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A Celtic NZ Again (Back to the Conspiracy)
73 Plays1 year ago
We're looking back at the history of attempts to rewrite the history of Aotearoa, in this case by making claims that Maori are not its indigenous people (and then making conspiracy theories to explain why this isn't widely accepted). Along the way we discuss local birdlife - without making reference to John Oliver - and use the phrase "pubic thatching".
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Opening
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's intro is brought to you by Conspiricism. You can't spell Conspiricism without racism.
Celtic Settlement Theory in New Zealand
00:00:06
Speaker
Yesterday we're looking at a very particular and peculiar set of suppressed histories. Those that claim Aotearoa New Zealand was first settled by an ancient Celtic people. Yes, now we first covered this particular theory all the way back in. Josh, no we haven't. This is a new topic. We've never talked about this before.
00:00:26
Speaker
And this is a back to the conspiracy beside we've definitely gone after this before. No, that's not true. That's fake news. That's just disinformation. Why do you hate our listeners, Josh? Why are you lying to them? Are you being paid by big history to make people think that all that is new is old again? No. Are you in the pocket of heterodox history masquerading as orthodox history? Are you subscribing to mainstream historical textbooks that tell people the Romans really existed and that the Greeks invented pizza?
History Fabrication and Misinformation
00:00:54
Speaker
I wish you all the history textbook manufacturers who are in league with the League of Nations who only pretended to be subsumed into the United Nations. Josh, why are you lying to the public? You finished? Let me check my notes. Yes.
00:01:11
Speaker
Okay, one, you believe in Romans, you don't stop going on about the bloody assassination of Julius Bloody Caesar. Two, pizza was originally Greek, just like pasta was originally Chinese. Three, you know I don't read books, so I'm not going to take money from publishers. Four, I'm not a crook. Five, we have talked about the Catholic colonization thesis on this podcast. Before six, I am not a number.
00:01:32
Speaker
Fine, but I humbly protest this malarkey that we've talked about this before. Fine, you can suppress the history of this podcast all you like, but today, whether you recognise it or not, we're going back to the conspiracy. The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Denton.
Meet the Hosts
00:02:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Edison. In Zhuhai, China, they are Dr. MRX dentists. We're going back.
00:02:12
Speaker
Back to the past, which is where the past traditionally is located. It's true. The past is very really found in the future. Although I guess if you're a historian and you're looking into the past,
Speculative Historical Claims
00:02:24
Speaker
you might be predicting you're looking into the past at some future point, at which point the future is past prologue or something of that particular ilk. Yes, but not only are we looking at the past history of this very podcast, we're looking at past history in general.
00:02:41
Speaker
Well, except that we're kind of not. Well, no, no. So I think, no, no. Yeah. So I think we're making, we're looking at claims about history, not historical claims. I think, I think the word historical there is doing more operative work. So it has to be claims about history, not historical claims. Yeah. Well, I mean, since they happen sometime, well, they are historical claims about history. This is going to be a very, very interesting podcast, isn't it?
00:03:11
Speaker
Yes, there is. And if we're being pedantic, then we have to stick on ceremony and play the proper sting before we get into the episode. Do we have anything to talk about? Before we talk about proper stings, is this a reference back to the fact that last time you edited an episode, you used the wrong sting?
00:03:29
Speaker
I did. I used the wrong sting and today is the day I redeem myself in your eyes if no one else is. I mean, I hope that's true. I hope the episode goes out with the right sting because if you get all of this preamble and then it turns out you put the wrong sting in, then either that is hilariously funny and deliberately so, or a tragedy.
00:03:49
Speaker
Well, you said that's my insurance. If I get it wrong, I'll just say it was me making a hilarious joke,
Humorous Podcast Themes Discussion
00:03:54
Speaker
and I'm covered either way. But I think the Back to the Future Back to the Conspiracy sting is possibly my favourite of all stings, so I don't think I can resist putting it on. You said that about the Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre two weeks ago. Yeah, but I mean it about the Back to the Conspiracy one.
00:04:14
Speaker
So you're basically telling me that you lie to me all the time about which themes you like or dislike. I'm pretty sure you already knew that. So do you have anything before we carry on into the main episode? No, I'm just going to sit here in a huff now because I have no idea whether what you're saying to me is true or false. Well, get used to it. Buckle up. We're going back to the conspiracy.
