover takes her revenge by having the head of her white supplanter brought to her by a Maori suitor as a love token. Like 'The Chief's Daughter', the story deals with a Maori woman's obsession with a white man. By the excessive nature of this obsession Grace suggests Maori oscillation between desire for the outward advantages of Pakeha page 118culture and an inability to express that desire except by way of savage unrestraint. But here a more atavistic and disturbing outburst of savage violence is unleashed by thwarted passion. The story begins with a historical summary of the early contact period when 'the Maori race was recovering, as best it might, that respect for the white man which it had once possessed but had lost by reason of familiarity breeding contempt and even war'. Here Maori have yet to learn that the response to outbursts of savagery will be 'a whole avenging [white] nation, with a gallows looming in the background'.²⁶ 'Hira' has a moment of light humour when the doomed young white woman sees her murderer approach while sketching from nature, and thinks: 'I'll get him to let me make a sketch of him — that is, if he is interesting looking and tattooed, and all that.'²⁷ But this kind of balancing satire directed at white views of picturesque Maori is incompatible with the story's gruesome treatment of dismemberment as part of the repertoire of Maori responses to the transition between a savage past and an unassimilated present.

Tales of a Dying Race is the work that most clearly expresses Grace's attitude toward the prospect of Maori extinction and, by implication, the attitude of the avid readers of the stories it contains. Domett in the 1870s had found Ranolf and Amohia hard to place with English publishers who approved the exotic Maori content but baulked at the poetry. Grace had no such difficulties placing his stories. He notes in his preface to Tales of a Dying Race that eleven of the stories had appeared in the Bulletin, two in the Triad, and one in the Dunedin Star.²⁸ J. F. Archibald, who published the tales in the Bulletin, sought rights to publish them as a book. In fact, Tales of a Dying Race was published in London by Chatto and Windus, who accepted the volume with remarkable alacrity on receiving it from Grace's agent. The biographical note in the Hone Tiki Dialogues details the enthusiastic response of the British reviewers, who responded both to Grace's depiction of 'the Maori's decadence' and to what the Daily Express termed the 'Responsibility of Empire'.²⁹

Evidently, Grace's rather patronising treatment of Maori themes found favour at the time in Britain as well as on both sides of the Tasman. Does this indicate that there was a general view throughout the empire that Maori, like other indigenous races, were destined for extinction? If we mean by extinction the total disappearance of the race, Tales of a Dying Race despite its title makes an ambivalent case. Grace is interested in the 'decadence' of contemporary Maori, that is, their page 119difficulties in adjusting to the impact of European civilisation and their decline from their old independent way of life, when New Zealand was truly 'Maori land'. This fatal impact theme is one he shares with Robert Louis Stevenson, but his stories lack the sober realism of Stevenson's depiction of that fallen state and the 'decadence' of Maori in his stories is treated as comic rather than tragic. Tales of a Dying Race is also, like Kipling's early tales of Indian and Anglo-Indian life, a series of sketches of exotic otherness and, as in 'Lisbeth', Grace's narrative sympathy for the subject race is associated with an antipathy towards missionaries. For Kipling, missionary activity has evicted Lisbeth, a girl from the hill tribes taken in by a missionary family, from her former world without giving her an adequate home in the new one. For Grace also, this in-between condition applies to Maori, but his interest in the Maori situation is narrower in its focus: Maori figure less as victims of the European malaise of Christianity than as an antidote to it. The most insistently approved aspect of Maori culture he depicts in Tales is that of sexual openness, which the missionaries seek to suppress and which serves as a source of consolation for Pakeha men seeking to escape the trammels of their own civilisation. In other words, Grace's subject is not so much the 'responsibilities' as the opportunities of empire.

Grace lacks Kipling's effortless precision with dialect and, while Kipling's racial attitudes are harsher, the Anglo-Indian is still present to us because his stories are so much more complicated than the ideas and attitudes embedded in them. Kipling speaks for empire, but he registers the brutal underside of imperial practice and he gives voice both to its ethnic multiplicity and to the range of types from within the British class system caught up in it. Grace seems more sympathetic to Maori, but the sympathy is rooted in his own antagonism to the puritanism he grew up with and the seeming absence of it in Maori life. His Maori are literary vehicles of that antagonism.

