My grandmother, who was born about 1880, was proud of the fact that both her parents were born in New Zealand. It made her, she used to say, 'a real Pig Islander'. A story she told me more than once was of how my great-great-grandfather John Flatt, a lay catechist, had fallen out with the Church Missionary Society by suggesting that its missionaries in New Zealand were acquiring too much Maori land. Twenty years ago, in the British Museum, I looked up evidence Flatt gave, while in London in 1834, to a Select Committee of the House of Lords looking into 'the State of the Islands of New Zealand'. I found that he had defended the acquisition of land by missionaries, saying - a familiar argument later on - that they had no other way, in that remote place, of providing a future for their children.

LRB 18 December 1986 | PDF Download