Wars Without End Ng■ Pakanga

Whenua O Mua New Zealand s land

wars A M■ori perspective Danny
Keenan
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A COMPELLING EXPLORATION OF CRUCIAL EVENTS THAT SHAPED
AOTEAROA, ENRICHED BY A MĀORI PERSPECTIVE.
—Buddy Mikaere, Māori historian and former Waitangi
Tribunal Director

‘FRIENDS, LISTEN TO ME!… THE CAUSE OF THIS WAR IS

LAND’

—Wī Tako Ngātata Te Ātiawa, 1860

From the earliest days of European settlement, Māori have struggled

to hold on to their land — a legacy affecting race relations in
Aotearoa New Zealand to this day.

Disputed land sales in the 1840s led to open warfare between Māori
and Imperial forces, followed by the reallocation of land by the
courts in the late 1860s to those Māori considered ‘loyal’.

Written by senior historian Danny Keenan, this is the first book to

approach the conflict from a Māori point of view, eloquently and
powerfully explaining this complex history.

Now, completely revised and updated to include Ihumātao and the

inaugural Raa Maumahara National Day of Commemoration, Wars
Without End is more relevant than ever.
CONTENTS

Abbreviations
Acknowledgements

Preface: ‘Land is the foundation of all our trouble’

Introduction: ‘The New Zealand Wars’ – What’s in a Name?
Chapter 1: Meanings of Land
Chapter 2: Impasse in North Taranaki
Chapter 3: Settling the Land Question
Chapter 4: Prelude to War
Chapter 5: North Taranaki
Chapter 6: Invasion of the Waikato
Chapter 7: Last Stands
Chapter 8: Taking the Land
Conclusion: ‘A vast change has taken place’

Map
Notes
Bibliography
Follow Penguin Random House
To my mother, Lola Emily Keenan
ABBREVIATIONS

AJHR Appendices of the Journals of the House of

Representatives
ATL Alexander Turnbull Library
DNZB Dictionary of New Zealand Biography
DOSLI Department of Survey and Land Information
JPS Journal of the Polynesian Society
Le Legislative Department
MA Māori Affairs
NLC / MLC Native Land Court / Māori Land Court
NZJH New Zealand Journal of History NZH New Zealand
Herald
NZPD New Zealand Parliamentary Debates
Sim Royal Commission of Inquiry into Confiscations
Commission 1927
TVNZ Television New Zealand
Wai 143 Taranaki Claim, Waitangi Tribunal 1990–1994
PREFACE

‘LAND IS THE FOUNDATION OF ALL

OUR TROUBLE’

‘Land is the foundation of all our trouble’, said Te Rauparaha of Ngāti

Toa and Ngāti Raukawa when asked to account for the
circumstances that had led to the killing of twenty-two Pākehā
settlers and two Māori at Wairau on 17 June 1843.1 Over the next
twenty years and beyond, Te Rauparaha’s view would be endorsed
by all Māori – that land was the source of all their troubles.

CENTRALITY OF LAND

It was once said that ‘all history is argument’. It is an argument

between different historians, different methods, between past and
present, even between what actually happened, and what happens
next. ‘Arguments are important,’ writes John H. Arnold; ‘they create
the possibility of changing things.’2
This book advances a range of arguments about land, conflict and
war in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Most historians agree that
these themes were closely related; one certainly gets that
impression from the primary record. But was land the primary cause
of war in New Zealand? Yes, it was, in my view.
 Other causes of the wars have been suggested by historians; the
debate about cause is partly reflected in the current difference of
opinion as to what New Zealand’s nineteenth-century wars should be
called. This book’s Introduction canvasses a range of names used by
historians over the years, before concluding that ‘the Land Wars’ is
the best term. At present, ‘the New Zealand Wars’ is undoubtedly
the most popular term, reflecting the belief of most historians that
the wars arose from a struggle for sovereignty between Māori and
the Crown.
However, as this book argues, ‘the Land Wars’ takes more account
of how Māori viewed those wars by foregrounding the issue of land.
This critical point is overlooked or discredited by many recent Pākehā
historians who relegate land to an issue of marginal importance. Yet,
foregrounding the land always took precedence for Māori, as indeed
it did for Crown and other Pākehā officials, like those from the New
Zealand Company, because land was the issue around which contact
and conflict invariably occurred. Land was as constant an issue for
officials as it was for Māori. For Pākehā, land provided the means
through which status, wealth, identity and eventually the franchise
might be acquired. For the Crown, acquisition of Māori land
formalised its claims for imposing unilateral governance on Māori,
claims which Māori strongly resisted, most markedly on the
battlefield.
As names go, ‘the New Zealand Wars’ does not locate land at the
heart of those troubles, which is where it should be. For Māori, the
notion of sovereignty – te tino rangatiratanga – was more than a
detached legal principle; it was a cultural constant grounded into a
historic, customary landscape. Te tino rangatiratanga and the land
were the same thing.
Over millennia, land remained anchored as the most abiding
organic element of the Māori world, and it remained so, long after
Pākehā settlers had arrived in New Zealand. Land was the source
from which identity, history and livelihoods derived; it was also a
cultural cornerstone from which vigorous defences were mounted, in
the face of Pākehā encroachment which threatened dispossession
and distress. And Māori did not step back from that defence. As
Angela Ballara has argued, if peaceful means to protect the land
failed, war remained ‘the ultimate sanction in resolving disputes’.3
Dispossessed Māori who were cut off from their lands through
misfortune continued to maintain knowledge of self, place and time
in customary ways, remaining grounded in those landscapes even
though they may have slipped from their grasp.
Māori knowledge of the organic world was multifaceted,
incorporating long-standing customary notions of past and present
which clearly pre-dated the earliest beginnings of Pākehā settlement.
Though diverse in their expression, from one tribal region to another,
these Māori notions of past and present were always underscored by
one thing in common, something that was everywhere: land.
As Chapter 1 argues, land was therefore vital to Māori, with its
customary governance tightly controlled by cultural principle and
convention. Chapter 1 introduces some recent scholarship on Māori
custom law to show how Māori arranged their land dealings before
Pākehā arrived; and how they sought to continue doing so in the
same vein thereafter. However, the emergence of inflexible colonial
governance egregiously undermined these expectations, with
minority Pākehā, acting in their own interests, struggling to resolve
their differences with Māori. A ‘paralysis of Native Policy’ was the
inevitable result, writes Keith Sinclair, ultimately leading to war.4