Maori figure in Tales of a Dying Race as subversive improvers of Pakeha. Maori women relax inhibitions and invite to the sensual. They offer an attractive opposition not only to the cares of the time-bound world but also to the coldness of abstract thought. Grasping the maiden, Reremoa, the scientist Rossmatin, finds 'something better than his pearly nautilus, something more worth keeping'.³⁰ Maidens like Reremoa can be split off from the unpalatable aspects of Maori life, a sensual booty to be carried off, not back to civilisation but to some page 120undefined intermediate space between the opposed worlds. Miromiro in 'The Tohunga and the Taniwha' is rescued by Harrington, the trader, from the erotic attentions of a withered tohunga. Like Domett's Amohia, she is the daughter of a bloodthirsty father, chief of the Onetea and a throwback to the old savagery. The two lovers are united on Harrington's boat where, at least for a time, they may drift at a remove from the responsibilities of civility and the terrors of savage tradition. Here Miromiro is not the 'wahine' of the Pakeha-Maori who usually remained among her people; nor is she like Domett's Amohia who, educated away from savagery, can be assimilated into European society. She is, rather, the means of entry into a world at a remove from both Maori and Pakeha society, a world at a distance from reality. White men may enter this world erotically by way of beautiful 'maidens' with unmaidenly ways, but what they enter is Lotos land. Maoriland at its most seductive is a world of faery, weaving the spell that civilisation may be escaped: 'the man who has once fallen under the spell of Maoridom, and has learnt to love its ways, comes back no more to civilization, but eschews the dwellings of the pakeha.'³¹

Nelson Wattie points out that wherever Grace's characters exhibit 'sexual frankness', they are always Maori.³² In 'Arahuta's Baptism' the tone of approval of freedom from puritanical convention is apparent when the narrator observes that 'Maori women are, for the most part, large-minded in matrimonial matters'.³³ The humorous tone of address is here directed at Grace's assumed reader: a sceptical Pakeha or Englishman, like himself, who might enjoy a literary visit to a world that allows satire to be directed at the prohibitions of Christianity and which offers the titillation of imaginary dalliances with permissive otherness. The story concerns the coming of the new religion, Christianity, and its destructive impact on the polygamy customary among the people. Here the main object of the story's animosity is the Reverend Gottlieb Poggendorff, whose strict interpretation of Christian morality destroys the harmonious family of the chief, Tamahua, and takes the life of his younger wife, Arahuta. The unstinting portraits of missionaries in Tales cast Maori sexual tolerance into sharp relief with the inhibitions of Christianity. Miss Cornelia in 'Pirihira' is a portrait of a religious woman that looks forward to the caricatures of the type in Frank Sargeson and A. P. Gaskell: 'To her mirth was an offence, and laughter was a sacrilegious thing. She had strange notions of the extreme value page 121of food, and thought it "too priceless a gift of God to be eaten in the dreadful prodigal 'colonial' way". And she believed in the Divine use of the rod'.³⁴

Not all the lady school teachers and missionaries are so ferociously depicted. 'School-Ma'am and Mormon Elder' is set in an Anglican school for Maori students. The school-ma'am in the story, Eliza, comes to display both a liberated attitude and a capacity for outwitting the censorious church authorities. She also shows a healthy instinct for wresting pecuniary advantage from seeming reversal when she points out to her American Mormon lover that 'there's the Government capitation grant, beside Church donations to the school'.³⁵ Eliza is invested with the sensual attractions generally associated with Maori maidens in the stories, but she is a citizen of the actual world not one to be stolen away on a boat; she must be married to be enjoyed.

What Maning calls becoming 'Maorified'³⁶ — which involves learning to see at least partly from the viewpoint of the other culture — is mainly an erotic adventure for Grace. Dressed up in higher purpose, it is also erotic for Ranolf in Domett's epic, but there is less preliminary chatter in Grace's version of the imperial-erotic encounter when Pakeha men meet maidens in Maoriland:

'Felton didn't go the whole hog all at once — he became Maorified bit by bit. It began by his going up the Whanganui River to Onepapa, Kohere's kainga, where he met Hina, Kohere's niece, and the usual developments followed.'³⁷

