Presenter: From your observation then, of the way we are getting along and the state we're in, do you think there is a solution to the seabed and foreshore issue that on the one hand won't lead to racial conflict and on the other hand won't bring down the government, whatever?

King: Yes, yes, and I think basically..

Presenter: What does it look like, that solution?

King: I think it will be like the solution that the government is currently offering but which is not being heard. It will be a clarification of customary rights for those very small number of Maori who are eligible for it and I'm talking..

Presenter: Title or rights?

King: Rights.

Presenter: Ok.

King: Not title, and what the government is offering Maori in that dimension is more than has ever been offered before and a hell of a lot more than they would get from National, ACT or New Zealand First and I think Maori will eventually accept that. You know, as a realist like the Shane Jones know this, they know that they're going to the table, they're talking and they want to come away from the table with more than they had before and the government is offering more than they've had before. But because I suppose of the emphasis with which the government rejected the idea of Maori title to satisfy the Pakeha constituency, Maori at the moment are blinded by that and they're not seeing what is actually being offered to them of substance.

Presenter: You have a very interesting explanation in your history about what you call the process of social accounting in Maori, early Maori, and you say when the balance of generosity or power is in your favour, your mana and your people's mana are enlarged, and when you are in debt to your neighbours and seen to be, your mana is diminished and so the imbalance of utu needs levelling and that's a description, yes, of early Maori society. Could it also be extended to Maori-Pakeha relations in the sense that if Maori feel slighted, if they feel that the government has denied them something, then it is necessary to address the imbalance, and Maori continually feel that they are in a position of supplication, supplicant now.

King: Yes, yes. I mean really I can only answer yes. That whole concept of utu or reciprocity, although you quote it there in historical context, is still a very, very live reality of Maori life now.

Presenter: And so in a political sense it's almost it seems to me, insoluble because you have to be seen by Maori to be being over-generous in fact, in order to get the reciprocity thing but Pakeha say ah, you're giving too much to the Maori again and so the government is always caught between those two stools?

King: One of the things Maori tried to do right at the outset was to involve Pakeha in their system of reciprocal obligations. Maori still want to do that. I nonetheless think that when the shouting dies down and Maori recognise what is being offered to them and that it is of substance, that that will be seen to be acceptable. At the moment they're listening to the rhetoric and they're particularly listening to the rhetoric perhaps of the Maori nationalists who say that Pakeha are taking away yet another Maori right. I mean look with the fiscal envelope, the fiscal hui envelope was a similar sort of dispute because what was at issue was not the fact that Maori didn't want to accept a million dollars but that the government had said this is all you're going to get and we're drawing a line underneath it and that seemed to be insulting, but that eventually died down.

Presenter: You also say in your preface to your book that it's fashionable to speak of the histories of a country as if they were all of equal value and validity, histories plural, and they are not of equal value and validity. What do you mean?

King: What I mean is that some accounts are wrong. I don't go along with the idea that all stories have equal value and ought not to be interrogated or challenged. You know, for example there are a group of Maori up the Wanganui River who believe that in the middle of the 19th century poisoned flour bags were sent up to wipe them out in an act of genocide. Thatnever happened. It's a rumour, it's a story and it's taken root. Some people used to hate Peter Fraser in the second world war because they said he'd been a pacifist in the first world war and then he was a warmonger in the second world war. That was strongly believed but it was never true. He was never a pacifist. He simply didn't approve of conscription, so I still think it's the job of the historian to say some stories are right, they have an evidential base, some stories are wrong. And in doing this one, I haven't adopted the view that all stories have equal value, I have made decisions about which accounts of how things happened are more likely than other accounts and I think you have to do that. I mean there was a good book that David Young published on the Wanganui River called "woven by water" and he took the attitude that it was not his job to distinguish between these stories and because he was a Pakeha writing about Maori stories, there's some justification. Judith Binney did much the same thing with her big book on Te Kooti but I would not do that. I think I have a responsibility to use my training and my expertise as it's accumulated, to give a pointer to readers as to which stories are more plausible than others.

