Helen Watson White
Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori Home Front during the Second World War by Angela Wanhalla, Sarah Christie, Lachy Paterson, Ross Webb and Erica Newman (Auckland University Press, 2024), 296pp, $59.99
Eighty years after the end of the war, and nearly 40 years on from Nancy Taylor’s official history, The Home Front: New Zealand in the Second World War, this book, Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori Home Front during the Second World War, arrives with its Māori perspective. While Taylor’s ‘social history’, as she called it, was praised by the Chief Historian in his Foreword, the quotation marks indicate that this was considered a sub-genre of history. Auckland University Press’s media release for Te Hau Kāinga gives two subject categories: History and Te Ao Māori. I find that significant.
Enriched by a broad range of historical photographs and other illustrations, not only does Te Hau Kāinga normalise the inclusion in history of all members of New Zealand society, but in describing that society it gives expression to a completely different worldview. This changes everything: questions of status and priority of values, understandings of unity and community, of what ‘service’ means, or education, politics, family. I don’t remember ever reading a ‘war’ book that so rarely refers to winning or losing. That is simply not the issue.
As proof of its radical identification with te ao Māori this book has a companion volume called Raupanga (meaning offering or sacrifice), which presents 39 illustrated narratives in te reo Māori about Māori wartime experience. Seven themes are explored, much as in Te Hau Kāinga: mahi (work); mahi taua (home defence); hapori (community); taiohi (youth); tōrangapū (politics); whakapono (religion); and i muri i te pakanga (post-war). Te Hau Kainga is an academic work, but eminently readable, with full bibliography, index and notes; Raupanga is a condensed, popular version, accessible to a wide audience. Both are based on qualitative (personal, observational) as well as quantitative (facts-and-stats) research. Both are history.
While the authors have interviewed a great many kuia and kaumatua still living, they also acknowledge they are standing on the shoulders of their tupuna, of revered Māori leaders and of scholars of the past. Te Hau Kāinga, they write, ‘would not exist without academic foundation works such as Nancy Taylor’s monumental two-volume official history’.
What I’m calling the democratisation of history was already apparent in Taylor’s book. Hers was the last in the country’s long list of official war histories, the final instalment in the fourth series entitled ‘The New Zealand People at War’, which treats ‘the people’ as supporting, but separate from, the armed services. After a total of 44 volumes published in four series, Taylor is left with an area of interest that seems almost an afterthought: the people at home. Not all the people, since the other two books in the final series had already treated Political and External Affairs and the War Economy, but those of all ages and conditions who come under the heading of ‘civilians’, who are not identified by their level of education, employment, or any other function.
War reached everyone on the domestic front, suggests Taylor, even children in their schools and homes. On p.1229 of her 1330-page work, the social historian marshals from daily newspapers evidence of how the ongoing conflict, with rationing and other limitations, made ‘fairly frugal’ the fifth and last Christmas of the war. Added to sweets that had to be ‘hunted and queued for’ were home-made ‘rag dolls, cardboard games, soft and wooden toys …’
This degree of detail is one end of Taylor’s evidence scale. The other end involves the domestic response—political and popular—to every movement of the war, from the rumblings in Europe before 1939 to the invasion of Poland, the ‘boldness and disaster of Pearl Harbour’, the dropping of nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities, and the complicated aftermath. Taylor’s treatment is exhaustive, the author praised by the official histories’ Editor-in-Chief for her ‘industry, persistence, perception, professionalism, compassion and vision’, considering the ‘sheer bulk of the material that she examined’.
As to the size of the job, Taylor agrees, writing in her Preface: ‘The social elements of history invite almost limitless exploration, illustration and qualification … the topics treated and the extent of the treatment are, to some degree subjective, another person could have produced a very different account.’
Te Hau Kāinga presents one of those other possible accounts with strong similarities but also major differences. In the book’s self-description, subjectivity is a crucial element, mainly found in the accounts of the historians’ informants rather than the views of the writers themselves. Even within the compass of a smaller book, the size of the job is recognised; there are different points of view on most issues, and we are drawn towards a holistic understanding of te ao Māori and an appreciation, on the other hand, that the historical experiences of different iwi were never quite the same.
Most importantly, where Taylor’s book had a single author, Te Hau Kāinga has five. Erica Newman (Ngāpuhi) and Lachy Paterson are engaged in research at Te Tumu: School of Māori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, where Sarah Christie was a postdoctoral fellow and where Angela Wanhalla (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāi Te Ruahikihiki, Pākehā) is a professor in the History Programme. The fifth writer, Ross Webb, of Wellington, is principal researcher analyst in the research team at the Waitangi Tribunal Unit. In addition, substantial contributions are acknowledged from six further researchers from a range of backgrounds, three of them with whakapapa to nine different iwi.
The authors’ spread of expertise covers women in the workforce in Aotearoa, adoption/whangai, kinship and identity, Māori history including texts in te reo, the relationship between Māori and the government up to the mid-twentieth century, Māori women’s history, organised labour and oral history. While it’s often been a denigration to describe a document as written by a committee, my perception is that there must have been some interesting discussions around the project table.
This was also a very large committee, counting the eight Māori students and others given scholarships or grants to assist Wanhalla and Paterson as lead investigators. It was an active group, too: ‘members of the team have traversed the country from Invercargill to Kaitaia to the Chatham Islands, gathering information and talking to people’. It’s a people-centred project, which is nevertheless indebted to the number of relevant archives and collections now available online.