Lubricious Maori maidens are the subject of voyeuristic male attention in the Tales. Mihamiha in 'The Korowhiti' blossoms into 'a luscious womanhood, which found her lissom though full of shape'.³⁸ Miromiro in 'The Tohunga and the Taniwha' 'with her luxuriant black hair and reddest of lips, remained the most luscious of maidens'.³⁹ The attraction of Maori maidens with their extravagant displays of sensuality is not what 'maidenliness' would signify in a European girl of the time: 'Reremoa was pretty, eighteen, abounding in her hair black as coal — a Maori sea-nymph.'⁴⁰ Miromiro in 'The Tohunga and the Taniwha' has the advantage of automatic deference to male authority. Her lover, Harrington, addresses her as 'child' and she responds 'submissively' to his demands.⁴¹

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Grace, however, does not simply oppose Maori lack of inhibition to European reserve. Harrington, disguised as a taniwha, rescues Miromiro from her misshapen tohunga suitor, thus demonstrating that Maori as well as European religion is an impediment to happiness. In 'The Tohunga and the Wai Tapu' the Catholic priest, Father Maloney, and the aged tohunga, Tuatara, battle with their spells and incantations for the souls of the tribe. In 'Karepa's Taipo' the convent education of Meri leads to her death when she crosses a dangerous river rather than remain alone at night with the white men. In this story the sexual propriety of Pakeha religion has a fatal impact on the Maori girl, but her father's superstitious belief that the visit of a taipo signals death is also condemned. For Grace, religion is a cross-cultural bane and he shows no favour in his depictions of its varieties of doctrine or ethnic allegiance. (Domett would agree here in respect of institutional religion.) If Grace's Pakeha society is weighted down by Christianity, his Maori are eager for new religions, fickle in their allegiances, shallow in their interest in doctrinal difference. They express eagerness to fit a 'noo religion' combining Mormonism and Anglicanism into their social calendar not so much as a deliberate act of cultural hybridity, as James Belich would argue, but out of an exuberant love of novelty.⁴² There is an element of Maori mockery here: the speaker, Hakopa, is adopting the American accent of the Mormon — 'noo' — and looking forward to having 'another werry good time' with the unlikely alliance of American and English religiosity.⁴³

The narrowness of Grace's cultural vision is signalled by the insistent eroticisation of Maori in his stories; even signs of cultural insight are expressed in a way that patronises those he approves: 'that love which comes only to the heathen in his blindness, blessed with an ideality of which the cultivated, artificial pakeha knows nothing.'⁴⁴ At times Maori values are given respect in these asides by virtue of their opposition to Pakeha mores, as when a tribal embezzler in 'Horomona' hangs himself to protect his mana and the local interpreter observes: 'No Maori ever hanged himself because he had got mixed up with another man's wife.'⁴⁵ Yet the narrator continually reinforces the stereotypes of Maori values and attitudes, familiar even today. Time is 'not a Maori custom', a 'Hard Case Pakeha', well acquainted with Maori maidens, observes in 'Told in the Puia'.⁴⁶ The amusing simplicity such narrative asides confer on Maori is partly balanced by the animosity displayed at times towards page 123European types. Villiers' maiden sister, Miss Cornelia, 'as prim and proper a person as all England could produce',⁴⁷ is as limiting a portrait as that routinely applied to Maori 'maidens' in Tales.

Grace inserts a rough historical template into the stories so that his depiction of Maori decline and the contrasts between ancient and contemporary Maori are given some context. 'King Potatau's Powder-Maker' is set during the wars of the 1860s. Its main character is Bagshaw, who makes powder for the rebels and is an unpleasant representative of the Pakeha-Maori, at odds with Maning's depiction of the earlier condition of this incipiently cross-cultural figure. Like Maning's hero, Bagshaw enters a world controlled by Maori not Europeans when he reaches 'what the Maoris called the aukati, or line of demarcation between the King Country and the pakeha's sphere of influence'.⁴⁸ But his geographical journeys are not reflected in any access of cultural accommodation, understanding or sympathy as they are in Old New Zealand.