Presenter: I mean one of the stories that you've excavated and revealed if you like, is the story of the Moriori and again you talk about that as you have to in an over-arching history of New Zealand. There are still people, does it not weary you, who write letters to the newspaper saying the Maori wiped the moriori out, what right have they to complain?

King: Yes, it greatly wearies me, just as it wearies me when I got a letter from someone saying my book was all wrong. He knows where the Moriori came from. They came from a Maori pa just near the current service station on the Warkworth-main road intersection. He knows that because his grandfather told him. You know, there are all these stories and there are all these rumours. Some of these rumours of course, like the Moriori one, take root and are pervasive because they have some value and for Pakeha as you say, the justified.. European colonisation of the Maori if they thought Maori had colonised Moriori, but again it's simply not true and as a historian I think I have a responsibility to say that and to show why it isn't true.

Presenter: And again the story of the Waitaha people?

King: Oh god, yes.

Presenter: Which you are.. You're not prepared to say this is nonsense?

King: Aren't i? I thought I did.

Presenter: Well no, no. Well, you said there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of the people called Waitaha, predecessors of Maori?

King: Yes, there were some.. There were Waitaha people who were Maori. There was no evidence that four or five thousand years ago there were people here and not Maori, called Waitaha. No archaeological evidence, no linguistic evidence, just absolutely nothing. And again you have to say that because there are people going around the country with a mystical look in the eyes, who are in touch with their ancestors, they don't need evidence and they're saying there used to be this wonderful people here who were in touch with the land and the sea and the soil and why can't we all be like them. And of course that's pervasive and attractive because we do want to be like those sort of people.

Presenter: All right, so what is the difference between a wishful thought or a sincerely felt belief like Moriori were wiped out by Maori, like Waitaha people 5000 years ago living in peace and harmony with nature, what is the difference between those things and Kupe discovering New Zealand or the canoes coming over, things that are sort of maybe true, have woven into myth, become part of the culture?

King: Evidence basically.

Presenter: Kupe was real?

King: Kupe was probably real because there are so many place names that have his name and because he is remembered by so many tribes as an ancestor and not as a god. I mean some would argue that Maui was real and Maui probably was originally but not in New Zealand because the Maui myths are right through Polynesia but there probably originally was someone called Maui. We'll never be able to prove that Kupe existed in the sense of picking up a box of bones with Kupe's name written on it, but that story is so pervasive. I mean one of the points.. Perhaps the major point of Maori place names was to indicate who had rights to particular places and those rights were established by being able to show that your ancestors had been there first, or they had driven other people out and you had placed your tribal place names there with your ancestor's name on. There's nothing of that sort to indicate that Waitaha were here but there is to indicate that somebody called Kupe was here. Probably not 950 a.d. when we were told he came, but almost certainly in the 13th and 14th century when the canoes came from Eastern Polynesia.

Presenter: Because as you said, the story of Kupe discovering New Zealand was Pakeha in origin.

King: Yes, well you see that's interesting. I feel I have to make that point, that that story and the story that New Zealand was called Aotearoa was not a Maori story. The reason that Maori now call New Zealand Aotearoa is because the school journal told them in 1915 that that was a good idea, it would be nice to have that name. So that became a Maori story and became a Maori myth but it did so because of the Pakeha education system.

Presenter: There was I.. I don't think.. You wouldn't have seen it I suppose, I bet you don't watch the e-channel?

King: No.

Presenter: But there was a piece on New Zealand where the bikini-clad presenter said "or god's own as the indigenous inhabitants once called it" (laughter) which is great. Ok, so what's the difference between the Waitaha people myth and the belief in the Taniwha? One is deserving of respect, the other is not?

