How come European New Zealanders embraced the native Maori tradition while Australians did not?
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The Maori were more concentrated geographically and shared a single language, this allowed them to mount a more effective resistance and put them in a stronger position to negotiate.
Embraced? They pick and choose what they want to consider their own culture. The Maori have some bad ass tattoos and the haka. What else did they embrace? Nothing that didn’t already suit them.
You mean as compared to Australian Aborigines, who are not Māori? For one thing, today Māori are 17.8% of the NZ population. In Australia Aborigines are 3.8%. There was much more genocidal violence from the Australian colonials. With that and the stolen generation there really hasn’t been as much of a recovery socially.
They resisted, firecely. They pioneered trench warfare. Benevolence had nothing to do with it.
The Maori successfully resisted being overwhelmed by colonization. They are a fierce, proud people that refused to let their culture be subsumed.
I think phrasing it the way OP did gives too much credit to the colonizers and not enough credit to the indigenous population.
First up, Church Missionary groups from the UK took opportunities to reach New Zealand very early. This meant that Māori as a language was translated and written within a few years of colonists and missionaries arriving. There was no such effort for the many different Aboriginal languages in Australia. The Māori also responded to both the message from the missionaries and the educational opportunities they offered.
Those same Church groups in England also wielded significant political power (the same groups that campaigned against the transatlantic slave trade) in the UK. Having seen what was happening to native groups in Australia and other countries, they took a stand against forced colonization and pushed for a British Governor to be appointed and rights to be extended to Māori. This eventually led to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
Regardless of the issues of interpretation of what the Treaty actually meant and the subsequent government land grabs in the Waikato and other places, the existence of the treaty affected how New Zealand society developed. The resurgence of Māori awareness of their cultural heritage in the 70s and the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal to address historic claims means that New Zealanders have spent over fifty years of effort into making things better, even if we can’t always make things right.
The Waitangi Treaty was signed in the 1800’s and united the people of a small (by land mass and population) nation. This agreement transformed government to provide a Maori voice in equality for decision making.
Australia had a referendum last year to provide Indigenous Australians the same sort of thing and the majority of Australians rejected that idea.
Don’t kid yourself, there is plenty of racism in NZ still, but officially, there is respect. That is something that Australia still battles with and the current government is trying to turn around.
They didn’t have a choice, the Maori fought and resisted for a long time to ensure they along with their culture and history wasn’t erased from history.
The uncomfortable but true answer is that Maori had a significantly more advanced level of material technology and higher immunity to disease than First Nations did because unlike First Nations in Australia they had not been isolated from the rest of humanity for tens of thousands of years. First Nations were relatively easily exterminated and were facing a much steeper ‘learning curve’, and ended up making up a much smaller and much weaker proportion of the population in Australia than Maori did in New Zealand.
I’m always surprised at how little time passed between the arrivals of Maoris in NZ and Europeans. It’s like 350 years give or take.
Lazily I used to assume they had a similar story to the aboriginal people in Australia.
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