Two Worlds

This book is a provocative synthesis of two previously separate views of the dramatic, action-packed first meetings of Maori and Europeans in New Zealand. What were those first meetings? From one contemporary perspective - that of the tribal Maori of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - the first encounters with European explorers such as Tasman and Cook were, in Salmond's words, 'simply puzzling extraordinary interludes in the life of the various tribal communities'. From the vantage point of the Europeans, however, the view was quite different. These contacts were simply more inevitable episodes in the continuing story of their 'discovery' of the world. Histories of these first meetings have until now drawn almost exclusively from the latter perspective. As a result, accounts of this contact depict the Europeans as being actively in charge of the drama, the explorers as heroes - while the Maori either sit as passive spectators or hide behind cloaks and tattooed masks.

Two Worlds is a penetrating rethinking of that view. Drawing on local tribal knowledge as well as European accounts, Anne Salmond shows those first meetings in a new light. Both Maori and European protagonists were active, all fully human, following their own practical, political and mythological agendas, 'quite unlike those of their modern-day descendants in many ways'. The result is a work of trail-blazing significance in which many popular misconceptions and bigotries to do with common perceptions of traditional Maori society are revealed. It also opens up new possibilities in the international study of European exploration and 'discovery'.