DEFENDING THE LAND

Ever since the earliest European contacts, Māori struggled to retain

land; it was a struggle without end waged through peace and war,
across material and intellectual boundaries. Chapters 2 and 3 focus
on Wellington and North Taranaki after 1839, and follow through a
particular set of contested land purchases placed in the broad
context of early land sales then under way in New Zealand. These
two chapters describe some early attitudes of Pākehā land
purchasers like William Wakefield, and Crown officials like William
Spain, towards the difficulties presented by Māori customary land
tenure. Earlier generations of tribal aggression, with conquered
Māori migrating great distances from home but wishing to return,
invariably added to these difficulties, especially as the prospect of
conflict with Pākehā loomed.
Chapters 4 to 7 describe the Land Wars campaigns on which most
of the New Zealand Wars literature has focused. The issue of land as
the cause of conflict first arose at Wairau in 1843, before spreading
north to Waitara in 1860. However, as Chapter 4 shows, the Waitara
war was preceded fifteen years earlier by a northern campaign
launched by Ngā Puhi in 1845 against the Crown to protect and
uphold chiefly mana, grounded in the land. This was seen as the
resisting Ngā Puhi rangatira, like Hōne Heke Pōkai, withdrew to their
own grounds – Puketutu pā, near Ōmāpere – in order to face the
oncoming British Army. Sporadic conflicts over contested land
ownership then broke out in the Hutt Valley and around Whanganui
between 1846 and 1847.
Chapter 5 covers in detail the origins of the war in Waitara and
shows the extent to which these disputed land issues, touched on in
Chapter 1, led to the outbreak of fighting. These issues were much
exacerbated by Governor Thomas Gore Browne’s refusal to
acknowledge the customary authority exercised by Wiremu Kīngi Te
Rangitāke of Te Ātiawa.
Chapter 6 discusses the 1863 spread of war into the heart of the
Waikato, fuelled by Governor George Grey’s determination to subdue
the Māori King movement at any cost, and to remove its supposed
threat to the Crown’s claim of sole governing authority. But, as W. H.
Oliver reminds us, land lay at the heart of the war in the Waikato:
‘the most powerful men in the Ministry, the puppet-masters, were
Thomas Russell and Frederick Whitaker, leading Auckland financiers,
speculators and lawyers, men who stood to make a great deal of
money if the Maoris south of Auckland could be prised off their
land’.5 Once the battle of Rangiriri was lost by Māori on 21 November
1863, the Land Wars were effectively over, and for Māori they were
as good as lost. Any fighting thereafter, though bloody and brutal,
constituted Māori ‘last stands’, lasting another nine years, as
discussed in Chapter 7.
Chapter 8 examines how Māori fared after the wars were over,
though ‘over’ is a misnomer of course because, while the wars were
effectively over for Māori in 1863, with the reformed Native Land
Court established in 1865, the fighting did not cease until 1872, with
conflict and tensions lasting much longer. Chapter 8 nonetheless
assesses the costs of war for Māori, especially as seen through the
debilitating legislative and legal measures instituted by the Crown to
appropriate Māori land while the fighting was still in progress.
Chapter 8 returns to some of the customary concepts discussed in
Chapter 1 to show how, after the wars, the assertion of these
concepts as legitimate was critical to Māori, if their land was to be
retained – or so Māori thought. We follow these issues through a
number of actual claims lodged with the Compensation Court in
North Taranaki, to determine a final outcome of that land alienation
process started twenty-five years earlier, on the beaches at Petone in
1839.
The Conclusion assesses the workings of the Native Land Court
after the wars, as it continued to assign negligible weight to Māori
customary concepts whilst, at the same time, seeking to extinguish
them outright. Wholesale losses for Māori were the inevitable result,
especially with the failure of the Compensation Court to offer redress
to Māori. As prominent rangatira like Wī Tako Ngātata of Te Ātiawa
would insist, the Kīngitanga’s assertions of sovereignty had not
caused the wars; rather it was Wiremu Kīngi’s determination to
protect the customary land.

A MĀORI PERSPECTIVE

As many Māori historians have rightly pointed out, seeking to

present a ‘Māori perspective’ on history comes with some challenges.
For Tipene O’Regan of Ngāi Tahu, one requires ‘the skeletal
framework of whakapapa’ to authenticate the Māori historical
tradition. Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal of Ngāti Raukawa agrees:
‘one should always be mindful that Māori history is tribal history’.
Māori always identified by their tribal and sub-tribal affiliations, he
writes.
Joseph Ānaru Pere of Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki concurs but argues that
the imprint of Pākehā was unavoidable. Tribal histories, identities
and the land, he writes, were interwoven and of paramount
importance, representing ‘what Māori people felt’. The transmission
of such histories was once guaranteed through language, carvings,
waiata, chants and karakia. But these had suffered greatly at the
hands of colonial settlers determined to take the land and thereby
break down the interwoven ‘ancient histories and traditions’.
Ranginui Walker of Whakatōhea took this one step further by
examining the traditions of Pākehā historiography. Given the
dominance of a colonial grand narrative in our histories, he writes, it
was gratifying to note that a ‘counter-narrative of Maori history was
now emerging, which had hitherto been submerged by European
expansionism and colonialism’.6
This book presents a ‘Māori perspective’ on New Zealand’s Land
Wars with the caveats of Tipene O’Regan, Te Ahukaramū Charles
Royal, Ranginui Walker and especially Joseph Ānaru Pere in mind.
This perspective is presented here in two ways. Firstly, this book
emphasises the issue of land, especially as framed by Māori custom
law which ensured that the land was governed by cultural protocols,
values and devices like whakapapa. Secondly, this book assesses the
‘Pākehā imprint’ on Māori land by examining a particular set of early-
settler purchases through negotiation, the signing of deeds, their
examination by a commission of inquiry and the disorder that
followed, through to the outbreak and waging of war, to the passage
of those lands and other Māori lands into a new and much-enlarged
court of inquiry.
Because the author of this book is from North Taranaki, the focus
here is necessarily Taranaki; though, in the hands of another Māori
historian, the focus could well be elsewhere. At all stages of this
narrative, emphasis is placed on the incidence, relevance and
influence of Māori customary concepts – or, if not, their absence is
highlighted. In the end, the ‘Māori perspective’ presented here seeks
to adhere to Joseph Ānaru Pere’s framework of ‘land, culture and
history interwoven’. This is achieved by utilising custom law concepts
as a point of reference in examining how, since the earliest Pākehā
contacts, Māori struggled to retain their tribal domains through an
egregious war and disorderly peace, as settlers sought to
appropriate the land, in the process undermining Māori customary
convictions.

TESTIMONY OF PAST AND PRESENT

Māori feelings of material and cultural loss were a natural enough

response to a war that would be long remembered by Māori, though
it would be quickly forgotten by the country at large. An important
indicator of Māori thinking, in those times of dispossession and loss,
lies within the testimony given by Māori to the Native Land Court
and its subsidiary, the Compensation Court established in 1865.
While contesting the loss of appropriated landscapes, Māori also
signalled that their mana – their tino rangatiratanga – remained
grounded and would be maintained and asserted. This was because
the past lay projected ahead. Throughout the nineteenth century,
Māori often used variations of the phrase ‘haere whakamua, hoki
whakamuri’, which meant ‘going forward, thinking back’, or ‘going
into the future, looking backwards’.7 This phrase referred to an
important facet of Māori ‘historical’ understanding, especially of the
cause and flow of events, whereby the past was said to inform and
bear directly on the present, and the future. E. T. Durie’s ground-
breaking scholarship has referred to this facet of Māori thinking:

Māori mental constructs were based on cycles in preference to lineal

progression, as shown in cyclical and repetitive art forms. The nurturing of
social cycles was as critical to survival as the maintenance of the cycles of
nature.

As later Māori testimony to the Compensation Court demonstrated,

traditions, history or simple storytelling, or the retention of
customary tenets of land, incorporated the ‘telescoping of drawn out
processes’ of chronology to present collective knowledge in a much
shorter order, and further involved

the collapsing of time, with ancestors of distant generations speaking to one

another, and the re-arrangement of sequences. Māori chronology in oral
tradition was not lineal but was categorised according to how the purpose
 was best achieved, the main purpose being to relay messages, transmit
values, describe essential outcomes, explain the nature of the world,
legitimate current social or political positions or to justify proposed action by
ancestral precedent.
Time was therefore collapsed according to the tradition that the
ancestors, and the past, spoke to and were a part of the present.
The order and spacing of events was not as important as the
outcome and value of ancestral advice to be relayed, given the
esteemed value of ancestral sanction. Approaches such as these
were widely employed by Māori when entering the ill-disposed
Compensation Court environment after 1865, or in their earlier
dealings with inflexible Crown officials.8
This can be seen in Wiremu Kīngi’s words to the Crown in 1859.
When Kīngi warned Governor Gore Browne that he would not give
up his blanket, he was of course referring to the land over which he
exercised a paramount customary interest, Waitara, a place where
‘distant generations spoke to one another’. Gore Browne understood
Kīngi’s resolve perfectly, but not his motivation. Wiremu Kīngi used
the term ‘blanket’ to emphasise his customary entitlement, sanctified
through his father, Te Rere-tā-whangawhanga, and a pantheon of Te
Ātiawa tūpuna before him. Kīngi warned Gore Browne that his words
came from the old people: ‘I therefore bethought me of what was
said in former times about holding land. My word is not a new one;
it is an old one.’9