Grace sees civilisation as a thin veneer superimposed on the savage self, which resurfaces at times of crisis. In 'A White Wahine' a Maori defending a Pakeha child against a war party from the Urewera finds that 'the savage in him came to the top'.⁴⁹ Yet if Grace depicts Maori as caught between the conditions of savagery and modernity, he himself is poised uneasily between a colonial and a modern response to their situation, and he inclines mainly to the former. Grace's ready generalisations about the other — 'she had the indulgent Maori disposition'⁵⁰ — that are embarrassing to modern ears were routine in racial discourse until the end of World War II. E. M. Forster in A Passage to India (1924), which brilliantly anatomises the way empire misconstrues the other, never hesitates to observe the general characteristics of Orientals. Forster interprets Indians with benevolent intelligence, seeking always to grasp their thought and motivation without the distortion of European prejudice. Grace, however sympathetic he is at times, readily falls back on familiar expressions of Pakeha impatience: 'To drive a bargain with a Maori always takes hours, may take days, and has been known to take years.'⁵¹ This attitude of bemused but exasperated parental condescension explains the contrast between the seeming urgency of the collection's title, Tales of a Dying Race, and its satirical lightness when discussing Maori qualities. Grace is conscious that the ancient ways of Maori life, which he sees as purer than those of the decadent present, cannot page 124survive the building of a colonial state; he sees contemporary Maori as in a state of decline; and he shares the prevalent view that the race in its unspoiled form is 'dying'. Yet he depicts Maori from the early phases of contact to the present as resilient survivors, able to turn setbacks to advantage and adept at manipulating gullible Pakeha to their roguish purposes. The contradiction is less an oddity peculiar to Grace than the result of fundamental instability of the concept of the dying race in late-colonial New Zealand.

In his preface to Tales Grace uses William Pember Reeves's term 'communism' to describe pre-European Maori social organisation, and adds that 'they brought both their communism and their methods of warfare to a ripe perfection'.⁵² Communism here means the collective ownership of land, which is viewed less negatively than the disposition towards warfare but is also an impediment to their survival in the new European-dominated order. Grace interprets the fate of the race not as a failure to adapt but as a fatal narrowness of concentration in what Maori chose to adapt to their use: they grafted a more advanced technology of warfare onto their savage practices and tribal animosities:

When the white man arrived, he found the islands rent from end to end by internecine wars; but instead of seeing in him their common enemy, against whom it was expedient for them to unite, the Maoris welcomed the pakeha, because he could supply them with powder and shot with which to exterminate each other. This they almost accomplished, and now the assimilation of a civilization they do not understand is finishing the work.⁵³

Yet moving from the distant historical context to the vaguely contemporary one in which the stories are set, Grace's collection does not support this sense of inevitable extinction. His Maori subjects exhibit a subversive humour and the ability at times to upstage the whites who would take advantage of them.

In 'The Blind Eye of the Law' Tukutuku's father 'had assimilated pakeha notions in reference to land, and, forsaking his Maori communistic ideas, had procured through the Native Land Court a bona-fide title to ten thousand acres, his share of the tribal territory'.⁵⁴ This makes his daughter a woman of substance and she is courted by page 125and marries the handsome Ruku. While the latter is away fighting the white man's wars in the Urewera country, Tuku accepts the advances of the Pakeha, Cruttenden. Ruku is now caught between two laws; his instinctive desire is to exact revenge and to recapture his wife by force but doing so will invite the full retribution of Pakeha law. He goes to court as a good subject of Queen Wikitoria asking that his wife be returned to him, but the judge finds that the law does not recognise the Maori form of marriage, cohabitation. The Pakeha wins the wife and the acres, but the moral victory goes to the warrior whose dignified defence here is a sign not so much of his belonging to a dying race as of the bias built into the Pakeha system that he has defended.

Pirimona in the eponymous story is a 'pattern for all good Maori to copy — the "show" Christian of the kainga, the missionary's pet convert'.⁵⁵ But, thwarted in his desire for an heir, Pirimona turns to the Maori tradition of taking wahine-iti into the household to supplement the breeding programme. Success brings remonstration from the missionary, but Pirimona has found the best of both worlds. Pirimona also appears in 'Rawiri and the Four Evangelists' in which Maori are amusing and clownish but where Pirimona upstages the missionaries, inventing a story that makes gambling a perfectly tika — correct — Maori practice. The effect of this, however, is neither to assert the dominance of Christianity over Maori beliefs nor to suggest that Christianity has been successfully Maorified (the four evangelists of the Bible have been translated into Maori as Matiu, Maka, Ruka and Hoani). The two words exist in an untidy relation of struggle, mixture and antagonism, and characters like Pirimona move with relative ease between them.

