BUYING THE LAND, SELLING THE LAND Governments and Maori land in the North Island 1965-1921.
Richard Boast
Victoria University Press, pbk. $60
Review by Terry Hearn
Anyone who has ventured into the labyrinthine world of Maori land law, replete with major policy swings, apparently innumerable Acts, regulations, Orders-in-Council, and proclamations will appreciate immediately the formidable task which the author set himself when he first contemplated preparing a history of the Crown's efforts to transform Maori customary law into English law and to transfer Maori freehold land to settler ownership.
But, drawing on some of the many excellent reports prepared for the Waitangi Tribunal and his own extensive experience as both researcher and counsel for a number of iwi, Richard Boast has completed a book which will foster the far-reaching reappraisal under way of the relationship between Maori and the Crown.
It should also serve to encourage historians generally to draw upon the extensive historical literature prepared for the tribunal.
The book has 11 chapters: Chapter 1 offers a brief introduction; Chapter 2 examines the legal framework, that is, the Native Land Acts, the Native Land Court, and the confiscations; Chapter 3 sets native land policy into its political context over the period 1869-1891; Chapter 4 offers an account of the Liberal and Reform governments' purchasing programmes from 1891 to 1929; and Chapter 5 is entitled "Land, economy, and environment, 1870-1920".
Chapters 6 to 10 deal with various aspects of the land-selling and land-purchasing process, offer two block case studies and one regional case study, while one chapter is devoted to Maori as sellers and another to Maori as non-sellers.
The focus is unerringly on Maori land policy, Maori land law and its implementation, and the consequences for Maori.
Throughout, the author endeavours to offer a carefully balanced assessment of the Crown's conduct.
He does not allow himself to be tempted into Crown-bashing, nor into levelling responsibility for the chaotic state of Maori land law and the social and economic consequences for Maori at the Native Land Court, once described as an engine of destruction.
Rather, as he points out, while the Crown employed methods which to Pakeha New Zealanders would have been unacceptable, while it ignored or discounted the social and economic consequences of its policies for Maori, it nevertheless saw itself as playing a constructive role, as effecting the transfer of land and allied resources into the hands of those prepared to turn them to productive account.
Boast's major argument, and it is one which runs through many of the reports prepared for the Waitangi Tribunal, is that the central issue relating to Maori and their land is less about the area bought and sold, or the prices paid, than it is about the legal structures Parliament created around Maori land ownership, the willingness of the Crown to breach fundamental Maori property rights, the great uncertainties which the law built into Maori land ownership, and the Crown's reluctance to assist the emergence of a Maori small-farmer class, despite the efforts Maori made on their behalf in the face of immense legal complexities and disincentives.
This book is a fine achievement. There are many matters left untouched.
There are others which merited greater exploration than is offered, among them the matter of the vesting of lands owned by Maori in the Maori land boards and the sale of some of those lands to the Crown, and the conduct of the Maori land boards, in particular the extent to which they discharged their statutory responsibility to protect and conserve the interests of Maori land owners.
There are archival sources not touched, among them those created by the Maori land boards: although many are frustratingly brief, those created by the Tokerau District Maori Land Board, for example, offer a rich source for any examination of the manner in which Maori land was administered from 1909 onwards.
Such matters aside, Buying the Land, Selling the Land is a timely, thoroughly researched, and eminently readable contribution to the history of 19th and early 20th century New Zealand.
- Terry Hearn is a Dunedin historian.
