In New Zealand, however, the biological amalgamation of Maori and European sent some commentators into transports of eugenic delight. Of the various theories of Maori origins propounded during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that proposing their Aryan origin informed much thinking in the interwar era and, like the Caucasian Aborigine, brought indigenes and whites racially closer in the settler imagination.^[37] To combine and paraphrase a few texts from that time: the Maori, our distant relatives, are manly and the bravest and most intelligent of the Polynesians; after the long voyage to New Zealand, which only fine human specimens would undertake or survive, subsequent generations were invigorated, intellectually and physically, by the bracing climate; just as Maori represent the best of their race, so white New Zealanders are the best of the British (better than those left behind — and infinitely superior to Australians). Thus, in New Zealand the superb blood of two fine peoples mixed.^[38]

Proponents of these views were not all European. At least one eulogist was of mixed Maori and Pakeha ancestry. Peter Buck (c. 1877-1951) was a doctor, politician, and ethnologist, later knighted and also known as Te Rangi Hiroa. He recalled his horror, as a student, reading a sign in the Otago Medical School advertising Maori skulls, pelves, and skeletons for sale, and yet subsequently devoted much of his professional energy to Maori somatology.^[39] In later life, he directed the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu and when he died, Sorrenson (1973:193) recalled, New Zealand's 'politicians vied with one another to bring back his ashes'. As one of a group of outstanding men of Maori parentage — including Sir James Carroll (1857-1926), Sir Maui Pomare (1876-1930), and Sir Apirana Ngata (1874-1950) — Te Rangi Hiroa was a national trophy, displaying the unique triumph of race relations in New Zealand. One patriot remarked that these men 'would grace any gathering of any race or any nation' (Nash 1927:36). Several could have been called 'half-castes' but that appellation appears to have been rarely, if ever, applied. Notwithstanding their mixed race, Pakeha often celebrated them as Maori.^[40]

Following the 'Aryan' tradition, Te Rangi Hiroa supposed an original homeland for the Polynesians in northern India. During their subsequent travels, he believed (1938:8, 25), they were infused with the blood of other races but remained fundamentally Europoid (or Caucasian). In an earlier essay (1924:365, 369), he described how New Zealand had changed those Polynesians who had landed there. For five centuries, 'the temperate climate had toughened … [the] constitution of the Maori, sharpened his mentality, and altered his material culture'. This evolutionary process set Maori apart from tropical Polynesians. And, after weathering 'the storm of extinction' that followed European settlement, Maori numbers had recovered. From their nadir in 1871, when there were an estimated 37,520 Maori, by 1921 they had increased to 52,751.

But Te Rangi Hiroa did not believe that Maori would survive as a distinct race. Their future was intermixture and absorption. The fate of Maori in New Zealand's South Island seemed already to endorse this prediction. By the end of the nineteenth century, so rapid and far-reaching had been the effects of miscegenation and cultural assimilation that — according to the prehistorian Atholl Anderson (1991:31), himself a product of this history — very few descendants of South Island Maori culturally identified with Maoridom (though this is not the case today). Te Rangi Hiroa (1924:371) argued that neither white New Zealanders nor Maori could object to 'another intermixture' since each side 'was long ago deprived of any pretensions to purity of race'. 'Miscegenation', he continued (1924:374), 'has stepped in, as it has all down the ages'. He challenged the earlier, much cited pontifications of Alfred Kingcome Newman (1849-1924), a medical doctor and businessman, who had predicted (1881:50, 475-6): 'In the course of a few generations the Maoris will die out and leave no trace of their union with the whites'. Instead, Te Rangi Hiroa (1924:371) argued that Maori would shape 'the evolution of a future type of New Zealander in which the best features of the Maori race will be perpetuated for ever'.^[41]

Favourable evaluations of Maori and Pakeha miscegenation, the way in which national figures like Te Rangi Hiroa seemed to demonstrate its attractiveness, and the distinctive features of race relations in New Zealand deserve more consideration than can be given here. Until the 1970s, white New Zealanders continued to take pride in what they saw as their unique success with Maori. As late as 1971, the historian Keith Sinclair (1971:125-7) wrote a short piece entitled 'Why are race relations in New Zealand better than in South Africa, South Australia or South Dakota?', particularly stressing the special influence of Christian and humanitarian ideals. A few years later, the historian Kerry Howe's (1977) study of race relations in New Zealand and Australia acknowledged ideological factors but qualified their importance, referring to environmental determinants in an argument to which my discussion will return. For most New Zealand historians of the last three decades, however, Sinclair's question might seem to validate a self-congratulatory assumption that they have energetically repudiated. No longer is New Zealand projected as an exception to the sorry history of settler colonialism but, as historian Claudia Orange (1987:5) remarked, a variation on the general pattern.^[42]