What kind of relation did the Aboriginals and the Maori had before the Europeans came?

by LeonInJapan
amp1212

There were, so far as we know, no relations at all between Aboriginals and Maori before contact with Europeans. Australian Aboriginal populations arrived down under somewhere on the order of 65,000 years ago . . . and we have very little evidence that they interacted with anyone outside Australia (save perhaps Papua New Guinea and the Torres Straight Islanders, possibly some Malay sailors in the North) again until very recently. Aboriginal genomes don't show any signal of mixing with Polynesian populations, for example.

Bear in mind that the Maori only arrived in New Zealand quite recently-- some time between 1250 and 1300 AD; so that's not long at all (compared with Aboriginals in Australia), and there wasn't any obvious reason for them to sail to the West. The West coast of New Zealand is blasted by storms and big seas-- not exactly a beacon saying "go this way!"

The Polynesians were astonishingly good blue ocean sailors, so while the Tasman Sea which separates Australian and New Zealand is very rough, they _could_ have sailed it-- but we have no evidence that they ever did. Lord Howe Island, which is more or less halfway between Oz and NZ didn't have a human population until very recently, and there's no sign than Maori or any other Polynesians ever got there.

Sources

Human Evolution in Polynesia

Aboriginal Genome Shows Two-Wave Settlement of Asia

Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago

cnzmur

This seems to be the most recent time this question was asked, so I'll post some relevant stuff I recently came across here ( and pinging u/amp1212 because they answered the question, so would presumably be interested as well). In 1929 a Polynesian-looking adze was found on a beach in New South Wales. In 2014, archeologists analysed the stone and came to the conclusion that the basalt it was made of probably originated on Norfolk Island, which was settled by Polynesians (probably via New Zealand) around the mid-thirteenth century, though the colony had failed by the time of European discovery. There are other routes for the adze to have arrived in Australia than prehistoric Polynesian voyagers, but (apparently, I don't have access to the whole paper) the researchers consider them less likely. Polynesian sailors of the early nineteenth century for instance are not very likely to have taken a tool like that when they had access to all the iron ones on board.

We don't know the answer to your question, but it's quite possible that there were some relations (though the use of 'Māori' is a bit of a misnomer, as Norfolk Island was settled very shortly after the discovery of New Zealand itself, and before much of a seperate culture would have developed). Whatever they were, the visitors probably wouldn't have lasted long as a seperate group. After a long voyage, and in a very new environment, they probably wouldn't have dealt well with any hostile actions by the locals (we know in Cook's day first contact with Australian Aboriginals on that coast was often hostile). If on the other hand they were friendly, there wouldn't have been much stopping a fairly quick assimilation. It's also possible that they returned (or tried to return) to Norfolk Island.

The photo of the adze is in the next article in the paper ('the study of the Maori mind', because that is what the 20s were like...)