The Meeting Place - A New Zealand History Blog

In the past twelve months I have taken part in a number of different talks and events alongside other participants.     Here, I provide links to those available to view online, organised chronologically.   Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement, February 2023 An online panel discussion with the 2022 recipients of the Prime Ministers Awards for Literary Achievement:   • Fiction: Stephanie Johnson – a celebrated and popular author of twelve novels, as well as poetry, short stories, and writing for stage and television • Nonfiction: Vincent O’Malley - a distinguished author and historian of the New Zealand Wars and Te Tiriti o Waitangi • Poetry: James Norcliffe – an acclaimed poet and writer for children and young adults, as well as a prolific editor and poetry champion   All three writers will read and discuss their work with award winning writer and broadcaster, Nick Bollinger.     Scarred Nations Symposium, Auckland Museum, April 2023 Scarr...

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.   ...

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 Chris Wikaira about their writing, passions and collaborations.  For more information and to book tickets see here .

History has rarely felt more topical or relevant as, all across the globe, nations have begun to debate who, how and what they choose to remember and forget. From the removal of the statue of Captain Hamilton formerly displayed in the centre of the city that bears his name, to the renaming of sites that recall colonial violence such as Von Tempsky Street and the town of Maxwell north of Whanganui, on the 159th anniversary of the British Army's invasion of the Waikato, Vincent O'Malley discusses how we remember and forget our own history.  Read more in recent BWB Text  Fragments from a Contested Past: Remembrance, Denial and New Zealand History , co-authored by Joanna Kidman, Vincent O'Malley, Liana MacDonald, Tom Roa and Keziah Wallis. Where:  New Zealand Fabian Society 2/57 Willis Street, Wellington (take the lifts behind Unity Books - to the second floor). When: 5.30pm, Tuesday 12 July 2022   Visit the Fabian Society website to register to attend in pe...

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...

Earlier this month, I gave a webinar as part of the University of Auckland History Department's 2020 seminar series. Because this was delivered online, it was possible to record the session, which has since been made available to view . Abstract: Today, the street signs pay silent homage to the Pākehā politicians and soldiers responsible for its conquest and confiscation in the Waikato War of 1863-64. Grey, Cameron, Carey, Whitaker and other streets in the small Waikato town of Kihikihi taunt its many Māori residents with daily reminders of the devastating effects and consequences of that conflict felt over many generations. Drawing on research for a Marsden Fund project documenting how the New Zealand Wars are remembered and forgotten, this seminar traces the intersections of history, memory and myth in this Waikato frontier town.    Watch the video here:  

The New Zealand Journal of Public History has just published a special issue devoted to the theme of history and reconciliation. Leah Bell's contribution, 'Difficult Histories' , based on her presentation to the New Zealand Historical Association conference at Victoria University of Wellington in November 2019, is essential reading. Leah presented this as part of a roundtable session for the Marsden Fund project that I am co-Principal Investigator on (with Professor Joanna Kidman), on how the New Zealand Wars have been remembered and forgotten.   My own contribution to the NZJPH special issue explores the intersection of history, memory and myth on the Waikato frontier.  It focuses on the small rural town of Kihikihi, just inside the 1.2 million acre area confiscated by the Crown in the wake of its invasion of Waikato in 1863, the Puniu River southern boundary of which also served as the northern aukati line marking the limits of the King Country district that Māori surv...

Owning Our History: The New Zealand Wars webinar was held on 22 March 2020. Kaikōrero / Speakers: Joanna Kidman and Vincent O'Malley Ringa hāpai / Chair: Susan Healy Watch the video (58:42) here. When Ōtorohanga College pupils petitioned Parliament in 2015, calling for a national day of commemoration for the New Zealand Wars, they sparked a vital debate about memory, identity and history. How do New Zealanders remember and forget difficult events in our colonial past? Why are some conflicts publicly remembered while others are forgotten or overlooked? And who decides? Now that New Zealand history will be taught in all schools from 2022, these questions become vitally important. We argue that iwi and hapū need to be at the forefront of conversations around this new curriculum and that connecting with mana whenua histories will empower rangatahi to better understand the places they call home. To watch other webinars from the Te Tiriti-Based Futures + A...

