Gordon McLauchlan: Great tales from New Zealand History

The title promises a feast, the author can tell a good story, the publisher has already found readers hungry for history in this country. How could this recipe fail?

If it is under-cooked. The vignettes of history are usually reduced to footnotes of the serious version. The bare summaries suggest great tales that beg to be told for their own sake, as complete crafted stories that might illustrate larger lessons of history, or might not. All that matters is that they really happened here and they are not previously well known.

The disappointment of this book is that for so many of the tales the bare summary seems to be all there is. The stories are succinctly told in Gordon McLauchlan's matter-of-fact style. Each runs to no more than a few pages. Most could do with substantial injections of colour and drama to live up to the events they record.

The pity is that so many of this selection are not the little known "tales" the reader might hope to meet. The book starts with a discussion of the Kupe legend, proceeds to a familiar account of Tasman's visit and onward to Cook and his contemporary French explorers.

The Boyd massacre, an atrocity that receives only tantalising references in modern histories, is made no more interesting here.

It happened because the skipper of the Boyd had a Maori crewman flogged when he would not, or could not, work. Once the ship anchored in Whangaroa Harbour, the crewman, the son of a local chief, displayed his wounds and "utu", writes McLauchlan, "was inevitable".

Utu meant luring the captain and others ashore. "Without muskets the Maori had to surprise the armed Europeans. They clubbed them all to death. Then they waited until dusk, returned to the Boyd in the ship's boats dressed in their victims' clothing and killed everyone they could find."

Laconic understatement can be an attractive part of the national character but it can leave you cold.

The book includes tales of the Treaty signing, Governor Hobson's much-loved wife, the mischief of Hone Heke and the first murder charge brought against a Maori under colonial justice. But the best of them is an extract from the diary of an early Wellington shopkeeper, William Dawson, who records being sent to sea by his father at the age of 10, never to set eyes on his family again.

As the book moves into the later 19th century, the tales become less familiar and more fascinating. The story of William Lane, a socialist utopian in Australia and South America who metamorphosed into a curmudgeonly editorial writer for the New Zealand Herald, is told with particular relish.

The fawning welcome of a United States naval fleet by our early 20th century politicians is recounted with high disapproval, though the tale might say much about the country's isolation at that time.

McLauchlan casts new light on the now-celebrated industrial disputes of that period, noting that the Waihi miners' strike, in which a miner died, was actually a contest between two unions.

But on the whole, the reader might expect greater tales. Bare facts do not often speak adequately for themselves.

History is not a dish best served raw.

* Penguin Books NZ Ltd. $29.95