The Great Divide

New Zealand to many is 'Middle Earth', home of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but it was also the last major land mass on the planet to be settled by humans. The country was catapulted kicking and screaming from the stone age to the space age within 200 years of Captain Cook setting foot there...Who really got to New Zealand first? Which version of the Treaty of Waitangi is the most accurate? What impact did a massive asteroid strike in the 15th century have on human settlement in the South Pacific? IT'S A STORY THAT WILL SURPRISE YOU The biggest known earthquake-caused tsunami can create 60 metre walls of water - around six times larger than the Japan tsunami. This New Zealand one created by what is now known as the Mahuika comet strike - after the Maori god of fire - was what scientists call a "mega-tsunami", 220 metres tall, 22 times higher than the Japanese tsunami, as it thundered up the South Island's east coast. Waves that high have been known to penetrate up to 45km inland in other parts of the world. To put this in perspective, if you were dining in the revolving restaurant at Auckland's Sky Tower, 190 metres off the ground, you would still be 30 metres (100ft) underwater.A STORY TOLD WITH HUMOUR: When dawn broke the following morning, more canoes pulled alongside and translator Tupaea remarked to Cook the overnight guests were yelling over the rails to their friends, "It's OK to come on board, the white men don't eat people!" "From which," Cook wryly and cautiously noted in his journal, "it should seem that these people have such a Custom among them." IN THE VOICES OF THOSE WHO WERE THERE: "About dinner time three canoes came alongside of much the most simple construction of any we have seen, being no more than the trunks of trees hollowed out by fire without the least carving or even the addition of a washboard on their gunnels. "The people in them were almost naked and blacker than any we had seen - only 21 in all - yet these few despicable gentry sang their song of defiance and promised us as heartily as the most respectable of their countrymen that they would kill us all." A STORY OF MISPLACED TRUST: Turning to Lieutenant Roux, du Fresne added: "How can you expect me to have a bad opinion of a people who show me so much friendship? As I only do good to them, assuredly they will do me no evil."AND THE CLASH OF CULTURES: By seven pm, word came through from the ships that "a great many more canoes, full of natives, had landed on the island." This was an all-out war involving, on one side, a battalion-strength team of Maori warriors drawn apparently from numerous tribes (about as many warriors as the current New Zealand Army can comfortably muster for any single military tour at the moment), and on the other 50 armed Frenchmen, most of them sailors. One side, of course, had gunpowder. The other side desperately wanted gunpowder. AND LESSONS LEARNED THE HARD WAY: Northland Maori in particular were beginning to amass quite a collection of captured weaponry, from the tempered steel of cutlasses and swords to the power of the mighty musket. The cardinal rule - never bang a casket of gunpowder - had been tested and learnt by the Ngati Uru of Whangaroa - and Maoridom's inevitable catch-up with European technology and power was well underway. There was, however, an even more potent force sailing over the horizon: missionaries. IN SHORT, IT'S OUR STORY...a story of migrants, the people they met, the future they forged.

The Great Divide, working from the original documents from 200 years ago, directly challenges the findings of books like Michael King's Penguin History of New Zealand or Claudia Orange's Treaty of Waitangi, and in doing so offers a fresh new perspective on an issue affecting every single New Zealander. Among the book's findings, all fully supported with documentary citations: The scientifically-documented discovery of stone tools five metres underground, beneath ancient forests in the South Island and beneath volcanic lava flows in Auckland city, shows New Zealand may have been settled by humans between two thousand years ago and 14,000 years ago - overturning accepted modern theories about a 1280AD migration. A massive comet strike that left a 20km wide crater with walls 150m high in the seabed near Stewart Island in the mid 1400s created a 220 metre high tsunami (twenty times higher than the Japanese one) that swept up the NZ coast, wiping out evidence of early human settlement, and is the most likely culprit in mass species extinction of moa, eagles and other animals around the same time. The early humans left South Island cave paintings featuring what scientists described as "crocodiles and pythons" - animals not known in Polynesia.Pre-European society was dominated by war, infanticide and cannibalism, which was the context directly leading up to the Treaty of Waitangi . That, contrary to the claims of the Waitangi Tribunal and modern Treaty scholarship, Maori at Waitangi realised they were surrendering 'absolute sovereignty' to the British and understood what it meant . That Maori did not intend for a dual power structure featuring "two treaty partners", but instead were openly calling for "one law, the Queen's law, for all" . That Maori signed at Waitangi precisely to put an end to war and cannibalism, and for the purposes of integration into British society. That the Treaty of Waitangi as we currently debate it (1840 version) was actually rendered legally obsolete by an 1860 meeting between the Government and 200 Maori chiefs in Auckland, raising questions about the constitutional status of the Treaty as people currently understand it. That the much-publicised Taranaki land disputes that set off the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s were not properly understood by the Waitangi Tribunal, which has made major precedent-setting rulings in a range of cases based on a flawed analysis of the evidence. The book finds that Pakeha and Maori both bear some responsibility for the breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, but that while many of the cash settlements are justifiable, the legal decisions justifying them are wrong in fact and law, and if carried through into a new constitution as is currently planned, will cripple New Zealand by turning the Treaty of Waitangi into something it was never intended to be - almost the exact opposite of what Maori who signed it were seeking. As the introduction to the book notes: "It is the experiences of real people, on all sides of an event, that define how the event is seen in history. The story of New Zealand is not some dry, dusty compendium of old parchments written by a collection of fusty academics; it is a story of life and death, of triumph and tragedy, of two peoples meeting for the first time in history - with wildly different backgrounds - struggling to find balance, honour and a new way forward. "It is the story of change, of how things never stay the same no matter how much we wish them to, and how 'adapt or die' is the overarching driving force that has filled humanity's sails since the beginning of time. It was the wind of change that drove the first humans from the warmth of the tropical Pacific down to temperate New Zealand, and the same wind that blew European explorers onto our shores either hundreds of - or as little as 300 depending on who you believe - years later. "History was not forged by the politically correct. It was forged by people with strong beliefs, strong prejudices and all the passion you'd expect from people at the earth's last civilisational frontier. Maori or Pakeha, the making of New Zealand is a story we can all be proud of, something we can and should celebrate. "It's our story." The Great Divide is likely to be one of the most talked-about books this year.

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