Sophie Gee

So she's kind of doing this quite complicated, not fully resolved thing.

of oscillation between different kinds of stereotypes about Maori culture and its relationship to colonialism.

So that's quite dodgy.

And, you know, one would not write that now if one were writing a history of the Commonwealth.

The only thing I want to say for Marsh is that she is, I think, possibly, I wonder, whether she is thinking about, for example, the contrast between

the relationship between Maori people and white settlers in New Zealand and First Nations people and white settlers in Australia.

There's much more awareness of sort of erasure and violence and oppression in the Australian context than in the New Zealand context.

I wonder whether she is actually doing a bit of a shout-out to New Zealand for having...

in many respects, a kind of cleaner slate when it comes to race relations.

Maybe I'm wrong about that.

I think that's right.

And actually just maybe as a final point, because I spoke about this at the very beginning of the episode, one of the things that she does that's quite interesting is to have Te Pokiha point out that he himself, or the Maori people, are actually not native to the islands of New Zealand, that they too have arrived.

So what he says in a late conversation with Alan, he says...

We too are strangers in New Zealand, you know.

We've only been here for about 30 generations.

We brought our culture with us and applied it to the things we found here.

Our religion too and our science, if we may be allowed to call it science.

And there's a long riff about how.

aristocratically magnificent Te Poukiha looks at this moment.

He says, Alan says, where did you come from?