Bruce Moon: Changing our Country’s Name by Stealth

To anybody who is reasonably observant, the rapid increase in appearance of the word “Aotearoa” in print and the spoken word will appear very striking, even sinister.  Thus, the former Race Relations Commissioner, Dame Susan Devoy, has used it; it has appeared on postage stamps in larger print than our country’s real name and more recently Prime Minister Arden has stated her opinion[1] that “Using 'Aotearoa' and 'New Zealand' together is ‘as it should be’”.

What is going on?  Is our country’s name being changed by stealth?  We are New Zealanders – surely we are proud of that!  By what right can anybody alter it?

As always, we can get some perspective by looking at our history which tells us that “Aotearoa” is a quite recent upstart with scant justification, if any at all, to be used as our country’s name.

Just as they had no sense of a Maori nation, “in the pre-European era, Maori had no name for the country as a whole”.[2]  This need be no surprise as the same was true for many Pacific Island Groups.  It was left to European explorers to appreciate the wider picture and give them names:  the Solomon Islands, the Cook Islands ... .[3]

The first to do so for us was Abel Tasman in 1642 who imagined that what he saw here was part of the conjectured Great Southern Continent of which it was supposed that another land mass off the tip of South America was also a part.  This had been named “Staten Land” or, in Dutch, “Staten Landt”.  So Tasman duly named our country “Staten Landt”.[4]  When it was discovered at almost the same time that South America’s neighbour was only another island, its name was changed accordingly and the Dutch States General renamed Tasman’s discovery “Nieuw Zeelandt”, in the next year.  That has been, anglicized to “New Zealand”, our country’s name for the 375 years ever since.

When the Treaty of Waitangi was written in 1840, our name was, appropriately, transliterated to Maori as “Nu Tirani” and it appears solely as that in the Treaty (Tiriti[5]).  [Question for all New Zealanders: How many times does “Nu Tirani” appear in the Treaty??]

Moreover, when documents were to be written in Maori, this continued to be the practice and when a document in Maori was posted on the wall of the Karitane Post Office about a hundred years later[6] it had been modified only slightly to the somewhat more accurate rendering of “Niu Tireni”.  “Aotearoa” just did not appear.

So where did “Aotearoa” come from and where was it used?  Pre-Treaty Maoris had many names for the main islands of New Zealand and “Aotearoa” was just one of them.  Moreover, it was sometimes used for the North Island (according to Michael King) and sometimes for the South (of which Barry Brailsford told me personally that he was certain!).[7]

As King continues, “Polynesian ancestors came from … islands, and it was to islands that they gave names” For the North Island, King nominates “Te Ika a Maui”, “Aotea” (also used for Great Barrier Island) and “Aotearoa”, the preferred name for the North Island of Tawhiao, the second Maori “king”.  To this list, Brailsford adds “Whai Repo” and Jean Jackson “Orokeroke”.[8] Jean says also that “Aotearoa” was also used to refer only to the three central mountains whose volcanic ash discharges could sometimes form a long pencil shape.

For the South Island, apart from Brailsford’s “Aotearoa”, King says it “was known variously as ‘Te-Waka-a-Aoraki’[9], … ‘Te Wahi Pounamu’ and ‘Te Wai Pounamu’”.  Jean Jackson adds “Kaikaldu” (which Sheila Natusch said meant “eat pigeons”) and says there is documentary evidence of this.  She says too that an unpublished work by Keith Darroch, available in the National Library, gives yet more information.

As King says, “In the Maori world all these names would persist in simultaneous usage until around the middle of the nineteenth century” after which Maoris “began to favour Nu Tirani and its variants … few Maori opted for ‘Aotearoa’”.

It was only about 1890 when Stephenson Percy Smith’s fictional Kupe story used “Aotearoa” as a name for the whole country that Maori use of it in this way increased though, as King notes again, “many South Island Maori …  recognised [it] as a name for the North Island only.”[10]

So what are we to make of all this?  It is that, at the very best, “Aotearoa” as a substitute name for New Zealand is very much a “Johnny-come-lately”.  Perhaps, more accurately, it is simply described as a usurper and even if South Island Maoris have bowed to the Northern weight of numbers and begun to use it as such, that is a very recent thing to have happened.

More than that, even, “Aotearoa” is totally absent from the Treaty of Waitangi and so in any situation or law which refers to the Treaty, use of “Aotearoa” is simply wrong and must be unacceptable.  It betrays the history and origins of New Zealand and should be treated accordingly.

We are all New Zealanders, whatever racial origins we may have; our country has been New Zealand and no other for 375 years and we should recognize and support it as such every day and in every way.

This article was first published on 1 May 2013, and was revised 20 November 2018. it was also published as a chapter in “One Treaty; One Nation”, 1 October 2015, ISBN 9781872970448.

Footnotes:  

[1] J. Ardern, “Newshub”, 18 Dec. 2019
[2] M. King, “The Penguin History of New Zealand”, ISBN 0 141 301867 1, 2003, p.41
[3] B. Moon, “How the Pacific Islands got their names”, "Nelson Mail", 5th July 2014
[4] Indeed this name “Staten Landt” was the first namever given to our country as a whole!
[5] That is, the sole genuine treaty, in the Ngapuhi dialect of Maori.
[6] Where I personally recall seeing it.
[7] B. Brailsford, “Song of Waitaha”, 1989, p.34
[8] J. Jackson, personal communication, 2nd May 2013
[9] “Aoraki” incidentally was never a Maori name for Mount Cook, but only for the long white clouds which often surrounded the peaks of the Southern Alps as A. P Harper found out during his explorations. See “Pioneer Work in the Alps of New Zealand”, 1896.
[10] Soon after that (1898) appeared W. Pember Reeves “The Long White Cloud” with the subsidiary title “Ao-Tea-Roa” which only appeared once more in the book in a footnote.

Bruce Moon is a retired computer pioneer who wrote "Real Treaty; False Treaty - The True Waitangi Story".