Racial Crossings

In January 1882 a banquet was held in Auckland’s Choral Hall to mark the visit of Tawhiao, second Māori King, member of Ngāti Mahuta iwi and leader of the Waikato tribes. A special Reception Committee had been set up to publicly entertain Tawhiao and his chiefs, the festivities culminating with a dinner in the evening. ‘The Europeans already assembled’, reported the Auckland Star, ‘received the visitors with cheers’. With the Auckland Mayor presiding, and New Zealand’s Attorney-General also in attendance, an illustrious company had gathered for the event, with guests ‘so arranged that in sitting down to table the two races were intermingled as much as possible’. Sentiments of friendship were also articulated by the Mayor in his toast when he stressed how Tawhiao appeared ‘to wish to break up ... isolation and to make themselves one people with the Europeans’. And, indeed, a good twenty years after some of the most significant battles of the New Zealand Wars, Tawhiao was pleased to agree, singling out love as ‘the great principle—the bond of union between races’. Despite the cultural differences also noted in the Auckland Star, and some more negative sentiments expressed by a columnist in a Dunedin newspaper a few days later, examples of racial crossings such as this document attempts to re-establish cordial ties between Europeans and Māori after the New Zealand Wars, but also show how the concern with racial crossings was important for a broad range of participants. It is this sense of the shared experience of racial crossings that plays an important part in Damon Ieremia Salesa’s book. In probing the ways in which Victorians were fascinated by racial crossings, focusing specifically on New Zealand, where the policy of racial amalgamation had particular currency, Salesa provides a fascinating and refreshing new perspective on colonial encounters between Europeans and Māori, as well as on Victorian racial thought and practice

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