Book Review: The New Zealand Wars | Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa, by Vincent O’Malley

Available in bookshops nationwide.

Vincent O’Malley’s, The New Zealand Wars \Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa, documents some uncomfortable truths about the early history of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Sensitively tracing inter-racial & inter-Māori events from the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (ToW) in 1840, until the end of armed conflict in 1872, O’Malley highlights events at significant variance with the sanitised, even romanticised, history still mostly accepted by the dominant culture.

Building on the work of other historians such as Belich & King, O’Malley exposes the early betrayal by the Crown, then the Colonial Government, of the central article of the ToW, namely the ‘…unqualified….chieftainship over…’ & ‘…full, exclusive & undisturbed possession of their (Maori) land…’ This in return for acceptance by Māori of peaceful settlement by Europeans.

Driven by pressure for land as the number of settlers rapidly grew, Crown representatives forged pretexts for taking military action against various Iwi & groups deemed hostile to the Crown, with the unspoken intention of forcibly acquiring land.

O’Malley provides an excellent chronology of armed clashes, from the Northern Wars in 1845, to the final shots fired in pursuit of Te Kooti in December 1871. He gives particular focus to the Waikato War (which sparked the Māori King Movement) & the unjust invasion of a peaceful Parihaka. Attendant atrocities are well articulated. As is the intolerant settler attitude towards Māori as an inferior race once Pākehā predominated – this mindset ‘justifying’ actions in breach of Treaty obligations.

Highlighting land confiscations & other injustices inflicted on Māori, first by force of arms and then by weight of numbers, (by 1860 Pākehā outnumbered Māori), O’Malley makes a connection between the loss of land & self-sufficiency, and an abiding grief & anger translating through subsequent generations even to today. He postulates that that unhappy mix puts into proper context the harsh reality of Māori over-representation in negative societal statistics.

The New Zealand Wars | Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa is well-written & illustrated, and comprises another forward step in establishing a truthful & accurate history of the founding years of our nation. It suggests itself as compulsory reading in our schools’ history classes.

Reviewed by Barry Keane

The New Zealand Wars \ Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa
by Vincent O’Malley
Published by Bridget Williams Books
ISBN  9781988545998

AWF19: Vincent O’Malley gives the Michael King Memorial Lecture

The New Zealand Wars | Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa will be back in stock nationwide this week.

Friday lunchtime at the 2019 Auckland Writers’ Festival and the ASB Theatre was packed out to hear Vincent O’Malley talk about The New Zealand Wars. He challenged us from the very start. We are still a nation in shock from the Christchurch massacre, so you could feel the attention of the audience focus on the speaker when he said this wasn’t an unprecedented event. The change of mood was tangible. Māori lost their lives in a similar way. O’Malley’s message is a simple one. We need to grow up. We need to act like grown-ups and own our history, warts and all. In the past we have chosen to ignore the story, in the same way we tossed aside the Treaty of Waitangi for over a century. Now we must recognise the profound influence that The New Zealand Wars have had on us all.

O’Malley spoke eloquently for an hour, filling in the gaps in our knowledge, helping to educate his audience. Two of his recent books have been very influential in moving our understanding forwards, first the massive The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000 in which he states that our defining conflict did not take place on the Western Front or at Gallipoli, but in the Waikato from 1863-64. A war of conquest and invasion by the Crown. His latest book, The New Zealand Wars: Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa, was launched just before the festival. At 270 pages against the almost 700 pages of the earlier book, this seeks to be a digestible guide, something that can be read and used in schools as a basic text book.

O’Malley’s talk was full of facts, many of them surprising. For example, two-thirds of the British army during the New Zealand Wars were Irish, and many became disillusioned with what they were doing. There were too many parallels with the treatment of Ireland. Many of the soldiers ended up marrying the Māori women from the iwi they had conquered. They had been fighting against people who had no standing army, people who were fighting for their lives and their lands.

In the 1850s there was a brief time of peace and prosperity. O’Malley reminded us that at that time Māori were driving the economy and the country’s exports. They were producing enough food to feed large cities like Auckland as well as themselves. It was in the 1860s that peace was shattered, war broke out in Taranaki and it appears that Governor Grey was determined to destroy the Kingitanga. ‘There was nothing noble about the massacres,’ O’Malley reminded us, and the execution of hundreds in Gisborne is ‘a stain on our history’.

