The Meeting Place - A New Zealand History Blog

Ministry for Culture and Heritage Seminar: Please join us on Wednesday 3 April, 12.15pm (just after Easter) at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, L4 ASB House, 101 The Terrace, to hear Professor Geoff Rice on: Christchurch 's Temple of Truth: Religion, Sex and Fraud in the 1890s .   Christchurch in the 1890s was visited by the extraordinary phenomenon of a much-married American evangelist, Arthur Bently Worthington, who proceeded to set up a new cult of revivalist Christianity. He gathered a large and enthusiastic following, whose liberal donations enabled him to build an impressive ‘Temple of Truth’ on Latimer Square. However, opposition from the established churches and rumours of sexual scandals, together with a controversial change of ‘wives’, made him flee to Tasmania. Amazingly, he returned and tried to make a comeback, but only caused public disorder and the only time the Riot Act has been read in Christchurch. This illustrated talk is...

Ministry for Culture and Heritage Seminar: We're delighted to invite you to hear Ewan Morris at our first public history seminar in 2013 at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, L4 ASB House, 101 The Terrace, Wellington at 12.15pm on Wednesday 6 March. Māori Monument or Pākehā Propaganda? The Memorial to Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui , Whanganui Statue in memory of Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui , also known as Major Kemp, at Wanganui , 1912. Image courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Reference Number: 1/1-021036-G In 1912 a memorial to the rangatira and soldier Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui (Major Kemp) was erected in Pākaitore / Moutoa Gardens, Whanganui . It consists of a statue, four bronze panels depicting battles in which Te Keepa was involved, and eight separate panels of text. The memorial was the subject of a series of court cases in 1913-14, resulting from the unwillingness of Te Keepa’s sister to pay for a statue that she felt did not properly ...

The biennial New Zealand Historical Association conference is being held in Dunedin from Wednesday 20 November until Friday 22 November. The conference organizing committee is looking forward to welcoming a large and energetic group of historians, archivists and librarians, teachers, curators, and heritage professionals as well as the historically curious. We have an excellent line-up of keynote speakers: Professor Elizabeth Elbourne (McGill University), author of Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799-1853 ; Professor Maya Jasanoff (Harvard University), the author of Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850 and Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World ; and Professor Henry Yu (University of British Columbia), author of Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America . Associate Professor Damon Salesa (University of Auckland), whose Racial C...

  Date: 7 March Time: 12.15pm–1.00pm Location: Te Wehenga and Malaga Pasifika Rooms, Ground Floor, National Library Isaac Coates's portraits are a window into a world of contact between Māori and Pākehā. They were created at a turning point in Māori-Pākehā relations, marked by the Wairau Affray – a confrontation over land in June 1843 in which at least 26 people died. Historian Vincent O’Malley surveyed the history of the period leading up to this change in his recent book, The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642-1840 . In this session Vincent, in discussion with Paul Diamond, will survey this period of early contact between the two races, and the enduring historical lessons. The speakers Dr Vincent O’Malley, Research Director of HistoryWorks and author of The Meeting Place ; Paul Diamond, Curator of the exhibition Part of the Turnbull Gallery exhibition, Head and shoulders: Portraits of Māori by Isaac Coates .

In a recent comment piece in the New Zealand Herald , Elizabeth Rata argued that tribalism and democracy ‘are incompatible — they cannot exist together as political systems in the one nation’. Tribalism, she further argued, was premised ‘on principles of inequality’, since kin status was what mattered. If chieftainship still exists to be expressed, Rata argued, then ‘so too must the tribal political system of 1840 also exist.’ Morgan Godfery has written a careful reply to Rata’s piece on his Maui Street Blog. But I want to comment further on Rata’s argument that tribalism and democracy are mutually incompatible. Historical Maori leadership structures have always fascinated me. My first book, published back in 1998, was on the role of committees in the administration of Maori affairs ( Agents of Autonomy: Maori Committees in the Nineteenth Century ). Later I wrote a PhD thesis at Victoria University of Wellington on a similar topic (‘Runanga and Komiti: Maori Institutions of Self-...

Imagine this: somewhere between 86 and 128 people, captured or surrendered at the end of a siege, are stripped naked, lined up against the side of a cliff, and summarily executed without trial by government forces. Couldn’t happen here, many people would probably say. But it did, and the story behind the worst massacre in New Zealand history deserves to be more widely known. In July 1868 Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki and nearly 300 other mostly East Coast Maori escaped from the Chatham Islands (Wharekauri) and made their way back to the mainland. This group, known as the Whakarau, had been held at Wharekauri since 1866. None of their number had been tried, and the government admitted that they were being held as ‘political offenders’ while arrangements were made to confiscate their lands back home. Judith Binney suggested that Te Kooti had been included among those illegally imprisoned at Wharekauri because he was regarded as a threat by rival traders back in Gisborne (Turanga). Te Koo...

When Bruce Stirling, Wally Penetito and I put together The Treaty of Waitangi Companion: Maori and Pakeha from Tasman to Today (AUP) back in 2010 some material never made the final text, simply for reasons of space. The Race Relations Act 1971, passed into law on 17 December 1971, was one such topic. What follows is our unedited entry on this (compiled by Bruce): The Race Relations Bill was introduced with some reluctance, with a view to implementing the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, signed by the government five years earlier. In its original form it was intended not so much to protect Māori from the racism they had long endured but to eliminate the Maori Affairs Department and all other special Maori agencies, furthering the goals of existing assimilation policies. That was how the government perceived its obligations to the UN, but Nga Tamatoa and the older leaders of the New Zealand Maori Council lobbied the government ...