Cannibal Jack : The Life & Times of Jacky Marmon, a Pakeha-Maori by Trevor Bentley, Penguin, RRP$40, ISBN 9780143203827, Available now.

Ah, Penguin. It’s a rollercoaster ride with you, isn’t it? So far this year I’ve loved a book, hated a book, and now back to love. And there’s all those odd goings-on with plagiarism and such. They’re like the Microsoft of New Zealand publishing.

But, on to Cannibal Jack. What a great book! What a great story! What a great character! Jacky Marmon was a “Pakeha-Maori”, born in Sydney to Irish parents who first jumped ship around 1817 to live with Maori around Kerikeri River and other Ngapuhi hapu around the Bay of Islands. Eventually he ended up with Hongi Hika, survived the Musket Wars and settled in the Hokianga, much later becoming involved with Hone Heke.

Cannibal Jack has a great narrative flow – based on two versions of Marmon’s supposed “autobiography” that were published in New Zealand newspapers around the time of his death in 1880, it intersperses sections from these with Bentley’s detailed research into the truer story of Marmon’s life. This allows Bentley to highlight and use the more flowery and, frankly, adventurous account of Marmon with the drier details of, for example, ship movements around New Zealand, missionary reports and other, more reliable, sources of historical data.

And it presents a fascinating portrait of Pakeha early involvement with Maori and the way those Pakeha viewed Maori as individuals and as a people. There is lots of detail of Maori life pre-colonisation, and some great examples of Pakeha misinterpretations of Maori concepts of tapu, muru and mana. Bentley also does a skilful job of interpreting Marmon’s stories to tease out the details of Pakeha feelings towards the Maori “way of life” and show us why the histories of Pakeha-Maori like Marmon are still so relevant today.

Marmon became a subject of much myth and speculation by other Pakeha in colonial New Zealand, mostly due to his wild tales of engaging in cannibalism and… yeah, okay, it was mostly the cannibalism. Let’s face it, even now cannibalism has a particular hold on the collective gory imagination of just about every culture in this world, and whether Marmon witnessed and was really involved with quite as much cannibalistic practice as he claimed would have to be open to conjecture, as Bentley makes pretty clear. What isn’t in doubt, however, is that Marmon’s editors/ghost writers knew that including as many details as they could attribute to Marmon’s flippant stories of such things, or embellish, was a great way to ensure readership!

Cannibal Jack is also wonderfully illustrated with both recognisable and less well-known images from early Pakeha history. I hope the story of early Maori and Pakeha interactions is as intriguing for other readers as it is for me – because really this is the story of why we are now who we are. Once we were people on opposite sides of the world, and when we came together we muddled through mutual captivation and confusion to some semblance of a nation and culture of our own. Histories like this can only help that grow even more. Three cheers.