Gerald Hensley
This month’s classic review is from Landfall 47, September 1958.
The Origins of the Maori Wars, by Keith Sinclair (New Zealand University Press, 1957), 26s. 6d.
‘THE WAR’, said Wetini Taiporutu, ‘is not merely a contention for the land at New Plymouth, but for the chieftainship of New Zealand.’ With this declaration the old chief began a controversy that has continued until today.
The cause of the struggle which began in Taranaki in 1860 and which went on for ten years to rack the North Island, cripple the government and nearly split the colony, could never again be so simply defined. The argument broke out as soon as the war itself, and at times raged a good deal more fiercely. It was praised as a war of civilization and condemned as a war of greed. Some thought it a protest against injustice and others a wilful rebellion; the government was alternately attacked for having started it and denounced for not getting on with it. The extremists on both sides hoped it would be a war of extermination. It was all very confusing, and unfortunately the confusion was in no way checked by the end of hostilities. Ever since, the causes and origins of the Maori wars – the greatest disaster in the country’s short lifetime – have been pored over with a morbid fascination; in pamphlet and in newspaper, in a bulky collection of polemic literature which began in 1861 and ended (if indeed it has ended) as recently as 1947. They have been subjected to searching scrutinies by Select Committees, Royal Commissions, judges and journalists, even by an ex-Minister of France. About the only thing this important historical problem had not received, indeed, is investigation by a good historian.
Fortunately this omission has now been rectified. Dr Sinclair, in what may very possibly be the best monograph yet written on New Zealand history, grapples firmly with the massive controversy. He emerges with an answer which is at once more complicated and considerably less comforting than Wetini’s. The wars may have become indirectly a fight for sovereignty between King (Maori) and Queen (Victoria), but they began unromantically enough in a clash over land – the invariable point of friction between colonizing Europeans and aboriginal inhabitants. Land and sovereignty, Dr Sinclair argues, were inextricably connected. A situation where the settlers had the sovereignty and the Maoris had the land was bound to be dangerous: the former would be constantly tempted to use their political and military power to despoil the latter.
To do the British Government justice, it recognized the difficulty. Anxious to protect the Maoris from a fate which seemed to be overtaking the natives in all other European settlements, it hoped to solve the problem by confiding the sovereignty, not to untrustworthy colonists, but to a Governor who could stand above and between, reconciling the interests of both races. For twenty years after the signing of the treaty of Waitangi the Governor, and theoretically the Governor alone, controlled native policy. The result was not encouraging. When it rose above mere temporizing – for inevitably Governors tended to be satisfied simply with preventing any fighting – the native policy of these years was confined to good intentions. Promising plans for a gradual integration of the races were almost nullified by imperfect execution the result of lack of money, lack of understanding, lack of staff, and lack of interest.
Dr Sinclair, however, avoids the pitfall of supposing that this mattered much. The succession of schemes and policies, Native Councils and Native Courts, had surprisingly little bearing on whether a clash could be avoided or not. The political origins of the war can be overstressed; the main causes lay beyond the reach of government. The numerical inferiority of the settlers, and the disorganisation of the Maoris in the face of a European influx, contributed more to the uneasy peace of the early years than all the policy-making of successive Governors. The colony was not necessarily wise because its head was Grey. As growing settlement threw them into increasing contact, as the pressure for land swelled, and as settlers and Maoris found themselves in economic rivalry farming for the goldfields market in Australia, the first signs of resentment and discontent began to appear on both sides. Then the rather self-conscious humanitarianism of British Governors could prevail little. Perhaps Dr Sinclair is stretching his evidence somewhat when he quotes the crudest anti-native propaganda which appeared in the most violent newspapers, and then describes it as ‘the views of the majority of Europeans’. It may be so, but it is impossible to prove. Nor is it safe to discount the views of ‘thinking men’ who, he tells us, read such papers with disgust, for it was precisely these thinking men who had most influence in the government. But there can be no questioning Dr Sinclair’s main point that innumerable frictions, squabbles, and misunderstandings of each other’s ways built up in the minds of either race a stock concept of the other-the shiftless savage and the, greedy settler, the sort of stereotypes over which people will fight. ‘The war began in the minds of many men of both races long before it occurred in the fields and bush.’