Being grounded in te ao Māori means the book has a different centre of gravity from other war histories. Much of the political power driving Māori experience resided in key figures like the renowned Apirana Ngata who had attained leadership roles in government, or in the case of Te Puea Herangi, in the kingitanga. The fact that Te Puea had opposed the conscription of Waikato Māori for The First World War might have made her a fearsome fighter for her people’s independence in the Second. Yet the main reason there was no conscription of Māori—when Pākehā were conscripted from 1940—was that there were so many Māori volunteers. While Taylor gives much space to the country’s dedicated group of conscientious objectors, that was not so much an issue for Māori, although some naturally resented defending the very ones who’d been responsible for confiscating their land.
Māori wanted to fight, but not for the reason Taylor gives in her quotation of Michael Savage: ‘When Britain is in trouble we are in trouble.’ The tribally organised 28th (Māori) Battalion, the most decorated of all the battalions of the 2NZEF, provided a central symbolic focus for Māori aspirations, representing a present and a possible future equality, plus advancement in mana. Although the casualty rate was higher for this unit—there were many Māori widows and fatherless children at war’s end—their story became a defining legend. Such fame might have justified their suffering, if it were not for the disillusionment felt in later years, for instance by the 28th’s ‘last man standing’, Sir R.N. ‘Bom’ Gillies, who said in an interview in 2024, ‘If I had the choice again, I would not fight in that war.’
The Battalion’s primary quality appealing to Māori communities was that their men were not just foot-soldiers for Pākehā, but Māori fighters led by Māori officers. This is the ringing note of independence, of self-determination, that sounds throughout the book, carrying the full force of Māori self-identity. When Māori were fundraising at home for the war-effort, they raised more when the money was specifically intended for the 28th Battalion. They agitated for a special Māori Patriotic Fund to be set up. The Auckland Māori MP Tāpihana Paraire Paikea wanted their contributions to ‘be specially noted so that future generations would know the amount of money contributed by the Maoris to the Patriotic effort of this war’.
The main thesis of Te Hau Kāinga is that ‘What Māori wanted for themselves and their lives differed from what most Pākehā envisaged for them.’ This drive, coming up against the fact of majority power in Pākehā hands, made for tensions that were felt in many contexts before the war and which continue to be experienced today, because the dilemma was never resolved. Claims for redress of historic injustices, breaches of Te Tiriti, were not put aside just because there was a war, and the disaster of past land loss continues to affect every sphere of Māori life.
In terms of the Home Front, there were many ways besides overseas service in which Māori could make a difference with their support. With Paikea’s creation of the Māori War Effort Organization (MWEO) in 1941, they did it on their own terms, volunteering for the Home Guard or work in ‘essential industries’ and especially raising productivity on market gardens and farms. The vexed question of land ownership, however, brought the element of hard-won autonomy into focus. If Māori did indeed hold land, they could get government help to intensify their agricultural enterprises. But neighbouring Pākehā farmers would often resent these developments, as representing Māori getting more than they deserved, a government handout which would further their private interests in a form of ‘privilege’ over others.
This thoroughly racist attitude is one of the ways in which a book about the 1940s is still relevant today. The idea of Māori difference being something that works in their favour rather than to their detriment is simply unhistorical. The evidence throughout this detailed observation of our cohabitation runs completely the other way. With the end of the war came the end of self-governance in the form of the MWEO and many other organisations. There was no more special treatment for Māori, now back under the jurisdiction of the Native Department, later the Department of Māori Affairs., which was paternalistic at best, racist at worst. When there were special schemes for rehabilitating war veterans, Māori did not receive the same degree of assistance as others, especially in gifts of land and development grants.
Sir Apirana Ngata had called Māori men’s war service ‘the price of citizenship’, anticipating that their whole community would be raised up to partnership in civic affairs and self-sufficiency in their own lives: society would somehow be transformed. This didn’t happen. The loss of lands Māori had already experienced was compounded by further losses—of soldiers’ abilities (a high proportion of the 28th were disabled) and lives.
There is a misunderstanding, say the authors, that the war brought many advances for Māori, as for other combatants and their families, for everyone. But the same Māori farmers, men and women who intensified their food production for the war effort, over and above their provisioning for their own people, had been through the Depression already, and had no way of lifting their condition above the sort of resilience they had learned. The young migrated to urban centres for paid work largely because the land was gone, even more of it since the government requisitioned some sites for war purposes.
Pākehā saw migration to the cities as a good thing, where Māori could become more assimilated, leaving rural areas to make their way in a new world. Yet their education had been stunted by the same governments that wanted a large labour force when and where it was needed. Girls were supposed to do practical subjects, boys to do manual trades. Parents, we learn, wanted more for their children: to be nurses rather than domestic servants, to enter the professions and return home to help their own families and communities.
So many years later, Māori women and men have made the progress they so much desired, gained the education they always deserved, and are speaking out—currently—against the Regulatory Standards Bill, which is intended to take us back to the pre-war days. There is nothing that irks a politician more than the idea of co-governance with, or self-determination for, a people who don’t know their place. This book explains, methodically and interestingly, why that attitude is an outrage.
HELEN WATSON WHITE is a Dunedin writer with a background in university teaching, library work, editing and publishing. She has written many reviews of theatre, books, music, art and opera, as well as articles, short stories and poems. Her photographs have been exhibited in several galleries.
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