The Meeting Place - A New Zealand History Blog

[The following review was first published in Metro magazine, October 2015.] For most people slavery conjures up images of cotton fields and sugar plantations, capricious white masters, whippings and abject cruelty. Hazel Petrie’s new history of Māori captivity opens with Jake the Muss from Once Were Warriors blaming his own violent tendencies on 500 years of slavery and humiliation. Meanwhile, wife Beth observes that ‘Us Maoris used to practise slavery just like them poor Negroes had to endure in America’. It is a common assumption. Except the reality, as Petrie succeeds in showing, was considerably different. Although some Europeans then and now liked to claim that Māori customs such as slavery were ended as a result of exposure to a superior civilisation, the evidence suggests quite a contrary and surprising chain of influence. Once missionaries set up shop in northern New Zealand from 1814 onwards, they attracted whalers and others to the area, most of whom willingly ...

Last week a group of Otorohanga College students presented a petition to Parliament calling for a national day of memorial to remember the wars fought on New Zealand’s own shores. It is a cause I support and the petition, which attracted over 10,000 signatures (including mine), and its handover attracted significant media interest. But one thing that caught my eye was the description used in media reports for the wars themselves. Many referred to these as the ‘ Land Wars ’, the ‘ New Zealand Land Wars ’ or even the ‘ Māori Land Wars ’. There appeared to be little awareness on the part of journalists that what historians have called the wars has changed over time. Do labels really matter? Well, they do because they convey some key messages about the nature of the wars, their causes and participants. To begin with it was common to refer to this series of conflicts as ‘the Māori Wars’. That was consistent with the British tendency to name wars after their enemies, like the Boer War, the...

On Tuesday this week I gave a well-attended public talk at the Tairawhiti Museum as part of commemorations organised by Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki to mark the 150th anniversary of the siege of Waerenga-a-Hika (17-22 November 1865). Prior to the talk, I also spoke with Jesse Mulligan on Radio New Zealand about the siege and its commemoration. As I noted, Waerenga-a-Hika marked the start of a four or five year period at Turanga (Gisborne district) that contained among the darkest episodes in New Zealand history.  The Gisborne Herald provided this report on my talk , followed by an editorial supporting my call for more awareness of the history of Waerenga-a-Hika and the New Zealand Wars more broadly. Local kaumātua also endorsed calls for a national day of memorial marking the New Zealand Wars that had previously been suggested by Tainui representatives and others. Earlier in the week the local newspaper provided some useful historical background on the siege and the Waitangi Tribuna...

In August 1837, a group of Anglican missionaries belonging to the Church Missionary Society (CMS) assembled at Waimate, one of their stations in the Bay of Islands, in northern New Zealand. There the party proceeded to torch a cottage, destroying the property within it and even shooting dead a horse. A week of prayer and fasting followed. The unfortunate horse’s owner, William Yate, had been dismissed from the CMS months earlier, following allegations of an inappropriate relationship with one of the crew on board the Prince Regent during its journey from England to New Zealand a year earlier. That in turn had resulted in several Māori male youths coming forward to testify that Yate had engaged in sex acts with them. Yate was hardly the first or last missionary to fall from grace, even within New Zealand. Yet as Tony Ballantyne argues in his new work, a close reading of Yate’s case has often been framed in terms of questions of sexual identity rather than the broader co...