A Jewish settler at the 'Frontier of Chaos”

Joel Polack, Artist, Writer, Traveller and Entrepreneur.

I gave a talk about Joel Polack this week. Polack was a monkey on my back, an unfinished project that I kept coming back to, adding a little information here and there. In the end I knew almost too much about him. I had to marshal all this information into a coherent narrative. I hoped that I would be able to do this by giving this talk. My small audience knew little about Polack and came along not because they thought that this is a rivetingly interesting topic, but because they came along regularly to these talks [Kia Torah] or came along to support me. In the event the general opinion was that this was quite an interesting talk. It did, however, raise a challenging question: Why bother with Joel Polack? Would he be of interest were he not a pioneering Jewish settler? What was his, or my contribution to New Zealand historical narrative. Polack had, by and large, a bad press in New Zealand history. He was not liked by his contemporaries, he was a snob, rather aloof and up himself. The Times described him as a grog seller and someone who acquired his land dishonestly. Polack sued the Times and won his case, but the New Zealand historical narrative was largely shaped by those who disliked him, missionaries, Busby the New Zealand resident, and members of the Legislative Council. He is not viewed by and large as a highly educated man, with wide reading and broad range of interests, almost certainly the most educated man in pre-colonial New Zealand. His ideas on New Zealand colonization were largely overtaken by the work of the New Zealand Company, which purchased in great haste large tracts of land for a pittance from Maori chiefs, who didn't understand the concept of the alienation of the land, and flogged off the land to speculators who had no idea of where the land was and what it was like. It was a hugely profitable exercise, but hardly ethical. Similarly in other parts of New Zealand, but particularly in Auckland a grab bag of setllers rushed to expropriate as much land as they could and then cash in on these. Although Polack bought land from Maoris, he also appreciated the value that Maoris placed on their land. So there arose questions from this talk about the nature of history, who writes it, and what line they try to paddle.  To read the text of my talk go to:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Oy2qQZiF2oZI6HOrgPULtDrddmcpRFHPC2y3ECh4xgw/edit?pli=1#heading=h.3khpiq38px2t