Vincent O’Malley’s account of the fi rst meeting between Ngāti Tūmatakōkiri and Abel Tasman’s crew sets the scene for how two peoples navigated fraught beginnings to find a ‘meeting place’ in pre-Treaty Aotearoa.

In The Meeting Place, O’Malley traces encounters between Māori and Pākehā in a landscape still shaped by Māori authority. Early misunderstandings and violence gradually gave way to accommodation and adaptation.
In this fragile middle ground, people traded, intermarried, forged alliances and shaped each other’s ways of life – until the balance was undone in the decades after 1840. Through people’s stories, O’Malley brings to life a time of
extraordinary change.

From the Bay of Islands to southern whaling stations, these encounters played out in many different ways. Missionaries worried about the impact of Māori culture on their families even as they relied on local communities for protection and support. Traders and rangatira forged partnerships through exchange, marriage and shared ventures, while visiting whalers and sealers entered into everyday life with Ngāi Tahu in Te Waipounamu.

Such moments of accommodation, sometimes uneasy, created a space that was neither wholly Māori nor Pākehā but something new – a uniquely local middle ground.

Shortlisted for the New Zealand Post Book Awards in 2013, The Meeting Place is now published in an updated edition with new research and an enriched visual narrative.