The figure of the Pakeha-Maori, who could accomplish this transition between worlds in Maning's Old New Zealand, has suffered a decline in status and esteem. In 'King Potatau's Powder-Maker', the cartridges fired by the Maori 'rebels' on the battlefields of the New Zealand Wars are an ironic adaptation of that most pervasive sign of colonisation, writing, to the purposes of military resistance. '[M]ade of paper torn from printed books',⁵⁶ the cartridges are produced in what Grace describes as a 'native industry'. (The image is not unique; in Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain [1997] the Indian mutineers use shot made from printers' type.) Light armaments are manufactured by the Maori using sulphur from the geyser region and saltpetre and charcoal obtained directly from nature. The Pakeha-Maori, Bagshaw, is the overseer of this unrecorded page 126colonial industry. He is a brute, treating his wahine viciously: 'Then the pakeha-maori rose, and, cursing her, kicked her with his heavy blucher boot. The blow struck her on the thigh, and she limped as she went towards the raupo shed and commenced the filthy work. She was his wahine.'⁵⁷ In 'Horomona' a white character is reproved for 'behaving like a pakeha-maori'.⁵⁸ Maning, writing during the military engagements, when the line of demarcation between Crown and rebels was fiercely contested, looks back to a time when the points of contact between the parties were more blurred and Maori enjoyed a authority since lost; Grace, looking back from the security of the 1900s when the borders between Maori are Pakeha have been tightly defined, sees the figure as combining the most unpleasant aspects of both cultures. Bagshaw is outcast in both worlds and in the end is slain by the weapons he has supplied to the rebellious Maori.

'Te Wiria's Potatoes', rather like Lawson's 'A Daughter of Maoriland', exposes the romantic illusions of a sentimental Pakeha farmer, Villiers, who is outwitted by 'the dispossessed lords of the soil'.⁵⁹ Green and sentimental, Villiers is an easy mark for his 'pet tribe' the Ngati-Ata, who stand 'in picturesque groups on [his] veranda'.⁶⁰ The story withholds support from both the gullible Villiers and his guileful neighbours. At the end Villiers cannot interpret the level of insincerity in Tohitapu, who berates his people for stealing while continuing to enjoy the fruits of the theft. As in Lawson's story, the Maori show a propensity to take advantage of Pakeha who sentimentalise them, but here there is none of the paranoia of Lawson's narrator about the inscrutability of the codes of the other. Instead, Grace emphasises their capacity for mimicking the rhetoric of outraged indignation employed against them by the thieves of their own land. Pearson observes that '[i]t is ironic that while Villiers, who has dispossessed the Ngati-ata, feels that they are downtrodden, and that they are his protégés, Tohitapu their chief calls him his Pakeha, as if he is his protégé'.⁶¹ This talking back to the colonisers is practised by the children as well as the chief without Lawson's tone of exasperated bafflement. When the Anglican Bishop arrives to inspect the Omakau Native School in 'School-Ma'am and Mormon Elder' he is 'welcomed merely by a crowd of half-clad children, who made personal remarks about him in Maori, which fortunately he did not understand'.⁶²

