by Roger Childs
“Aotearoa” was not used in centuries gone by
“Of all the fake history with which New Zealand is swamped today, nothing is more blatant than the claim that “Aotearoa” is, or was, the Maori name for our country.” –Nelson Historian Bruce Moon
For most of the nineteenth century and more than half of the twentieth, Government departments and speakers of Maori used “Niu Tireni”, or some slight variant of it as the Maori name for New Zealand. Only in the late 20th century did “Aotearoa” become the accepted Maori name for the country. Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck) makes no mention of Aotearoa as the country’s name in his seminal history The Coming of the Maori printed in 1949. In the 536 pages of small print there is just one reference to Aotearoa “… Manaia fled to Aotearoa in a canoe named Tokomaru.” Manaia was a Hawaiki clan leader but where Aotearoa was is not stated. 3
Michael King in his Penguin History of New Zealand notes that “… in the pre-European era, Maori had no name for the country as a whole.”4
“Aotearoa” didn’t feature in the early nineteenth century
If “Aotearoa” was the old Maori name for the country, it would surely have been in the te reo versions of the 1835 Declaration of Independence and the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. However in both cases Nu Tirani is the Maori translation.
Missionaries, Henry and Edward Williams, translated James Busby’s and William Hobson’s final Treaty draft of 4th February 1840 into Te Tiriti o Waitangi. They were fluent speakers of Maori, having lived in the far north of the country for seventeen years.
“The Williams chose Nu Tirani, a reasonable, if not perfect, transliteration using the limited sounds of that speech. And when their text was presented to the great assembly of chiefs and others the following day, not one word was spoken to challenge the Williams’ choice. Not once does “Aotearoa” appear in Colenso’s recording of the speeches of the day, carefully checked by Busby at the time.” 5
Later at the great meeting of over 100 chiefs at Kohimarama, which was called by Governor Gore Browne in July and August 1860, the word “Aotearoa” does not appear in the Maori Messenger’s verbatim record of the speeches and proceedings.
Where does the name “Aotearoa” come from?
According to well-known scholar, teacher and Training College lecturer, Barry Brailsford, it may have been the name for theSouth Island,andMaori scholar, Jean Jackson, told Bruce Moon that “Aotearoa” was used for the long thin line of cloud and volcanic ash which sometimes appears around the three central peaks.
As historian, Michael King, observed “In the Maori world names would persist in simultaneous usage until around the middle of the nineteenth century, after which Maori began to favour Nu Tirani and its variants … few Maori opted for Aotearoa.” 6
The name was actually used first by two white settlers. William Pember Reeves who was a cabinet minister in Ballance’s and Seddon’s Liberal governments of the 1890s, used Aotearoa as a subtitle in his 1898 book The Long White Cloud – my copy is just called “New Zealand”. Aotearoa appears only once in the text.
The other was Stephenson Percy Smith, who used it in some stories he was writing, also in the 1890s. Smith was the first to write the Kupe story which was publicised in school journals in the 1910s. He also came up with the idea that many of the first Polynesian colonists arrived in a Great Fleet – a theory that has now long been discredited.
We need to have pride in our real name
As is well known, the early Polynesians had no concept of New Zealand as a nation. Aotearoa as a name has no historical credibility and was not used in traditional Maori society. However despite these indisputable facts, the new curriculum instructs teachers to TELL students that Aotearoa is a much older name than New Zealand! There is no mention of Tasman and his naming of the country and how “New Zealand”, one of the oldest names in the Pacific, came to be.
Surely learning history should be a unifying experience and all young New Zealanders are entitled to learn the true history of their country and take pride in its distinctive and time-honoured name.