'Missionary beguiled', The Press, 24 September, 2005

Not many books could be described, on republication with only minor changes 40 years after they first appeared, as still significant and relevant. The reappearance of this classic of New Zealand historical scholarship can be welcomed without reserve.

The book is a classic not only because Judith Binney had more success in her attempt to answer intractable questions about Thomas Kendall's life than earlier writers but also because the life itself is an astonishing story. Kendall came to New Zealand in 1814 as one of the small band which established the first Christian mission here. He was a key figure in the crucial interaction between Maori and Pakeha that followed and in the tense and troubled relationships within that tiny group.

In 1820 he returned to England with Hongi Hika. Back in New Zealand he became deeply implicated in the arms trade that supplied Hongi with the muskets to wreak devastation on other iwi and became involved sexually with a Maori woman. After the irretrievable breakdown of his relationships with his missionary colleagues and with the censorious Marsden, he left New Zealand to spend time in Chile, then settled in New South Wales where he drowned in 1832.

Readers should not come to this book expecting a conventional 'life' – a 'when, where and what' narrative. Binney instead attempts to dip beneath the surface, to understand the moral, emotional and intellectual journey of an evangelical Christian confronting an alien and, it proved, beguiling culture and society. The complex relationship between Kendall's sexual liaison with Tungaroa and his intellectual and emotional 'seduction' by Maori beliefs and values is carefully dissected by Binney. Kendall himself deplored the corrosion of his faith and morals, but also found the new culture irresistible. In Binney's words he succumbed to the Polynesian world, yet withheld himself from it.

I am not sure that anyone 'modern' can truly understand Kendall, but Binney's exhaustive and imaginative scholarship provides as clear a window into his world as we are likely ever to have. Her book made me reach again for Mark Twain's Autobiography to re-read the 'text' Twain constructed to introduce it: 'What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is in his head, and is known to none but himself. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written.'

Binney may have attempted an impossible task, but she has used Kendall's acts and words to allow us to see, beneath 'the visible, thin crust of his world', something at least of the hidden mass of a man of extraordinary importance in the story of the relationship between Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand.

'Reissue of the week', The Dominion Post, 9 July, 2005

Judith Binney's The Legacy of Guilt: A Life of Thomas Kendall is as fresh as ever 37 years after first publication. New Zealand history is hot, and here is another quality reissue with a new, updated preface from Binney, who transformed her youthful academic thesis into this compelling and dramatic biography. Church Missionary Society evangelist Kendall was one of the first missionaries to the Bay of Islands in 1814, settling with his wife and family in Rangihoua under the patronage of local chiefs, Ruatara and Hongi Hika. He was appointed a JP, started a school and attempted to compile a Maori grammar. However, the missionaries in the small settlement disliked each other and isolation only compounded their misery. The temperamental Kendall developed what has been called a Faustian delusion as a result of his fascination with indigenous beliefs, but was unable to recognise the fallibility of his own faith and values. Hongi and younger chief Waikato accompanied him on an unauthorised trip back to England in 1820, where the chiefs were feted as exotic natives while building up a hand arms cache. Back in New Zealand, Kendall was dismissed for gun running and adultery with a local woman. Drowned in 1832, he has survived as a character in drama and poetry.