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Nelson, New Zealand, near Park Abel Tasman.

Imagine for a second that you’re a 19th century Englishman that the Industrial Revolution has left with nothing. Your only possibility for advance is to become a settler. But first you need to choose where to go. America is not an option, since they’re in the middle of Civil War. In India and South Africa there’s no land left to buy, and if you want a large plot for yourself, Oceania is the place to go. You just have to face a couple of months in a boat, and if scurvy, the pirates and the storms don’t kill you, you still have one more choice: Australia or New Zealand. You prefer the second in advance because you’ve been told that the climate is kinder and similar to home. But, just in case, you ask around to know what your new neighbors will be like and things like that.

The answer is simple. You can choose between the aborigines or the Maori. To you, they’re one and the same and you figure they could be related. But the drunk at the inn keeps belting down pints and chatting. He tells you that the first are barbarians with prehistoric faces and obsessed with setting everything they see on fire. They’re pyromaniacs in a country without a fire brigade. Things aren’t looking up but it turns really ugly when you’re told about the second. Cannibals. Real animals who when Captain Cook first saw them and opened fire, instead of running scared like any normal son-of-a-bitch, turned in their toy-like canoes and headed straight for the Endeavor, the discoverer’s schooner. Four against two hundred, they fared quite badly in the fight. Yet, as soon as they could, they took vengeance and were rather satiated. And that’s the right word, since they ate more than a few settlers. They savor human flesh, and the whiter the better. You get the point. You stay in Australia, and fuck those Kiwis.

This is literally what happened in the 1800’s. The aborigines are descendants of the peaceful tribes from southern India that immigrated to Australia through Indonesia some 50,000 years ago. The links have been established because of some similarities in the language and, above all, because they are the only groups in the world that share the use of the boomerang. Fire has been their only survival tool. With it, they renovate the plants they eat while simultaneously corralling wild animals in smaller territories, therefore making them easier to catch.

The Maori, on the other hand, following the flight of the birds they saw migrating each year, arrived in canoes to New Zealand from Polynesia only some 700 years ago. They were more advanced than the people from the other side of the Tasmanian Sea, but more than anything, they were wilder. And it served them well because it kept the insatiable settlers away from their territories. Their collection of dissected heads, their atrocities and their war dances where the stick their tongues out frightened the life out of people. First impressions go a long way. The truth is, they were lucky from the start because 100 years before Captain Cook discovered them, the Dutch had already been through and hadn’t even disembarked. The tulip captain decided he didn’t have enough resources for such a big conquest – best to keep the existence of these islands under wrap until a better occasion arise. They spent just enough time to call the place New Zealand and leave. It wasn’t the only place they named, only to lose at later date. Something similar happened in America with New Amsterdam. They said the land there was impossible to build on because it was too swampy and so they sold it for four pounds. Manhattan was the name of the tribe living in those swamps. The English that bought the place are still splitting their sides laughing.

The same as the ones who signed the Waitangi Treaty by means of which the Maori became subjects of the British monarchy and the monarchy recognized its property rights over their lands. In theory, a perfect agreement. Some are conquered without having had to shoot a gun, while the others kept everything. But in time it became the perfect trap. Because they were the legal owners of the land, they could sell it, which is exactly what they did. Voluntarily or by force, who knows, but very few held on to their possessions. One thing is true. They have kept their feral look. All Blacks, they’re still dancing and sticking their tongues out to give anyone they face a fright, even if it is only a rugby team. What we don’t know if they still keep their enemies heads at home as trophies.