Bush and Cultural Context in New Zealand
00:04:42
Speaker
Right, enough beating about the bush. We're talking about the New Zealand hypothesis. About the New Zealand bush. About the New Zealand bush that will come into it, yes. And that's not a euphemism, people. That's how we refer to the forests and parts of our country. Yeah, no, it's a perfectly normal term here. It does not refer to any American presidents.
00:05:03
Speaker
or pubic thatching now pubic
Racist Celtic New Zealand Theory Introduction
00:05:08
Speaker
thatching is a great phrase i mean it also sounds like if we recall back to a character who hasn't appeared on this podcast for quite some time penis ricochet the famous belgian detective i'm fairly sure that his british counterpart is pubic thatching
00:05:25
Speaker
almost certainly, but we're going off topic straight away, possibly by design, because this is kind of a, it's a depressing topic. It's an annoying topic. I don't know. This is sort of a bit newer for a while.
00:05:39
Speaker
One of the things which is in the notes here is, has anything of note happened since the last time we talked about the Celtic New Zealand thesis, the theory that the ancient Celts were the first people to colonize Aotearoa New Zealand? And we covered it back in episode 36 of February 2015 and episode 254 of February 2020. The notes say, has anything of note happened subsequent? And the answer is kind of,
00:06:06
Speaker
No, there was a period of time, between basically 2015 and 2020, where the people who believed that Aotearoa New Zealand was colonised by the Count were getting a little bit of press coverage from time to time. But basically that seems to have just disappeared, or I've stopped reading the relevant publications like the Franklin E Local. By the way, probably a good thing.
00:06:32
Speaker
Now, the theory we're going to be talking about, let's be frank right up the front. It's a racist theory, advanced by racists.
00:06:50
Speaker
In particular, basically, it's a response to the idea that
Debunking the Celtic New Zealand Theory
00:06:55
Speaker
the Maori people were indigenous to New Zealand, got severely screwed over by the colonizers. Maybe we should do something about it. And this tries to negate that by saying, ha, ha, ha, but they weren't. They weren't the indigenous people because there were other people here before them.
00:07:09
Speaker
And those other people who were here before them, we only don't know about their existence because the Maori wiped them out. So, ipso facto, it's fair that we've almost wiped them out because what's good for the goose is good for the gander, or some kind of, when you think about it, really, really specious, ethical reasoning that goes, well, you know,
00:07:33
Speaker
If Group X has committed atrocities, we're allowed to commit atrocities on that group ourselves. Which now I think about it sounds very political and may well relate to events going on in the Middle East at this time. Quite possibly, yes.
00:07:49
Speaker
It is worth pointing out, perhaps, that on that note, there was a time in New Zealand's history where some people, possibly people who didn't know what they were talking about, thought that it was a very real possibility that the Maori people were going to go extinct. We have here in
00:08:04
Speaker
Auckland Malnga Kia Kia, otherwise known as One Tree Hill, which has a large cenotaph on the top of it, Great Big Stone Monument, which was built as a monument to the Maori people. It was like, ah, it's going to be a shame to see those guys go. Here's a big thing in their honor.
00:08:21
Speaker
Well, I mean, and disturbingly on that point, in the early 20th century, our parliament, so our governing body, actually did have a debate in the House, it's in the Hansa, the official record of parliamentary proceedings, about what to do about what they called the Māori problem.
00:08:45
Speaker
and they basically had two options on the table. One, they could educate the Maori-ness out of Maori through the school system, so encourage them to enroll in largely white or Pakea schools. Or two, just engage in a bit of casual genocide to get rid of them. And our parliament and all its supreme wisdom decided that genocide was a bad idea, so it would just be better to eradicate the culture through education instead.
00:09:15
Speaker
The enlightened early 20th century, ladies and gentlemen. Gotta love it. So to this particular hypothesis that we are devoting this episode to, the Celtic New Zealand hypothesis is basically the claim that pre-Māori people settled Aotearoa and either died out before the arrival of the Maori or were wiped out. Yeah, were wiped out by the Maori.
00:09:39
Speaker
So it was, um, you, you were the person who kind of started calling this the Celtic New Zealand hypothesis. So the history of the term is complicated. So there's an American New Zealander by the name of Martin, and I think his last name is pronounced to Trey,
Books Supporting the Celtic NZ Theory
00:10:01
Speaker
but a I don't know, and also be because he's a racist, I don't care.
