The South Island and its Peoples

A Maverick Traveller: The Podcasts of Mary Jane Walker

IT’S something of a cliché, in New Zealand’s South Island, that Christchurch is ‘English’ and Dunedin ‘Scottish’. Indeed, for a long time, the different national origins of early settler communities, including a significant number of Chinese gold miners, entirely overshadowed the fact that Māori also inhabited the South Island for some seven or eight hundred years and were the first colonisers, having navigated their way there from the tropical Pacific.

Māori culture was seen as something associated with the North Island and the boiling mud pools of Rotorua, not the South Island: where, indeed, colonial poets wrote about an empty land, untouched by humans until they came along.

It was true that Māori eventually became far more numerous in the North. But to say that the centre of gravity passed to the North is not to say that South Island Māori faded away completely. Instead, a distinctive culture known as that of the Waitaha people came into being, one of its products being a form of art that looks quite different to the ‘classic’ Maori art of the North Island. . . .

Original blog post: a-maverick.com/blog/south-island-peoples-maori-settler