 Te Wai e Horene, Waita Matā, te marae e Takotorā, kō Wai Papa, koutu a haku rangatira, tēnā koutu, tēnā koutu, tēnā tatu katoa. New Zealand is located at the heart of the world's largest ocean and more than anything else, this shapes our identity as a country. As many of you will know, about 85 million years ago New Zealand floated away from Gondwana land, evolving in isolation with its plants and animals. Jared Diamonds described New Zealand as the world's smallest continent, or the world's largest islands. For a biologist he remarks, examining the New Zealand biota as the closest, we will get the opportunity, quote, to study life on another planet. And I imagine that there's times when we all think that. Before the first human beings came ashore, living systems have been co-adapting here, as I said, for millions of years. Creating an extraordinary array of endemic species including flightless birds, giant snails and walking bats. And we now know that the ancestors of many of these creatures had to fly, float or were blind here. They had to survive a long, difficult oceanic journey or airborne journey and adapt to environments very different from those from which they'd come. And as they moved into new niches, this sparked rapid innovation and the emergence of new species. I think something similar happened in the case of human beings. In order to reach this remote archipelago, the ancestors of Māori had to invent blue water sailing, a legacy that we're still exploring. And when the first star navigators from island Polynesia landed here about 700 years ago, New Zealand became the last significant landmass on Earth to be found and populated by human beings. They had to adapt very quickly to environments that were very different again from their island homelands. Sometimes they made mistakes setting fires that ran out of control and exploiting some local species to the point of extinction, including the moa, that great flightless bird that was their best source of protein. Nevertheless, the rate of successful innovation was impressive. Different ways of life, products and ideas emerged in different parts of the country in a very short space of time. Like the first Polynesian voyages, the first Western explorers to arrive in New Zealand, Abel Tasman and Captain James Cook, faced formidable challenges. In order to cross the Pacific and reach these remote islands, European mariners had to perfect the art of sailing over very long distances and technologies that enabled them to survive challenges from island warriors. So in 1769, when Endeavour made its landfall on the east coast of New Zealand, the scientists on board from the Royal Society thought that they'd discovered Terra Australis incognita, the great unknown southern continent that people have been looking for for many hundreds of years in Europe. Fabled to be rich in gold and silver and pearls and was just riding around on elephants and instead what they discovered was my hometown of Gisborne. So that time in Europe, life was in a phase of explosive innovation. Modernity began in Europe in the 1760s, just as the Endeavour brought the first Europeans ashore in New Zealand. Captain James Cook and his companions, Joseph Banks, later president of the Royal Society, Dr Solander, favourite student of Linnaeus the botanist, arrived on board the Endeavour in October 1769 and this was a scientific expedition sailing on the crest of the Enlightenment. They were trying to measure the size of the solar system and to discover, as I said, Terra Australis incognita and to study its plants, animals and people. On both sides of early settlement then in this country, there's been a history of high ambition, exploration, rapid adaptation and innovation. Out of Asia and the Pacific on the one hand and out of Europe on the other. And as an anthropologist, there's my hometown, 1769, some of the plants they collected when they ran ashore. As an anthropologist I've been really fortunate to study these voyaging worlds. I was trained originally in four field anthropology in the States. Biological anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and social anthropology. And I'm very fortunate, I think, that my discipline has avoided that Cartesian abyss between the natural and the social sciences and between the idea of people and so-called environment and so on, mind and matter, subject and object. Those kind of Cartesian divides don't really belong in the discipline that I belong to. When I was, originally, they used to call it the study, it's got this great global scope, they used to call it the study of man. And then sometime in the early 60s they realised that was a bit sexist. And so my professor, when I first came here to the University of Auckland, Ralph Pennington, used to start off the stage one lectures by saying, anthropology is a science of man, embracing women. But he was trying not to be sexist, didn't quite work. But anyway, good effort, Ralph. And perhaps because of that, I've been a bit of a disciplinary nomad, you might say, moving from Chomsky and linguistics, which is quasi-mathematical, my master's thesis was a Chomsky and grammar, to socio-linguistics, to social and cultural anthropology, to historical anthropology, and sort of mixing them all up all the time, to environmental anthropology, and now I guess philosophical anthropology, you might say. And from New Zealand, across the Pacific and to Europe. I guess that's what happens when you spend your academic career studying people who've spent a lot of time trying to discover what's across the horizon. And in addition, I've been really fortunate to have a deep exposure to Māori knowledge and ways of understanding the world with elders like Eruera Sterling, Meti Meti Penfold and many others over the years, and my colleagues in Māori studies. So now I'm engaged in what I would call experiments across worlds. What happens and what has happened in New Zealand and elsewhere in the Pacific is people with very different ideas about how reality works have come together and try to negotiate shared ways of living. So that's kind of where I locate myself and have done, I guess, for a long time. And I think I'm really fortunate to work as an