King: Oh no, it's not that. The main difference is that the people who believe in the taniwha are largely Maori and the people who believe in waitaha are largely Pakeha led by Barry Balsford [phon]. A few Maori are part of the group but it is not a Maori story. Those stories about taniwha in the Waikato swamps or wherever have been there for generations and are if you like, you know, the taonga or oral treasures of those people.

Presenter: It's interesting you see, what is an oral treasure to one person is a load of nonsense to another. This crystal can cure me of anything. You know, what? How do we.. Is it necessary to try to figure out what makes that difference between nonsense and a spiritual taonga?

King: Well, let's look at it this way. One of the points Bill English made about the taniwha was that he has religious views and they are not enshrined in legislation and he doesn't think Maori religious views should be. But Bill English like me, is a Roman Catholic and you can be pretty sure that if the Vatican was at Putaruru or Calvary Hill was at the top of Mt Victoria or the Lake of Galilee was in the Wairarapa, then he would be protecting those sites and everybody Christian would be. I think it's legitimate that Maori religion and expressions of it should be given some kind of respect and my attitude would be to say not to prevent that happening but to extend it to things that are important to the Pakeha cultural heritage and of course in the book you know, the example I mention is the fact that while the taniwha was being saved at Mercer, Frank Sargeson's ashes were carved off from his home in Esmonde Road. I would like to see a wahi tapu concept in the resource management act that recognised both heritages.

Presenter: It's interesting, you always talk about compassionate truth..

King: Do I?

Presenter: When writing about..

King: I always do?

Presenter: No, always! I mean on and on you go.

King: I did once.

Presenter: You have mentioned it and people have cottoned onto it and have said compassionate truth, that's what Michael King does very well, particularly in relation to biographies of Janet Frame and Frank Sargeson. Did you have to employ that either consciously or in retrospect unconsciously on the history of New Zealand at all?

King: I wouldn't so much say compassionate truth, I would say something like it. Perhaps an imaginative understanding of the people you're writing about as well as a purely evidential one. Yes, you try and get into the psche and the minds and the cultures of people you're writing about. That's one of the ways of understanding them, but you don't do it by taking a stab or a guess. You immerse yourself in the literature of what they said, the letters they wrote, their public statements and so on and that's a valid thing for a historian to do.

Presenter: Could you have written this history with this tone 20, 30 years ago?

King: Absolutely not.

Presenter: So what's changed in your mind?

King: What has changed is that I had more raw material to work from. We had more if you perhaps.. You know, compare it with the 1950's when Keith Sinclair did his Penguin History of New Zealand. Very little New Zealand history had been written, very few theses had been done by post-graduates and he took a lot of guesses. He had hunches about things, a lot of which turned out to be right. I had to have fewer hunches because I could go to either the written literature or I could go back to primary source material not available then that is available now. And being a historian I usually bring this up in the context of biography, I actually don't make many guesses. If I haven't got an evidential base for saying something I probably won't say it or I'll say this is a guess rather than say this is true.

Presenter: Have you changed your mind about anything over the years? I mean for example you're quite firm here, you don't subscribe to the fatal impact view of history..

King: Oh no, no.

Presenter: And as James Belich and Dame Anne Salmond have written, you know, he Maori were vigorously engaged with Pakeha in the early days. They weren't helpless victims all along the way. Did you ever subscribe to the fatal impact?

King: Yes I did. I read the Alan Moorehead book and it was Alan Moorehead who coined that phrase basically about what happened to Polynesians in the Pacific, and I..

Presenter: It was a stunning book wasn't it, at the time?

