Getting inside the outsider

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Dame Anne Salmond said she was flabbergasted when she won the Montana book award for non-fiction this week. I would very much like to see what a flabbergasted Salmond looks like.

She always seems so serene, and she is so beautifully groomed, that you suspect that even on those rare occasions Salmond is truly astounded, you wouldn't notice so much as a ripple.

She made a very gracious speech at the book awards, and she is as gracious in person about the surprise that she won.

Almost everyone expected that the late lamented Michael King would take the history prize. Still, it's a bit odd, to me anyway, that when you talk to Salmond about her win you wind up talking about King.

Salmond says, "Well, I knew Michael since the time we were quite young. He was a friend and a very generous one."

Salmond had "settled it all in my own mind. I was hoping that I could just sit and enjoy it. Being on display is a bit disconcerting."

She was an anthropologist before she was a historian and by way of scientific pursuit I ask what she wore to the awards.

She thinks it is quite funny to be asked such a girly thing.

"Getting right down to it," she says and laughs and doesn't mind at all because she is interested in texture and context, the way all good historians are.

What she wore was "this fantastic velvet jacket". She bought it for the launch of the book on a shopping expedition with her daughter Amy and it is "very 18th century". She wore it with a silk cravat arrangement and she did look of that century, a bit like a very swish sea captain on a day off.

The book she won with (she actually took home both the Montana medal for non-fiction and the history category) is The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas and it is a rollicking good yarn which is, says the writer, "one of the great stories of the world. It's got all the ingredients: it's got sex and it's got danger and it's got death".

She wrote the book in her shed out in the back garden which her architect husband Jeremy built for her because he got fed up with her writing on the kitchen table.

Salmond had just gone on leave from the University of Auckland, where she is a professor and pro vice-chancellor, when Jeremy became very ill.

He had had a bone marrow transplant and "he had a relapse so we had this incredible crisis I suppose. So everything kind of paled into significance. Then he started to get better and I started to write and in many ways I think this gave a real intensity to the experience of writing the book. It was very close to the edge. It was looking at mortality very close up. So, yes, I guess you can imagine from that what danger is like."

She means the danger Cook faced on his three journeys through the South Seas, which as we all know ended in his death in Hawaii in 1779 where he shot a chief and was stabbed, shot and clubbed.

She is much more comfortable talking about Cook. This personal story she offers hesitantly.

She finds historical figures so much more worthy of her curiosity. "I'm too interested in other people."

She talks about Cook as though he is still alive and indeed he is on the pages of her book.

Being a captain was a lonely occupation, especially for a farm labourer's son who had risen through the ranks of officers who were all gentlemen.

"I think he always had that consciousness of struggling." Cook was always the outsider. He had to attempt to restrain his crew from shooting islanders and spreading venereal disease.

"He was trying to be an enlightened leader, he was trying so hard to do it well ... and it was almost impossible."

He was pretty much the only crew member who wasn't at it and, says Salmond, by the third journey "it all came to pieces. So in a way for me it's a sort of Shakespearian tragedy. It unravelled."

Her job was to knit it back together. When she set out, she had no idea what she would end up thinking of Cook.

"I know, for example, what many of my friends in Gisborne think of him. That he came and he shot people."

But it was not surprising that Salmond would come to admire Cook. He was, after all, an adventurer and Salmond is a great respecter of the adventurous spirit, owning one herself. At 16 she went to Cleveland on an American Field Scholarship. She joined the Glee Club, went to the prom and earned her letter sweater in volleyball.

She also discovered, in the course of having to give talks about her home country, "that I didn't know anything and I was sort of having to spin a yarn. And so when I came back I decided I was going to learn Maori, and so it started."

Nobody was learning Maori 40 years ago, and at an age when most people are desperately trying to fit in, Salmond was something of an oddity, although she would not put it quite that way.

She still remembers that somebody warned her mother that "I was going back to the mat. In Gisborne it was not the thing to do."

She didn't mind. It was, she says, "like falling in love I think. There was this whole other world that I had known nothing about and I was just absolutely entranced with it."

This foreign place was good training for a historian, especially one who would go on to write about Cook, a man who was always on the outside looking in.

"Maori have the experience of operating in an environment where they're a bit out of sync, where the things they think about and remember and the way they like to do things seems a bit marginal.

"In those early years on the marae I was usually the only Pakeha there and I realised what it was like to have that experience of being a person within an environment where everything else was being done differently."

At 20 she went off for three months to one of the most isolated places in the Pacific, the Ontong Java atoll in the Solomon Islands, where nobody spoke English and where the people "were still tattooing and doing love magic".

By the time she left she was dreaming in the language. She declined the tattoo, and the offer of an arranged marriage.

She is adventurous but not reckless. She had, she agrees, a safe place from which to go adventuring. She comes from a large close family - she is one of eight children - who she adores. Her father, now dead, "supported me with trepidation".

I know that she is brave because years ago she came to a lunch I put on which was supposed to be a replica of a New Zealand feast circa the mid-1800s. The menu involved undrinkable bitter herb beer and stewed possum and Salmond was both heroic and polite.

"I remember that lunch. Well, I've eaten some interesting things in my time."