We are still living with the consequences of that time of war today. Three million hectares of land were confiscated, and those confiscations were indiscriminate, with those who did not fight or sided with the crown also losing their land. 20% of Māori in Gisborne were killed, compared to the 5% of the population that were killed in the First World War.

O’Malley’s call to action is that we teach our own history in our schools and look after our battle sites. We must make sure our children know about this and we must get around the hang-ups that the Ministry of Education still has about the whole subject. Only by doing this will we break some of the intergenerational problems that have built up. We need to lobby both local and central government for more to be done. The sites that relate to our history are often neglected and hard to find. We need to make people aware and interested, create trails and history that we can follow on the ground.

The talk ended with rapturous applause for O’Malley and all he is trying to do.

Reviewed by Marcus Hobson

The New Zealand Wars | Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa
by Vincent O’Malley
Published by Bridget Williams Books
ISBN: 9781988545998

Book Review: The Great War for New Zealand Waikato 1800-2000, by Vincent O’Malley

Available in bookshops nationwide

Emotion is probably something to be avoided when preparing to review a book. However, having grown up in the King Country, learning next to nothing about the New Zealand Wars, caused a considerable pang of emotion for me when reading The Great War for New Zealand Waikato 1800-2000 by Vincent O’Malley. Because the story O’Malley tells is one that provides a comprehensive understanding of the foundations of modern life in New Zealand which many Kiwis, both Māori and Pākehā, would not know they were missing.

The King Country derives from the Kīngitanga Movement, which established not only a Maori King but also a defined geographic region south of Pūniu River in the Waikato.
As defined in Wikipedia: ‘The King Country (Māori: Te Rohe Pōtae or Rohe Pōtae o Maniapoto) is a region of the western North Island of New Zealand. It extends approximately from the Kawhia Harbour and the town of Otorohanga in the north to the upper reaches of the Whanganui River in the south, and from the Hauhungaroa and Rangitoto Ranges in the east to near the Tasman Sea in the west. It comprises hill country, large parts of which are forested.

‘The term “King Country” dates from the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, when colonial forces invaded the Waikato and forces of the Māori King Movement withdrew south of what was called the aukati, or boundary, a line of pā alongside the Pūniu River near Kihikihi. Land behind the aukati remained native territory, with Europeans warned they crossed it under threat of death.’

O’Malley answers the question of ‘Why the King Country?’ with great detail on the politics of colonial greed, the savagery of warfare and land confiscation that led to the final retreat of the many different hapū of Waikato Māori into this area as war refugees.

At the very beginning of the book, O’Malley notes that the country is currently in the middle of commemorations of the centennial of World War 1 battles fought in by New Zealanders at Gallipoli, Sinai and the Western Front. However, he argues, as many do, that these battles were not the defining of New Zealand as a nation. Rather, on ’12 July 1863 the biggest and most significant war ever fought on New Zealand shores … as British imperial troops crossed the Mangatāwhiri River and invaded Waikato.’

O’Malley later notes that ‘the Waikato War does not fit within a comfortable nation-building framework. Accordingly, our nation was born at Gallipoli not Ōrākau’. This rings true to me: I had heard of Gallipoli as a school kid in Ohakune, but not Ōrākau.

Once he has laid the foundations of his book, O’Malley then describes ‘early Waikato’ from 1800-1852, a largely peaceful and prosperous region with a ‘confident Māori world’, embracing British style commerce, including international trade, and Christianity within a framework of Māori traditional beliefs and practices.

No doubt, the different views of sovereignty and land ownership were the crucible from which war between Māori and Pākehā eventually poured with savage heat. Waikato Māori were reasonably happy to sell land for small-scale or individual settlement, while the Colonialists saw the Treaty of Waitangi as providing the means by which large tracts of land could be bought by the Government, carved up and then on-sold to settlers. And the New Zealand Constitution Act of 1852 could only have exacerbated the situation, particularly as it was designed to allow only the then minority of Pākehā the vote, an intolerable situation for Māori.

The descriptions of the subsequent battles, including bush warfare, are extensively detailed, inclusive of lists of iwi and hapū involved in each, along with complete information on the colonial regiments and militias. This creates an opportunity, particularly for Māori today, to understand the connections their ancestors may have had with particular battles and incidents.

