In this 2000 interview with Paul Diamond, Māori-language scholar and translator Margaret Orbell discusses her fascination with the Māori oral tradition. The pair also discuss Māori challenges to her efforts to translate waiata into English.

A transcript of their conversation is provided below. 

Paul Diamond: Māori waiata have been an absorbing interest for Margaret Orbell. Her doctoral thesis was based on the texts of waiata aroha, love poems composed by women. She worked with the ethnomusicologist Mervyn McLean on the 1975 book, Traditional songs of the Māori. This was the first to include both the words and music of traditional waiata.

Margaret Orbell: My background was mainly literary, I did a degree in English. I’m very interested in poetry, particularly traditional bodies of poetry, poetries which are shared, in one way or another, by all the members of a community, and it’s not that I’ve made any direct carry-over from English to Māori, which would be naive and totally inadequate, but I did have a background of being interested in, particularly Renaissance poetry, which is rhetorical, you get the individual voices speaking, which happens to be the case also in Māori poetry, in waiata and oriori, you get very elaborate patterns of imagery, of metaphor, which again is very much the same, and the great strength, in the tradition, in that it is shared by all the members of the community. There were Shakespeare’s intricate plays, with all that wordplay, and complexity, being valued and understood by a whole cross-section of London. This has turned out to be quite a reasonable sort of a background, in some ways, for waiata, when I discovered they existed, and I didn’t know they existed until I was 25.

Paul Diamond: And as part of that process you discovered things that showed up when New Zealand poets, you’ve said, when they complained about a lack of unicorns in the hills in New Zealand that there were equivalents, indigenous equivalents.

Margaret Orbell: This is the indigenous tradition of 1000 years of song, and there it is voluminously recorded in the nineteenth century, mostly by Māori writers, often by an alliance, actually, of Māori, who were the authorities, and wrote the manuscripts, generally they wrote them themselves rather than dictating them, and Pākehā enthusiasts who, not very numerous –

Paul Diamond: Such as George Grey.

Margaret Orbell: Such as George Grey, such as Elsdon Best, such as John White, it’s there’s not so much that they were enormous numbers of Pākehā, but they were helpful, because they did preserve the manuscripts and see that they, on the whole, they got into public collections.

Paul Diamond: And, as you’ve said many times in the past, this is just still a huge untapped resource.

Margaret Orbell: There are hundreds of songs, thousands, I imagine, of great beauty and power, and great importance for this country, because they relate to our landscape, to our birds and trees and mountains, which will gradually be interpreted and edited, it’ll be an ongoing thing, it’s quite inexhaustible. We’ve got an extraordinary body of information. It’s apparently by far the best recorded tribal society and post-tribal, in the world, for what that’s worth. There’s a lot of it. There’s room for endless approaches by teams of people, one would hope.

Paul Diamond: Like other Pākehā working in the Māori world, Margaret Orbell faced challenges as the Māori cultural revival gathered momentum. The critic Keith Stewart said that once a champion of Māori in a white world, she now suffers from being white in an increasingly precious brown one.

Margaret Orbell: Everyone comes to this with their own angle, their own approach. There have been some people who’ve questioned whether I should be doing it, but there has been a very positive response – some Māori, that is – but there’s been a very positive response from others. It’s a very, very mixed complex scene, it swirls around.

Paul Diamond: When people were questioning, what were the bases for that?

Margaret Orbell: Basically, I think that I wasn’t Māori, but I don’t want to make too much out of it, because it’s not the main issue. The main puzzle, to me, is why so few people, certainly until recently, have been working in this area at all.

Paul Diamond: Well, and also the fact remains, as Michael King has pointed out, that it was Pākehā woman historians, I mean, who feature prominently in the group of people working in this area.

Margaret Orbell: That’s also true, yes. But I’ve been dealing, a lot of the time in any case, with anonymous manuscripts, songs which have moved around the country from one singer to the next to the next, so the question of tribal affiliation doesn’t really appear, isn’t really an issue in that case. Social attitudes come and go. I only know that this material is there, my translations have not been queried by those who have been annoyed by my presence, as well as others who are pleased I’m doing it, but they have not actually, no serious query about my accuracy for what that’s worth.

Paul Diamond: Do the challenges make it difficult to keep working in the area?

Margaret Orbell: No. Because there’s so many pluses, so many positive aspects to it, not least that I’m enjoying myself. It’s a wonderful thing to be in a position where you can discover so much, because there is an abundance of these complex songs, you can trace patterns from one to another, there’s critical mass. That means that cryptic remarks turn up in one form or another, the same formulaic remark, turns up in various texts. Ah! When you put those different contexts together, you can see what’s going on, you can slowly acquire a knowledge that all the listeners, that the highly sophisticated listeners, to those singers, had.

Michael King: Margaret was someone who had established her credentials more than anybody else, to promote the survival of the language and the culture –

Paul Diamond: Historian and biographer, Michael King.

Michael King: – but because of her ethnicity, some of her colleagues were not giving her the recognition or the support that they ought to have done. And I’d have to say maybe part of that was due to Margaret’s own manner, and mannerisms, given that she was intellectually engaged by these things, and she was a terrific scholar, but I don’t think Margaret’s the sort of person that enjoys rushing up to a hui and hugging and hongi-ing and kissing and those sorts of things, and sometimes in a Māori context, if people sense a physical withdrawal or distance, they then make an assumption that there’s an emotional and intellectual withdrawal, which of course was not the case. It’s hard to think of a scholar who has done more than Margaret, right across the whole field of Māori studies.