Sophie Gee

Te Pukeha said that if it had been his own possession, he would never have parted with it.

but the pakeha was very hot up.

The tiki was deposited at the museum where the curator would vouch for its authenticity and so on.

The point I want to make about the tiki, Jonti, in this book is that it's like the diamond in the Moonstone, in the Wilkie Collins story.

It's this colonial, it's an Indigenous object, an object of enormous kind of spiritual resonance that has actually turned out to be passed among many hands.

It no longer has its kind of connection or kind of original contact with,

First Nations culture.

It's actually kind of lost that already and become this object that's traded between white people and Maori people that is allowed to kind of pass into white hands.

And actually, Te Pokiha here is operating as a kind of intermediary between Maori culture and white culture, which is exactly what Collins and other writers are doing with native objects in their stories about India.

So it's a really important trope, I think, that Marsh is picking up on and using with the Tiki.

Ah, smoking quill.

I'm completely persuaded by that.

That's a great point.

Yeah.

I'm deeply moved by that, Chanti.

It's very, very resonant.

And it brings me to the last quotation, really, that I want to offer about Te Pukeha and how Marsh is handling his characterisation.

So on the one hand, he kind of makes fun of the sort of colonial preoccupation with the Maori.

He's very sensible of how Maori

oversimplified it is and how there's this tendency on the one hand to sort of fetishize the Maori and on the other hand to kind of derogate them.