Introducing Tauwhitu

In a Kerikeri pub sometime in the 1980s, Boston author Christina Thompson met a group of Maori having pints after a day spent diving for crayfish and uses this first encounter with native New Zealanders as the starting point of her travel memoir, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All. Thompson continues with this meeting-of-alien-peoples theme as the link between the memoir part of her book, in which she is cast as a kind of explorer charting new cross-cultural territory in her relationship with Maori foundryman, Tauwhitu (“I was small and blond, he was a 6-foot-2, 200-pound Polynesian. I had a Ph.D., he went to trade school”), and the history part (the European discovery and colonisation of New Zealand). A Philadelphia Inquirer review writes: “Charming, insightful, honest, balanced, the book offers a unique look at the pressures of marriage across cultural, racial, and geographical boundaries.”