As Wattie points out, Grace often belittles his Maori characters by mocking their speech.⁶³ The most egregious example of this mockery page 127is to be found in the Hone Tiki Dialogues which appeared as number two in the New Zealand Railway Library. In the tradition of Thomas Bracken's 'Paddy Murphy's Budget' poems, Grace manages to extend his gross caricature of Maori work habits, land dealings and cupidity with a generalised parody of inferior English that, apart from scattered markers like Pakeha, might apply to Aboriginals or Maori: 'I run to ketch t'e train…. T'e pfeller belonga t'e hotel tell me I miss t'e train if I no' hurry up. So I run, my wurra! yeh.'⁶⁴ Yet the sketches do allow a partial reversal of the stereotype as the Maori trickster character, Hone, holds his own against the patronising Pakeha narrator and even outscores him at times. In 'The Hatless Brigade' Hone produces an apparently unconscious parody of the dying race theme by regaling the narrator with his view that the habit among young Pakeha of not wearing hats indicates a racial descent into madness in which Pakeha will adopt Maori 'indifference to propriety' and Maori will seize the coats, hats and boots abandoned by their declining conquerors.⁶⁵ In 'A Delicate Subject' the unfortunate consequences of Maori land sales and dependency on wage labour is rehearsed by Hone. The story attributes the fundamental fault to Maori idleness and readiness to sell assets for cash, but it also establishes a sense of the scale of the loss involved and the seeming inevitability of Maori economic decline while indicating sympathy for the subjects of this exchange. In 'The Pakeha Woman' Grace humorously questions the advanced state of Pakeha women by way of Hone's preferences for the more biddable and attractive wahine, and attributes the popularity of miscegenation among Pakeha men to Maori women feeling sorry for them. 'Decadent' his Maori subjects may be, but for a fading race they display surprising resilience and wit. Even their stereotypical language use which seems cruelly to measure their distance from European civility proves at times an effective weapon against their supplanters.

Brantlinger Argues That throughout the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries there was a 'massive and rarely questioned consensus' about the inevitable disappearance of primitive races.⁶⁶ It is certainly true that racism and empire colluded to produce the convenient conviction 'that savagery was vanishing of its own accord page 128from the world of progress and light' and that extinction discourse 'mitigated guilt and sometimes excused or even encouraged violence towards those deemed savage'.⁶⁷ However, in the 'dying race' writing of late colonial New Zealand, we do not find a solid uniformity of opinion as to what the term meant: extinction, absorption or adaptation. We find, moreover, significant differences in the figuring of the affected race from that which we find in other settler societies, notably Australia. In New Zealand extinction theory is sometimes the callous expression of a colonial desire that the inconvenient other will simply disappear, but it is also influenced by an optimistic conception of hybridity. Miscegenation is commonly viewed in a positive light, although the white sympathy for miscegenation tends to be theoretically directed at its salutary effects on the Maori race rather than a matter of favouring actual unions.⁶⁸ Commenting on Maori attitudes towards miscegenation in his biography of Sir Apirana Ngata, Ranginui Walker observes that, while the term 'half-caste' had pejorative connotations for Pakeha, 'Maori admired hāwhe kāhe children for their physical beauty, a product of hybrid vigour'.⁶⁹ For Maori, hybridity brought the immediate pleasure of attractive children; for Pakeha, it could offer the prospect of an improved racial stock and the removal of a troubling difference.⁷⁰

Debates about race in colonial New Zealand took place against a broad background of shifting imperial attitudes, influenced by events such as the American Civil War, slave revolts, emancipation, and the Indian Mutiny, all of which impinged directly or indirectly on New Zealand attitudes. At the same time, a whole literature on the 'South Seas' was being compiled, both as part of the imperial endeavour and at times in conflict with the idea of empire. In many respects racial attitudes in New Zealand confirmed and mimicked the larger imperial pattern, but there are significant departures and local inflections. In particular, the liberal-romantic perception of Maori remained forceful in New Zealand, and was assimilated into the pseudo-scientific racism that emerged in the late nineteenth century, which hardened racial attitudes elsewhere in the empire and in America.

In America, according to James Kinney, 'the clear concept of formal racism — a "scientifically" based, rational ideology of black inferiority — emerged only in the nineteenth century'.⁷¹ Moreover colour prejudice was informed by a general aversion to hybridising. By the 1890s a 'vicious page 129racism' had taken shape supported by social Darwinism and the horror of miscegenation.⁷² The romantic and paternalistic Christian varieties of racism which had driven the anti-slavery movement were replaced by a sense of inevitable evolutionary process. As Kinney observes:

the resulting discrimination and oppression in the 1890s and later evoked a literary response almost equal to the battle of the books over slavery, and that shared some important similarities with the earlier fray … Eventually, … interracial sex emerged as the central issue, just as it had for the abolitionists and the slavery apologists a half century before. Among whites, turn-of-the-century beliefs in the genetic racial inferiority and the hereditary disposition of blacks to disease, led inevitably to rabid fear of interracial sex.⁷³

In New Zealand, social Darwinism informed racial discussion in the late nineteenth century, in particular the ideas of the dying away of the Maori and the inevitability of the triumph of the stronger race in the struggle for survival. But racial attitudes moved away from the American and Australian horror of miscegenation, actively promoting the assimilation of the Maori into the dominant European race, and this is reflected in the literature and the ethnological writings of the period. Aryanism was a key intellectual component of this ideology.

