The Meeting Place - A New Zealand History Blog

Event: Auckland Writers Festival Event: Past and Present Date: Friday 26 August 2022 Summary: Sociologist Joanna Kidman (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Raukawa) and historian Vincent O’Malley make a formidable team, as partners in life and scholarship. They both contributed to the recently published Fragments from a Contested Past: Remembrance, Denial and New Zealand History , and co-lead the Marsden Fund project – He Taonga te Wareware?: Remembering and Forgetting Difficult Histories in Aotearoa New Zealand – a three-year study into how the 19th-century NZ Wars have shaped memory, identity and history.  O’Malley is a founding partner of HistoryWorks and the author of the 2022 Ockham NZ Book Awards General Non-Fiction winner Voices from the New Zealand Wars | He Reo n ō ng ā Pakanga o Aotearoa . Kidman is a Professor of Sociology with a particular interest in youth movements and higher education. They speak with Dale Husband about their writing, passions and collaborations.   ...

In the inaugural Auckland Museum Institute Humanities Lecture for 2022, Dr O’Malley describes how the Great War for New Zealand, begun from the invasion of Waikato in 1863, played out in Tāmaki Makaurau, and the legacy it left behind. In his acclaimed 2016 book   The Great War for New Zealand , Dr Vincent O’Malley argued that it was in the invasion of Waikato in 1863, and not either world war, that was the defining conflict in New Zealand history. War in the Waikato shaped the nation in many ways and caused incalculable misery and lasting harm for many Māori communities. But as the same book highlighted, it also sealed Auckland’s future. In this lecture, O’Malley describes how the conflict played out in Tāmaki Makaurau and the legacy it left behind. Vincent O’Malley is the author of many books on New Zealand history including bestselling works   The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800–2000   (2016) and   The New Zealand Wars / Ngā Pakanga o Aotearo...

Last month I spoke at the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park seminar, held at Auckland Museum, on how the Waikato War helped transform Auckland and the wider Hauraki Gulf. Auckland, I suggested, is a city built on immense Māori contributions, even if this history is not widely known or understood today. Watch the video of my talk here.

I was asked recently, during the course of an interview with the New Zealand Herald on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Bastion Point/Takaparawhā occupation, about who Auckland’s ‘founding father’ was. My first response was that I don’t like the term ‘founding father’ as for one thing ‘it’s very patriarchal’ . (Where are the ‘founding mothers’?). But if we had to name one, I added, then the Ngāti Whātua rangatira Āpihai Te Kawau had stronger claims than John Logan Campbell , who is usually described as the founding father of Auckland.  Āpihai Te Kawau (source: https://nzhistory.govt.nz/people/apihai-te-kawau ) It was Āpihai Te Kawau who invited Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson to found a new settlement on the shores of Waitematā Harbour in 1840. Ngāti Whātua subsequently gifted the Crown over 100,000 acres in the area. They did so, I suggested, in the expectation of an ongoing reciprocal relationship of mutual benefit to both Māori and Pāk...

On 9 July 1863 a proclamation was issued by the government addressed to 'the natives of Mangere, Pukaki, Thirmatao [ sic - Ihumatao ], Te Kirikiri, Patumahoe, Pokeno, and Tuakau', warning that: All persons of the native race living in the Manukau district and the Waikato frontier are hereby required immediately to take the oath of allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen, and to give up their arms to an officer appointed by Government for that purpose. Natives who comply with this order will be protected. Natives refusing to do so are hereby warned forthwith to leave the district aforesaid, and retire to Waikato beyond Mangatawhiri. In case of their not complying with this order they will be ejected. MA 1/1863/186 (Box 835), Archives New Zealand On the same date magistrates were despatched to the various settlements to deliver the notice and demand that Māori take an oath of allegiance to Queen Victoria or leave. As discussed in The Great War for New Zea...

In The Great War for New Zealand, historian Vincent O’Malley tells the story of the Waikato War of the 1860s – how it set back Māori-Pākehā relations by generations and changed the course of New Zealand history for good. Here, in an original essay for The Spinoff, he explains how the war helped create modern Auckland. In 1845 the small township of Auckland (population 3635) faced an existential crisis. War raged in the north and it was rumoured that the assistance of the powerful Tainui tribes had been sought for an attack on the settlement. A nightmare scenario for the town’s residents was the prospect of a simultaneous assault from the north and south, with Ngāpuhi and Tainui combining to virtually assure Auckland’s destruction. Yet when a delegation came south to solicit assistance from paramount Tainui rangatira Te Wherowhero, the response was emphatic. “You must fight me if you come on to Auckland; for these Europeans are under my protection,” he told them. In Mā...