The New Zealand government actually has a website on NZ history. The section on Pearse is quite well done:

Pearse continued his flying experiments, achieving several further powered take-offs or long hops, most of them witnessed. None of them, in terms of length or control, was a true flight by any strict definition. In July 1906 he patented his aircraft.

Whether or not Pearse flew in any acceptable sense, and regardless of the exact date, his first aircraft was a remarkable invention embodying several far-sighted concepts: a monoplane configuration, wing flaps and rear elevator, tricycle undercarriage with steerable nosewheel, and a propeller with variable-pitch blades driven by a unique double-acting horizontally opposed petrol engine.

Pearse's plane had, without a doubt, a lot of innovative features. However, he also obviously had the problem that comes from working completely alone. He had some very good ideas, but new ideas , devices, almost always take development, need to have the bugs worked out of them. If an inventor is communicating with other designers, developers, it's always possible to avoid some of that, because someone else may already have done it. But Pearse was apparently getting his information mostly through a subscription to Scientific American. So, he had to do it all himself. And it was a lot to work out! He was developing an airframe, the design of the wings, aerodynamic controls to keep it stable in flight, landing gear, and a new kind of gasoline-powered engine...even linkage to change the pitch on the propeller blades. With all that, it's no wonder he never was able to do more than few witnessed short flights, and never claimed to have beat the Wright brothers- he clearly knew he hadn't managed to finish doing it all.

The Wrights , on the other hand, even though only in rural Ohio already knew about previous work in aerodynamics and airplanes, largely because they came to the notice of the enthusiast Octave Chanute, who put them in the communication loop. They were able to read Lilienthal, and so had a good idea of things that had been tried, could methodically conduct experiments with their own wind tunnel. They also didn't invent their engine: it was a local mechanic, at a foundry, who suggested altering an automobile engine by making the engine block from lighter aluminum, and they employed a machinist, Charlie Taylor, to make it....and he also helped to develop it.

The Wrights also had a pretty clear notion of what it would take to establish their claim, and when they finally did their public demonstrations, those demonstrations were not simply the short, "promising" hops and glides of Lilienthal, Santos-Dumont or Langley. They wanted there to be no doubt. The Wright Flyer could get into the air and stay there, doing figure 8 loops until it was time to land and get more gasoline.

Pearse's case does bring up the problem of how people want to think of something as having been invented. Generally, we tend to think in rigid categories, there being one good idea, by one inventor, which is built and immediately shows its superiority to all others - bad ideas- and becomes the one good successful invention . The Wrights were aware of this, and consciously followed that model. But the normal story of invention is much more varied. The sewing machine was developed among a number of different inventors who agreed to pool their patented ideas in order for all of them to make their own working machines. The McCormick reaper was one of a number of reapers, and succeeded not by superior design but by dint of Cyrus' ruthless and litigious approach to business and good customer support. The telegraph was invented by several people, who agreed that it would be best for purposes of clarity if the patent was in the name of one man, Samuel F. B. Morse. And the photocopier took years and years of very slow development and tinkering before it got out of the laboratory...and even more happened in the decades Xerox was making it.

Sadly, this categorical thinking of Good Invention/Bad Invention has tended to either short-change ingenious people like Pearse, or falsely attribute great success to them. Pearse's case is somewhat similar to that of James Rumsey, the American engineer and steamboat inventor. Like Pearse, Rumsey was working in a rural setting, and was forced, and so tried, to create everything- not only a jet propulsion system for his boat, but even his own steam engine. His rival, John Fitch, chose a much simpler path. Fitch used simple banks of paddles, instead of trying to work in hydrostatics, and when he couldn't buy a working state-of-the-art steam engine from Boulton and Watt, he copied one of them. Rumsey didn't finish developing all the parts of his design, was thus only able to do a few short demonstrations. Fitch was able to repeatedly run his boat first, and therefore generally gets credited with being the inventor of the steamboat. However, Rumsey had , in the course of his experiments, hit upon the idea of the water-tube boiler, which was a fraction of the weight and size of a standard pot boiler, and much more efficient- the perfect thing for a boat. That boiler became pretty standard in the 19th c., and was quite important. Yet, generally speaking, most historiography has either tried to cast Rumsey as a failed inventor with a failed steamboat, or as a successful inventor with a very successful steamboat. Neither is true. Both Pearse and Rumsey deserve better.