One thing we kids in Ohakune did come away with from schooldays was an understanding that Māori had fought with huge skill, courage and, in many cases, Christian chivalry. Using contemporary material, eyewitness accounts and records, O’Malley provides us with a clear view of what lies behind this understanding. And he pulls no punches, with much of the honour belonging to Māori and much of the treachery and dishonour belonging to the Pākehā side.

The battles are meticulously described and this 600+ page book, extremely well published by Bridget Williams Books, contains superb reproduction of photographs, maps and documents.

After the battles comes the land confiscation (raupatu) which is probably what motivated the Government to invade Waikato in the first place. This is a really messy period of venality and double-dealing, which of course has a considerable impact on the late-20th Century and 21st Century New Zealand politics and economics. Some may say that Māori have been compensated, with the millions of dollars spent on settlements with iwi plus settlement back to Māori of land and public buildings, fishing rights and similar. That this isn’t a widespread view among Māori is backed up by the 2015 petition to parliament calling for a national memorial day for the victims of the New Zealand Wars, delivered by Honey Berryman of Otorohanga College.

Because I spent all of the ’70s and early ’80s away from New Zealand, my knowledge of the various mid 19th-century conflicts was from a 1950s-60s perspective – not very enlightening. Michael King’s History of New Zealand and James Belich’s The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict were very important in improving my understanding of what really are the foundations of New Zealand. The Great War for New Zealand extends that understanding greatly.

Obviously the book is a tome which could be used as a text at university level. But it should also be available in some form or another at secondary school. Bridget Williams Books are good at publishing short texts. It would be very helpful if they were to come up with a means to make this important history more accessible.

For this book not to be in the shortlist for the Royal Society of New Zealand Award for General Non-Fiction at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards is a mystery.

Reviewed by Lincoln Gould

The Great War for New Zealand Waikato 1800-2000
by Vincent O’Malley
Published by Bridget Williams Books
ISBN 9781927277577

Book Review: The Meeting Place. Māori and Pākehā Encounters 1642-1840

There are many academic reviews of The Meeting Place and I feel confident that both high school and university students will become familiar with this text.  Is this, though, a useful text for the home?  I felt that my education skipped over a lot of early New Zealand history, and that it was law school where I finally began to understand our early history.  This book really helped me to gain a good insight into early New Zealand history, and subsequently a better understanding of how race relations in the twentieth century played out.

The book examines the interactions between Māori and Pākehā from the earliest of contact through to sophisticated, systematised encounters.  The author, Vincent O’Malley, outlines these encounters chronologically, starting from the earliest contact (and the greatest examples of culture clash/ misunderstandings) through to regular engagement around 1814, right up to the ‘tipping point’ when one culture dominated.  The years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the presence of the British Government and regular settlement in New Zealand by the British meant that the European settlers were able to be more self-reliant.  No longer needing Māori for trade, or being able to resolve matters through British law rather than negotiation meant that the cultures separated.  Pākehā culture rapidly dominated – by 1858 there were more Pākehā residents than Māori in New Zealand. Maori adopted many aspects of Pākehā culture; Pākehā no longer felt the need to engage with Māori and previous efforts in understanding and applying Māori culture waned.

If you are reading this book for fun I suggest skipping the introduction.  It took me two goes to read through and appreciate the introduction – I was concerned the whole book would be as academic and dry.  Instead, there were parts of the book, particularly the very earliest encounters, that I read almost as though it was a thriller – I was keen to learn what would happen next!  Stories where Māori were treated as possessions or slaves really got to me, and explanations of some early cultural misunderstandings were appreciated. The book’s strength for me lies in these explanations, as attempts by the author to obtain sources from both cultures helps to provide context to the encounters.  Concepts around gift-giving are discussed in the early part of the book. At this time (1770’s) Māori gift-giving required the gift to be returned to an equal or greater amount as a way of preserving the mana of the recipient.  It was not necessary, however, that this take place straight away.  Early encounters of trade/ gift giving were well placed to create confusion – gifts Captain Cook and his crew gave Māori (with no expectation of reciprocity) saw gifts being made the following day.  Equally, giving Māori an item and then indicating what was desired in trade was not well received.

Why should the average home own this book?  The Meeting Place really helps to explain the environment, events and tensions in bi-cultural Aotearoa / New Zealand.  This is our story.  The stories told and context provided is one of the more balanced and nuanced explanations of our early history.

Reviewed by Emma Wong-Ming

The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters 1642-1840
by Vincent O’Malley
Published by Auckland University Press
ISBN 97818694059 6