The Meeting Place - A New Zealand History Blog

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 Tribunal

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