Courtesy of National Radio
Presenter (Kim Hill): It sometimes seems as if Michael King has always been here, writing about us, Being Pakeha, Being Pakeha Now, book ended a period of intense soul searching for New Zealanders. His biographies of Princess Te Puea and Dame Whina Cooper made Maori culture more accessible to non-Maori than it had been for many before. Courtesy of National Radio
Presenter (Kim Hill): It sometimes seems as if Michael King has always been here, writing about us, Being Pakeha, Being Pakeha Now, book ended a period of intense soul searching for New Zealanders. His biographies of Princess Te Puea and Dame Whina Cooper made Maori culture more accessible to non-Maori than it had been for many before.Same with his biographies of literary greats Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame, New Zealand made accessible to itself. His new book is about the whole damn lot really. It's "the Penguin History of New Zealand", again accessible and interesting. It's officially launched on monday, the day after tomorrow. A few days ago he received an inaugural Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement, along with Hone Tuwhare and Janet Frame, and also this Monday he begins his treatment for throat cancer. I wondered how fortuitous his life has been. I mean is his writing career as he planned it?

Michael King (biographer and historian): No. I wanted to write, I wanted to earn a living from writing and initially that had to be journalism because there was no other way of doing it, and I only launched into authorship fulltime when I had enough strings in my bow to fall back on like journalism again or teaching or whatever. I never looked further ahead than just writing the kind of books I wanted to write. There were virtually no literary awards at that stage and very few literary fellowships so the best I could hope for I thought, was just to live off the marketplace and that in fact didn't happen.

Presenter: And what was the first book you did, the Princess Te Puea wasn't it?

King: Princess Te Puea was the first major book. I had done one ahead of that on Maori tattooing while I was still working as a journalist, but the Te Puea biography was the first one that was a major book, yes.

Presenter: And that led on to the biography of Dame Whina Cooper?

King: Yes, in a kind of way. It actually locked me into Maori history for about a decade which I had never planned.

Presenter: No, and for which you got some flak?

King: Oh yeah, but been there, done that. Don't really want to go into that again. I mean my second book was actually going to be on James K. Baxter in my plan. I wanted to do biographies of different people - artists, politicians, sportsmen even, but the Te Puea book was unexpectedly successful. I mean unexpected as far as the publishers were concerned, so I kept getting commissions to do more Maori history from publishers and from Maori, and that's why I went in that direction. And then as you say, it got a bit tricky because one of the consequences of the Maori renaissance was that Maori started to say, we want to represent our own culture in our own way and I had no real argument with that and I had plenty of other things I wanted to do so I moved on. But you'll notice from this book, that Maori history is always there and as far as I'm concerned, if you're a nationalist New Zealand you are.. You ought to be as interested and concerned at the Maori part of the equation as the Pakeha part of the equation.

Presenter: and do you think that you've done something to address what is an appalling ignorance on the part of non-Maori about Maori history?

King: I don't know that I'm the one to say whether I have or whether I haven't. I would like to hope that I have because actually..

Presenter: Well, I talk about you with James Belich and Dame Anne Salmond and..

King: Yeah, ok. I mean I'm an old-fashioned liberal person who believes that knowledge and information dissolve prejudice and give people perspectives and enable them to understand you know, what's going on so if it's had that effect that's good. That's one of the reasons you do it but you also have to accept that hundreds of thousands of people don't read books and don't get that information and insight.

Presenter: No, but it must filter down somehow?

King: Yes it does and it's one of the reasons when I do books, I usually go on the road to promote them and even do things like talkback because when you're on a talkback radio programme, it's not like talking to National Radio listeners, you're talking to people who by and large don't read books but you can still get at them and fire a bit of information at them.

Presenter: I think I might have to distance myself from that comment least I be accused of elite snobbery. It's all on you, Michael, as they say. Societies you say in the preface to "The Penguin History of New Zealand" are conditioned not so much by events as by group memories of events which seems to lend credibility to the filtering down process, that it's not what happened, it's what somebody tells you has happened and somebody told them that it had happened?

King: Yes, I was thinking of the big things like the depression, like the effect of world wars, like even you know, the effects of things like that liberal government in New Zealand that gave women the vote and introduced old age pensions and so on. What's significant is not just that those things happened but that people remembered them and it actually conditioned their lives. I think of my parents, my parents' lives were entirely conditioned by the depression and the second world war and that's why they wanted for themselves and their family a quiet suburban life with a job that you had for life. Values that in the 1960's you know, as an angry adolescent I kind of rejected but now of course I understand much more about why they had those values. It's because they had those two enormously disrupting experiences that we never had and future generations won't have.