King: Oh, it's a wonderful book and it brought up one of those expressions, like Tim Flannery's future eaters [phon], that's gone into the language, and for a lot of people that was shorthand for the evils of European colonisation, both the fact that they brought diseases which killed people and the fact they brought cultural concepts which they forced on other people as being more important and more pervasive. So it's probably true that when I started to get involved in Maori history in the late 60's I did subscribe to that but I what I continually encountered was not victims of fatal impact but vigorous Maori people who were always competitive about what they did whether it was with other Maori or whether it was with Pakeha, and who showed no sign of being the victims of fatal impact at all, and still don't. In fact with the momentum of the whole Maori renaissance, Maori are possibly in a stronger position than any other colonised indigenous people on earth, and that's not to the credit I would have to say.. Or it's partly to the credit of Pakeha because the circumstances of the Treaty of Waitangi were unusual. A humanitarian group of people in government at the time the treaty was signed and therefore there was a treaty, but it's mainly due to the competitive drive of Polynesian culture, part of which is the pursuit of mana, that made Maori want to embrace competition. There's this wonderful little cameo that when James Cook arrived off the New Zealand coast in 1769, Maori came out in canoes and threatened him and abused him and waved their patua about because that was a challenge. When he came into Botany Bay in Australia, a group of Aboriginal men fishing off the shore looked up, saw this boat, stared at it for about 30 seconds and then went on with what they were doing. Now, that says something about the dynamics of those two cultures.

Presenter: I'm talking to Michael King whose "Penguin History of New Zealand" is just out.

King: Coming out on the 13th, yes.

Presenter: Very well. You talk about, as a number of other people do, the warlike history of Maori, the very brutal way in which they could behave towards one another and for example you talk about Hongi Hika who killed 60 Hauraki people who believed he'd made peace, and yet simultaneously he was a fine character. I talked to Dorothy Urlich cleo [phon] about how we can hold those two thoughts in our minds at the same time. Do you have any problem with that?

King: I probably wouldn't say he was a fine character. I would say he was acknowledged by his people as a fine character because according to the tikanga or customs of Maori life, or the tikanga or customs of Ngapuhi, he did very well, but according to the tikanga of course of other Maori, they don't view him in quite the same light.

Presenter: Spiro Zavos taught you history at St Pat's Silverstream. Does that seem a long time ago?
King: Mmm.

Presenter: Was he a good history teacher?

King: He was a marvellous history teacher. He was just out of university, he was full of enthusiasm for history and he dropped that enthusiasm on us and made it contagious and it was probably..

Presenter: So what history were you taught then?

King: Oh well, it was the syllabus and it was largely British History and with British and European history, but it was the way Spiro taught it. There wasn't New Zealand history. For example spiro got us to do as a major project about which there was some, you know, leeway in the curriculum, got us all to do a mini thesis and I at the age of 17 did a mini thesis on why every major country in Europe had had a revolution but not Britain and it was really heady stuff. I got right into it, I read lots of stuff, I greatly enjoyed it and I thought this is what being a historian is like and I want more of it. You know that ad for tea on television where the curate or the minister does all sorts of somersaults and the lady in the front says whatever he's on, I want it, I felt that about history. You know, Spiro clearly was excited by the scholarship and he communicated that to us.

Presenter: And was it history or was it other people's lives or the way other people were or what was it?

King: It was partly other people's lives but it was a realisation that you could actually chart how things happened and why things happened and as a result have an understanding of real places, an understanding of how they came to be the way they are.

Presenter: And as you point out in this new book, the history of New Zealand is extraordinarily compressed because it's been so recent.

King: Yes, that's right.

Presenter: And i've never thought of it that way before. I think of New Zealand being a young country but being.. Having a compressed history is a whole new way of looking at it. How has that made your job easier?

King: Oh, it's made my job easier in the sense that I haven't had to canvas as much evidence as I have if there'd been people here for 6000 years.

Presenter: And also because you've shaken the hand of the man who shook the hand of Sir George Grey who shook the hand of Hone Heke?

King: Oh yes, I knew Tom Seddon when I was a student. Tom Seddon was Dick Seddon's son and Tom Seddon had shaken George Grey's hand and I'd shaken Tom's hand. It made it all seem very close, it did. And it is very close and very recent. It's.. I suppose it's of most relevance when you look at things like environmental history, that because what we've done to our country in a hundred years other people took 2000 years to do, we've done it rather badly..