00:10:06
Speaker
who wrote a book called Ancient Celtic New Zealand. It's one of those kind of large coffee table books which contains within it pictures and diagrams that's meant to be evidence of an ancient Celtic occupation in New Zealand. And so because of this book, I referred to this thesis as the Celtic New Zealand thesis.
00:10:30
Speaker
Because the book is called Ancient Celtic New Zealand. But Dutra himself does not consider the people that he catalogues in Ancient Celtic New Zealand to be actual Celts. He takes them to be peoples related to the Celts.
00:10:48
Speaker
So he will claim he's not talking about an ancient Celtic New Zealand thesis, even though his book is called Ancient Celtic New Zealand. So yes, I did technically coin the phrase, but I coined the phrase with very good reason, thinking that it was what Martin Duque was actually trying to suggest in a book called Ancient Celtic New Zealand. Right. Yes, that was the first one. There's another book.
00:11:17
Speaker
There's this fellow Maxwell C. Hill. Yeah, this is To the End of the Earth and back again. There are two versions of this book. I've read both. It's one of those books where the first version was so bad that when the second version was announced, so I say second version, second edition was announced, I thought, oh, he's going to edit it and make it tighter.
00:11:41
Speaker
and possibly slightly better argued. But it's one of those classic cases of someone writes a second edition and they put back all the things they were encouraged not to put in the first edition. So the second edition is even worse. I think he recounts the story of Aristotle two or three times in the course of the book. And not in a way which tells you anything new or exciting.
00:12:08
Speaker
It's just for some reason really, really fixated on the ancient Greeks, because whereas Dutre thinks that Aotearoa New Zealand was colonised by a group of people related to the ancient Celts, Hill believes that the country was colonised by a coalition of ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks.
00:12:29
Speaker
So, yeah, he thinks that there are people trying to get to the Americas, but ended up in the wrong hemisphere. Some, I guess in this they're going to South America. But anyway, and also, he, as I understand it, talks about two waves of pre-Māori colonisation, where a bunch of people came down here and then other people found
00:12:53
Speaker
carvings in Polynesia that guided them here again or something? Yeah, so Hill's thesis is... it's kind of interesting in
Misattributed Celtic Artifacts
00:13:05
Speaker
that his thesis is the ancient Greeks and Egyptians are trying to get to the Americas and basically they get waylaid in Polynesia and end up going in the wrong direction. So they head south rather than east.
00:13:19
Speaker
And so they end up in Aotearoa. Now, along the way, they are leaving carvings and signs of their travel. So when these people don't come back from their American sojourn,
00:13:32
Speaker
the Egyptians and Greeks go oh we should send a another set of boats to try and locate what happened to the first set of boats and those boats able to then navigate to where these people got to originally because they're able to take the signed importance basically left behind by the first trip.
00:13:51
Speaker
which seems a slightly weird and overly elaborate theory. Well, I mean, basically, he's trying to explain why an expeditionary force was able to engage in colonization because you need a large enough population. So you need basically a second wave to then explain how these ancient Greeks and Egyptians were able to live for a long period of time down under before being, in his terms, not ours, wiped out.
00:14:19
Speaker
Because they can't have been wiped out because they weren't here. Now, it's all well and good to say, okay, there were people here before the Mallory, but it would be expected that if someone's going to make a claim like this, that they would actually front up with some sort of evidence. And these guys, they do cite evidence.
00:14:37
Speaker
It's perhaps not as convincing as it could otherwise be. So the one thing that Doutre is really, really interested in is spiral carvings on rocks, which he takes to be a classic Celtic design motif. So once again, his book is called Ancient Celtic New Zealand. A large chunk of his evidence is spirals are a design motif found in Celtic culture.
00:15:03
Speaker
So why he denies it's an ancient Celtic thesis, I really don't know. I think it's mostly to go, oh, I've been misnamed by dentists here. It's not actually what I believe, because it is what you believe, Martin. You're just not willing to bite the bullet that someone else coined the name for the thesis you're now associated with.
00:15:21
Speaker
Now, of course, the thing about spirals is that A, they're quite easy to draw, technically easier to draw than a circle. Yes, you just have to start drawing a circle and then miss. Yeah, but the other thing is that if you spent any time in the bush back home, you see spirals a lot in nature because most of our ferns, you know, they start from a curled up to then, is it a term, unfronted?
