This work is an excellent introduction to the history of Maori and their myths and legends. It contains some of the best-drawn art inspired by Maori legend and tradition, and the illustrations are so impactful that they stay with you forever. Te Tohunga in Maori means a talented practitioner of any craft or art, religious or otherwise. Hamburg-born artist, Wilhelm Dittmer, has described the art with great detail and precision. The language remains easy to comprehend throughout the book. He includes descriptions of famous Maori art pieces titled: Tiki—the Ancestor of Mankind; The Creation of Hawaiki; The Battle of the Giants; The Death of Maui; The Fight of Night and Day, and many more. Maori Art is a traditional New Zealand art that consists of the art of the Maori people, who initially settled the island between 1250–1300 CE. Maori graphic art comprises mainly of four forms: carving, tattooing, weaving, and painting. Traditional Maori art was favorably spiritual and told details about their ancestry and other culturally essential topics. The dominant colors in the art were black, white, and red dominated.

With the drawings it began. An expired world tried to come to life again in the fragments which some old Maori narrated. Nature all around favoured admiration only, and her loneliness was alive with longing. Of Maori art I had never heard, and, when that art was first offered to me, I had none other to choose. At first it disgusted me. But I had to make use of my time. The evergreen nature was beautiful, and entrancing was her invitation to waste my life in her midst, as she herself was wasting hers. To protect myself against her allurements, I began the first sketches of old carvings. Then I made more. Sitting beside me, and looking at my work, an old Maori related the deeds of his ancestor, upon whose carved image I was at work. And they were mighty deeds! In the evenings later, at the camp-fire, those deeds lived again in my thoughts, and the imagination busied herself, awkwardly enough, to express new ideas with the help of new forms. That was the beginning of the first drawing. Out of books I could learn the old legends, but from the fragmentary narratives of my old friends they sprang into life: so the number of drawings grew—aimless, purposeless. By that which first had disgusted me I was now greatly attracted; the forest was dreaming while I worked, the river murmured, and a strange people awoke interest and friendship. Then, one day, came a traveller from Europe. He saw the drawings and spoke the words: “Make a book”, and the magic words: “I’ll get it published!” Then he went his way back to Europe again. It was four years ago. Because these words were spoken in a far-away country, this book came to life—otherwise the destiny of those first few drawings would doubtless have been the destiny of everything else in the great nature: to wither, to fall to dust. Perhaps it would have been a pity. As to the text of the book: ’twere better that another had written it. More serious treatises have been published by those with greater opportunities to hear and more art to reproduce the legends from the mouths of the old folk now dead and gone, and I owe a good deal to them, especially to Sir George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology and Rev. R. Taylor’s Te ika a Maui, as well as to Mr John White, Mr E. Schirren, and Hamilton’s Maori Art. But it was to my old friends that I chiefly listened, seeking to look into the past through their eyes, to stir my imagination through their memories; yet, even though my pencil may not have done its work amiss, I have grave doubts of the work of my pen. A part only of the legends is contained in this book: it will suffice to keep alive what I have received from my tattooed friends during the long, long days of a peculiarly strange life. The little that is new in my book does not pretend to be scientific: I have written it to help my drawings along their way. And, after all, the book would possibly never have been completed without the friends which the drawings made in New Zealand, above all Augustus Hamilton, Director of the Colonial Museum. The encouragement and help I received from him, the benefit of his wide knowledge and love of art and of all things Maori, and his true friendship, gave confidence to my wavering hopes of representing graphically the imaginings of a people so alien to and so distant from the European mind. At last everything was done: the parting hour came—from the new home back to the old. And now my thoughts are wandering back, often and often, to that distant time when everything was at its beginning: when the tent was pitched under the willow on the river, and from the Maori village on the other shore issued the sounds of happy life; when morning after morning the sun rose golden over the hills, and every night the river reflected the silvery stars; when the willow grew slowly yellow, and the falling leaves gilded the tent; when the smoke of the camp-fire rose blue into the skies—and the first drawing was finished.

This book builds on Claudia Orange’s award-winning Treaty of Waitangi, using a wonderful range of photographs, maps and paintings to bring the Treaty’s history to life. Depictions of key players and moments sit alongside a clear and informative text that helps explain the history of this key document. Two peoples meeting, agreements made and broken, claims and protests: all are a part of the story of the Treaty from before its signing to the present day. Never before have the Treaty’s varied stories been made so accessible the general reader.

How did the European settler perceive M&āori? What images of M&āori society and culture did European artists create for their distant audiences? What preconceptions and aesthetic models lay behind early European depictions of M&āori? These are some of the questions explored by art historian Leonard Bell in this major study of the relationship between the visual representation of M&āori and the ideology of colonialism. He explores the complex and unbalanced cultural interchange between Europeans and M&āori in nineteenth-century New Zealand, in addition to showing how the great range and variety of pictures often revealed more about the artists &– and their society and its attitudes &– than they did about M&āori themselves. This lively and readable book is well illustrated with examples of the artists' work and will be an important contribution to the understanding of colonial New Zealand and the role played by the artist in expressing and creating cultural patterns.