Presenter: No. What will form our characters do you think, the sort of baby boomer characters if you like?

King: What will form us? Well..

Presenter: We don't have as you say, those kind of iconic experiences.

King: No we don't, and we don't have the great binding experiences because I mean you know, for something like the second world war, virtually the whole country was mobilised, all the eligible men virtually were in the services, almost every family had someone away or lost and that gave them a kind of camaraderie that lasted till the end of their lives. We don't have that. I mean you know, whereas my father might look back on battles fought I, I suppose, look back on the early c and d demonstrations or the anti-apartheid demonstrations. We in part were the generation that started to worry about what was going on in the rest of the world and whether or not we were acting appropriately.

Presenter: I mean I'm beginning to get the impression that what the current generation of 30-somethings are going to remember is you know, the house that they couldn't afford to buy at auction.

King: Well yes, yes sadly, all kinds of things that we used to regard as being basic New Zealand possibilities are kind of disappearing and diminishing like that. People are feeling..

Presenter: Is it that or is it that people are caring so much more about that than about anything else now? This is not necessarily a criticism of them. I mean they have a right to be anxious.

King: Yeah, I think we will change our realities because things don't have to be the way they were. For my parents again it was important that you owned your own house and that you had access to a beach. The next generation of course may finish living in rental accommodation or apartment accommodation because they can't afford to own their own house but in the long run that may not turn out to be a terrible thing. I mean one of the things that's happening in Auckland and Wellington in particular is that suddenly we have life in the inner cities again which we didn't use to have. In the 1950's, if we went into Wellington on Saturday and Sunday they were ghost towns. Now they're alive because people are choosing to live in city apartments again. So there are all.. It doesn't necessarily mean things are changing for the worse just because they're changing.

Presenter: Just your access to the beach comments of course makes me think about the seabed and foreshore controversy that's ongoing at the moment and I don't know whether you care to comment on not so much what the possible resolution may be although you may, but what it says about Maori-Pakeha relations at the moment?

King: It's an interesting issue and I rather wish that it had blown up a little bit earlier because I'd actually put the book to bed when it happened.

Presenter: I wondered. I was reading the index to see first-off whether you'd covered it at all.

King: Well, there are relevant things. You read about the Queen's Chain in there and things like that and that's an important New Zealand value, that belief we had that turns out to be largely mistaken, that we had the right to go anywhere by a river or a lake or the sea.

Presenter: One of those founding myths?

King: Yes it is, it is but what would have interested me as a kind of cameo piece at the end of the book, it would have been a marvellous way of looking at the current debate about what kind of nation we are because it seems to me that the views of what sort of people and nation we are, conditioned how people react to it so that for example you've got probably a mainstream view that we still are a bicultural society, we are Maori and Pakeha, but you've got that other very strong view that we are all just New Zealanders, the national party single citizenship argument, and then I suppose you've got the Maori nationalist view that says we are Tangata Whenua and Tau Iwi or indigenous people and foreign invaders and those positions are represented in the positions people take on the seabed and foreshore issue. In particular the.. We're still coming to grips with whether or not Maori, because they were here first and had the Treaty, should have access to things that non-Maori don't have. I don't have any difficulty with the fact that they ought to.. For example, that people who have lived by the same stretch of coast for hundreds of years ought to have special rights for things like gathering seafood but of course that's not how people are perceiving it and to a lot of Pakeha it was perceived as yet another Maori grab.

Presenter: When you say "they ought to" who is they?

King: I'm talking.. You mean when I'm talking about Maori?

Presenter: Yeah.

King: I'm talking about individual hapu or iwi, you know, what has got..

Presenter: All right. Because I mean one other point and this has to be raised and albeit you may think that it's a talkback issue but mixed.. The Europeans and New Zealanders that you and other historians have made clear, have mixed from the very early days, in the sealing days and the whaling days. For example the tapsell dynasty of arawa which you mention in your book, was started by a Dane called Philip Tapsell and he and a whole lot of others all took Maori wives and had Maori families. Now, does that mean that that group is essentially founded by Pakeha, or did the Pakeha join the Maori and become Maori, in which case how much Maori makes a Maori and this is a question that's asked increasingly?

King: Well, it's never been a matter of vulgar fractions. The Tapsell family are Maori not because of Philip Tapsell but because Philip Tapsell's descendents identify as being Maori, with a Maori mother, and they certainly were. I mean even Philip Tapsell himself was a Pakeha Maori in the sense that he spoke the language and became of their culture and lived by their morays. It basically has to be a question of cultural identification. No matter how much Maori "blood" in inverted commas you've got, if you identify with Maori, you're accepted by other Maori as Maori and you live a life that practices Maori values, then you have every right to be Maori.
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