00:15:50
Speaker
I would say it's unfilmed, unfilmed, unfilmed and unfil. Yeah. So, so spirals are actually a common natural feature found in plant life here. So it would be kind of unusual for the indigenous population to not copy things they see in nature. But it's apparently spiral patterns are only found in Catholic societies and only Celts would think to carve spirals into rocks.
00:16:17
Speaker
And speaking of rocks, there are apparently mounds of them that are supposedly, what do they say? They are Celtic cairns or something, which may be natural formations or... Or placed there by Maori, but he denies that if they are non-natural formations that they can be placed there by Maori, because the mathematical alignment of these rocks is so perfect.
00:16:45
Speaker
that obviously only in advance people like the Counts could have worked this out. Now, of course, we're leaving to one side the fact that actually Polynesian peoples are actually quite good with numbers. So Bobby Hunter, he needs to meet if you can navigate. Yeah, but also traditional
Natural Rock Formations Misidentified
00:17:03
Speaker
Weaving patterns are numerically complex, so numbers are not something which Polynesians have any particular weakness in. But the biggest issue with the kind of evidence that Dutre works with is that he will show you a map of a series of rocks on a plane.
00:17:22
Speaker
And then he'll select the rocks, which he takes to be important, and then show that mathematically the relationship between the important rocks is really interesting. And that seems like post-factor reasoning. We're going, I'm looking for a mathematical relationship between sets of rocks. So if I exclude these rocks here, then I get the relationship I want. But if I put these rocks in, then suddenly that mathematical relationship just disappears.
00:17:48
Speaker
And yeah, there's also the rock walls, not just mounds of rocks, but rock faces. In particular, there's the Kaimanawa wall, which geologists say is just a natural feature. So this wall looks interesting because it has a lot of vertical and horizontal cracks in it that make it look as if it's a series of blocks that have been put in place.
00:18:18
Speaker
Now, geologists think it's a natural outcropping of ichnambrite, which has fractured in a particular way that makes it look as if it's a series of blocks set into a wall or into a cliff face, but actually isn't. And actually, if you spend time at the Kaimama wall,
00:18:42
Speaker
and you take a pin or a long narrow object and actually try to actually push it into the cracks, you'll find that the cracks don't go all the way back there. It turns out it is just fracturing. It looks like it's made of brick, but actually it's just natural fracturing, which happens in these kinds of rock formations. But no, apparently that wall is evidence along with other stone structures of ancient Celtic colonization sites.
00:19:10
Speaker
Yes, and there's a bit of that, but it's not just, to the accredit, it's not just archaeological evidence of this kind. They also get into a bit of biology, bit of folklorology, bit more biology than animals.
Biological Evidence Misuse
00:19:26
Speaker
So there's the rocket jaw thing, which I thought went out with phrenology, but
00:19:32
Speaker
Oh no, these people love phrenology, Josh. They love skull shapes. They love jaw shapes. Yes, so there's this idea that Polynesians only have what's called a rocker jaw, which means that if they find any bones here that do not have rocker jaws, well, they can't be Polynesians. But yeah, I remember I've read stuff from the late 1800s that was talks about skulls and jaws and stuff and was a little bit dodgy back then. So I'm not quite sure.
00:20:01
Speaker
that they're only on solid ground deer at all. But in terms of other bone remains, there's rat fossils. So apparently at one point, it seemed, because this is a thing we've said here before, New Zealand has no native land mammals. The only, most of our native animals. No, we did. We did. We had an osser once, but that osser is well gone.
00:20:28
Speaker
Oh did we? That's a shame. But mostly bird life and the only native mammals around here apart from the long lost otter is dolphins, aquatic mammals and bats, avian mammals.
00:20:44
Speaker
which means the terrestrial mammals are basically all introduced and that goes certainly for the rat which was thought to be introduced here by the Maori. Now at one point it seemed like
00:20:59
Speaker
Fossils showed that they were there beforehand, which means someone else must have brought them. But it looks like that was just a- Wait, is that in case not actual fossils, bone remains? Bone remains. Oh, yeah, sorry. I always think of fossils as bones, but they're not, are they? They're rocks and the shapes of bones. Yeah. Yeah. So basically, there's a few series of sites in the, I think, the lower North Island.
00:21:23
Speaker
where we find the remains of Kyori in a layer. So Kyori is the Polynesian rat in a layer which seems to predate human arrival in Aotearoa, New Zealand. We have to be careful about the terms we use here because there's the human arrival phase, which is when Polynesians first started arriving in this country, not in this country. I'm in China, in your country, Josh, our country.