Was war therefore inevitable? Dr Sinclair seems to think so, and he is in good company. Sir Frederic Rogers of the Colonial Office (Dr Sinclair follows the illustrious but rather lonely example of Earl Granville in persistently calling him Sir Frederick) turned his thoughts again in later life to New Zealand. In the light of experience he concluded sadly that native races in temperate climates were always doomed to extinction by Anglo-Saxon settlers, and drew some comfort from the thought that the Maoris had had History as well as a considerable array of generals against them. But a claim of inevitability, though consoling, is too easy. Whatever might have happened in the long run, there was nothing inevitable about the clash which occurred in 1860. War broke out in that year for an exceedingly simple reason: because the Governor who was supposed to mediate and intercede between the races, instead allied himself and the Imperial troops he commanded with the land-desperate settlers of Taranaki. For the first time it made a war for land physically possible.
The conduct of those who were responsible for this disastrous situation is carefully examined by Dr Sinclair in some of his best passages. He seems chiefly to censure the Governor, Sir Thomas Gore Browne (whose character is revealed with unhappy clarity in an accompanying photograph), for assuming control of native affairs in 1855 when he was in fact quite incompetent to do so. Gore Browne’s reservation of native policy may have been unfortunate, however, but it was not his fault. The Imperial Government made it abundantly clear at this time that while it bore the burden of defending the colony it could never yield control of native policy – so closely affecting defence – to colonial ministers. The error in the Imperial reasoning lay in assuming too readily that this control would be safer with the Governor. Dr Sinclair is more charitable about Gore Browne’s consent to the Waitara purchase (the immediate cause of war in Taranaki), holding justifiably that the Governor’s main fault was misunderstanding, a very humanitarian combination of good intentions and ignorance. Donald McLean is less easily exonerated from moral blame. Perhaps Dr Sinclair underestimates the good faith of the land purchase negotiations; there is a certain amount of evidence to suggest that so disorganised had the Atiawa tribe become that the existence of a chiefly authority to forbid land sales was seriously in doubt, and had in fact never been recognized by either Fitzroy or Grey. Nevertheless, this still leaves McLean in a rather ambiguous position, manoeuvring obscurely between a trustful Governor and an equally trustful Ministry.
In the course of his account Dr Sinclair manages to lay some vigorous old ghosts. They have almost all been laid before at one time or another, but this time they will very probably remain so. The Land League, that mythical Maori trade union, disappears (it is to be hoped forever) from New Zealand historiography. And he makes it painfully clear that the ‘purchase’ of the Waitara block from the Maoris can no longer be regarded, even hopefully, as just. He is right; it is time this was said, and in such firm and incontrovertible tones. Only his final chapters on the extension of the war to the Waikato seem inconclusive and somewhat anti-climactic; they either repeat what has already been said, or raise entirely new questions which have to be left unanswered; they might have been better omitted.
Yet every chapter shows its author’s distinctive virtues: the alertly-argued style, the balanced judgment, the clarity of exposition, the flashes of a slightly sardonic wit. Indeed the only traces of the book’s doctoral origins are to be found in the accuracy of its documentation. Dr Sinclair has now strayed off to more enticing pastures later in the century, but it is impossible not to regret that he has not given in a second volume a discussion of the wars as good as his analysis of their origins. With this book the writing of New Zealand history emerges a little further from its anecdotage: for the first time a large and difficult problem is dissected by one who mixes industry and insight in proportions as rare today among historians as they are among anyone else. It is all the more pity, therefore, that the printing and binding should be unworthy of so important a book.
Leave a Reply