The Meeting Place - A New Zealand History Blog

In October 2021, Professor Joanna Kidman and I gave a talk at City Gallery , Wellington, on ‘Remembering and Forgetting Difficult Histories: The New Zealand Wars’.   City Gallery Talk (photo: Story is King Media) The talk, delivered in conjunction with Brett Graham’s extraordinary Tai Moana Tai Tangata exhibition, draws on research conducted for our Marsden Fund project on how the New Zealand Wars are remembered and forgotten.   Brett Graham, Vincent O'Malley and Joanna Kidman pictured in front of Cease Tide of Wrong-Doing, part of Brett Graham: Tai Moana Tai Tangata, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth As we noted in the abstract for the event, si tes of enormous violence can be places of memory embedded in the land, but also of silence and forgetting. The ‘difficult histories’ of the New Zealand Wars are remembered by Māori through many forms – including art and sculpture, while ignored, or at best, mythologised by many Pākehā. The talk took place in ...

Difficult Histories: The New Zealand Wars is the Marsden Fund-supported research project that I am co-Principal Investigator on with Professor Joanna Kidman. The project traces shifting historical perspectives of the New Zealand Wars and investigates how different groups have commemorated these conflicts over time and how memory and silence about this difficult past permeates people’s everyday lives in the present.       We have recently established a YouTube channel featuring webinars and other talks we have taken part in, playlists of other relevant material, and short videos filmed during our visits to sites connected with the New Zealand Wars.   Recently, for example, we visited a number of sites at Whanganui and Taranaki, including Handley's Woolshed, in the Nukumaru district, where a group of Māori children were attacked by the Kai Iwi Cavalry in November 1868 and two of their number killed in horrific circumstances. In the video below we discuss what we f...