00:21:50
Speaker
And then there's the human occupation phase. So, Curie probably came with humans during the arrival phase, because they were onboard ships, and then would have continued during the occupation phase. So, there are a few sites that seem to suggest that Curie are here before the arrival phase.
00:22:11
Speaker
But these results are disputed because there are worries that the way that the bones were collected has led to contamination. So it is actually a huge debate in archaeology as to whether these... Now see, I'm saying fossils now.
00:22:29
Speaker
these bone remains have been dated accurately. But people like Dutray and Hill go, oh, oh, this just shows. If the Polynesian rat is in the country before the Polynesians arrived, how did it get there? And even the archaeologists and biologists who believe that the remains dating is correct are going, well, we might just be wrong about the arrival phase.
00:22:58
Speaker
So we think that Polynesians arrived at a particular date. It actually isn't beyond possibility that Polynesians actually could have been visiting or locating this place 100 or 200 years prior. The rats could have got there at that stage.
00:23:15
Speaker
nothing about the rat remains, even if they indicate a rival by human beings as earlier than expected, actually shows that were brought here by Celts, Egyptians or Greeks, especially since the Polynesian rat comes from Polynesia. Well, the kind of rat you get in the era of the world, the Celts, the Egyptians and the Greeks lived are a different kind of rat entirely.
00:23:42
Speaker
And from little rat bones to giant bones, there's also been talking about the boats of giants, but we'll leave the giant bones talk to one side for a moment because we're going to be coming back. We will be coming back to it. We will be coming back to the giant bones. Now, another thing that shows up a bit is actually Maori folklore.
00:24:00
Speaker
and the idea that there are these stories of people which can be interpreted as saying that they were sort of red-haired, white-skinned people, and there's some sort of oral tradition of talking about them in Māori culture, which again seems to be a bit of
00:24:23
Speaker
If not, if not misinterpreting evidence, then sort of even being willfully blind towards what people who actually know about this stuff say about it. So there is folklore, but I don't think it means what they think it means. No. So there are fae folk in Maori mythology, people like the Turehu and the Patapatahag.
Maori Folklore Misinterpretations
00:24:49
Speaker
And they're often described in some accounts as having read here and being fair-skinned. There's actually a very interesting theory in anthropology because you actually find
00:25:02
Speaker
red-haired, fair-skinned people in folklore in a lot of countries. So a lot of the countries in Africa have similar kind of faith folk stories. One theory behind it is that albinoism is even more striking amongst dark-skinned folk than it is amongst light-skinned folk.
00:25:23
Speaker
And albinos have unfortunately been where she is. So sometimes albinos have been treated as mystical and special and thus deserving of protection. Sometimes albinos have been taken to be abnormal and deserving of death. But there's often been this thing, this theory in anthropology and sociology that albinoism is often taken to be a marker of the unusual and faith folk often have those unusual markers associated with them.
00:25:53
Speaker
So one of the theories as to why the Turuhu and the Patiparuhe often described as having red hair and fair skin is this theory that it is a kind of quasi-explanation for why albinoism does sometimes occur within the Maori population. But it's once again, it's a case of taking
00:26:13
Speaker
And this is a crude way of putting it, theory stories, and then claiming they must be literally true. And it would be interesting to ask people like Hill and Dutre as to whether they believe in the reality of leprechauns and fae folk in Western European countries.
00:26:32
Speaker
Because if they say, oh, those are obviously theory stories and we don't take them seriously, why do they take these stories seriously and thus being evidence of some kind of hidden or suppressed history?
00:26:45
Speaker
So all of these theories do appeal to a bunch of evidence, but none of it really seems to be particularly solid. And it does seem to be a case of people just having made up their minds about a theory and looking for evidence to support it rather than going out and noticing weird and interesting evidence and coming up with something
00:27:04
Speaker
to account for it. It's all just sort of interpreting stuff that other people and indeed one would say experts already have a completely different explanation for. Yeah, basically.
00:27:17
Speaker
Yeah, now at this point, at this point we talked about originally, we did have to say, okay, hang on, this is once again, we're a podcast about conspiracy theory.
Conspiracy Theory of Historical Suppression
00:27:25
Speaker
So where is there a conspiracy angle to this, which is basically a bit of your old sort of suppressed history type stuff. The idea is that people are, it's not just that people don't know this stuff, it's that people don't want you to know this stuff. And so there is some sort of a conspiracy to keep the truth suppressed.
