Aotearoa
Aotearoa (pronounced: [aoˌteaˈroa] ) is the most widely known and accepted Māori name for New Zealand.
Translation
The original derivation of Aotearoa is not known for certain. Ao = cloud, tea = white and roa = long, and it is accordingly most often translated as "The land of the long white cloud". According to oral tradition, the daughter of explorer Kupe saw white on the horizon and called "He ao! He ao!" ("a cloud! a cloud!"). The first land sighted was accordingly named Aotea (White Cloud) and is now commonly known as Great Barrier Island. When a much larger landmass was found beyond Aotea, it was called Aotea Roa (Long Aotea). Thus Aotearoa is a traditional name only of the North Island, though it now commonly refers to the whole country.
Clouds seen from the sea
A possible explanation for the name is derived from seafaring. The first sign of land from a boat is often cloud in the sky above the island. New Zealand's mountain ranges are longer and higher than elsewhere in the South Pacific and so they are particularly good at generating standing waves. The resulting long lenticular clouds are very different from the more usual cumulus clouds seen elsewhere in the region. The sight of these clouds over either of the country's two main islands could easily have led to this name.
Snow-capped mountains
A second possible explanation relates to the snow-capped nature of New Zealand's mountains, notably the long chain of the Southern Alps which forms a backbone to the South Island, but also the North Island Volcanic Plateau. Polynesian travellers, unused to snow, might well have seen these snowy peaks as a long white cloud.
Twilight land
A third explanation is connected with New Zealand's location below the tropics. Polynesian seafarers would have been used to tropical sunsets, in which the sky goes from daylight to night very rapidly, with little twilight. New Zealand, with its more southerly latitudes, would have provided surprisingly long periods of evening twilight to travellers from the tropics, and also surprisingly long summer days. It has been suggested that this long twilight is the actual origin of the term Aotearoa, which therefore would better translate as "long light sky". The presence of the Aurora Australis, and the vivid sunsets, are given as theories for the origin of part of the name for Stewart Island/Rakiura, namely Rakiura meaning "glowing sky".
Usage
In pre-colonial times, Māori did not have a commonly-used name for the whole New Zealand archipelago, although a small number of tribes used Aotea or Aotearoa to refer only to the North Island.
Te Ika a Māui ("The fish caught by Maui") was a more widely used name for the North Island. The larger, but sparsely populated South Island was called Te Wai Pounamu ("The greenstone water") or Te Wāhi Pounamu ("The greenstone place"). As a counterpart to Te Ika a Māui, the South Island is sometimes referred to as Te Waka o Māui (The Canoe of Māui), or Te Waka o Aoraki (The Canoe of Aoraki), depending on one's tribal connections. Most of the South Island is settled by the descendents of Aoraki, after whom the country's largest mountain is named (according to legend, he was turned into the mountain), but the northern end was settled by various northern tribes who favour the Māui version.
When Abel Tasman reached New Zealand in 1642, he named it Staten Landt, believing it to be part of the land Jacob Le Maire had discovered in 1616 off the coast of Argentina. Staten Landt appeared on Tasman's first maps of New Zealand, but this was changed by Dutch cartographers to Nova Zeelandia, after the Dutch province of Zeeland, some time after Hendrik Brouwer proved the South American land to be an island in 1643. The Latin Nova Zeelandia became Nieuw Zeeland in Dutch. Captain James Cook subsquently called the islands New Zealand. It seems logical he simply applied English usage to the Dutch naming, but it has also been suggested he was possibly confusing Zeeland with the Danish island of Zealand. After the adoption of the name New Zealand by Europeans, the early Māori name for the country as a whole was Niu Tireni, a transliteration of New Zealand. This name is now rarely used as Māori favour using neologisms created from Māori words rather than transliterations from English.
Modern usage
It is almost certain that the use of Aotearoa to refer to the whole of New Zealand is a post-colonial usage and it has been suggested that this usage was initiated by Pakeha (non-Māori). Historians (e.g. Michael King) have theorised that it originated from mistakes in the February 1916 School Journal and was thus propagated in a similar manner to the myths surrounding the Moriori. Nonetheless it has become increasingly popular with Māori in recent times. Aotea is also sometimes encountered, but is in decline.
The name Aotearoa is used as an alternative name for New Zealand both by Māori and non-Māori. It has not gained official recognition as a legal alternative name for the country, but its increasing popularity over the last 25 years, and usage in official Māori names, such as the National Library / Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, makes this a possibility. Since the 1990s New Zealand's national anthem God Defend New Zealand[1] has been officially sung bilingually, and as such the use of the term Aotearoa has gained a wider audience.
Popular culture
In 1940 Douglas Lilburn composed one of his most famous orchestral works, the overture Aotearoa, which quickly became one of his most popular compositions, and was played by orchestras both in New Zealand and in Great Britain. This made the term more widely known.
The term gained a wider international audience in 1981 with Split Enz's single Six Months in a Leaky Boat, which contained the line:
- "Aotearoa, rugged individual, glistens like a pearl at the bottom of the world"
Common jokes among Māori nationalists are to say Aotearoa means "land of the wrong white crowd" and that the correct Māori pronunciation is "OUR-tea-roa".