The effect of the Aryanisation of Maori in late-colonial New Zealand is illustrated by Alfred K. Newman, president of the Wellington Philosophical Society in the late 1870s, who displayed a brutal attitude towards Maori population decline in an 1881 essay, 'A Study of the Causes Leading to the Extinction of the Maori'. There, as John Stenhouse observes, he depicts the race as 'dying out before the Pakeha set foot in New Zealand'. Cannibalism, infanticide, suicide, murder and disease decimated the precontact population.⁷⁴ The disappearance of the race, in Newman's view, was 'scarcely subject for much regret' because it was 'dying out in a quick, easy way, and being supplanted by a superior race'.⁷⁵ For Newman, this fading away was simply an extension of that of the peoples derived from Malaya and scattered through the Pacific: '[t]hrough all this vast range of land we find a decaying race'.⁷⁶ Yet by 1884 Newman was insisting that the House of Representatives do its 'duty' to 'stop the decay' of the Maori race.⁷⁷ He urges the government page 130to 'enforce upon [the Maori race] a knowledge of sanitary laws, and of the necessity for observing them if the race is to be preserved'. Newman's concern with the health of the Maori race contradicts his earlier assertion that 'it is inevitable that it will disappear'.⁷⁸

Stenhouse notes that around 1905 Newman once more succumbed 'to the allure of grand theory', not scientific racism this time but the myth of the Aryan origins of the Maori.⁷⁹ His new-found racial conscience seems to have been influenced by his conversion to this theory, popular in amateur anthropological circles at the time. A member of the Polynesian Society, along with Elsdon Best and Edward Tregear, Newman advanced the theory in his 1912 book Who Are the Maoris? Newman confesses to finding the Maori race 'splendid' and 'charming' and argues, citing Tregear, that they derive from Northern India. As part of the Aryan diaspora, Maori were related to the British and thus fit subjects for assimilation into a hybrid race that would discover something ancient in the process of making something new.⁸⁰

Maoriland racism was focused on a declining but attractive indigenous other rather than a degraded black other as in America or a competitive and threatening Asian other, as in Australia. Yet the differences from Australia can easily be overstated. Tales of a Dying Race appeared in the year that Federation passed in Australia. There had been some expectation in Australia that New Zealand would join, more, certainly, than there was in New Zealand itself. Ged Martin notes among the arguments against New Zealand's joining the federation was a concern for the fate of Maori.⁸¹ Yet reading the New Zealand Illustrated Magazine in its first four numbers issued in 1899–1900 reveals no worried debate about how Maori might fare in a state which disenfranchised its indigenous people. The magazine does, however, provide evidence of disquiet about the Asianisation of Australia, echoing those in Australia itself:

Probable causes of future trouble and discord are involved in the occupation of the North of Australia. If that part of the Continent is to be colonised by aliens, and its industries carried on by means of Asiatic and coloured labour, … then Australia is laying up trouble for herself in the not very distant future, and it behoves us to consider whether we should involve ourselves in such matters in which we have no immediate concern.⁸²

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Harold Beauchamp as a member of the Royal Commission appointed by Richard Seddon in December 1901 to investigate 'whether the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia is one which it is prudent or desirable that the Colony of New Zealand should accept even upon the basis of an original State', found that the workers of New Zealand were strongly opposed, in part because of 'the bogey of coloured labour in Australia. New Zealand workers wanted to keep clear of anything like that.'⁸³

Beauchamp knew that public sentiment was against New Zealand's joining the federation. In his scrapbook is clipped a Sunday Times article of 1901: 'A majority of the residents of the "Land of the Maori and the Moa" hold in their hearts the conviction that their country has a grand separate destiny to work out, and they will never abandon that grand prospective dignity for the smaller one of being one of seven Commonwealth States'.⁸⁴ That separate destiny was signalled in the Illustrated Magazine by the quality reproductions of paintings of sublime landscapes and by an ubiquitous interest in things Maori. In outlining the magazine's intentions, the proprietors mention 'the preservation of Maori and Pioneer History, which would otherwise soon be lost to posterity'.⁸⁵ Although the two seem to be joined here in terms of equality, the point is that pioneer signifies, for the promoters of the new magazine, that which is in the past, like the ancient culture of the Maori. The difference between Maori and pioneer as historical descriptions in the magazine is that the former indicates a past incompatible with the present, the latter indicates a past being renovated in the process of entering a brighter future (of which the magazine itself is a portent). Part of that modernity is announced by the instinct to preserve the memory of the latter, to incorporate it, indeed, within the emerging and distinctive character of Pakeha society.

