Michael King, a Moment in Time

It was very moving for me, [...] to find documents written by Moriori themselves in the 1850s and 1860s which told the story, which listed all the names of those who had been killed and to know that these documents had been written by people crippled with arthritis and tuberculosis, going blind from cataracts, [...] as messages to their descendants and messages to posterity. And I was quite affected to find these things and to be able to give those people a voice again in the 20th century. That to me, probably, was the most satisfying part of that whole project.

– Michael King

I set to work in 1986 on a Moriori book that was published in 1989. Now I haven't closed off that kind of work at all but I'm simply in the position where I would only do that kind of thing if I was asked by the people concerned to do it and had their full cooperation.

– Michael King

Some of the journalists that I worked with found it an odd thing for me to be doing. It didn't seem to have occurred to anyone professionally in journalism up to that time that to be a good well-equipped reporter you ought to be able to do something like speak Māori.

– Michael King, on learning Te reo