MANA AND WHAKAPAPA

One way to interpret Māori voices, of course, is to consider Māori

cultural or ‘structural’ devices by which knowledge was recorded,
maintained and transmitted. Such devices do provide important
insights and especially contexts. On occasions, this book draws on
such cultural devices, such as whakapapa, to provide insights into
Māori understandings of past and present. Over time, whakapapa
provided many things for Māori, and performed many functions. Of
interest to Māori historians was the role of whakapapa as the
primary organising device of all Māori knowledge, including
knowledge of the past, with mana as the primary organising
theme.10
Māori demonstrated this principle often when providing testimony
to the Compensation Court after 1865 in the expectation that the
mana of their tūpuna, grounded within the lands now under
investigation, would be recognised. Māori were not initially averse to
new modes of authority, writes Durie, which might offer finite
settlements now seemingly beyond what the custom law could offer.
Accordingly, such testimony was offered by Māori in good faith. But
they did so with one important condition, writes Durie: ‘the
expectation of just results’.11
Mana, the greatest organising principle of Māori knowledge, can
be defined simply as abiding power and authority conferred by
descent; a power that was strongly defended, strenuously sought
after and at all times given effect to by Māori individuals and kinship
groups, in times of peace and war. Mana was also derived from the
creation and protection of sacred sites, or wāhi tapu, within the
landscape. Wāhi tapu could take many forms, as was evident from
Māori testimony when addressing contested land issues – burial
grounds, former cultivations, village sites or places of conflict. As
early as 1844, such sites were generally set aside from purchases, as
in New Plymouth when Land Commissioner William Spain separated
wāhi tapu out from the much-contested Ngāmotu purchase, though
this did not protect them from later Crown purchases or public works
appropriations.
Whakapapa provided extensive generational gradations of
remembered ancestors. It was so often the unseen ‘watermark’ that
lay within Māori communications with the Crown, such as Wiremu
Kīngi’s many letters to Gore Browne, citing the words of tūpuna,
urging that the Governor desist from precipitate action. Whakapapa
stretched back to the very beginnings of time, emphasising people,
places and events of note which together represented the mana of
the living. In the nineteenth century, all Māori knew these
knowledge aggregations. Evidence of them was everywhere,
embodied in the ancient landscapes and especially in the
expressional culture which gave Māori the cultural space, writes
Teurikore Biddle, ‘to express their feelings about their histories,
environments, communities and relationships’.12 As Cleve Barlow
writes, whakapapa contained an endless array of organic subsets. In
essence, whakapapa provided ‘the basis for the organisation of
knowledge in respect of the creation and development of all
things’.13
The best thing that can be said about whakapapa as an organising
device of Māori history, then, is that it arranged customary
knowledge along certain lines and within certain categories. Such
categories included the mana of wairua, or knowledge which
pertained to celestial and spiritual forebears. A second category
dealt with the mana of tūpuna, or knowledge relating to mortal
ancestors. This category recognised the power of forebears who
featured most strongly in accounts of the past. They were known to
have lived and their places of rest were closely guarded. Their
names were invoked in battle and they could be located on the land
through descent histories of conflict, traditions of achievement,
marriage or alliance, or remembered as stories of people embodying
significant land-forms.
Some Māori scholars, such as Mason Durie, have used such
gradations of whakapapa to provide an intellectual framework for
their published work. This works quite well because, for Māori, it
aligns the distant past with more recent times, enabling the injection
of customary concepts into contemporary readings of Māori activity
since 1840. Mason Durie does this to enhance our understanding of
Māori acting within the nineteenth century in particular. As a
consequence, the criteria by which we might assess Māori activity
after 1840 is aligned more closely with customary explanations for
their social and political choices. In part, this book attempts a similar
approach, examining nineteenth-century Māori activity, in the
context of conflict over land, realigning those activities with more
recent scholarship on ancient customary understandings.14
MANA WHENUA; A PLACE AND SPACE

The whakapapa category developed by Mason Durie of most interest

to us here is ‘mana whenua’, or mana of the land, because this is a
book about land and conflict. Mana whenua was (and remains) a
broad term. Māori will often debate its meaning, especially when the
term is used erroneously in place of te tino rangatiratanga, which, in
the modern era, tends to assume a more national application. At
heart, mana whenua is quite place specific. It is the place where you
belong; if you are Māori, it is the place where you stand or put your
feet (your tūrangawaewae). In the past, mana whenua was all about
identifying with – and defending if necessary – specific places of
descent and historical significance.
‘Mana whenua’ was normally used to denote a kinship group’s
claim to the power associated with possession of the land. If the
land was lost, the kinship group retained the right to return and
reoccupy. The power to do so was conferred by the authority of
celestial ancestry that was mediated through appropriate whakapapa
linkages. Mana whenua, then, represented many things to tangata
whenua kinship groups, such as the power associated with the land’s
capacity to produce, the procreative power of a residing group, an
association between mana and afterbirth, inherited rights,
conservation, and, of course, the consequent right to militarily
defend.
A war over the land – a war for mana whenua – was a war for all
these things, material and temporal. Mana whenua encapsulated a
collective Māori right to customary ownership of the ancestral
paepae, the lands from which the certainty of their belonging
derived. This entitlement was validated by whakapapa which
remained in place, across the nineteenth century, firmly grounded
into the ancient, now-contested landscapes.

MĀORI KINSHIP

Nineteenth-century accounts of Māori engaged in colonial warfare

invariably included descriptions of Māori kinship groups that were
variable in their accuracy. Kinship definition and terminology was
always speculative and problematic, frequently leading to erroneous
assumptions over Māori land entitlements. Similarly, Māori self-
descriptions of identity often confused Crown officials who could not
detect complexity or subtlety within the specifics of Māori
representations about themselves in relation to their land holdings.
This was particularly evident during Land Commissioner William
Spain’s inquiries into the New Zealand Company’s land purchases in
New Plymouth. Spain’s failure to grasp such customary notions
directly contributed to the later conflicts. Crown confusion was also
evident when, before the later Compensation Courts, Māori were
compelled to provide details of kinship that were expected to be
fixed in time and place. Little allowance was made during those
hearings for the essentially fluid nature of such customary realities.
The point is well made by E. T. Durie that in pre-contact times, for
Māori, descriptions of such kinship connections were unnecessary,
much less fixing them in time and place. This was because of the
essentially minimalist nature of pre-1800 spoken Māori. Few Māori
words existed to encapsulate fluidity and diversity; it was simply a
lived reality. All Māori knew their respective kinship units, and they
knew their place within a unified customary tribal landscape,
however fluid it might have been. The gradual introduction of
ethnographic – or fixed – identity descriptions, after first contacts
with Europe, provided no shortage of conceptual problems for
Māori.15
The scholarship on the subject of Māori kinship structures – past
and present – is interesting and substantial, and has in recent times
been the focus of public debate because of the Crown’s insistence
that modern Māori should establish state-sanctioned authorities for
themselves, if they wished to manage Crown assets and moneys.
Self-represented Māori entities, entirely structured by whakapapa,
were actively discouraged. Yet tribal identities, and their narratives,
were once entirely nuanced, with iwi groups always governed by
long-standing and continuing considerations of customary identity
and mana.
ONSET OF CONFLICT

In the nineteenth century, a prolonged period of conflict and war

over land was visited on Māori, beginning in the 1830s and
progressing well beyond 1900. Māori did not always see these
tensions coming, though there were men with foresight, such as
Nōpera Panakareao who, in January 1841, declared that ‘the
substance of the land goes to the Europeans, the shadow will be our
only portion’.16
For incoming settlers and their later elected governments,
acquisition of land from Māori assumed an importance matched by
few other issues for its longevity. The machinery of state constructed
to achieve that singular end was enormous, and the rationale
iniquitous. For Māori, the land was inextricably bound up with
identity, whakapapa, validity and mana. Māori did not choose the
fight that came, but when it did, it was faced with resolve, not only
to save the land and its resources from destruction, but also to
safeguard and assert the long-standing mana of the people
embedded within.
New Zealand historiography has suggested that the reasons for
these conflicts and wars were complex, and they were. The
Introduction which now follows will discuss the arguments of a
number of New Zealand historians about causes and naming of the
wars, before concluding that the issue, at heart, was land.
INTRODUCTION

‘THE NEW ZEALAND WARS’

