Dame Anne Salmond to start Rutherford lecture series

15 October, 2014

2014 Rutherford Lectures to visit Café Scientifique with Dame Anne Salmond

Dame Anne Salmond, renowned author, academic and environmentalist, will give this year’s Royal Society of New Zealand Rutherford Lectures on four different areas of our national life. Dame Anne will open the series, called ‘Experiments across Worlds’, with a lecture in Tauranga on Tuesday 28 October starting at 7.00 pm in the Tauranga Yacht and Powerboat Club at Sulphur Point.

She will explore how exchanges between different ways of being, particularly Māori and European, have helped to shape our past in New Zealand, and how they might contribute to an innovative and successful society for future generations.

Dame Anne Salmond is Distinguished Professor of Māori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland and was awarded the 2013 Rutherford Medal, the Royal Society of New Zealand’s highest research medal, for her eminent work on Māori social structures and interactions with the European world, and on European exploration and engagement in the Pacific. She was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1990.

Dame Anne says she is fascinated by ‘long-run human history’ and how the trajectories of people and their philosophical frameworks intersect.
‘New Zealand is the last significant land mass on Earth to be found and settled by people. Very late in human history, Polynesians in voyaging canoes settled New Zealand, and about five hundred years later, were followed by explorers out of Europe at the time of the Enlightenment.’
‘Both traditions were highly innovative and experimental, with people rapidly adapting to life in islands very different from their homelands. I am interested in what we might learn from their ongoing exchanges in relation to key topics of national interest such as the sea, land, people and power and water.’

In her opening lecture on ‘The Sea’ in Tauranga, Dame Anne will discuss Maori relations with the ocean, beginning with the moment when Te Whanau a Apanui went out to confront oil company Petrobras’ drilling ship the Orient Explorer in 2012, an echo of the episode almost 250 years earlier when canoes headed out from Cape Runaway to confront Captain Cook’s Endeavour. ‘You can’t really understand these contests unless you go back and understand Māori conceptions of the ocean and also European ideas about sovereignty, freedom of the sea and economic zones,’ she says.
‘It is not as though these ideas no longer have contemporary traction. They are really powerful and they are not just shaping the present, but there’s the opportunity for us to open up different kinds of futures. They may allow us to find ways of living that are more creative, survivable and sustainable.’

In her second lecture on ‘The Land’ in Christchurch, Dame Anne will begin with the first European settlement in the Bay of Islands, where the Church Missionary Society missionaries established their first precarious foothold ashore, and their relations with local rangatira including Ruatara and Hongi Hika. The bi-centennial of that arrival will be commemorated in December this year.

Again, she will explore convergences and differences between Maori and European ideas about land, including notions of property and the impact of the enclosures and surveying in Britain, and how these conceptions played out in New Zealand, along with Maori notions of tuku and hoko and their impact on early land deals and the Treaty of Waitangi, down to the present.

In her third lecture, ‘People and Power’ in Wellington, Dame Anne opens with the encounter between Hongi Hika and King George IV in Carlton House in London, tracing the entanglement of ideas of rangatiratanga and sovereignty from that moment, through the Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Waitangi to contemporary debates about democratic rights and freedoms.
She will also examine the rights of Maori women and children, and how these have changed over time. In examining the award of the suffrage to women in New Zealand, a world first, she will argue that this was in part because Māori women already had property rights and represented their people in land court cases and elsewhere. ‘When European women wanted rights to property and political participation, it was pretty hard to deny them when Māori women had them already.’

Dame Anne will give her final talk ‘Rivers – Give Me the Water of Life’ in Whanganui as part of the A Place to Live national conference, which will advance the discussion on improving the environments and economies of New Zealand’s regions and smaller centres. This lecture will begin by discussing the settlement between the Whanganui River hapu and iwi and the government in August this year that recognised the Whanganui River status as a legal person in its own right, an example of ‘creative jurisprudence’ that Dame Anne believes may be a world first.
‘What does this mean for our relationships with fresh water? It’s no longer about property rights, but rather seeing waterways as the lifeblood of the land on which we all depend and the right of a waterway to remain healthy is something which, in that settlement, has been put into a legal framework.”

The 2014 Rutherford Lectures are free and open to the general public. However, to ensure a seat, please register at www.royalsociety.org.nz/events

Enquiries to: lectures@royalsociety.org.nz or 04 470 5781

Lecture details:
The Sea
Tauranga | 7pm Tuesday 28 October
Tauranga Yacht and Powerboat Club, Sulphur Point

The Land
Christchurch | 7pm Thursday 6 November
Charles Luney Auditorium, St Margaret’s College, 12 Winchester Street, Merivale

People and Power
Wellington | 6pm Thursday 13 November
Soundings Theatre, Te Papa

Rivers – give me the water of life
Whanganui | 5pm Sunday 16 November
Royal Wanganui Opera House, 69 St Hill Street

Ends

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