anthropologist in my own country and in the Pacific region. There's never, never a dull moment. I'm often working on questions of intense public interest. So recently I wrote something in response to Alan Duff about domesticity and fatherhood in Māori families at the time of early contact, which showed that Māori men at that period, according to all the European male observers, were very tender fathers and violence towards women and children was almost unknown, which seemed to arouse an extraordinary public interest with about 17,000 Facebook hits. So very interesting. So you have to think all the time and very hard about how you're communicating and to whom, trying to strike a balance between all sorts of different audiences as an anthropologist in my own country. Māori are always a major part of my audience in Pacific people, unlike anthropologists in many other parts of the world. But equally, people just out there are fascinated very often by the sorts of things that we're inquiring into. And so you have to balance between observing the rigors of scientific and scholarly disciplines and being able to talk in ways where more or less everybody can understand what you're saying. And sometimes I think our arcane languages might be a bit of a reflex when it comes to the monastic history of scholarly endeavor. And I used to think about that a lot when I was in Cambridge and that sort of the way that the modern university arose in Oxford and Cambridge originally out of monastic communities. So the retreat from the world type of thing. But as a scholar in Māori studies, like all of my colleagues, there's just no chance to do that really. There's always negotiating radical challenges to scholarly authority from all sides, whether from students, from people you meet in the street, at parties, you know, you're liable to be sort of shoulder tapped when you're just relaxing on the beach and someone wants to talk to you about some very intense matter to do with the treaty. You know, it's interesting. And in Parliament from time to time. Because it's also the case that many of these issues have sort of, you know, public importance. In anthropology, I guess, we take it for granted that as people ourselves, there's no external position, no pure position, from which we can observe the lives of others. Or indeed life in general, or indeed the world in general. You know, we're located by who we are as people and our historical and cultural contexts. There's no getting out of it. Despite our pretensions to the contrary at times. So we often study our own societies to try and grasp the presuppositions, the forms of order that we are taking for granted ourselves as scholars. Because these can be an impediment in understanding the lives of people who think differently and understand the world in other ways. So participant observation is the signature method or technique in our discipline. It works across that Cartesian divide of subject and object. It's about getting involved, but at the same time, in order to learn, building up very close relationships, but at the same time, there's the need to preserve a degree of critical distance. And this is a very, very fine and difficult balance. So in my work, I've been located on the cutting edge of encounters between worlds. The worlds of Europe, as they've arrived here in New Zealand in particular in the Pacific and the worlds of Asia and Polynesia. And assumptions about what is real and how the world works are very different in these cultural locations and historical times. And this provokes a sort of questioning, skeptical attitude to assertions of authority in science and politics or even elsewhere, even sometimes in the university, I say it. And it fosters a very long view of human history in which scholarship itself is included as one of human endeavours. We tend to see, as anthropologists, human history as one rather short strand in a very long planetary and cosmological history. And all of those other strands are being intimately entangled with ours. So if you think about the life of people, then law, medicine, engineering, technology, the sciences, politics, economics and so on are all topics of anthropological interest and indeed anthropologists study them. And we have sub-disciplines in these areas. That makes you acutely interested in what everybody else in the university is doing and trying to sort of do your best to follow some at least of the great findings that our colleagues are making. And that's why the university as a community is such a fantastic place to be. So I get very excited by what's going on with complex systems theory, planetary transformations and living systems that surround us and are impacting on lives everywhere, but in the Pacific, and in New Zealand at present, the ocean, waterways, landscapes, the atmosphere, other life forms, as they entangle with ours. And from that I guess I'm drawing on Māori philosophy as well. And some of you will know that recently, very recently in Parliament, the Whanganui Treaty Settlement was passed into law which recognises the Whanganui River as a legal person with its own rights. It's the first time in the world that a river has achieved that recognition. Interacting with people and I think on a scientific basis this is accurate. They've been there, the river's been there for a lot longer than we have. And it has its own requirements to be healthy in which we all depend in turn. So it's impossible to understand, I think, human experience in different times and places without trying to understand at least something of the exchanges between people and these wider systems at different scales right down to the molecular level. And I've got colleagues who call themselves like Lisa Matiosa-Smith, a molecular anthropologist. And that in turn is pretty much impossible, as I'm sure you will all understand, but very exciting. I love being an anthropologist in my own country and the extraordinary challenges that poses you just can never rest on your laurels for one second, always supposing you have some. And the University of Auckland, I have to say, has been a fantastic place from which to do it. Ngareira i ako rangatira. Te na koutu. Te na koutu. Te na tatu.