In the history of intimate relations between Maori and Pakeha, public policy and private life are woven together. Matters of the Heart reveals much about how Maori and Pakeha have lived together in this country and our changing attitudes to race, marriage and intimacy. That history runs from whalers and traders marrying into Maori families in the nineteenth century through to the growth of interracial marriages in the later twentieth. It stretches from common law marriages and Maori customary marriages to formal arrangements recognised by church and state. And it runs the gamut of official reactions – from condemnation of immorality or racial treason to celebration of our unique intermarriage patterns as a sign of us being ‘one people’ with the ‘best race relations in the world’.