Aotearoa Maori: New Zealand about 1780

THE quality of any habitat can be satisfactorily appraised only in the light of a knowledge of the particular group inhabiting it at a particular time. As the habit of the group changes, or as a different group irrupts into the habitat, its potentialities and promise are transformed; after every advance in the culture of its occupants and every change of occupancy its resources must be re-evaluated. Less than two centuries ago New Zealand was in the undisturbed and undisputed possession of a human group with a neolithic culture. A little more than a century ago the full flood of European culture reached its surffringed shores and soon flowed deeply over the land; in the last few decades the skills, technology, and proficiency of this immigrant culture have advanced at an unparalleled rate. The Maori revered the forest and protected it with elaborate and all-embracing restraints, and he prized nephrite-the jade-green stone from which he fashioned his weapons-above all other mineral resources; the invader, however, found the dull green bush a barrier to his pastoral progress, but he set store by the black stone he called coal. To the two cultures the New Zealand habitat meant different things; each set a different assessment on the same materials.