Presenter: Very efficient we've been at destruction you mean?

King: But I think also that was one of the reasons why we were for a time the social laboratory of the world. One of the reasons we did things like votes for women and old age pensions before anybody else, was because we were a young country without stultifying traditions that prevented those things being done. People tended to ask.. if you were a 19th century politician, you tended to say you know, why not rather than why. You felt that the agenda was open and that was an extremely healthy thing.

Presenter: Do you think we've still got that? We like to think we have, you know that esprit and the number 8 wire or whatever it is.

King: We do like to think we have. That feeling came very much to the surface when the whole nuclear issue came to the top in the 1980's. It was another way in which we were seen as leading the world..

Presenter: It's the little engine that could?

King: That's right. I think it's.. And it's a thing that comes right through from King Dick Seddon's day, god's own. We've gone on believing that. I think a lot of us still do believe that there's some basis for it. The whole thing about the New Zealanders who go abroad and do things very well.. Have you talked to James McNeish about his dancing peacocks?

Presenter: I haven't, no. Chris Laidlaw did a really good interview with him.

King: I was just going to say, I take issue with him because he talks about those men as being exiles, New Zealanders exiled abroad. I don't see it that way at all. I think we've always exported people who chose to become expatriates but they remained New Zealanders. They were just New Zealanders in other countries and that's one of our traditions, giving bright people to the rest of the world from Rutherford right through to McDiarmid.

Presenter: Yeah, but isn't the feeling often that they would like to go home but they can't and in that sense they are exiles because there's nothing there for them. It's a, you know, a land without people almost..

King: ..[indistinct] you know, I knew Dan Davin very well and he's in that category according to McNeish, and he definitely felt that he couldn't go back and find a job either in publishing or academia but he didn't cease to be a New Zealander and he didn't feel exiled and he threw his home open to New Zealanders in Oxford and he was the sort of cultural high commissioner by reviewing New Zealand books, making sure New Zealanders were visible in the UK. It's wrong to call him an exile just because he couldn't live here. You know, it's an argument with shades of subtlety and perhaps I'm just moving it further along the spectrum, but I just think that idea that those people were under privileged culturally because they didn't come home, is wrong. I think they were still New Zealanders and they were living as New Zealanders in other parts of the world.

Presenter: Do you think there are many people here now who feel that they're exiled from the other side of the world? Do you know what I mean? I was talking to Peter Calder about his memoir of travels with his mother and his descriptions of her were very poignant and while he said no, she didn't feel like an exile, she really did feel as if that was home, she was going home at the age of 70-something, back to England for the first time.

King: Mmm. I think that's a reality for that age group. I mean my parents and my grandparents always called Britain home, even though..

Presenter: ..[indistinct] Think of sussex downs?

King: Well, not even that because they had all run away from dark satanic mills. They'd gone.. The family had got away because they hated it there. It was the next generations that thought of the Sussex Downs, but that's almost gone. That's in that very old age group. I mean most of us are now in the place that Peter Calder is. We recognise that we have an affinity with that place but it aint home and we know that as soon as we hit the ground and talk to people.

Presenter: How is your health?

King: Oh, I've.. Well, oddly enough I feel very well.

Presenter: It's a leading question because I know that you are as we say, battling cancer. Would you like that expression used, battling cancer?

King: I'm not battling cancer yet. I may finish up battling cancer. I'm living with it at the moment. I have cancer and I'm going.. I'm about to start eight weeks intensive radiation and chemotherapy to try and kill the cancer I have but it's come as a complete surprise to me because I never felt better in my life but I know if it's allowed to run its course, I definitely will not feel better than I ever did in my life and I will not be alive, so I am going to do the treatment and I hope to come out the other side.

Presenter: How did you find out you had it if you feel so good?

