Ranginui Walker: He Tipua, The Life and Times of Sir Apirana Ngata

By MICHAEL KING

Apirana Turupa Ngata is the colossus of Maori affairs in the 20th century. He bestrode the complex nexus of Maori politics, culture and society like nobody before or after him. It is difficult to believe that there will ever again be a single figure of such influence and stature.

We have long needed a full biography to understand more fully the significance of his life and how it both reflected and changed his times. Now we have it, and it is splendid.

Ngata was a child and product of Ngati Porou, the great tribe that holds mana whenua over the East Coast of the North Island from Gisborne to Hicks Bay. He was born in 1872 at Te Araroa into a chiefly family which had already embraced Christianity and supported government forces in the wars against Te Kooti and Titokowaru.

Ngata was educated at Te Aute, the famous Anglican boarding school dominated by the Williams family and headmaster John Thornton. He went on to university to become the first Maori graduate (in arts and law) and to be the most influential of the founders of the Young Maori Party.

In 1905 he won the Eastern Maori parliamentary seat as a protege of James Carroll. In the course of a long political career, nearly 40 years, he became the country's most innovative and successful Minister of Native Affairs and, eventually, the Father of the House of Representatives.

The list of initiatives with which he is associated - Maori land and farming development, the first Maori cultural revival, Maori recruitment for the New Zealand forces in the First and Second World Wars and the establishment of the Maori Battalion, the recording of song-poetry, the encouragement of Maori sport - is nothing short of staggering.

There is nobody interested in Maori history and New Zealand history in general who has not lamented the absence of a Ngata biography, to help us to understand how one man came to assume such an astonishing number of roles and responsibilities.

Pakeha historian Graham Butterworth was at work on such a book, and other scholars such as myself refrained from working on Ngata's life and career for that reason.

Butterworth, however, did not complete the project and the field was opened for Maori academic Ranginui Walker to pick it up, research it fully, particularly from Ngata family papers, and bring it to this triumphant conclusion.

No doubt Butterworth and even I could have written an adequate biography of Ngata. But it could not have been written with the depth of understanding of Maori language, customs, tradition and perspectives which Walker brings to the task. Nor would those with relevant information to offer, especially members of the Ngata family, have shared it as willingly as they have done with Walker, a respected Maori academic with a long track record of scholarship and integrity.

The very title of the book, He Tipua, is an indication of the profoundly rooted Maori perspective from which it grows. "Tipua" is a word that will be unfamiliar to most Pakeha. It implies a form of supernatural spirit, a superman, even, who is larger and more powerful than those around him. It is the perfect term to encapsulate Ngata's charisma and the pervasiveness of his influence, not simply within Ngati Porou but in Maoridom at large.

Notwithstanding his debt to mentor James Carroll, Ngata was the first person to become a truly national Maori leader within the Maori world.

What, then, has Walker's expertise and decade of scholarship produced to tell us that we did not already know?

In the first place it locates Ngata's life firmly and elaborately within its Maori context. The family and tribal background to his ambitions and achievements is explained more comprehensively than ever before. Walker is also especially good in describing the nature of Ngati Porou's accommodation with Western things, through such associations as education, Christianity and support of the Armed Constabulary. He analyses this as a strategy for survival and development, and he makes clear the nuances of its effect on the culture of Ngati Porou.

Walker presents the most clear-headed account yet written of the nature of the Young Maori Party coalition of interests. And he presents a far more informed account of Ngata's time as Native Minister and the events that led to his resignation from that position than any published previously.

Most of all, though, he reveals that Ngata's talents and ambitions covered an even wider canvas of Maori and public life than we knew; and he gives us a comprehensive picture of the man's modus operandi and the physical and emotional resources that enabled him to achieve over such a broad range of activities - the fact that he needed only three or four hours' sleep a night, for example.

Some of the book, especially early tribal history material, makes for dense reading. The episodic structure occasionally stalls narrative flow. And Walker has chosen to focus his text on primary sources rather than address some of the analytical issues surrounding Ngata's career discussed in existing historical literature.

These are minor reservations, however, about a book which delivers unexpected riches in the form of new information about Ngata and a much fuller understanding of the significance of his life and work.

E Rangi, ehara i te tangata, he taniwha, he taniwha, he taniwha.

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* Michael King is the author of many books on New Zealand history.