Overview
The object you see here is a patu pora – a short weapon, intended to be used for striking. It’s made in the form of a patu onewa (stone club), but from iron obtained from European pora (ships). Although fashioning a patu pora would have been a slow and difficult process, it was perhaps easier than working the stone used to create patu onewa.
The patu pora is an important example of Māori use of European technology, and highlights Māori ability to adapt to changing circumstances, as well as their ingenuity and creative genius in mixing new materials with old forms.
In his book Making Peoples, historian James Belich writes that in 1815 the Ngāti Pou chief Te Puhi of Whangaroa owned a patu pora created by beating an iron bar into shape. It isn’t known whether this patu pora from the Te Papa collection is the same one.
Maori and Europeans began to trade with each other from the late eighteenth century. To a large extent, Europeans relied on Maori for food, including fish and vegetables, as well as for fibres such as flax, and for help with building fences and shelters.
Maori were quick to begin using the new technology brought by Europeans. They selected the materials and objects they valued most highly and adapted both the function and the form. James Belich has noted that the early European explorers ‘saw perfect earrings ground from bits of glass, large nails made into chisels, small nails made into fishhooks.’ (1)
At first, Europeans determined what goods they traded with Maori. They offered cheap items (such as trinkets, cloth, and small iron tools), emphasising their rarity in this country to get as much for them as possible.
However Maori quickly took more control in the trading process, raising the prices of their own goods. And as competition among European traders grew, Māori became more discerning about which goods they exchanged with Europeans. In the 1770s large nails, which could be made into chisels for carving, were the most prized trade items. As century neared its end, iron tools overtook them in popularity.
Maori sought heavy blankets and dogskins, and Sydney traders imported them from England especially for the New Zealand market. Maori used these items in completely new ways, converting them into attractive and practical clothing. However, after 1800, guns became the main import to this country. Maori used them not only in battle, but to display tribal wealth, as gifts, and for firing salutes.
Cross-cultural exchange between Maori and Europeans went beyond the material level. Ideas and concepts were also exchanged, most notably in the field of religion.
‘Maori did not passively receive Europe but actively engaged with it. They chose, adjusted and repackaged the new, in many respects into a less culturally damaging form. They did so with courage and perceptiveness, exploiting a technologically formidable Europe that thought it was exploiting them . . . ’(2)
References
1. Belich, James (1996). Making Peoples – A history of the New Zealanders: from Polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. Auckland: Allen Lane, Penguin Press. p 149
2. Belich, James (1996). Making Peoples – A history of the New Zealanders: from Polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. Auckland: Allen Lane, Penguin Press. p 154
More information
The following publications may be found on the Discovery Centre bookshelves or in Te Aka Matua Library and Information Centre, Level 4.
• Belich, James (1996). Making Peoples – A history of the New Zealanders: from Polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. Auckland: Allen Lane, Penguin.
• The Journal of the Polynesian Society Vol. 39 (1930). New Plymouth: Thomas Avery & Sons. p 1987