John White occupies a minor but interesting position in the nineteenthcentury New Zealand literary scene, thanks to the series of ethnographic novels he wrote about Māori. These books, while mediocre in terms of artistic quality, are culturally significant, for they reveal in a fascinating way the attitudes of many European New Zealanders of this period towards Māori and Māori culture. White was born in 1826 in County Durham. The White family had strong Wesleyan connections, and in 1834 they emigrated from England to Mata in the Hokianga, where there was a Wesleyan missionary presence. White’s low-church upbringing had a lasting influence on him – it lay behind his generally very negative stance towards traditional Māori religion, for instance. It was combined, however, with a profound interest in Māori culture, an enthusiasm that grew out of his almost daily contact, during this early period of his life, with the local Ngā Puhi people of the Hokianga. The ethnographic knowledge White gained at this time laid the foundation for his main career as an interpreter and, later, scholar of Māori culture. It also greatly influenced his writing, which was firmly rooted in his ethnographic interests. The young White appears to have seen himself as a poet – he hung a picture of Byron on his wall, to the chagrin of his father – and he wrote quantities of mediocre English verse, some of it in the form of narrative poems modeled after Walter Scott, some of it in the shape of short lyrics addressed to a ‘lady love’. At the same time, spurred on perhaps by his reading of Ossian, he was busy collecting local Ngā Puhi material, material which would one day form the basis of his ethnographic fictions. This material included ‘New Zealand songs’ (waiata and karakia, some of which White translated into English), ‘native tales’ (tara or stories told to him by Ngā Puhi friends, which White recorded in Māori and sometimes translated), ‘NZ anicdotes’ (short descriptions or observations in English illustrating Ngā Puhi life and custom), and longer narratives, often involving accounts of warfare, drawn from Ngā Puhi oral history. Various as this material was, it is unified by a focus on utu (response or revenge). This theme, indeed, later came to dominate White’s writing about Māori. At first this material was collected quite haphazardly, in the moments White could spare from his farm work. But later on, as his