Introduction:

We would like to thank the Nelson Historical Society for inviting us to deliver this lecture – we are honoured to do so. We would like to acknowledge the work of James Jenkins in establishing the Society in 1954, and his bequest, which made the lecture series possible. We have flown in from Napier, where we are hiding from interruptions to work on Volumes II and III of Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka: A History of Maori of Nelson and Marlborough, which are scheduled for publication about mid-2007.

We are living on a grant from the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, for which we are very grateful. Volume II will be a social history of the impact of European colonisation on Maori of Te Tau Ihu, while Volume III will be a smaller companion volume listing all the evidence identifying Maori in time and place during early colonial times. It will include baptisms, marriages, census records, Maori Land Court records, land ownership records, and so on, and will be an invaluable resource for people tracing whakapapa, and will relieve us of many requests for help.

We are currently looking for funding to write Volume IV, which will contain about forty biographies of chiefs, leaders, interesting individuals and some families in the 1820 – 1860 period.

Tonight, we are going to discuss the process of producing these histories, rather than the stories themselves.