maori and pacific

Perpetrator, Judge and Jury

March 1, 2016 Leave a Comment

Gerry Te Kapa Coates

Kūpapa: The Bitter Legacy of Māori Alliances with the Crown by Ron Crosbie (Penguin Random House, 2015) 504 pp., $65

Ron Crosby is a barrister with a keen interest in Māori history, and a recent member of the Waitangi Tribunal. He also is the author of The Musket Wars (1999), which is about the conflict between Māori in the two decades before the Treaty of Waitangi was signed. These violent conflicts were spurred by the introduction of firearms as a new weapon, allowing old grievances between iwi to be addressed at a level not seen before, and leaving their own ‘bitter legacy’, the precursor of the Māori alliances with the Crown resulting from the Land Wars from 1845 to 1870. These alliances with the Crown were as flexible and pragmatic as those between iwi or hapū. [Read more…]

Connecting Places, Ancestors, Gods with the Present

December 1, 2015 2 Comments

Edmund Bohan

The Lives of Colonial Objects, edited by Annabel Cooper, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla (Otago University Press, 2015), 368 pp., $50

The inspiration for this beautifully produced and sumptuously illustrated essay collection, described by its three editors as one ‘in which objects serve as pathways into New Zealand’s colonial history’, comes originally from Neil MacGregor’s celebrated best-selling book A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), itself based on a groundbreaking collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum. The occasion for this book’s conception, however, was the 2013 conference on ‘Colonial Objects’ at Dunedin’s Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, whose themes were described as the ‘material circumstances’ of colonial life; and while there were 70 papers given, only 50 are included here, and of those, some were not actually presented at the conference. [Read more…]

Kia Ora, Everybody!

July 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Michael O’Leary

Parekura Horomia – ‘Kia Ora Chief’, by Wira Gardiner (Huia Publishers, 2014), 448 pp., $45

If there was ever an Apt Phrase Award about its subject in the title of a book, then this biography of Parekura Horomia, with its ringing ‘Kia ora, Chief’, would have to be in the running for top prize. However, I would also add that there is an equally appropriate catchphrase provided by ‘the Chief’ himself, in the way he readily greeted people with ‘Kia ora, everybody!’ For Horomia may have been the Chief, but he also stood with the ordinary people from whom he came. In the book, Gardiner invokes Māori politician Hekia Parata, when she worked for the ‘Chief’: ‘She remembered that he would give the same speeches over and over again, and they seemed to be well received every time – even on the third and fourth hearings, not unlike the time-honoured Monty Python skit: ‘Who’d a-thought 30 years ago …!’ [Read more…]

The Missionary and the Murderer

April 1, 2015 1 Comment

Max Oettli

Journey to a Hanging by Peter Wells (Vintage, 2014), 412 pp., $45

Peter Wells’ historical account of the persecution and assassination of Kereopa Te Rau has a rather gloomy title, and I first opened it with a sense of foreboding and unease. It’s true though that the story he tells us here is of a hanging – or rather of two: one of a hapless German missionary, from a tree in the hinterlands of Opotiki in 1865; the other of Kereopa Te Rau himself at the hands of the colonial authorities in Napier in 1871.

Wells starts his book with a protracted ramble through the old prison in Gisborne, now a backpacker hostel, walking up a picturesque path where, in his terminology, the past is to ‘pitch … against the Vagaries of the present’. By this means he immediately signals that the account will be a personal one, marking the 140th anniversary of Te Rau’s execution (oddly, Wells never actually alludes to this, though he makes clear he is visiting Gisborne over New Year in 2012). His initial visit, in the introduction, culminates at the gallows. He makes a useful comparison between the ‘murderer’, Kereopa Te Rau, and his victim, Carl Sylvius Völkner; both die on a rope, but the latter was rather more amateurishly strung up by a bunch of enraged warriors seven years earlier and suffered horribly. The convicted murderer, on the other hand, ‘died fairly instantly’. [Read more…]

Maoriland

March 1, 2015 Leave a Comment

Nicholas Reid
Ko Te Whenua Te Utu: Land Is the Price by M.P.K. Sorrenson (Auckland University Press, 2014) 344 pp., $49.99; Beyond the Imperial Frontier: The contest for colonial New Zealand by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, 2014) 280 pp., $49.99

Professor Emeritus M.P.K. Sorrenson is one of the people most qualified to write ‘Essays on Maori history, land and politics’, as his collection Ko Te Whenua Te Utu is subtititled. For over 30 years a leading light in the University of Auckland’s history department, he was also for 25 years a member of the Waitangi Tribunal, weighing submissions and contributing to those voluminous reports which, in his Epilogue, he calls New Zealand’s ‘largest exercise in public history ever undertaken’ (p. 299). Considering the matter of whether Pākehā can ever validly write Māori history, Sorrenson concedes in his introduction that ‘the most outstanding Maori history written in recent years’ was written by a Pākehā, Judith Binney. Nevertheless, being himself of mixed Māori and Pākehā descent, Sorrenson also claims to have a ‘personal motive’ in his long scholarly engagement with Māori politics and land ownership, ‘since I had been nurtured on stories of the alienation of the last remnants of my mother’s Maori land’.

Ko Te Whenua Te Utu comprises 13 essays, public lectures and commissioned reports, which Sorrenson has written over more than half a century, between 1956 and 2011. The earliest, from 1956, is ‘Land Purchase Methods and their Effect on Maori Population, 1865–1901’. It is modified section of Sorrenson’s MA thesis, and argues that the loss of land and disruption of the social cohesion of tribes were major causes of the decline in Māori population in the late nineteenth century. The most recent, from 2011, is ‘Folkland to Bookland’, examining the career of the nineteenth-century bureaucrat F.D. Fenton (first chief judge of the Native Land Court), who likened the loss of Māori customary tenure of land, and its transference into personalised title, to the loss of the ‘commons’ in Tudor England. [Read more…]

Addressing and Naming the Unknown

February 1, 2015 1 Comment

David Herkt
The Naturalist by Thom Conroy (Vintage, 2014), 381 pp., $37.99

The German mid-nineteenth-century scientific explorers of New Zealand conducted an extraordinary project of revealing a new colony in the midst of a great transition. They described the natural and indigenous social environments of an isolated archipelago, the last country in the world before the sunrise, one without lineage in global thought, as it was simultaneously colonised by the British.

It was not, nor could it be, a neutral or dispassionate vision. New Zealand was observed through lenses that were calibrated to contemporaneous purpose. German scientists like Ferdinand von Hochstetter and Ernst Dieffenbach ostensibly served the needs of their employers: von Hochstetter for the New Zealand government, and Dieffenbach for the private New Zealand Company. Their degree of complicity with their paymasters, however, would differ radically.

Ferdinand von Hochstetter is the later and perhaps more simplistic example. New Zealand: Its physical geography and natural history was first published in German in 1863, and in English in 1867. Von Hochstetter, who had joined the 1857–59 Austrian Novara global expedition of natural survey, had been temporarily employed in Auckland and Nelson by the New Zealand government to make a rapid survey of possible geological resources, particularly coal, gold and other metallic ores. [Read more…]