The Penguin History of New Zealand Quotes

“Even as recently as 10,000 years ago humankind had spread to and over every habitable continent on Earth, including New Zealand’s nearest neighbour, Australia. And this occupation and colonisation had major effects on the subsequent evolution of plants, animals and land forms. But not in New Zealand. In New Zealand, as an early geographer put it, ‘a land without people waited for a people without land’.”
― Michael King, Penguin History Of New Zealand

“martial people, however, it was not long before Maori began to use muskets in inter-tribal”
― Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand

“Like colonisers elsewhere, the East Polynesian ancestors and their immediate descendants had learned, by trial and error and committing some major mistakes, to turn New Zealand’s natural and environmental conditions to human advantage (how many people perished, one wonders, in the search for a safe”
― Michael King, Penguin History Of New Zealand

“If popular mythology is to be believed, the discoverer of New Zealand was a Polynesian voyager named Kupe. Oddly, this myth was Pakeha in origin rather than Maori. Maori came to embrace it solely as a result of its widespread publication and dissemination in New Zealand primary schools between the 1910s and the 1970s.”
― Michael King, Penguin History Of New Zealand