{"id":266674,"date":"2026-02-04T05:35:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T05:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/266674\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T05:35:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T05:35:07","slug":"scotty-morrison-the-first-nzers-would-have-felt-like-they-were-going-from-a-dairy-to-a-supermarket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/266674\/","title":{"rendered":"Scotty Morrison: The first NZers would have felt like they were \u201cgoing from a dairy to a supermarket\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his element: Scotty Morrison joins the dots between knowledge and environment. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n

\n When he embarked, Scotty Morrison never expected Origins, his voyage into Polynesian prehistory, to last more than one season. But his visits to Taiwan, where the Pacific migration began, and to the cradle of humanity itself in Ethiopia\u2019s Omo Valley, revealed \u201cso much more to do and so much more
\n to explore\u201d.\n <\/p>\n

A second season took the story from the far east of the Pacific to its western shores, following the k\u016bmara\u2019s journey from the Americas in the holds of early explorers. And now a third literally brings it all home.<\/p>\n

Early in the first of two parts, Morrison returns to \u201cmy Hawaiki\u201d, Ra\u02bbi\u0101tea, the island in French Polynesia where his own ancestral waka, Te Arawa, set sail for a new land to the southwest 800 years ago. But the story isn\u2019t so much about the feats of navigation of the first people to sail to these islands \u2013 it\u2019s what they did when they got here.<\/p>\n

Aotearoa New Zealand\u2019s first people found new geologies and new flora and fauna. The arrival, Morrison says, would have been like \u201cgoing from the dairy to the supermarket. Holy heck, look at this, it\u2019s flush with food sources. They must just have looked at it and thought, \u2018Man, we can build things out of all of this, it\u2019s just limitless what we can do in this land.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But the nature of the land, and what was food, medicine or poison had to be learnt through experiment and, as Te Arawa\u2019s Tame Malcolm explains in the programme, systematically shared within the new population. <\/p>\n

Morrison asks, \u201cIn the first hundred years of arrival in Aotearoa, what did they do? Where did they go? How did they find food sources? How did they work out where to stay and what were the best places for them to actually start to locate themselves?\u201d<\/p>\n

That knowledge was gained through a sustained burst of scientific inquiry, what we now know as m\u0101tauranga M\u0101ori.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope people watching get a taste of how the knowledge system that our ancestors created connected them with their environment. How they were able to sync themselves into this new environment and then, over a couple of centuries of observation, started to place the gems of knowledge within our storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first occupants, as Morrison puts it in the programme, \u201cused metaphor to cloak their knowledge in story\u201d. <\/p>\n

Thus, Ng\u0101i Tahu\u2019s legend of the chief who chased to the West Coast the taniwha that had kidnapped his wife is, functionally, a mineral map.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you start to peel back the layers of those stories, you see what extraordinary minds they had, that high level of intelligence not just to understand the science of everything, but to frame it in a M\u0101ori context, in their context of the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was holistic whakapapa, not just the whakapapa that we understand today as being the recitation of names of ancestors in a direct line. As they named things, they created a spirituality around them and they created, for want of a better word, a religion around them and placed their faith and their belief into what they had created.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the second episode, Morrison travels to the Chatham Islands, where the remains of a waka that appears to be recorded in traditional stories as one of two that brought Moriori ancestors from the mainland, were discovered in 2024. If parts of the story of Origins would have been impossible to tell even 20 years ago, this is history as breaking news.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to quickly rush back into the sound booth,\u201d last year, he says, \u201cand add a couple of parts in, because now they\u2019ve been able to prove that it is the Moriori waka Rangihoua.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not, Morrison hopes, the conclusion of Origins. He believes there is one more part of the story to tell.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight at the end of the second episode, we\u2019ve left the door open. That first 100 years is very much about creating a new home and adapting to the new home and finding the resources and creating a knowledge system that allows them to be able to sustain themselves and live here successfully. There are continual journeys going back and forth from Aotearoa to Eastern Polynesia; they\u2019re getting more people, they\u2019re saying, \u2018This is what we\u2019ve found, come back with us.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThat carries on for hundreds and hundreds of years until a point in our history where that all stops \u2013 1500, 1600. A lot of historians have said that\u2019s because of a big change in weather patterns and wind systems, which for 200 years means it becomes impossible for them to return home. It\u2019s that point where they start to consolidate their areas and create tribal boundaries, and it\u2019s there that conflict starts to arise. After living in a reasonably peaceful way for hundreds of years, they start to develop their weaponry and their expertise around warfare, to be able to defend their tribal areas that they\u2019ve marked out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the second season of Origins is now available only on Whakaata M\u0101ori and the first currently can\u2019t be watched anywhere, Morrison would like to see all episodes eventually collected as a historical resource for New Zealanders.<\/p>\n

The ancestors he has followed across the Pacific and back were, says Morrison, \u201creally extraordinary people\u201d, and \u201cdespite the negative impacts of colonisation, it\u2019s in our DNA to be extraordinary. I believe every M\u0101ori person can be extraordinary like our ancestors were.\u201d <\/p>\n

Origins screens at 7.30pm on Tuesdays on TVNZ 1 and will stream on TVNZ+. <\/p>\n

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