By Joanna Kidman and Vincent O'Malley The New Zealand Wars (1845-72) had a decisive influence over the course of the nation’s history. Yet Pākehā have not always cared to remember them in anything approaching a robust manner, engaging at different times either in elaborate myth-making that painted the wars as chivalrous and noble or, when that was no longer tenable, actively choosing to ignore them altogether. More recently there are signs of a greater willingness to face up to the bitter and bloody realities of these conflicts. For many Māori, that is not before time. If a turning point in Pākehā remembrance could be identified, then perhaps it might be the petition organised by students from Ōtorohanga College that led to a national day of commemoration for the New Zealand Wars (Rā Maumahara). In 2014, students from the school, some as young as 15, visited nearby Ōrākau and Rangiaowhia. The group was led by kaumātua who were descendants of the survivors. At e...

Efforts to ensure more young New Zealanders learn the history of the New Zealand Wars at school stepped up recently, with Stuff launching a campaign to support this kaupapa. As an editorial announcing the campaign noted: "Kiwi school kids can leave the education system knowing more about Tudor England than the New Zealand Wars.  This is a ridiculous situation and a sad indictment on our commitment to partnership under the Treaty." The series of stories included some inspirational examples of schools which had taken up the challenge , including one Hamilton primary school . The New Zealand Wars, I explained in one interview for the series, could best be understood as a clash between two competing visions of what the Treaty of Waitangi represented. I also spoke about this issue on TVNZ's Breakfast show. Over the past month or so I have been giving a series of talks in schools around the country on New Zealand Wars history, with more to come. I spoke about h...

Stuff recently ran a great series of stories as part of a special project called NZ Made/Nā Nīu Tīreni that included information about every modern Treaty of Waitangi settlement, maps of Māori land loss and explanations about how had this occurred. As John Hartevelt wrote in introducing the project : "New Zealand has not done well at grappling with its past. The unsettling truth about how this country was made is still not well understood. It has not been adequately taught in our schools. Our popular culture hasn't reflected it well enough. And our media has failed to tell it loudly and clearly. The Treaty of Waitangi, and its subsequent betrayals, is the heart of how New Zealand was made. We need to reckon with what happened in order to understand the Treaty settlements process that continues today." The theme of selective remembrance is one I returned to when invited to contribute an opinion piece as part of the series.           ...

By now many people know something of the story of the small-town petition from which big things grew. In December 2015 students from Otorohanga College and their supporters presented a petition signed by over 12,000 people to Parliament. Some eight months later the government announced that a national day of commemoration for the New Zealand Wars would be established. Rā Maumahara was born. Less well-known is that the Otorohanga College students had a second objective. They wanted the history of these conflicts to be taught in all schools. We are still waiting on that one. The Ministry of Education strongly opposed this aspect of the petition in a 2016 submission to the Māori Affairs Committee, while admitting it had no idea how many students studied the New Zealand Wars. Anecdotally, many people have told me they learned nothing of these wars. But I was curious to know more. So I took to social media. Last week I put up a Twitter poll with a simple question: Did...

'Questioning the Canon: Colonial History, Counter-Memory and Youth Activism' , co-authored with Dr Joanna Kidman from Victoria University of Wellington, was recently published in its online version in the journal Memory Studies . Abstract: Social memory is inscribed by power relations that both produce and contain canonical state narratives. In settler nations, where indigenous and state relationships remain unresolved, tribal memories of violent colonial histories that are passed on to successive generations expose ‘official’ silences in foundational stories about a nation’s origins. In this article, we examine a public debate that occurred when a group of secondary school students took a petition to the New Zealand Parliament calling for formal recognition of the difficult history of the New Zealand Wars – a series of nineteenth-century clashes between British imperial troops and their colonial allies against indigenous Māori. Drawing on Hirsch’s concept of ...

'Settler Colonial History, Commemoration and White Backlash: Remembering the New Zealand Wars' , co-authored with Dr Joanna Kidman, has recently been published in its online version by the journal Settler Colonial Studies . When students from a North Island secondary school began a petition to Parliament in 2014 seeking a national day of commemoration for the victims of the New Zealand Wars fought in the nineteenth century, they sparked a national debate about how, why and whether New Zealanders should remember the wars fought on their own shores. Although the petition attracted significant support, it also drew its share of criticism. This paper considers the subsequent debate through the lens of public submissions to Parliament on the petition. A particular focus is on the nearly three-quarters of submissions that opposed the petition. These are examined within the context of wider Pākehā (non-Māori) unease at the unravelling of settler colonial forms of national identity ...