Why are the Māori people, who arrived in the 1300s, so well recognized in NZ but Aboriginal Australians, who are said to be 65000 years old inhabitants, not so well recognized in Australia?

Question

I will be immigrating to either of these countries next year and was just reading about their history & culture, and found this weird.

The Europeans arrived in NZ just about 300 years after the Māori, yet majority of the cities/towns/hamlets you see in NZ are named after Māori names, Māori culture has been well integrated with the European culture and are very well recognized/respected, for example the Haka dance done on multiple occasions by the national rugby union team, the Māori name of NZ on the passport (Aotearoa), the Māori traditions and symbols etc.

But, you don’t see the same level of cognizance for Aboriginal Australians in Australia, even though they are said be 65000 years. There are hardly any cities named after Aboriginal names, no sign of Aboriginal culture integrated into the Australian lingo or cultural practices?

So, why does this incongruity exist between both the nations?

**EDIT**: Thank you so much for the detailed answers, everyone! I appreciate it dearly. Learnt a lot of new things today 🙂

In: Other

Answer 1

there are a lot of factors to this but I think the core one is

England never intended to colonise New Zealand.

actively setting up government over NZ as a colony happened really late and was partly done because a bunch of English citizens were moving there anyway

at that point they’d had *somewhat* friendly relations with the Māori for decades, so a treaty was drawn up, translated into Māori, and signed.

The Treaty of Waitangi is a contentious founding document because a key difference in meaning between the English and Māori texts meant that each side agreed to *different terms* of sovereignty.

But in Australia there was never any treaty. A core issue around indigenous rights and recognition in Australia is **there still isn’t a fucking treaty**.

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aside from that, there is a practical advantage to New Zealand integrating Māori culture into “mainstream” pākeha society – and that is that there is a more or less singular Māori culture

Australia’s indigenous peoples formed hundreds of nations with hundreds of languages. There was an entire continent to spread over and tens of thousands of years to diverge. Australia can’t just put all government documents into English and Aboriginal, because there is no one Aboriginal language.

personally I think that this gets used as an excuse to not bother trying