The Meeting Place - A New Zealand History Blog

Earlier this week came the official announcement that I had been awarded the John David Stout Research Fellowhip for 2014: The Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies is delighted to announce that the John David Stout Research Fellow for 2014 will be Dr Vincent O'Malley, research director of HistoryWorks Ltd. Dr O’Malley’s most recent book, The Meeting Place: Maori and Pakeha Encounters, 1642-1840 (2012), was a finalist in the general non-fiction category of the New Zealand Post Book Awards this year. He is the author of four books on relationships between Maori and Crown and Pakeha, in addition to many book chapters and journal articles, and  reports for the Treaty of Waitangi settlements processes. During the fellowship, Dr O’Malley will be working on a book on the Waikato War, 1863-4. This was a pivotal turning point in the history of New Zealand, yet no major study has been undertaken since 1879; it is apt that Dr O’Malley will be exploring this subject in

This week I gave a paper at the New Zealand Historical Association biennial conference, held at the University of Otago. My paper explored the understandings of British parliamentarians as to the impact of the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 on Maori communities. Here is the abstract: Asked to nominate the point at which relations between Maori and Pakeha had really begun to turn sour in the nineteenth century, many historians would likely nominate the passage of the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852. As Chichester Fortescue famously told the House of Commons in 1861, from the time of the 1852 Act the governor had been ‘[o]bliged to act under a Constitution which appeared to have been framed in forgetfulness of the existence of large native tribes within the dominions to which it was intended to apply’. With the benefit of hindsight it is all too easy to assume that ‘absent-minded imperialists’ really had forgotten their obligations to Maori. But a close analysis of British Parl

On the anniversary of the invasion of Parihaka I am reposting my earlier piece on the events of that day, with additional links at the bottom of the page to further sources of information available online and some transcription corrections. ++++++++++++ On 5 November 1881 Native Minister John Bryce led 1600 Armed Constabulary into the South Taranaki settlement of Parihaka, arresting leaders Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi. Over the following weeks the remaining residents were forcibly dispersed and the settlement destroyed. The ‘crime’ of the people of Parihaka had been to peacefully resist the confiscation of their lands. Over the years, these events have been described — and the enormous injustice that occurred — exposed in a number of secondary works. These include George Rusden’s 1883 History of New Zealand , Dick Scott’s influential account Ask That Mountain (1975), Hazel Riseborough’s Days of Darkness (1989), and Rachel Buchanan’s The Parihaka Album (2010). Yet o