Joan Metge

Joan Metge

Everybody was really down on the Māori and thought the "drift" to the cities was a "Bad Thing". Everyone was sounding off about it … but nobody went and talked to the people who were actually migrating, to see why they left the rural areas, what they did in town, what they thought about it and how they were getting on. So that’s what I did.

Joan Metge, speaking to Marilyn Head, 2006

Whānau, pōwhiri, kaumātua, mana – that these words are familiar to most New Zealanders is a source of great satisfaction to anthropologist Joan Metge, whose groundbreaking research and work with Māori communities since the 1950s has been mainly directed at promoting cross-cultural understanding.

Born in Auckland in 1930, Metge had no contact with Māori until her family moved to Pukekohe in 1940. There she was exposed to ‘the best and worst of race relations’, observing Māori held in high regard as well as widespread discrimination. A warm friendship with a Māori classmate, however, revealed ‘a whole hidden Māori world that Pākehā didn’t know about, that I wanted to explore!’

Trained as an anthropologist to gather information by talking and listening to people in their own context, she spent two and a half years doing fieldwork with urban Māori in Auckland and rural Māori in the Far North, writing up her notes while studying in London.

Until the 1930s, there had been little interaction between Māori – who were almost wholly rural – and Pākehā. But when the Depression and later the Second World War brought increasing numbers of Māori into the cities, relationships between Māori and Pākehā and within Māori communities themselves were significantly affected.

Metge’s huge contribution was to recognise and document this movement to the cities, not as an aimless ‘drift’ by the feckless as it was often characterised, but as a contemporary migration, every bit as courageous as the great migration that brought their ancestors from Polynesia to Aotearoa, and with similar motivations.

Metge pays warm tribute to the many rural and urban kaumatua who accepted and mentored her, trusting her to share what she learned with other Pākehā, truthfully and with respect.

Metge’s pioneering studies of the effects of urbanisation and social transition have been a valuable contribution to international research on cultural minorities, but in New Zealand the impact of her work has been profound. In the post-war period, when South Africa was pursuing the separatist policies of apartheid and aboriginal people in Australia had yet to get the vote, Metge was taking Māori history, society and culture to Pākehā through university extension courses, lectures and publications based on her fieldwork. Her books, A New Maori Migration, The Maoris of New Zealand and Talking Past Each Other, were greatly influential in raising awareness of and addressing the causes of intercultural misunderstanding and offered a valuable framework for improving cross-cultural communication.

By Marilyn Head

Medals and awards

James Cook Fellowship 1981-83, Elsdon Best Memorial Medal 1987, DBE 1987, New Zealand Medal 1990, Te Rangi Hiroa Medal 1997

Further reading

Paula Martin, Lives with Science: profiles of senior New Zealand women in science, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, 1993

Joan Metge, A New Maori Migration: urban and rural relations in northern New Zealand, Athlone Press, 1964

Joan Metge, New Growth From Old: the whānau in the modern world, Victoria University Press, 1995

Image courtesy of Joan Metge

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