00:27:44
Speaker
And the weird thing about this conspiracy is that the only people who can be basically making this conspiracy work would be Iwi, the Māori tribes, and the Crown, the largely Pākea-orientated government of Aotearoa, New Zealand.
00:28:05
Speaker
And if you know anything about race relations in this country, or anything about the political situation in this country, you'll be aware that the Crown will occasionally say sympathetic things of
00:28:20
Speaker
being in harmony with its treaty partner, the Maori. But the crown doesn't actually do much proactively for Maori good, Maori welfare, or doing anything to solve the problems of colonisation.
00:28:39
Speaker
why the Crown would be involved in a conspiracy to suppress the history of the country, which would indicate if this history were true, that actually the descendants of the Pachia who colonized this place are actually also the descendants of the people who originally colonized this place and were wiped out by Maori, makes absolutely no sense.
00:29:05
Speaker
the conspirators in this case, it doesn't make any sense that they've been involved in a conspiracy which actually disadvantages them. So not only is the historical theory doesn't really hold water, but the conspiracy theory also doesn't really have a lot going for it. Now, that's what we talked about originally back in 2015 when we brought
Excavation in Huntley and Giant Bones
00:29:30
Speaker
this up.
00:29:30
Speaker
Then in episode 2020, we had episode 254 featuring what might have been our best titled episode ever. They might be giants, but they're probably mower bones. Because a story came up in 2020 that a bunch of folks who were, were they actually related to the Celtic New Zealand theory guys or were they a different bunch?
00:29:58
Speaker
They seem to be people who were in sympathy with them, but I don't think they were actually directly related to them. So I mean, usually when you talk about the Celtic New Zealand thesis, we're talking about Martin Dutre, we're talking about Maxie Hill, there's another character called Noel Hilliam, who was also involved in these kind of tall tales.
00:30:19
Speaker
The people in Huntley, who were tunneling into the side of a hill, seemed to have been in sympathy with these people, but I don't know they actually featured these people amongst their amateur archaeology team.
00:30:36
Speaker
Yes, but what they were doing was, as you say, tunneling into the side of Waikare-2 Valley Road in Huntley, but south of Auckland, because they were looking for a cabin that supposedly contained seven to eight foot tall giants, or rather the bones of these giants, of pre-Mari origin. I don't know why they thought that to begin with.
00:30:59
Speaker
But they did believe that there were three or four sites around the country which contained such remains, and so they believed that by digging into there, they were going to find this and rewrite the history of New Zealand. Now, they did find bones, I believe. I'm not sure if, is that how it got started, do you think? They'd heard about these large bones had been found there and decided, ah, this must be one of those places where they were giants.
00:31:24
Speaker
I mean, it seems that that's the most reasonable interpretation to take. So yes, obviously they'd heard stories about there being a cavern which contained within it bones of large and unusual size, which normally back home, if you're talking about bones of large and unusual size, you're probably talking about mower bones. Mowers for people who are not from New Zealand, basically the emu or the ostrich,
00:31:53
Speaker
of Polynesia, except they're really, really big, and they've been extinct for quite some time now. In fact, we didn't even know about the existence of Moa until, I think, the beginning of the 20th century, where the first bones were found. And then people were going, oh, there used to be these really, really, really big birds here.
00:32:17
Speaker
I mean, it used to be a really, really big eagle. We had the largest eagle in the world back home, but it's been extinct for a long time.
00:32:26
Speaker
It has, unfortunately. Yes, I mean, like I say, no real native mammals, so a lot of ecological niches were filled by life. Birds with very, very thick skulls, because their primary way of getting food, because they can't fly, because we have a lot of flightless birds back home.
00:32:47
Speaker
They can't fly so they run at high speed at trees, head first to knock the nuts out of the trees. So they have to have very very thick skulls because otherwise they would either be giving themselves concussions or killing themselves whilst trying to eat. It's a wonderful country to birds.
00:33:05
Speaker
really is. But yes, so there are very large, I mean, go look up more, MOA. You can find pictures of them, you can find pictures of their bones. In fact, there's one that does go around the internet, a bit of that MOA talon that was found in a cave.
Clarification on Large Bones Found
00:33:25
Speaker
It's
00:33:25
Speaker
It's the bird equivalent of a hand of a mower species was found in a cave still with like skin and stuff on it. And it sort of goes around as the, what the hell is this cursed looking thing? But it's just the core of a really big bird. And their bones, their leg bones were considerably larger than a person's leg bones.
