The Meeting Place - Maori and European

When I wrote about New Zealand Jewish Writers in Jewish Lives in New Zealand Joel Polack, the Jewish trader who arrived in Aotearoa in 1831 dominated the chapter. He was not the greatest, but by far the most interesting of the writers. Ever since, I harboured the plan to write something more substantial about him. I believe that I know more about him than anyone else does and I have looked at material about pre-colonial New Zealand that other historians ignored. For example the commodities Polack asked his brother to buy for him sheds a light on the changing nature of trade in New Zealand. Setting up a brewery was a big step in an environment where the drinking culture was dominated by grog and grog sellers. Polack had interesting things to say about the Maori people and their adaptability. He had his own vision of New Zealand as a place for European settlement. He was perhaps the best read person living in the Bay of Islands at the time judging form the list of books he listed that were destroyed when his house was set alight. He had an interesting relationship with Maori, stripped at one time and having had to call on Henry Williams to settle a dispute, yet doing deals with Hone Heke. He resisted the temptation to go native and marry a Maori girl, but Colenso claimed that Polack was attacked and beaten up for his affair with a Maori girl. Despite the opportunities to marry a well born Maori girl, he tried to find a Jewish wife and bring her over a from Hobart. He was interested in the very issue of the meeting place between two cultures and had a good opinion of the Maori people. I have a lot of material gathered on my computer, some of it no longer accessible because of the incompatibility between my old computer and the new Windows 8, and I keep coming back to Polack. But as the Ethics of the Father says:

• "It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it" (2:21)

For my birthday I was given Vincent O'Malley's The Meeting Place. It is interesting reading. He has read very widely, but I couldn't help feeling that his book is an argument, with other historians, tracing the perception of the intereaction of Maori and Pakeha form the Fatal Impact school of thinking to the contemporary Treaty of Waitangi school of Maori as a vibrant culture that survived an encounter that was not as fatal as some thought. In fact, there are parallels between the survival of the Jewish people and their resilience and that of the Maori. This is a theme that is worth exploring further. The centres of Jewish culture were destroyed, completely annihilated. Yiddish as a literary language, Yiddish literature, Jewish theatre, authentic Jewish music have become only subjects of academic study, as probably the vibrant pre-European Maori culture, traditional oratory, traditional music, dance, became only bastardised shows for the entertainment of tourists. Yet these cultures both proved to be resilient and a new culture emerged from the ashes of the old that was destroyed. The Meeting Place is an interesting book for historians with a real interest in pre-colonial New Zealand, but the stories of people are missing that would have brought the history alive, women like Charlotte Badger, Jane Kendall, Betty Guard, and men like George Bruce, Barnet Burns, and indeed, Joel Polack and his nemesis, Benjamin Turner and many other interesting characters among the first settlers.