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

THE NEW ZEALAND WARS

When most people think back to the wars fought on New Zealand
soil during the nineteenth century, the name ‘New Zealand Wars’
probably springs to mind. Certainly, since the publication of James
Belich’s important book, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian
Interpretation of Racial Equality, the name ‘New Zealand Wars’ has
become popular. The name now seems to be securely embedded
into the psyche of most New Zealanders, especially those with an
interest in our nineteenth-century history.1
Belich used the term throughout his book, and throughout his
later television series of the same name. He did so because his
central thesis was that the wars were, in the final analysis, a contest
of sovereignty. Running through the book, though perhaps less
discernible in the television series, was the contention that these
nineteenth-century conflicts constituted a significant war of
sovereignty fought between disparate Māori tribes and a determined
new Pākehā government, backed in part by the formidable British
Imperial Army.
These wars were not mere storms in teacups, said Belich. They
were ‘bitter and bloody struggles’, as indeed they were. They were
as important to New Zealand as was Cromwell’s revolution to
England, or the Civil War fought between the North and South to the
United States. We can see this in the number of troops deployed. In
1863, at the height of the wars, about 15,000 British troops were in
the field, arrayed against a total Māori population of about 62,000.
In other words, the British Army and support units, pushing south
into the Waikato, possibly numbered more than one-quarter of the
total Māori population in 1863.2
In an episode of the television series, Belich stood near the site of
Te Kohia pā, just south of Waitara. These days, the site of the pā
itself is on private land and is not easily accessed. Belich stood close
to the site marker and pronounced Te Kohia as the place where ‘the
great civil wars of the 1860s’ began. Had this been America, he said,
the site would have been a shrine, a Mecca for visitors. But not here.
Te Kohia was an empty space marked by a decaying wooden sign,
nestled among a row of trees, tucked in behind the Brixton
community hall on lower Waitara Road.3
Te Kohia pā was shelled by the British Army on 17 March 1860,
bringing the Land Wars to Taranaki. A day later, the pā fell to the
British ‘at the expense of one dead private’, writes Keith Sinclair.
Some British officers thought the engagement to have been
insignificant, concluding that more blood had been spilled by the
British on local tavern floors than on the contested soil at Te Kohia.
But, said Sinclair, the advent of war was ominous: ‘ten years of
uncertainty, years of building fortifications instead of farmhouses,
digging saps instead of ditches, were to bring the grim reality of war
into plain view’.4
The battle at Te Kohia lasted one day, with Te Ātiawa withdrawing
from the pā during the night. According to Sinclair, the Auckland
Examiner noted the event with a headline that mocked the British
effort: ‘Colonel Gold and His Brilliant Capture of the Empty Pa’.
Throughout the wars, settlers harboured deep suspicions about the
fighting capacity of the British. The Taranaki war lasted one year,
almost to the day. The war was intense at times, but mostly
sporadic, at least until the final months when Te Ātiawa embarked
on a series of costly forays against the advancing British, attacking
their redoubts. Initially, the war was confined to Waitara and to the
landscape of Te Ātiawa. Only once, when the war spread south of
New Plymouth to Waireka, did the conflict spill onto the lands of Ngā
Māhanga a Tairi. Other tribes from farther afield also joined the fray,
most notably Ngāti Ruanui at Waireka, and Ngāti Maniapoto at
Puketekauere and Māhoetahi.

THE SPREAD OF WAR

The battle at Te Kohia in 1860, however, was not the first

engagement between Māori and the British Army. Fighting had
started earlier, in the Bay of Islands. On 11 March 1845, a war party
of Ngā Puhi and a British naval force clashed around the streets of
Kororāreka while it burned to the ground. After the battle, the Ngā
Puhi protagonists retreated inland, pursued by the British Army as
far as Puketutu, near Lake Ōmāpere. The Northern War lasted
another year to 1846.
With that conflict barely over, the British Army was posted to the
Hutt Valley and to Whanganui to quell further ‘rebellious Maori’. This
done, a decade of peace followed. But the 1850s were a turbulent
decade, characterised by bitter internal tribal fighting just north of
New Plymouth which contributed to the outbreak of war at Waitara
in 1860.
By 1863, the war at Waitara had spilled into the Waikato despite
the efforts of rangatira like Wiremu Tāmihana Tarapīpīpī Te Waharoa
of Ngāti Hauā who had sought to confine the war to Taranaki.
Peacemaking efforts initiated by Governor George Grey in 1862 were
not trusted by the Waikato and Ngāti Maniapoto tribes of the
Kīngitanga.5 During his earlier tenure as Governor, from 1845 to
1853, Grey had earned some respect from Māori, in part by his
resolving of the wars in the north without penalising Ngā Puhi. When
he was brought back as Governor in 1861, he faced Māori hostility.
To some extent, Grey reciprocated. In July 1863, he launched a pre-
emptive military strike against the King movement, crossing over at
Mangatāwhiri and driving deep into the Waikato.
Within a few months, Waikato Māori and their allies were in
retreat, fighting for their survival against the invading British Army.
With the Waikato war ended by 1864, Tauranga Māori next bore the
brunt of the British. But hostilities had lingered in South Taranaki
since 1863. The British were posted back there and to the
Whanganui district a year later, but not for long. The British Army
was gradually withdrawn from New Zealand after 1866 because its
work in subduing Māori resistance to settler encroachment was seen
to be over.
Thereafter, New Zealand’s own Armed Constabulary played a
greater role in the fighting against Māori. The campaigns after 1868
waged against Riwha Tītokowaru of Ngā Ruahine and Te Kooti
Arikirangi Te Tūruki of Rongowhakaata were seen as ‘mopping up’
actions, which, though violent, they essentially were. They were
fought by the Armed Constabulary and various militia units, as well
as by significant numbers of kūpapa – Māori ostensibly aligned to
the Crown. These later campaigns were significant. But, to all intents
and purposes, the wars had long finished. The ‘great civil wars of
the 1860s’ which had commenced in Waitara in 1860 had effectively
ended on 20 November 1863 with the defeat of Waikato, Ngāti
Maniapoto and allies at Rangiriri when Māori failed to contain, much
less prevent, the massive British Army push southward.
The New Zealand Wars, then, argued Belich, were substantially
wars where the question was asked, and answered – who would
prevail? Would it be the Crown, or would it be Māori? In the end, it
was the Crown of course that prevailed, having done so by the end
of 1863. This was achieved despite the skilful military innovations of
Māori, especially the use of enclosed trenches and the ‘modern pa’.6
New Zealand was, therefore, the reason for the wars, and New
Zealand was the prize. They were the ‘New Zealand Wars’.
THE MĀORI WARS

However, giving names to history, especially to the history of

warfare, is seldom easy and is rarely uncontested.7 Giving names to
historical events implies decisions being made about participants,
localities, causes and even culpability; or, conversely, it implies
decisions not being made, if names are to be used uncritically. We
do tend to reveal our thinking on such issues by the names we use.
Before ‘New Zealand Wars’ became popular, other terms were
used to name these wars, to some extent illustrating the diverse
range of opinions about participants, places, causes – and
responsibility. Not so long ago, the popular term was ‘the Māori
Wars’, a name that still persists in some quarters despite being dealt
a near-death blow by Belich. This name reflected the British Army’s
practice of naming their colonial wars after their enemy – hence the
Zulu Wars, the Boer War and the Māori Wars.8 The ‘Māori Wars’ was
also accepted as an appropriate name for a long time because Māori
were seen as having precipitated the outbreak of war. Much later, it
was generally acknowledged that Māori should not bear such
responsibility. According to J. G. A. Pocock, names like the ‘Māori
Wars’ had ‘divisive implications’. They suggested to the Pākehā
subconscious that ‘we fought them’, while their psychological effects
on Māori were harder to predict.9 Thus, for many, the continued use
of terms like ‘Māori Wars’ carried divisive and even accusatory
connotations.
Keith Sinclair had used this term when he examined the wars in
1957, but his use of ‘Maori Wars’ was uncritical. Sinclair wrote at a
time when, post-Second World War, empires the world over were
retrenching, not least the British Empire. He did not argue that Māori
carried any responsibility for the wars. If anything, he argued the
reverse. He was damning of colonial officials at Waitara, and he
argued that inflexible ministers who drafted native land policy bore a
major responsibility for the outbreak of war. And the cause of war,
he said, was the land. The demand for land among settlers before
1860 was very high. They were especially envious of the ‘fertile
Waikato’, said Sinclair. Yet, the demand for land was ‘out of all
proportion to the increase in the number of Europeans’. It was not
only speculators who clamoured for land, it was also the poorer folk;
and, in their combined pursuit of Māori land, the interests of both
classes – rich and poor – coincided.
But the land speculators were dominant. They were merchants
and shopkeepers, and they substantially controlled the provincial
governments and the press, and they dominated Auckland society.
Especially dominant were Frederick Whitaker and Thomas Russell,
the Auckland members of Alfred Domett’s Ministry. Sinclair said they
were legal partners in a firm with ‘extensive speculative and
mercantile interests’. Land was clearly foremost in their political
ambitions. Men such as these would later abolish the Crown
monopoly on Māori land purchasing, unilaterally removing
protections from Māori against fraudulent land dealings at the hands
of settlers.
Whitaker and Russell (and others) also formulated the later
policies of confiscating huge tracts of customary Māori land, thus
‘blatantly demonstrating what the war was about’. They also
negotiated government loans from Russell’s Bank of New Zealand,
contingent upon anticipated land gains from the war, once the war
was won by Pākehā. ‘All of these policies were of enormous benefit
to themselves, as well as to settlers in general’, Sinclair argued.10

THE ANGLO-MĀORI WARS

The ‘Māori Wars’ was soon superseded by the ‘Anglo-Māori Wars’.

