Grey Street Must Fall: The Waikato Garrison Towns in History and Memory

In December 2017 I had the pleasure of addressing the two-day 'Garrison Towns in the Nineteenth Century Empire' symposium hosted at Victoria University of Wellington as part of the Marsden Fund project Soldiers of Empire.

My contribution considered the garrison towns of the Waikato district along what became the boundary between the area conquered and seized by invading British and colonial troops after April 1864 and the Kīngitanga territory to the south of this, beyond the Puniu River. A particular focus was the town of Kihikihi, which continues to have a disproportionately large Māori population today in comparison with other settlements in the region.   
 
Corner of Whitaker and Grey Streets, Kihikihi. Named after Frederick Whitaker and Sir George Grey respectively
 
Abstract:
 
Today, the street signs pay silent homage to the Pākehā politicians and soldiers responsible for its conquest and later confiscation in the Waikato War of 1863-64. Grey, Cameron, Carey, Whitaker and other streets in the small Waikato town of Kihikihi taunt its many (34%) Māori residents with daily reminders of the devastating effects and consequences of that conflict felt over many generations. The settlement that prior to 1863 was principally known for being the home to Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāti Paretekawa rangatira Rewi Maniapoto became one of many military settlements along the new frontier that separated the Kīngitanga and Crown in its aftermath. Beyond lay the Puniu River and the unsubdued area henceforth known as the King Country. 

This paper considers the changing social and political dynamics of these Waikato garrison towns in the mid-nineteenth century – from their surprisingly important role in the development of the New Zealand (and Māori) economy prior to the war, through to the quite contrasting experiences of the military settlers in its wake. It asks, beyond street signs, what other remnants of this history remain and how else is the painful legacy of local (and brutal) conflict at nearby Ōrākau and elsewhere marked and recorded?

xxxxx

As I concluded in my address, the legacy of the Waikato War is everywhere, not just in the names of Kihikihi’s streets but also arguably in the socio-economic status of many of the region’s Māori residents. And as we enter a post-settlement phase in our history and we contemplate how best to remember and commemorate this history, it’s worth pondering what this might mean for former garrison towns like Kihikihi. That requires more than a change of street signs. It needs a wholesale shift in the way that Pākehā New Zealand engages with the history of the wars fought on our own shores.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sexual Frontier - Contrasting Māori and European Attitudes towards Sex and Nudity in the Colonial Era

Image
In pre-contact Māori society young unmarried men and women had a high degree of sexual freedom. With the exception of a few high-born women who were ceremonially bethrothed, pre-marital sex was considered socially acceptable, though blatant promiscuity was frowned upon and a certain level of discretion expected.   Sex was considered a normal and healthy part of every day life, with no particular taboos around it. Copulating couples were depicted in carvings and bawdy stories and waiata concerning sexual exploits or the size of men’s penises were common. Te Puawai o Te Arawa, 1905, 1/1-003279-G, ATL That relative openness extended to same-sex relationships, of which there is ample evidence from waiata and other traditional sources. Tutanekai, for example, who famously swam to Mokoia to be with Hinemoa, was also known to have had an initimate male companion known as Tiki. (By contrast, in the eighteenth-century Royal Navy death was the mandatory penalty for anyon...
Read more

'I am an Irishman': Irish and Māori Historical Connections

Image
Just as exceptionalism has formed an enduring strand of American historiography, New Zealand history has its own variant of this. In New Zealand’s case, this rests largely on the notion that the Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840 between representatives of Queen Victoria and more than 500 Māori chiefs represented a unique experiment in benevolent and humanitarian imperialism. Allied to this is often the notion that subsequent relations between the indigenous Māori tribes and incoming settlers were, after a few early hiccups, vastly superior to other white settler dominions. For much of the twentieth century Pākehā New Zealanders liked to boast that their country had the ‘greatest race relations in the world’. It turns out Māori had a different story to tell concerning the history of their relations with the newcomers. In recent decades New Zealand historians have played their own part in deconstructing these myths. Most historians now acknowledge that the Treaty of Waitangi had much ...
Read more

A Stain Upon History: The Ngatapa Massacre, January 1869

Image
Imagine this: somewhere between 86 and 128 people, captured or surrendered at the end of a siege, are stripped naked, lined up against the side of a cliff, and summarily executed without trial by government forces. Couldn’t happen here, many people would probably say. But it did, and the story behind the worst massacre in New Zealand history deserves to be more widely known. In July 1868 Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki and nearly 300 other mostly East Coast Maori escaped from the Chatham Islands (Wharekauri) and made their way back to the mainland. This group, known as the Whakarau, had been held at Wharekauri since 1866. None of their number had been tried, and the government admitted that they were being held as ‘political offenders’ while arrangements were made to confiscate their lands back home. Judith Binney suggested that Te Kooti had been included among those illegally imprisoned at Wharekauri because he was regarded as a threat by rival traders back in Gisborne (Turanga). Te Koo...
Read more