00:33:45
Speaker
So if you looked at one and were assuming that it was from a person, it would have to be a bloody big person. But it wasn't, it was from a bloody big bird. Nevertheless, these people believed that they were going to find a bunch of giant bones buried somewhere in Huntley. And they were digging in the side of a road which ended up tunneling into the land on the side of the road, which was not land that they owned. And I believe when the landowner found out they weren't particularly happy about it.
00:34:13
Speaker
Yes, back home you'd say they were bloody furious. They were bloody furious. Yes, apparently the farmer, when the owner of the land found out they were annoyed that it was happening, they were also annoyed that people had assumed that they had given their assent and they were part of this people, looking to prove that Maori weren't here first. But nevertheless, these people, they had a website, they had a blog,
00:34:39
Speaker
I don't know if it's still up or not and I do not care to check. Yeah, I haven't looked at it for quite some time. So I found out about it was doing a casual search for Celtic New Zealand stuff online and found this blog. And when I found the blog, I went
00:34:57
Speaker
tell someone about this. So I actually contacted the local eway, I contacted the Huntley council, I basically said are you aware that there appears to be some illegal archaeological digs going on back home because archaeology is something which
00:35:15
Speaker
has to be done with great care back home. We have an entire Department of Conservation team, which is devoted to the archaeology of the country and we want to make sure it's done properly above board and with appropriate experts. And I got in contact with them and basically nothing happened.
00:35:37
Speaker
although eventually something did happen. Eventually, yes. So at the time they said on their blog, what's the quote, Malory, as we know them, did not possess an empty land as taught in the school books these days or as printed these days in the media. Polynesians, Green Gross's apostrophe, in fact, came to a land already occupied and then they conquered it. What is inside our cave when we finally reach the cavern part will eventually prove this. So there are very much.
00:36:05
Speaker
looking for evidence to prove that Māori were not the indigenous people of Aotearoa. Now they did some digging. They found a large bone, which they thought was the leg bone of a large human, which people looked at and said, I'm pretty sure that's a more bone. It did eventually make the news. Radia New Zealand had a story about it.
00:36:26
Speaker
and people talked about sort of old stories, old people who had heard these stories of crypts with giant skeletons in them and things like that, and stories from victims of the Spanish flu and World War II Japanese soldiers, these old stories from all over the place. Nothing particularly concrete,
00:36:50
Speaker
Yeah, the closest thing we get to kind of a concrete detail here is that as the RNZ story notes, in that area in Huntley, there have been rumors of a burial cavern or cave for quite some time. And so there was apparently, and we've put apparently here because this is all kind of secondhand or thirdhand information,
00:37:15
Speaker
There was a point in the latter part of the 20th century where a road was being built and the people who were building the road basically cut into or through a chamber which had bones within it, which was then covered up as part of the, not covered up in a conspiratorial sense, covered up as in part of building the road. But then rumours started to abound what
00:37:42
Speaker
or who did these bones belong to? And that seems to be the motivation for the tunnelers. They know, or at least think there is, a cavern somewhere. I should point out they were engaged in this dig for several years.
00:38:00
Speaker
And so they kept on making a larger and larger tunnel that needed shoring up and needed oxygen being pumped in. So they claimed that they were heading towards a cavern. They never found a cavern. They just kept on digging a longer and longer tunnel, which people now think was they were probably excavating a waterway that had collapsed as opposed to an entrance to a cave system.
Conclusion: Decline of Celtic NZ Theory
00:38:26
Speaker
So they were looking for a cavern that was rumoured to exist, but we actually had no evidence actually ever did exist.
00:38:35
Speaker
And unfortunately for them, it never really worked out. I mean, you had a bit of, as you say, you were the one you went to try to announce to the authorities that was going. You had a bit of, had some dealings with some of these people. In the original episode, we read out a particularly long Twitter exchange you had with one of these people that kind of involved the peer of you trolling each other to a certain extent.
00:39:02
Speaker
and bits definitely did not produce anything of substance from the sky who was making all sorts of claims. In particular, they also had an old piece of wood which they insisted was the end of a string, like the neck of a stringed instrument, but was much larger than the neck of any stringed instrument normally, which means it must have been a stringed instrument for giants. And anyone else looking at it said, it looks like it's the prow of a canoe, but apparently you couldn't have been that for
00:39:28
Speaker
reasons. Yeah, because apparently all canoe prowls look exactly the same, which indicates this person has never been inside a museum back home. No, but in the end, well, yes, yes. This
00:39:46
Speaker
person must find watching pirate films astounding. I think that's unrealistic. All of these boats have different figureheads. I mean, we all know boats have exactly the same figurehead. This is just, this kind of artistic license is going too far.