This name was popular for a time, having first been used by Alan
Ward in 1967 in an important essay that reassessed the causes of
the wars. Ward argued that, in the end, the wars comprised a series
of sustained conflicts between two peoples: new European settlers
and native Māori. All other issues were important, for sure, but they
were peripheral. The conflicts of the 1860s had arisen, Ward argued,
because, after many years of settler unease, a small and anxious
white community (typical of other colonial situations) had wanted to
press its claims.
 According to Ward, the crisis of 1860–63 came about because of
twenty years of ‘tension and mistrust arising from many causes,
some connected directly with land, some not’. He conceded that the
land-hunger motive was important, especially in Taranaki. True, the
war had begun as an attempt to deny the right of Wiremu Kīngi to
prohibit the alienation of land by minor owners. But the Governor,
who initiated the war, had been misled by his colonial officials, said
Ward. He had pursued war because he believed that Kīngi had no
valid claims and was merely an ‘interfering bully’. Gore Browne
believed that he was promoting law and order by ending a long
period of violence and anarchy in North Taranaki.
Although Māori hospitality and generosity were always at hand,
said Ward, North Island settlers nonetheless felt themselves to be
‘insecure in the face of Maori power’. The invasion of the Waikato by
George Grey expressed the determination of Pākehā to resolve the
ultimate question: ‘which race and which society was going to
prevail and admit the other under its sufferance’. Pākehā were
determined to force the question, and were determined that it be
resolved in their favour. Settlers would secure their claims to sole
sovereignty, and they would govern in their own interests. A
seemingly seditious and belligerent King movement, based in the
upper reaches of the Waikato, provided the perfect provocation for
Pākehā to press their claims.11
The prospect of war in 1863 produced war fever on the streets of
Auckland. Sinclair has described the scene: ‘On 25 June, part of the
militia was called out. The townsfolk were intensely excited, partly
frightened by rumours of an impending Maori assault, partly
aggressive.’ Feelings against Māori were dominant. Many Māori took
the extreme step of moving back to the Waikato, in the depths of
winter, as Grey had instructed them to do, taking with them their old
people and the bones of their tūpuna.12
Politicians also saw opportunities arising from the land
confiscations that would be forthcoming, once the impending war
was won. W. H. Oliver has pointed to key Auckland individuals in
1863, as had Sinclair: ‘the outbreak of war in the Waikato in 1863
was welcomed in Auckland as that province’s perfect opportunity to
realise her “grand colonial destiny”’. The Māori were in rebellion, said
Oliver, and British regulars were available to conquer them. Auckland
businessmen could follow in the wake of the army. ‘The land could
be thrown open to settlers but first of all – and this was the vital
nerve of policy for Russell and Whitaker – it could be presented to
the speculators.’13
Despite the dominance of land as an issue, however, Ward argued
that land was but one issue of many. In the end, the wars
constituted a defining conflict fought between two distinct peoples,
precipitated by settlers. They were, therefore, Anglo-Māori Wars.
Perhaps paradoxically, Sinclair eventually adopted this term.
However, he would later argue that, though it was indeed a war of
peoples, in his view the primary cause of war was still the land, as
he had argued in 1957. Another major cause of war, and an
immediate one, was undoubtedly the determination of the
government to assert its authority over New Zealand, said Sinclair.
However, in any discussion about causes, he would still stress the
‘competition for land’.14

THE LAND WARS

From about the mid-1980s, the term ‘Land Wars’ appeared and won
some acceptance among historians because the issue of land was
now widely held to have been an important factor underlying the
wars, especially in Taranaki and the Waikato. Though Sinclair had
argued this in 1957, the ‘Māori Wars’ took some dislodging. Earlier, in
1965, Keith Sorrenson had published a chapter entitled ‘The Politics
of Land’ in which he too mounted a strong defence of land as the
cause of war, though his preferred name was the ‘Māori–European
Wars’.15
In 1986 the Historic Places Trust indicated its clear preference for
the ‘Land Wars’. According to the Trust, what to call the wars had
become a problem for many New Zealand historians since the term
the ‘Māori Wars’ had fallen into disfavour. Conceding that there was
some debate on this issue, the Trust, on the recommendation of its
Māori Advisory Committee, advised branches to use ‘Land Wars’ in
Trust publications. However, branches were to first consult with local
Māori about appropriate naming of these conflicts. Where a general
term was needed, however, the ‘Land Wars’ was to be preferred over
the ‘New Zealand Wars’.16 J. G. A. Pocock also preferred the ‘Land
Wars’ because it avoided using ethnic terms altogether and
encouraged the ‘beneficent idea that we are now one people’.17
As names go, it is fair to say that the ‘Land Wars’ was never really
popular, or not as popular as it might have been; certainly not since
Belich reinvigorated ‘New Zealand Wars’. Yet, ‘New Zealand Wars’
was quite an old term that had been used for well over a century.
The name appeared as early as 1860 when Charles Torlesse
published a series of articles in the Lyttelton Times advocating that
strong measures be taken against Māori waging war against the
Crown.
Octavius Hadfield took a different view, and used a different
name. To Hadfield, they were ‘England’s Wars’, since new settlers
carried a major responsibility for their outbreak. His pamphlet ‘One
of England’s Little Wars’ appeared in 1860 to protest against the war
in Taranaki. He argued that these were England’s Wars, not New
Zealand’s Wars. But Charles Hursthouse used the term ‘New
Zealand’s War’ in 1865 when answering severe Colonial Office
criticism of settler actions in New Zealand. These were wars for New
Zealand, he argued. Other writers agreed. A Sketch of the New
Zealand War was produced in 1899 by Morgan Grace who had
served as a medical officer in Taranaki.18

