Joel Polack and the nature of historical writing

There is a painting of a man in a gabardine coat and hat, slightly hunchbacked, talking to a couple of Maoris on the beach, with potatoes and a dog in the foreground. Unfortunately, though I have a detail of the picture, I can't track the full picture down. I found it a couple of days ago, now I lost it. Such is the nature of Google searches.

Looking at this picture, I would want to know about the men, the European so obviously out of context, the Maoris, and what was going in among them. They seem to be bargaining. I know the goods Polack obtained from his brother, the auctioneer, publican and general wheeler dealer in Sydney. He wrote a very specific request spelling out the amount his brother should be prepared to pay for the goods, and complained about some goods that proved to be too expensive. The transaction would have taken place before 1837, but some time after 1831 when Polack first visited New Zealand. This picture encapsulates the rapid changes in New Zealand society and the interaction of Pakeha and Maori. The brutal Musket Wars would have been in living memory, but in this scene there is not a musket to be seen. It is a picture of peaceful trade, in a setting that, as Polack imagined, would be a wonderful place for European settlement.

I keep coming back to Polack, completing a project about him is in my bucket list. With this in mind, I read Vincent O'Malley's The Meeting Place, and more recently, some of his Beyond the Imperial Frontier. I wrote to him and expressed surprise that he didn't dwell more on Polack's account of the encounters between Maori and Europeans. He mentioned Polack in passing. In his reply, and I am grateful that he bothered to reply, Vincent O'Malley said that there are 'different approaches that can be taken to the past', one is biographical, another is encyclopedic. O'Malley takes a thematic approach. The problem with that approach is that it cherry picks incidents from a broad period, perhaps 1769, when Cook first arrived, to 1840, when some form of Imperial government was established, but somehow it does not capture the rapid changes that took place, not only within generations, but even virtually from year to year. I maintain that history is about people, who change and survive in ever altering circumstances. I am currently reading Simon Schama's Rembrandt's Eye, in which he tackles the history of the seventeenth century through the lives and paintings of Rubens and Rembrandt. The era comes alive though their daily concerns. I love Schama's story telling. I am also enamoured with David Reynolds, who writes about the shaping of the twentieth century through the eyes of some of the key protagonists, Chamberlain and Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, Carter, Sadat and Begin, Nixon, Kissinger and Brezhnev, Regan and Gorbatchev. This may be the “'great men' view of the past', now out of favour with professional historians, but it makes riveting reading.