Its target is both a local and international educated/academic readership, with perhaps a prestigious literary prize waiting in the wings.
To get the negatives out of the way: the text is heavy going in places and could probably have been edited to about two-thirds of its length without any loss of context.
The 10pt typeface will be difficult for older and less clear-sighted readers to follow (as is this reader), not to mention quotes that appear in 8pt.
The text verges into a sort of poetic academia in places, words spilling out like the Huka Falls, and it's easy to switch off. Finally, it's mostly all been said before, and I wonder if readers who are interested will bother with a re-hash of old chestnuts such as when and from where Maori arrived in New Zealand.
However, as a new New Zealander who arrived on these shores in 1959, Encounters triggered a host of emotions that have probably been experienced since the first European settlers arrived.
That's because Moon's book, in spite of, or maybe because of, his command of the language, captures the big picture, the inherent quality that is ''our'' New Zealand: a new land, new opportunities, the creation of ties with that land through children and grandchildren, which I'm sure does not happen with families growing up in crowded cities in the northern hemisphere.
But Moon isn't just a historian, he's an artist who can sense how earth, water and sky define the human psyche, reminding readers of New Zealand's vast, empty landscapes, and the awesome quality that simply driving across sparsely populated plains towards distant mountains (I have Central Otago in mind) can generate awesome, man-alone-in-the-wilderness impressions.
Without going into details of Encounters' 47 chapters collected under four headings - Imagining New Zealand, Arrival, The Land, Imagined New Zealand - Moon captures this timeless quality.
He explains why rivers came to occupy a sacredness in Maori mythology, that there were probably no rivers of great width and length where they came from, and for early Maori arrivals, ''the many life-sustaining properties of rivers, together with their great scale, made them candidates for acquiring sacred status''.
Moon also devotes space to the importance of land acquisition to meet the then requirements of settlers from Britain, and the late 1850s are seen as the catalyst when Europeans began to outnumber Maori, who were seen as being ''unable to cultivate their own land in the way the Europeans could, and so therefore should dispense with their territory so the settlers could make better use of it''.
But defining Encounters through its detail is not the way to read it. It's the impressions it leaves that will inspire (it is to be hoped) a united sense of nationhood regardless of race, and the realisation we occupy a privileged place on Planet Earth.
Ian Williams is a Dunedin writer and composer.
