Elsdon Best

New Zealand historian (1856–1931)

Elsdon Best (30 June 1856 – 9 September 1931) was an ethnographer who made important contributions to the study of the Māori of New Zealand.

Elsdon Best was born 30 June 1856 at Tawa Flat, New Zealand, to William Best and the former Hannah Haynes Nibbs. When his father obtained a position at the Colonial Treasury, the family moved from its farmstead at Grasslees Farm to Wellington, where Best, now aged 9, went to school. After completing his formal education, he took and passed the Civil Service examination and became a clerk in 1873. Within a year he found the work uncongenial and moved to Poverty Bay, where he worked in farming and forestry. In 1881 Best joined the Armed Constabulary. Based in the Taranaki at a time of increased tensions between the Māori and the colonial settlers in the area, he became involved in the arrests of protesters. Through the influence of his brother in law, Walter Gudgeon, he transferred to a Māori contingent and later that year he participated in the raid on Parihaka

Best returned to New Zealand in 1886 and entered into a timber venture with his brother, using sawmilling equipment he had purchased in the United States. He also came into increasing contact with the Māori and, encouraged by Gudgeon and other notable settlers from the Taranaki, including Percy Smith, studied their language and culture. Best's devotion to his study, together with his facility in Māori, allowed him to win the confidence of the Tūhoe, whose traditions he published in a series of articles in the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute and the Journal of the Polynesian Society. In 1897, he published the monograph Waikaremoana, the Sea of Rippling Waters, With a Tramp through Tuhoe Land, in which he presented the lore of the district.

In 1910, Best was appointed ethnologist at the Dominion Museum which allowed him to pursue his research in a more focused manner. In 1912, he published The Stone Implements of the Maori, which was followed four years later by an accompanying bulletin on Māori storehouses. In 1919, his The Land of Tara appeared, a history of the Māori of Wellington Harbour. A systematic survey of traditional Māori culture, The Maori, appeared in two volumes in 1924, and in 1925 Best's Tuhoe, the Children of the Mist. This a monumental study in 1200 pages of the traditional history and culture of tribe with which he had spent so much of his life. From 1919 to 1923 Best took part in each of the four Dominion Museum ethnological expeditions. In 1914, Best was awarded the Hector Medal of the New Zealand Institute, and in 1919 he was made a fellow. His ashes lay buried beneath a monument, erected in 1960, in his birth town of Tawa at Grasslees Reserve. The nearby suburb of Elsdon, Porirua was named in his memory.