JAMES COWAN’S WARS

In the early 1920s, James Cowan wrote his masterly two-volume

history of the wars under the New Zealand Wars name. Cowan
travelled extensively and spoke with many veterans of the later
Armed Constabulary campaigns, both Pākehā and Māori. He visited
most of the sites while they were still warm and still bore evidence
of battle.19
In fact, Cowan was raised on one of the most important war sites.
His father’s farm encompassed part of the 1864 Ōrākau battlefield,
in South Waikato. He grew up amidst the ‘romantically shaped
ceinture of volcanic saliencies’ which seemed to mount guard like
giant sentries over the Māori King’s domain, just to the south of
Ōrākau across the Pūniu Stream which was the King’s eastern
boundary. The foundations for his later scholarship were laid during
these youthful days spent on the ‘farthest out farm on the King
Country frontier’. Many hours were spent on the old battlefield where
‘shawl-kilted tattooed Maoris’ had once fought against ‘Pakeha
stalwarts who had carried rifles on many a bush war-path’.20
Cowan used the term ‘New Zealand Wars’ to represent a
monumental series of wars fought between settlers and Māori,
somewhere out on the distant fringes of the British realm. They
were wars fought to consolidate New Zealand’s place within Empire.
His volumes were subtitled ‘A History of the Maori Campaigns and
the Pioneering Period’. They were written, wrote Cowan, to fulfil the
need for a consolidated ‘history of the wars with the Maoris since the
establishment of British sovereignty and of the era of pioneering
settlement and adventure’.21 Belich described Cowan as ‘a product of
an intensely Anglocentric, Empire-worshipping period in New
Zealand’s development’.22
However, it is important to note that Cowan published his wars
volumes in 1922 and 1923. At that time, New Zealand had not long
emerged from a European war that had cost 16,697 New Zealand
dead and 41,317 wounded. Of these casualties, 2779 men had died
at Gallipoli on or after 25 April 1915, the date an attempted British
invasion of Western Turkey commenced. These casualty figures were
a great shock to New Zealanders at home, especially those of the ill-
fated Gallipoli campaign. Almost immediately, 25 April was
established as a special day of remembrance, being formalised by
legislation in 1920 as Anzac Day.
In his New Zealand Wars volumes, Cowan records a total death
toll of about 3000 people, on New Zealand’s own soil, of which about
two-thirds were Māori. Such figures were equally shocking, but they
were quickly lost sight of as Anzac Day focused attention on the
nation’s dead overseas, sanctifying a new national narrative that ‘we
came of age as a nation on the beaches of Gallipoli’ – a triumphal
narrative that, erasing New Zealand’s colonial past, has persisted
ever since. But the battlefields of Turkey and Western Europe were
many miles away from the battlefields strewn across New Zealand.23
Much later, in 1934, Cowan wrote of the legacy of New Zealand’s
own wars. Throughout the country, he wrote, redoubts and
stockades had appeared, whilst Māori continued to inhabit scattered
villages with no fortifications. It was ‘extraordinary that such things
could have happened in New Zealand’. The government, however,
had played a ‘strong hand’, influenced throughout by Pākehā opinion
which had ‘assumed a kind of frenzy’.24
When writing some sixty years after Cowan, James Belich took a
very different stance in defence of his use of ‘New Zealand Wars’.
Belich’s primary focus was on the nature and minutiae of the
campaigns launched against Māori; and, looking beyond these, on
the later Pākehā interpretations of those conflicts which had
contained a significant bias. This Victorian bias had impeded
understandings of the wars and had denied Māori recognition for
their substantial military achievements which had, at the very least,
led to complicated battlefield outcomes.
This Victorian interpretation was ‘alive and well and living in New
Zealand’, and had become an integral part of the wars’ ‘received
version’ which Belich set out to challenge. He argued that the wars
were largely an internal contest over the sole right to govern. They
were wars substantially removed from the context of Empire. He also
rejected the term ‘Land Wars’ because, he said, this name was
‘monocausal’. It was a name which suggested that the wars were all
about the seizing of Māori land, and very little else.25

NEW ZEALAND’S CIVIL WARS

Other names have also appeared over the years. Edgar Holt named
his 1962 book The Strangest War after a quotation from Sir Fredrick
Rogers, Under Secretary at the Colonial Office in London, who said
that ‘it seems to me the strangest war that was ever carried on’.26 To
Tony Simpson in 1979, the wars were Te Riri Pakeha: The White
Man’s Anger.27 The Colonial New Zealand Wars was the literal title
used by Tim Ryan and Bill Parham in their popular illustrated 1986
book of that name.28
The term ‘New Zealand Civil Wars’ has also appeared from time to
time. Some historians have suggested that the conflicts of the later
1860s were in fact civil wars fought by Māori against Māori, with
settlers and the Crown almost relegated to the role of bystanders.
According to Peter Maxwell, ‘the historians do not emphasise that in
the final stages there were no more than a handful of Europeans
involved. What began as a colonial war between the two races
became a civil war almost exclusively fought by Maori.’29 More
recently, Cliff Simons has suggested that, in fact, without Māori
allies, the Crown may not have won the wars at all. ‘People will have
to confront the reality that the wars were not a simple case of Māori
versus Pākehā’, he says.30
Such erroneous suggestions arise when historians attach too much
weight to the latter years of conflict. It is true that, by the late
1860s, Māori forces had assumed most of the fighting in pursuit of
Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki, as he fled westward from
Waikaremoana. However, by this time, the wars were effectively
over, and they had been lost by Māori. Māori fighting against Māori
from the mid-1860s was always bitter and characteristically violent,
a tragic footnote to the wars lost earlier in the Waikato.
The war was won by the British Army; and it had been won by
November 1863. And the British had not needed nor recruited Māori
allies in order to subdue the Kīngitanga. As for the later wars, far
from being a bystander, the Crown’s interests always lay at the heart
of Māori fighting Māori. Despite this, Māori fighting alongside the
Crown did so for very good reasons of their own, as seen with Ngāti
Kahungunu resistance to the Hau Hau insurrection and invasion
which culminated in battle at Ōmarunui, near Napier, on 12 October
1866. The fight on that day was taken to the Hau Hau by rangatira
of Ngāti Kahungunu like Tareha and Renata Kawepo.31
More generally, the case for ‘New Zealand’s Civil Wars’ – between
the Crown and Māori – has yet to be argued. Promoting a ‘contest
for sovereignty’ as cause is popular again, with recent Pākehā
historians once again relegating issues like land as monocausal and
incomplete, reducing the custom law to a footnote whilst they
remind Māori of the sovereignty – or tino rangatiratanga – that they
lost, or perhaps never had.
Mounting such a case for ‘civil war’, however, will be challenging
for Pākehā because it will need to be well grounded in New
Zealand’s historical, literal and figurative organic landscape, much
like the Māori argument for land as cause which is framed by land,
forests, rivers, resources and other communal assets rooted in
cultural millennia. James Cowan is possibly the only Pākehā historian
to have thus far achieved this feat, though he did not frame his
prodigious scholarship as a ‘civil war’. But doubts do persist; J. G. A.
Pocock thought the concept of ‘civil war’ had severe limitations: ‘it
would be good to be able to call them “Civil Wars”, but we were not
then a single polity, nor are we now; and land, after all, was what
the wars were fought about’.32
In the end, what constitutes a ‘civil war’ needs some clarification.
Overseas examples reveal how difficult this task can be when
matched with historical specificity to New Zealand. For example, the
American Civil War of 1860–64 bears a marginal resemblance only,
on the face of it, to the Land Wars. A better comparison is found on
the Great Plains, in the wars fought against the Native American
tribes by the colonial American state, assisted by the United States
Army, especially in the 1860s. Tragically, these Native American wars
share many similarities with those fought against Māori in New
Zealand.

THE MOST POPULAR NAME

For the present, then, ‘New Zealand Wars’ is the most widely
accepted and used name. The name has persisted strongly, and has
been picked up, with varying justifications, by historians of the wars
as diverse as Chris Pugsley, Neil Finlay, David Green, Jock Phillips,
Cliff Simons, Vincent O’Malley, Michael Belgrave and Jeff Hopkins-
Weise.
Another is Annabel Cooper, one of the few women to have
ventured into the field of New Zealand’s Land Wars. Her recent
Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand Wars on Screen provides
an engaging analysis of ‘screen stories [that] have portrayed the
cultural encounters, tensions and open conflict of the New Zealand
Wars’.33 Other women in the field include Lyndall Ryan (Land Wars
memorials in Australia), Rebecca Burke (early Māori–settler relations)
and Kristyn Harman (Māori prisoners in Tasmania), all of whom
presented papers to the first academic conference devoted solely to
New Zealand’s Land Wars, held at Massey University, Wellington in
February 2011.34
Thereafter, it might be said that the ‘New Zealand Wars’ as a
name finally attained an apogee of sorts in 2016 when a meeting of
iwi representatives from throughout the country decided that 28
October should be set aside every second year as Raa Maumahara
National Day of Commemoration, or New Zealand Wars Day, as it is
more commonly known. The inaugural Raa Maumahara
commemorations were held at Waitangi on 28 October 2017,
followed by commemorations held at Waitara in 2019. Community
pressure for such an occasion had first appeared in the late 1880s,
when Pākehā veterans of the wars, no longer young men, began to
seek greater recognition for their sacrifices made decades earlier.
But the date chosen by Māori – 28 October – would have caught
them by surprise. This was a significant date, said Māori
Development Minister Te Ururoa Flavell, because on that date in
1835 the Declaration of Independence of New Zealand (He
Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nu Tirene) had been signed.
As most historians of the wars quickly realised, this date had in
fact no direct relation to the wars at all, attracting some negative
responses. There were better dates on offer, like 17 March, when the
British Army had first opened fire at Waitara in 1860, or 20
November, when the British Army attacked Rangiriri, forcing the pā
to surrender the following day, effectively bringing the wars to an
end. These were defining, solemn dates that brought to mind real
histories of Māori at war, against their will, with all of the suffering,
dispossession and loss – yet survival – that followed.
The date 28 October was chosen for a different purpose; it was,
foremost, one that all Māori could agree on, each iwi with their
vastly different experiences of participation in the wars, or not. Of
the fifty or so tribes in New Zealand in the 1860s, it has been
estimated that about thirty took an active part in the fighting. The
proposed date for a New Zealand Wars Day also served a second
purpose; in the context of ongoing Crown–Māori relations, 28
October was as much about continuing political leverage as it was
about honouring the histories of the New Zealand Wars.