King: Lumps came up on my neck and I am one of those people who believes that as you grow old you get aches and pains and most of them go away after about a fortnight and it's not worth spending
$40 having the doctor tell you that, so I waited. But the lumps didn't go away, they got larger and I went to the doctor and they turned out to be secondaries because I had a throat examination and there was a large tumour in the throat that I wasn't aware was there.

Presenter: And so this is eight weeks of probably feeling quite unpleasant?

King: Oh yes, it will be very unpleasant. It will be penance to give me brownie points for whatever is to follow.

Presenter: But you're not.. You're quite sanguine about it, you're not preparing to meet your maker right now?

King: No, not right now. I'm not ready to do that.

Presenter: Are you still a Catholic, a practising Catholic?

King: What do you mean by practising?

Presenter: I don't know.

King: I never know what to answer.

Presenter: Well no, I mean catholics are the only people in the world who describe them as lapsed. They described themselves, I'm a lapsed catholic and I don't understand what that is and so I thought practising might be the opposite?

King: I think I'm a catholic in the sense that somebody might be Jewish. I have that imprint upon me and I always will, and it's part of my rich heritage, but I don't believe in the dogma and the doctrine. I've got some faith in the prayers and the grace, particularly at this time of my life, because I've always thought that the spirituality that's common to everybody actually is efficacious in doing things for your physical body and so forth and I have to say that when the cancer became apparent, the kind of letters and messages of support I got from people who told me they were praying for me, actually buoyed me up in a way that I think was probably very good for my immune system, so these things do have an effect.

Presenter: Eight weeks is a long time in a man's life who's been as prolific as you. Will you be scribbling notes on your next book in between radio and chemo?

King: My encologist tells me that I will have something called a squidgy brain once I start the chemotherapy, that I won't be able to concentrate or particularly remember things. I'm prepared to let all that go. I'll work with it for as long as I can and then I'll just put up with it until it's over and hope that in the process of recovery my faculties will be returned to me.

Presenter: And what is the next project?

King: I'm currently writing a history of Waikato University which was commissioned a while ago, for their 40th anniversary next year. That will be done, and beyond that I want to do another biography but I haven't quite yet settled on the subject.

Presenter: Oh, can you think like that? I mean you say I want to do a biography now?

King: Oh well, I should put it this way. I have two subjects in mind, both of which I would like to do, and I haven't yet settled upon which one it will be and it might depend on what sort of funding I'm able to get because it will be this kind of book that will not be highly popular commercially but which I think ought to be done because they are about important people.

Presenter: Right. And you've said that it's very, very hard to carry on writing.. You talked about abandoning a biography at one stage because of a lack of financial support in New Zealand?

King: Yes, isn't it funny? Some people took offence at that including Michael Laws who said I was greedy because I wanted foundation support as well as earning money from books, but good biographies, particularly of New Zealanders who have also lived overseas, require certain resources to be able to research them adequately and you will never get enough money back from the book alone to do that, so the support is necessary. I abandoned a biography of John Money, the New Zealand-American sexologist, because I simply couldn't get enough money to live in the United States long enough to be able to do it and I'm too old to live in the YMCA and hitchhike with a backpack on. I would want to do it you know, in a degree of comfort that enabled me at least to work well. I think there's a time in your life where you do do things the hard way but then there's a time in your life when you say I've been doing this for a long time and if it isn't comfortable and if I'm not going to enjoy doing it I don't want to do it.

Presenter: Novel? Could you write a novel? I'm just trying to think of something that you haven't done? You have a novel?

King: Yes, I have a novel but somebody pinched it.

Presenter: Rats.

King: A woman called Annie Proulx published "The Shipping News" and when she got to Newfoundland it was so like my Chatham Islands novel that I thought she must have been in my bottom drawer and I know if I published now people would say it was derivative so we'll wait and see.

Presenter: oh, Annie Proulx in your bottom drawer would be a scary prospect. Historian and author, Michael King. His book "The Penguin History of New Zealand" is published by Penguin.

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