Witi Ihimaera (editor): Where's Waari? A History of the Maori Throught the Short Story

(Reed $29.95)

Review: Dennis McEldowney*

When Witi Ihimaera was still at school he was so outraged by Douglas Stewart's story The Whare, which he saw as demonising Maori, that he threw it out of the window and was caned by the headmaster. In this brave anthology he reprints not only Stewart's story but several more he probably wants to throw out of the window. He doesn't say. "You be the judge," he says to the reader.

The title comes from a child's picture-book, Where's Wally?, where the puzzle is to find a young man in a crowded scene. Where is Waari in these diverse stories? For this book is not really "a history of the Maori through the short story." It is a history of the perception of Maori. Ihimaera has chosen mostly established writers, from Douglas Stewart to Bruce Stewart, from Katherine Mansfield to Patricia Grace.

For half of the century the stories span all the writers were Pakeha.

Ihimaera is kind enough to say that they at least looked at Maori, but they looked through spectacles of varying hues. Some were borrowed from popular magazines, such as Strand, to find humorous stories of wily natives putting one over the settlers.

There are romantic stories about dusky maidens - always maidens if not princesses - written in a kind of biblical prose. One of these maidens, improbably as it must have seemed at the time, conquers the world's opera houses.

Some writers see Maori life as an escape from constricting puritanism.

But all are looking in from the outside. The most honest are those who admit their incomprehension and make it their subject, even the objectionable Stewart, even the still more objectionable Henry Lawson. The famous Australian's story is full of such words as savage, ignorant, cunning, ungrateful, superstitious and smelly.

Roderick Finlayson, Noel Hilliard and Maurice Shadbolt got much closer, but it is only when Maori begin writing that the stories really turn inward. Which is not to say they are all writing about "Maori issues."

For all the Saints, by the first of the Maori writers in the book, J.C. Sturm, would be a fine character study in any culture, and Rowley Habib's Strife in the Family is as much universal as Maori. If Ngahuia Te Awetoku's The Basketball Girls is a Maori story it is equally a lesbian story.

But there are inevitably angry stories about Maori in prison, caught in the travails of social welfare, doing drugs, messed up by their education.

Patricia Grace revisits the theme of dispossessed Maori getting their own back. In her sharply satirical Ngati Kangaru, Maori returning from Australia occupy beach houses on the grounds that they are seldom used and therefore available for all - a trick learned from the writings of Edward Gibbon Wakefield.

These stories are all in the sometimes despised genre of social realism; Maori writing is too urgent for the luxury of word games. The important thing (to the editor as much as the reader) is that they are stories you read because you want to, rather than because you ought to.

They are the best possible background to the arguments on Maori issues that seem to be engulfing us.

* Dennis McEldowney is a writer and former publisher who lives in Auckland.