NGĀ PAKANGA WHENUA O MUA

In the end, the question might be asked: Does it really matter what
we call these wars? What’s in a name? However, the names we give
to history are important, of course, because the names that we use
speak volumes as to what we think – in this case at least – about
such important issues as causes, who was involved, where precisely
did these events occur and who was responsible. The Historic Places
Trust was correct in suggesting that branches should consult with
local Māori before deciding on a name to use. This is because one
issue frequently overlooked by historians is: What did Māori people
think?
Māori people do have names for these wars. If we are able to look
at how these names are derived, then perhaps we might catch some
customary insights into how Māori themselves viewed issues such as
causes, places and extent of conflict, who was involved and even
who was responsible.
In North Taranaki, the term ‘Ngā Pakanga Whenua o Mua’ is a
term used among older Māori to describe past conflicts and war that
frequently ravaged Māori settlements scattered from Ngāmotu to
Mōkau. ‘Ngā Pakanga’ refers to the conflicts, or the wars, which are
seen as ancient, sporadic and never-ending. ‘Whenua’ refers to the
land on which, or over which, the wars were fought. ‘O Mua’ means
‘in years gone by’. So, in a sense, the term means ‘the Land Wars
without end’.
The ‘Land Wars’ is the term most preferred by Māori because, far
from being monocausal, the land was always the most important
issue into which many other issues flowed. Wars fought over the
land were long-standing, pre-dating the arrival of Pākehā by
centuries. When the later wars were fought against the Crown, the
issues, of course, were vastly different, setting them apart from
anything that had gone before. But for Māori the cause was
invariably the same: ngā pakanga whenua, fighting over the land.
And to Māori, the whenua, as we have seen, drew its meaning from
its specific customary and cultural context.
In other words, there was always a geographical specificity
attached to the land. This is why the few Māori historians who have
entered the Land Wars field tend to focus on their own
tūrangawaewae. There are good cultural reasons for doing so, not
least being the conventions of the marae to which all Māori
historians seek to adhere. Accordingly, Monty Soutar’s ground-
breaking doctoral thesis ‘Rāpata Wahawaha and the Politics of
Conflict’ focused on the wars fought throughout the East Coast
during the 1860s by taua from Ngāti Porou. Tony Sole’s study Ngāti
Ruanui provides a detailed account of the wars fought in South
Taranaki after 1868. Buddy Mikaere’s Victory at Gate Pā? The Battle
of Pukehinahina-Gate Pā: 1864 (with Cliff Simons) draws inspiration
from ‘my tipuna Pāraone Koikoi o Ngai Tamarāwaho and all who
fought at Pukehinahina and Te Ranga in 1864’.35
Traditionally, Māori had little sense of a unified regional or national
identity since such notions were at variance with the importance of
hapū or iwi as cultural and political centre. However, an alternative
Māori term often used is ‘Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa’. This name,
which appears on a number of Land Wars monuments, has recently
gained in popularity. It means ‘the wars of New Zealand’ or ‘the New
Zealand Wars’. The term is currently being used, for example, by
Archives New Zealand to name its substantial collection of war
documents and records. However, though of value in that context,
the term does confer on the wars a sense of size, space and unity
that did not exist for Māori.
THE PRIMACY OF LAND

As the wars drew to a close, Māori were drawn into an environment

of laws, documents, proceedings and petitions. For Māori, such
developments were now unavoidable if appropriated lands were ever
to be retrieved from the Crown. Such processes were as foreign as
they were daunting. But there was little alternative, if livelihoods
were to be rebuilt out of the wreckage of war. Māori therefore came
forward and, utilising a full range of customary tenets, argued for
the return of lands. But first they had to demonstrate their
‘adherence to the Queen’.
In 1877, Ruhia Teira sought the return of a portion of the southern
Ōakura Block. Following the lodging of his petition, Teira was cross-
examined on the question of loyalty to the Crown. He was asked,
‘whether your hapu generally was in rebellion’? Teira responded:
‘about an equal number fought against the Government to those
who supported them’. ‘Were the principal men of the hapu under
arms against the Government’? Teira replied, ‘some of the principal
men who remained quiet have died since the fighting. Some of them
fought against the natives.’36
Hemi Matenga’s right to petition in 1878 for the return of Waitara
South lands was also similarly examined. To the question, ‘were any
members of (your) tribe in rebellion against her Majesty?’ Matenga
replied, ‘No, none of the Ngatihinetutu. The only one of them who
remained behind was killed by the hau haus.’ And later, ‘was any
portion of this tribe of which this hapu formed a part engaged in
rebellion against the Queen?’ to which Matenga replied, ‘some of the
Ngati Awa were.’ ‘A large number?’ ‘I cannot say: I was in the north
at the time.’37
Such testimony tells us many things about how individual Māori
families from Ōakura and Waitara were affected by the wars of the
1860s. Of all issues that weighed heavily on Māori, none was as
important as the fate of the land. This is why Māori viewed the wars
of the 1860s through the context of land. There was really no other
issue. In 1957, Keith Sinclair recognised the primacy of land as the
cause of war in Taranaki. Yet, he argued, it might have been
different. Serious land problems bedevilling settlers around the
country were not affecting Pākehā who were moving to Taranaki.
Taranaki settlers were therefore less desperate. But their hunger for
land outstripped their need. Taranaki settlers were also fearful;
‘anxiety united with avarice in producing aggressive attitudes
towards Maori’. These were expressed in a stern demand that Māori
be forced to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Queen; and they be
disciplined for defying the government, writes Sinclair.38
By 1859, Governor Gore Browne was undoubtedly determined to
force the issue over land in Waitara. But how had he come to this
view, one of intolerance towards the land claims of Māori? And what
was the basis of those claims made by Māori? In the next chapters,
we will seek to untangle some of the many strands of competing
interests in land, as possessed by the Crown and Māori, that could
not be reconciled and, as a consequence, contributed to the
outbreak of war in Waitara in 1860.
CHAPTER 1

MEANINGS OF LAND

ACQUIRING LAND

‘It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the importance of land

problems in the early years of settlement’, wrote Keith Sinclair in
1957. From a humanitarian point of view, land policy should have
only been an incidental aspect of a native policy which aimed to
protect Māori from exploitation, giving effect to the provisions of the
Treaty of Waitangi signed in 1840. Instead, he said, land policy was
actively prosecuted in the interests of European settlement alone.
Quite how that policy was to take shape was argued by colonial
officials pursuing any number of agendas; and the overriding
humanitarian purpose seemed contradictory – to reconcile the
‘progress of colonization’ while making provision for the ‘just rights
of the Natives’.1
But such ideals could not be easily detached from the need to
acquire land outright from Māori; and, in any event, few officials
subscribed to such humanitarian ideals. In 1851, William Fox of the
New Zealand Company decried the ‘millions of acres, capable of
maintaining millions of people’ which Māori ‘make no use of
themselves’. Neither would they sell to Pākehā nor allow them to
take occupation. To make matters worse, Māori title to these
‘wastelands’ had, by an ‘unfortunate policy’, been recognised as valid
by the British Government. It was probably, Fox concluded, only a
question of money: ‘under the circumstances, even if it should cost
£50,000, it does not seem unreasonable to suggest that it is the
duty of the government to obtain (the land) without delay’.2
But Fox was wrong; money was not the issue. There were many
sticking points to get over before any notions of a satisfactory native
land policy could be determined. The most difficult of these was
undoubtedly how to reconcile a native policy based on unfettered
Pākehā access to Māori land with the unwelcome demands of Māori
customary tenure.

