Bravo, Neu Zeeland presents one of the earliest and most significant overseas travel accounts written in Māori – the diary of a visit to Vienna made by its author, Hemara Te Rerehau, and his Tainui kinsman, Wiremu Toetoe.

In part the diary is a report on the young men’s ‘OE’, recording visits to cathedrals, palaces, museums and the world’s first public zoo. It also shows that the two Māori were seen as ambassadors for their country. They worked in the imperial printery of the Habsburgs, met several European rulers including Queen Victoria, and were the showpiece of three important civic occasions. As the Māori passed in one street procession the excited Austrians shouted ‘Bravo, Neu Zeeland’.

Te Rerehau and Toetoe returned home to a divided country and Emperor Franz Joseph’s gift of a printing press was used to print Kingite propaganda during the bitter land wars of the 1860s. This shocked Pākehā in New Zealand and Austria but Helen Hogan shows, by placing Te Rerehau’s diary in its historical context, the logic of the Māori men’s loyalty to their own people.

Wiremu Toetoe and Hemara Te Rerehau were not the first to travel to a dream world and return to something well short of Utopia. But the account of their travels remains a testament to their intelligence, sense of adventure and perceptiveness that a harmonious bringing together of two cultures demands. It provides a glimpse of what might have been and what yet might be.