00:40:00
Speaker
Fortunately, well, unfortunately for them, the dig did get called off. They, I believe at the time they tried to sort of say that they'd already given up when they got told not to do it. And therefore the joke's on you for trying to make them stop because they'd already decided to stop quite independently. One of them claimed that one of them, one of the tunnelers apparently is a Reiki practitioner and claimed to have placed a Reiki curse on the tunnel.
00:40:29
Speaker
Which as you know, as we are such reiki devotees, we're now very petrified of even going through Huntly in case our chakras or spinal alignments go astray.
00:40:46
Speaker
So at the time they said, OK, well, we know there are other sites we're just going to go off and tunnel under them. And did seem to hint at some sort of sinister conspiracy behind getting them found out, even though they had been publicly posting it about it on their blog.
00:41:01
Speaker
Yeah, they seem to be very, very surprised that because they had a blog which wasn't private, people found out about their activities. They seem to think it was very suspicious that people might be searching for activities like theirs. When, I mean, if you had just did a generic search for New Zealand history, you probably would have found it eventually. Or you looked for unusual Maori
00:41:31
Speaker
are artifacts, you'd probably find it as well. There was nothing hidden about what they were doing. So the fact they got annoyed, they were found out. So next time, password protect your blog. So that is, and that was the last thing we heard of anything basically related to the Celtic New Zealand hypothesis in the media and frankly good.
00:42:01
Speaker
So it's been interesting to look back because it's like you say, for a while, it did seem to be kind of a thing, but it's sort of faded out. And I would not be surprised if some of the conspiracists types, some of whom are now members of parliament in this country have a bit of Celtic New Zealand stuff worked into the now wide ranging
00:42:28
Speaker
conspiracy theories around vaccines and absolutely everything else, but at least they're not particularly public about it.
00:42:36
Speaker
No, I mean there was a point in time in the 2010s where Noel Hilliam and Martin Dutre would either write into the New Zealand Herald and get into the Leices to the Editors page, or even have short articles devoted to Dutre has found yet another unusual stone in Auckland with a carving that cannot be explained.
00:42:59
Speaker
And so for some reason there must have been someone at the Herald who was willing to go, oh, I'm willing to bat for this thesis by giving them a few pages every year. But that seems to have luckily dried up. Hmm. So, um, yeah, there was really no reason for us to be talking about this at all. So we're going to stop and then we're going to go and record a bonus episode.
00:43:25
Speaker
for our patrons, none of whom believe in the Celtic New Zealand hypothesis as far as we know. Yes, as far as we know. We're going to talk a little bit about a bit of real estate from the looks of things, a bit of meat eating or not as it happens, a bit of Alex Jones, maybe a bit more podcast talk and maybe, maybe we've been lying to you this whole time and there is a bit of an update.
00:43:50
Speaker
about the Celtic music of the thing. We're going to talk about an attempt at a documentary that Martin Dutry tried to make. And because I can't publicly talk about some of the information, it has to be
00:44:07
Speaker
in the bonus episode. So if you want to find out about the documentary that Martin Dutry tried to make about the Celtic New Zealand thesis, which apparently is not the Celtic New Zealand thesis, it's the Celtic adjacent New Zealand thesis, then you're going to have to subscribe to the podcast and find out. So yes, if that's something you'd like, patreon.com, look for the podcast that's going to the conspiracy and that's all you need to know. And yeah, I believe we're done. Let's never speak of this again.
00:44:36
Speaker
Or until we do back to back to the conspiracy. Back to back to the conspiracy. Yeah, which who knows? I wouldn't rule it out. Back to life. Back to society. Back to reality. Back to. I don't know. We're quoting. We're one of us is misquoting 80s song lyrics. I think it's time to call things to an end, which I'm going to do in the traditional manner by saying goodbye. Goodbye.
00:45:03
Speaker
The podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy stars Josh Addison and myself, associate professor M.R.X. Denton. Our show's cons... sorry, producers are Tom and Philip, plus another mysterious anonymous donor. You can contact Josh and myself at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider joining our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.