DEVISING A LAND POLICY

Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, settler politicians such as Fox

frequently took issue with the ‘unfortunate policy’ that had granted
protections for Māori land. By this, he was referring to the Treaty of
Waitangi. Article 2 of the Treaty had promised Māori sovereign
protection of their vast estates, or so they thought. When
disagreements subsequently arose about the status of land holdings,
constant reference was made by Māori to the Treaty. In 1884, the
Māori King Tāwhiao’s petition to the Queen reminded her that, by
agreement, she had promised to secure chieftainship to Māori and to
protect their lands and fisheries. ‘But these contracts have been
trampled upon by the Government without exception,’ he said.3
Whether Article 2 had ever conferred protection over Māori land,
or not, persisted as an issue of sharp disagreement after 1840. This
was especially so after 1862 when that article was effectively
annulled by the Crown with the passing of the Native Lands Act. This
Act enabled Māori land titles to be extinguished, with a Native Land
Court established for that purpose. Chief Judge Francis Fenton would
later express his ‘complete satisfaction’ with the smooth working of
this Act, especially once it was amended in 1865. Neither he nor the
legislature, he said, could have expected that the Land Court ‘would
have worked with the wonderful ease which has marked its
operations’. So much so, that preliminary notices and other
cautionary processes authorised by the Act, as protections for Māori,
had now been abandoned with no anxiety being expressed by
government or Māori.4
Article 2 had also been discredited at Waitara in 1860 when the
Crown had openly contemplated waging war on Te Ātiawa in order
to force through its contested purchase of land near Te Kohia. An
attempt to survey the land in dispute was met by a party of sixty Te
Ātiawa who obstructed the surveyors, refusing to allow them to walk
on the land while it was in dispute; and they would not allow the
surveyors to peg the ground, as if to consummate this act of
alienation. As a consequence of this refusal, reported Robert Parris,
District Commissioner, the intervention of a military force had
become necessary to enforce the survey. Parris hoped that, on the
threat of force, Te Ātiawa would scatter.5

REMOVING PROTECTIONS FOR MĀORI

Two years earlier, in 1858, the new Governor, Thomas Gore Browne,
had expressed reservations about the contradictory native land
policies inherited by him when appointed Governor in 1856. He did
not agree, he said, that measures to extinguish Māori land titles, as
were now being proposed in New Zealand’s settler Parliament,
represented the ‘true end of British policy’.
Gore Browne criticised government plans to abolish Māori
communal titles through a proposed Native Territorial Rights Bill.
This proposed 1858 measure recommended sweeping powers for
judicial officials to convert Māori communal titles into singular Crown
grants. By extinguishing such customary protections for Māori, the
land could be easily alienated direct to settlers. Such measures did
not reflect true and fair principles of land administration. Nor did
they do justice to the efforts of the ‘conscientious and experienced’
officials now working alongside Māori. These men toiled in a difficult
policy area, said Gore Browne, mediating land issues, giving effect to
both Māori and Pākehā aspirations.
Such men were now being viewed as ‘irresponsible officials’ by
politicians for allowing Māori views to at least be heard. Gore
Browne took exception to the view that his officials were
irresponsible. He was not prepared to concede that earlier officials
had enacted native policy wrongly. But he was troubled by the
complexities of reconciling settler interests with those of Māori; of
finding a way to acquire Māori land while making allowance for
Māori entitlements, however they might be defined. In the end, he
did concede that New Zealand faced serious issues about the
continuing status of Māori land. But, for the time being at least,
Māori did seem to hold undisturbed title.6
Crown officials, ‘conscientious and experienced’ or otherwise, had,
however, often expressed doubts about where the ‘true end of
British policy’ was, and whether they should be upholding the
protections conferred under Article 2 of the Treaty or not. As a
result, operating in such an ambivalent policy environment, native
officials constantly sought to circumvent these protections if it meant
moving land acquisition forward.
Despite his reservations, Gore Browne would also move to
circumvent these protections in 1859. If circumvention could not be
easily achieved, then conflict loomed as the inevitable consequence.
This was because, as was evident at Waitara, the Crown reserved to
itself the right to assert its sole authority over all matters, including
dealings in land, and was by 1859 unwilling to countenance any
challenge to this authority, especially from Māori.

FINDING A PLACE FOR MĀORI

Some support, however, remained for the Treaty as cornerstone of a

Crown land policy. As contemporaries such as William Martin pointed
out, assertions of Crown authority which underpinned land policies
were at odds with the undertakings given to Māori through the
Treaty of Waitangi. By that agreement, he said, Māori had expected
that their lands would be safeguarded and available for their own
unrestricted use. The Māori text of the Treaty, said Martin,
guaranteed to the chiefs ‘their full rights of chieftainship’.
However, paradoxically, Martin noted the soundness of the policy
whereby the Crown was institutionalising Māori interests, converting
the ‘irregular and arbitrary sway of the Chiefs into a more definite
and legal authority, subordinate to the Governor’. Nonetheless, said
Martin, the Treaty was a ‘national contract’ which had provided
settlers with rights of passage to New Zealand. As such, it ‘binds us
irrevocably as long as we retain the benefit of the contract’.7
Partly because of views like these, and of the influence that Martin
still exercised as critic of native policy, officials could not overlook the
fact that before the Treaty was signed Māori possessed customary
rights which Māori argued extended into the critical 1850s and well
beyond, not least because their livelihoods depended on retention of
those ancient landscapes. And such rights did exist, no matter how
often the Crown might wish to declare those rights to be
compromised because land seemed, for the most part, to be
‘unoccupied and waste’.8 This expression, used earlier by William
Fox, referred to Māori land not under cultivation nor otherwise
rendered ‘productive’ in economic terms, even though it might be
the productive site of planting, hunting and fishing.
Rangatira such as Wiremu Kīngi Te Rangitāke of Te Ātiawa insisted
that tribal rights to land possession pre-dated settlement from
England, and he urged Gore Browne to see it this way. As one report
later acknowledged, officials were bound to accept that a ‘distinct
owner for every habitable spot (existed) in the Northern Island’,
even if such rights were complicated by ‘the obvious causes of
inheritance and marriage’. And it was true that such rights of
ownership, whether vested in one or many joint proprietors, were
not alienable without the consent of the tribe.9

PĀKEHĀ EXPECTATIONS OF LAND

But provision had to be made somewhere, said the Crown, for new
settlers who were arriving with expectations of acquiring land on
which they might develop new settlements, economies and
livelihoods. This process would be far from straightforward. Officials
observed that ‘native titles’ to land in New Zealand were peculiar. In
most other Crown colonies, native peoples had been recognised as
possessing some rights over the soil. But many were paid
‘comparatively trifling sums’ in order that such rights might be
quickly surrendered. In New Zealand, land could not be so easily
acquired. By the interpretation placed upon the Treaty of Waitangi
by the British Government, at least immediately after 1840, it was
considered that the New Zealand tribes possessed a continuing ‘right
of proprietorship over their lands’.
As Gore Browne and William Martin argued after 1858, this was a
right that could not be so easily extinguished, despite what colonial
politicians might think. This was not simply a general right of
dominion; it was a ‘right of proprietorship’. This right of
proprietorship was similar to that exercised by ‘landlords of estates’
in the home country, England. It amounted to a Māori land right
which the Crown was bound to recognise, and in policy terms, the
Crown was bound to make good if seeking to alienate land. Article 2
therefore might have some standing, or so said the Crown’s
‘irresponsible officials’.
Observations such as these were made to address the policy
options of government where meaningful access for settlers to Māori
land was concerned, while at the same time making due allowance
for ‘Native rights’. Settlers objected to such rights as these being
asserted on behalf of Māori, arguing that they were unfair on
colonists. That Māori individuals might be entitled to an absolute
proprietorship over lands of ‘whatever territories his tribe might think
fit to make over to him’ was inequitable. And it would be
unreasonable of Māori, it was said, if they were to impose any
conditions on land transactions which might be seen to operate ‘for
their own sole and exclusive benefit’.10

PRESSURE ON SALES

In this context, one of a certain accrual of rights owing to Māori,

individual tribes became defensive and were increasingly reluctant to
alienate land. They were equally determined to arrest the rate of
sales already achieved by the Crown. The South Taranaki hui called
at Manawapou in April 1854 by Ngāti Ruanui attracted large
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