Grace's stories belong in a general effort to foreground those aspects of Maori culture judged amenable to the broad processes of economic, political, cultural and imaginative assimilation. Grace's Maori, as Lydia Wevers observes, are 'exotic and primitive but familiar enough to be assimilated into received Anglo-European and American literary traditions'.⁸⁶ Grace also participates in the export of colonial ethnic representations. Wattie observes that the popularity of his stories in New Zealand, Australia and Britain 'suggest that his benevolent but paternalistic views found ready acceptance in colonial minds', noting page 132that he established 'a literary fashion that was followed by other New Zealand writers'.⁸⁷ He also helped implant those views in an international readership for colonial stories, embracing both the adventure narratives of empire and the more complex registrations of cultural negotiation found in Stevenson and Kipling. Here Grace inserted a distinctively and highly marketable New Zealand mode of racial representation: allowing readers to feel both sympathy for yet another nobly dying race and admiration for their surprising resilience and humour.

Grace was writing at a time when Maori leaders including Apirana Ngata and Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) were urging a greater share in modernity for Maori.⁸⁸ The writers of Maoriland, however, dwelt not on the modernising tendencies within Maoridom but on the ancient character of a race whose warriors and maidens provided compensating images to the stresses and restrictions of Pakeha life. In his preface to Tales of a Dying Race Grace follows Maoriland myth by attributing the decline of Maori population less to the effects of colonisation (although he acknowledges its fatal impact) than to the Maori propensity for warfare, which colonisation merely exacerbated. He depicts pre-European Maori society as both Arcadian and murderous, the two existing in a state of oscillation: 'In times of peace the Maori enjoyed an Arcadian existence, into which no care intruded; in time of war he passed into the seventh heaven of rapturous excitement…. Tribe conquered and even exterminated tribe, but nothing could assuage the Maori's thirst for fighting'.⁸⁹ Grace confirms Brantlinger's concept of the 'self-exterminating' savage,⁹⁰ when he argues that after colonisation, the Maori enthusiasm for warfare undimmed, the race was merely better equipped to affect its own extinction. Here colonisation is not an active agency wreaking damage on Maori economy and culture but a passive process in which Maori assimilate an alien civilisation and are killed by their misapplication of it. It is Maori savagery that causes the dying, not the guns with which they are supplied.

Did the refrain of Maori as a dying race mean that Maori were held to be on the point of extinction or that the old Maori ways, Maori traditionalism, were passing away forever as New Zealand modernised? There was no uniform settler position on this question, illustrated in the contradictory responses to be found in the record of the model pa constructed at the 1906–7 International Exhibition in Christchurch. The organisers of the Exhibition made clear that they believed that page 133'[t]he fine old tattooed warriors of the Maori will soon be as extinct as the moa'.⁹¹ There is a quality of pleasure, almost exultation in recording tales of ancient 'savagery' of these warriors.⁹² Yet the Governor's speech depicts Maori not as dying but as thriving:

I am glad to think that what has often been said — that the Maori race is fading away — is not true. It is the hope of every one in the great Empire to which you belong that the Maori race will increase. I wish you well. I hope that you may have happy days here.⁹³

The bland words of empire may be empty rhetoric, but those they addressed were not in fact dying or even fading. Nor were they about to be assimilated into colonial culture. Already underway was a movement of revival that would be called a 'renaissance',⁹⁴ less far-reaching than the more familiar one of the 1980s, no doubt, but nevertheless an irrefutable sign of growth not decay, assertion not decline. Grace's stories, explicitly modelled on a pessimistic view of the Maori future, nevertheless confer a subversive energy on their subjects that is at odds with the ideological frame they are placed within.

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