Revealed: Prince Philip’s 1954 letter: Maori are treated like ‘museum pieces and household pets’

A newly discovered letter from Prince Philip reveals that the greatest royal thought that Maori were treated in New Zealand as “museum pieces and household pets.”

The 1954 letter, written to Australian politician Sir Harold Hartley, also contains criticism of New Zealand as “the perfect welfare state” that was “over-governed and without much room for initiative,” reports the Daily Mail.

The letter was written after the Duke of Edinburgh toured New Zealand with Queen Elizabeth a year after her coronation.

It has now gone on sale at British auction house Dominic Winter, where it is expected to fetch around $ 580.

Writing about the Maori, Philip said, “New Zealanders seem to consider them somewhere between museum pieces and household pets.

“There seems to be no official policy for them that is enlightened at all.

“… New Zealand as a whole seemed to me too governed and without much room for initiative, the perfect welfare state indeed!”

Philip also offers some praise for New Zealand, saying: “The people were universally charming and generally very considerate.”

Elsewhere in the letter, Philip reveals that he was impressed by a museum exhibit of Maori culture, and says that he had developed an interest in the subject after reading Sir Peter Buck’s Arrival of the Maori / Te Rangi Hīroa (Ngāti Mutunga).

The book, written in 1949, covers the history of the Maori in Aotearoa and was considered an essential text for many years.

It was published two years before Sir Peter’s death and, in the letter, Prince Philip regrets what he says is a lack of Maori leadership since his death.

“New Zealand put their tour together extremely well and we ended up seeing at least some of almost everything,” wrote Philip.

“I took a look at the museum, which is very well organized. I was particularly fascinated by the Maori part after reading Peter Buck’s The Coming of the Maori.

“There doesn’t seem to be any Maori [sic] of his caliber at the moment and the result is that the growing Maori population is growing without proper leadership. “

Philip’s racial relations comments are some of the many he has made throughout his long career, far less than illustrated.

In 1986, he said to a British student in China: “If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slanted eyes” and in 1998 he asked a British student in Papua New Guinea: eat? “

At a meeting of the World Wide Fund for Nature in 1986, he told the crowd: “If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has two wings and it flies but it is not an airplane and if nothing and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it. “

And in 2002 he surprised an Australian Aboriginal leader by asking, “Are spears still being thrown?”