The Maholian Way - Part Three: The history of Maholia & relationalism

Until the 1980s, the history of Maholia – or Telenesia as it was previously called – was similar to that of its neighbours New Zealand and Australia and, to a lesser extent, the history of other industrialised settler societies.

The first people of Maholia are the Latuans, who are ethnically similar to the New Zealand Maoris and other indigenous peoples of the South Pacific. It’s estimated that there were about half a million Latuans at the time of first European settlement. Evidence also suggests that, like the Maoris, they migrated from Polynesia about 1000 years ago. Latuans were traditionally hunter-gatherers with some cultivated crops. They lived in permanent dwellings made from stone, mud, wood and grasses, and practised elaborate carving and weaving. Their 150 tribal groups also have intricate and sustaining traditions of story, song and belief.

Then in 1769, Captain James Cook and his crew were heading northwest from Cape Horn when they sighted the east coast of what is now Main Island. They sailed up this coast to the island’s most north-easterly point (later named Cape Cook) before turning west, and on 19^th March, Passion Sunday, they enter the waters they called Passion Bay. A lifeboat was landed at the mouth of the Kamoa River where the suburb of Port Fensham now stands, the Union Jack was hoisted on a flagpole roughly fashioned from a sapling, and the islands were claimed in the name of King George III. The landing party then returned to the Endeavour, sailed out of Passion Bay and westward through the strait Cook named after the then British Prime Minister, the Duke of Grafton, and headed northwest again to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti.

The name ‘Telenesia’ was suggested by one of Cook’s officers, Augustus Hemming, an amateur classical scholar. In ancient Greek ‘tele’ means ‘distant’ and ‘nesos’ means ‘island’. Of course, from the perspective of the country’s residents the islands are not distant, and so for years the name was a source of disquiet, until in 1979 a national plebiscite approved the change to ‘Maholia’. This is derived from the word ‘maholi’ which in several Latuan languages means ‘our world’ or ‘our land’. (For simplicity’s sake I will only refer to the country as Maholia, even when discussing the pre-1979 era.)

Maholia consists of four main islands. There is New Galloway in the south, Main Island in the centre, Luacoca in the north, and Parlufu to the east of Luacoca. Originally, Main Island’s official name was Charlotteland, after George III’s queen, but it has always been called Main Island and that is now its official title. Maholia is about one and a half times the area of New Zealand, and its latitude extends from the 28^th to the 38^th parallel (that is, from level with Brisbane, Australia, to level with Melbourne).

Europeans have inhabited the country since the early nineteenth century. First came whalers and sealers, traders and missionaries, who between them established a series of small coastal outposts on Main Island, New Galloway and Luacoca. In 1814 the Telenesian Settlement Company was formed in London to promote exploration and more substantial settlement of the islands, beginning with the establishment of the town of Moorfield on Main Island’s west coast. But as explorers and would-be settlers started to penetrate inland from Moorfield they were fiercely resisted by the Latuans, who quite naturally did not want their territory invaded and appropriated. However the Europeans, with their superior weaponry, gradually took over more and more land for farming, forestry and the establishment of towns.

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