Richard Wolfe: Moa

Reviewed by Margie Thomson


Full title: Moa: The dramatic story of the discovery of a giant bird

AS the moa looms over most other species, so does the figure of Professor Richard Owen preside, Zeus-like, over 19th-century scientific discovery.

They were a well-matched pair who, from 1839 onwards, did much to enhance each other's reputations. The moa, having been reduced to bones several centuries before, was a rather more passive participant in that process than the "imperious" Owen, who in his position as Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology at the Hunterian Museum in London received crates of these bones from New Zealand collectors and astounded the public with his "discovery" of "the tallest bird that ever walked the earth".

In this "biography of a bone", Wolfe traces the European discovery of the moa and, being Wolfe, in the process conducts us around a veritable root-system of collateral stories.

Wolfe, best known for his books about New Zealand ephemera and kiwiana, simply cannot resist a good story, and he finds them in every nook and cranny. Thankfully, he looks back on history with a wry twinkle in his eye, taking an affectionately humorous approach born of a liberal, 21st-century perspective.

So, for instance, just as we are on the brink of witnessing the moa's introduction to mainstream British science, we must first detour around the Hunterian Museum to wonder at the skeleton of the "Irish Giant", Charles Byrne, standing 2.5m (8 feet, 4 inches); or the skeleton Chunee, a 5-tonne Indian elephant.

By book's end, however, we have met a fascinating bunch of adventurers, vagabonds and inquirers, the many key players in the discovery and analysis of the moa's remains, and have a pretty good feeling for the excitement and one-upmanship of the 19th-century scientific world.

In those days, science was scarcely at all the province of professionals - Owen, as Wolfe points out, was one of the few full-time scientists, and he was provided with his raw material (bones, rocks, carcasses) by amateur enthusiasts the world over. One gets the feeling that almost every ship making the return journey from the colonies back "Home" arrived with crates full of botanic or animal specimens.

The population at large was just as fascinated by the new discoveries about their world. We talk today as if we invented the idea of information as entertainment, but the Victorians got there before us, flocking to public lectures and soirees to hear about the latest discoveries - kiwis, moas, dinosaurs, geological strata and so on.

At least one of Wolfe's main characters actively promoted science through a programme of lectures and talks. However, naturalist Gideon Mantell's great achievements in discovering both the Iguanodon and the Hylaeosaurus were overshadowed by Owen's conclusion that these were simply a subspecies of Saurian reptiles which he named Dinosauria.

As Wolfe shows, news of an enormous, extinct bird was already filtering into European consciousness before Owen got in on the act. Joel Polack, New Zealand's first Jewish settler, was the first European to see "several large fossil ossifications" and later to write: "That a species of emu, or a bird of the genus Struthio, formerly existed in the [northern] island, I feel well assured."

The missionary William Colenso was in fact the first European to record the bird's identity as "moa", after he and fellow missionary William Williams were told about it by East Cape Maori in 1938. The following year Williams bought, from a Maori chief, the fragment that would eventually be passed to Owen in London.

Wolfe's narrative begins with this small bone, an "unpromising fragment", which was passed from hand to hand and finally shown to Professor Owen. For all his faults ("dastardly and envious", Mantell confided in his journal), Owen was a brilliant taxonomist and the moa was to become one of his most famous achievements. While he was at first unimpressed by this small fragment of bone, Owen soon realised it must come from a "large, struthious bird in New Zealand". It was not long before more bones were found, and his prediction confirmed.

The burgeoning passion to find moa bones was not unlike the passion for gold, on a smaller scale, and eventually entire graveyards were uncovered, showing evidence of the deaths of many thousands of these "feathered monarchs" at the hands of hungry Maori. Europeans collected cratefuls of bones and sent them back to Owen and, eventually, to new museums in New Zealand and around the world.

The moa as an economic food stock died out centuries before Europeans came to New Zealand, but there are heart-breaking indications that there may have been one or two left even in the early 19th century. All the evidence shows, however, that even if they had spotted this extraordinary creature, early European collectors were likely to have shot them as proof.

Darwin's ideas of natural selection, with their increasing hold over popular imagination and science, inevitably recur in Wolfe's narrative, although Owen was, for the most part, an adversary of Darwin. The moa, young New Zealanders were told in a textbook in 1899, was a lesson in evolution, for it "paid the penalty of sloth". It certainly succumbed to the more aggressive human species.

Its loss, Wolfe believes, "provides an increasingly important lesson for us all ... We ... owe it to that big bird that its surviving relatives and other members of our unique fauna do not go to the same way".

Wolfe offers us an idiosyncratic, eclectic view of history, which, rather like the books of Simon Winchester, can easily be enjoyed by all, boffin or not. The only real complaint is that a few more visual aids (maps, portraits) would have added to the enjoyment.

Penguin, $29.95