Writing about New Zealand’s internal wars

Cover of The War in New Zealand by William Fox. Originally published in 1866, this reprint was published by Capper Press in 1973.

Writing about New Zealand’s internal wars

War has had a great impact on New Zealand society. Over the last 60 years writing about war has become a mainstay of local non-fiction publishing. Generations of New Zealanders are familiar with our exploits in two world wars and the impact of these conflicts on the nation. But how familiar are New Zealanders with our own internal wars of the 19th century?

Musket wars

Tens of thousands of Maori died in the intertribal Musket Wars of the opening decades of the 19th century. On a per capita basis the estimated casualty figures for these wars is equivalent to around 200,000 New Zealand deaths in the First World War (instead of the 18,000 lives actually lost). Yet they have remained ‘shadowy events for many New Zealanders’.

This may reflect the fact that they were almost exclusively the concern of Maori with European participation largely confined to the supply of weapons. As such they were of no great consequence to early writers seeking to write the grand narrative of European colonisation. Ron Crosby's The Musket Wars (1999) and Angela Ballara's Taua (2003) are two significant works that have attempted to shed more light on the causes and consequences of these devastating campaigns. Tom O'Connor Tides of Kawhia (2004) and Pathways of Taranaki (2006) offer readers with a fictional account of life in New Zealand during this important time of early contact.

The Northern War

Lindsay Buick's New Zealand's First War or The Rebellion of Hone Heke (1926) adopts the traditional line that the history of our internal wars begins with Hone Heke's assault on the British flag in 1845. Buick was a member of a small group of New Zealand-born historians writing in the first quarter of the 20th century. In conjunction with men like Robert McNab, James Cowan and Elsdon Best, Buick attempted to make New Zealand's past readily accessible to the general reader.

The wars of the 1860s

More has been written about New Zealand's wars of the 1860s although it hardly compares to interest shown in America's great internal war of the same period – in 2001 it was estimated that over 50,000 books on the Civil War had already appeared, with 1500 more appearing annually.

A number of 19th century ‘accounts' of these wars have been ‘justly forgotten’. William Fox declared in The War in New Zealand (1866) that he had ‘strong convictions; but convictions are not prejudices’. In 1864, as Colonial Secretary in the Whitaker ministry, he oversaw the confiscation of nearly three million acres (1.2 million hectares) of Maori land, defending these actions on the basis that Maori had started the wars.

John Featon almost certainly served in the New Zealand Artillery Volunteers in the 1860s before becoming a journalist in the 1870s. The blurb in the 1971 reprint of his The Waikato War 1863-1864 (1879) acknowledges that there is ‘no attempt to provide a balanced view’.

James Cowan

The ‘James the First’ of New Zealand writers on these wars was the ethnographer, historian and journalist James Cowan. Cowan ‘straddled fiction and non-fiction’ and was a pioneer oral historian. He talked to men who had been participants in these campaigns and visited the sites of many of the bloody struggles in which they had been involved.

In 1903 Cowan interviewed Kimble Bent, an American-born soldier who deserted his British army regiment in June 1865 during the south Taranaki campaign against Titokowaru and was widely condemned as a traitor. Bent's character was somewhat reformed as a result of Cowan's The Adventures of Kimble Bent: a story of wild life in the New Zealand bush (1911). Cowan's follow up, The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period (2 vols, 1922-3), ‘remains seminal.'

James Belich

The ‘James the Second’ of the New Zealand Wars, James Belich, confronted traditional interpretations with The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1986), in which he maintained that New Zealanders had deliberately forgotten the wars. Worse still, Maori military and political achievements had been under-represented.

A television series based on The New Zealand Wars brought to the attention of many New Zealanders Maori figures and experiences that had previously been ignored or understated. Belich's work was both ‘controversial and influential’ and inspired new debate on what these conflicts were really about, their course and outcomes. Matthew Wright's Two Peoples One Land (2006) offers a useful post-revisionist interpretation.

Film and later novels

A sense of the wars representing New Zealand's ‘wild west’ was brought to the big screen with Rudall Hayward and A.W. Reed's movie tie-in novel, Rewi's Last Stand (1938). Maori were no longer demonised. Gavin McLean argued that this change formed a bridge to recent novelists' more positive representations. These works include Ray Grover's semi-fictionalised Cork of War (1982), Maurice Shadbolt's trilogy Season of the Jew (1986), Monday's Warriors (1990) and The House of Strife (1993), and Witi Ihimaera's The Matriarch (1986).

Related conflicts

A number of writers have also provided telling insights into the events and experiences surrounding campaigns that fell outside the main phase of the New Zealand Wars. Included here are Belich's I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru's War New Zealand 1868-1869 (1989), Hazel Riseborough's exploration of Parihaka, Days of Darkness: Taranaki 1878-1884 (1989), and Judith Binney's Redemption Songs: A Life of Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki (1995). With 2007's police raids against suspected terrorist training camps in the Urewera ranges, Mark Derby's The Prophet and the Policeman: The Story of Rua Kenana and John Cullen (2009) is a timely publication on a region with a troubled past.

Wars on the web

In addition to this website, Archives New Zealand's website showcases the nation's war art including many pieces associated with 19th century wars. The National Library's Papers Past contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals from 1839 to 1932. Readers can access a vast array of primary material at the click of a mouse. Likewise the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre also provides a growing library of out-of-print war books and memoirs for readers.

Bibliography

Adapted from the Penguin Book of New Zealanders at War (2009) – an excellent source of contemporary accounts of New Zealand's 19th-century wars.

Useful assessments of war writing are:

• Patrick Evans ‘War Literature', in Terry Sturm (ed), The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature in English, 2^nd edn, Oxford University Press, Auckland, pp. 566-75.
• McGibbon, Ian, ‘Something of Them Is Here Recorded', http://www.nztec.org.tm/scholarly/tei-McGSome.html;
• O'Brien, Brian, ‘Literature and War', in McGibbon, Ian (ed), The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Military History, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 2000, pp. 276-80
• Worthy, Scott, ‘Light and Shade': The New Zealand Written Remembrance of the Great War, 1915-1939', in War & Society, 22/1, May 2004, pp. 19-40.

General histories - New Zealand's internal wars

• Ballara, Angela, Taua: ‘Musket Wars', ‘Land Wars' or Tikanga?: Warfare in Maori Society in the Early Nineteenth Century, Penguin, Auckland, 2003
• Battersby, John, The One Day War: The Battle of Omaranui, Reed Books, Auckland, 2000
• Belich, James, The New Zealand wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, Penguin, Auckland, 1988
• Best, Elsdon, Notes on the Arts of War, Reed Books/Polynesian Society, Auckland, 2001
• Brooking, Tom, Milestones: turning points in New Zealand history, Mills Publications, Wellington, 1988
• Cowan, James, The New Zealand Wars and the Pioneering Period, 2 vols, Government Printer, Wellington, 1922-23
• Crosby, R.D., The Musket Wars: A Short History of Inter-iwi Conflict 1806-45, Reed Books, Auckland, 1999
• Dalton, B.J., War and Politics in New Zealand 1855-1870, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1967
• McLean, Gavin, McGibbon, Ian with Gentry, Kynan, The Penguin Book of New Zealanders at War, Penguin, Auckland 2009
• Wards, Ian, The Shadow of the Land: A Study of British Policy and Racial Conflict in New Zealand 1832-1852, Government Printer, Wellington, 1968
• Wright, Matthew, Two Peoples, One Land: The New Zealand Wars, Reed Books, Auckland, 2006