“Recording the Incident with a Monument”: The Waikato War in Historical Memory

Abstract

This paper charts changing perceptions of the Waikato War in national memory and consciousness. The recent sesquicentenary passed by most New Zealanders largely unnoticed. Historical memories of the war that once (in part thanks to James Cowan) fed into larger nation-building narratives cut across them today. A century ago it was possible for Pākehā to believe that the Waikato War had given birth to fifty years of peace and that mutual respect forged in battle had provided the basis for “race relations” of unparalleled harmony. By the 1970s such a notion could no longer be sustained, leaving a kind of uncomfortable silence about one of the decisive events in New Zealand history.

Questioning the canon: Colonial history, counter-memory and youth activism

“…In August 2016, 8 months after the petition was delivered to Parliament, the government announced that a national day of commemoration for the New Zealand Wars would be introduced. This is important because the way that wars are remembered changes over time, and this is true of the wars that shaped New Zealand’s colonial history (O’Malley, 2015). The canon is reformulated in response to the needs of different groups.…”

“…At Ōrākau, armed cavalry and other troops hunted down and killed more than half of the defenders as they made a desperate effort to flee for their lives on foot. The stench of decomposing bodies in the nearby swamp where many fell could still be smelt weeks later (O’Malley, 2015: 86). These painful incidents were inscribed in the Waikato tribal memory in multiple ways, including in the names given to people and places, waiata (songs) and oral histories (McCan, 2001).…”

“…Nostalgia for the ‘pioneering period’, and the perception that Māori no longer constituted a threat to settler hegemony, allowed some of the worst incidents in New Zealand history to enter Pākehā collective memory as chivalrous, noble and heroic moments in the nation’s past. The 50th anniversary of Ōrākau was attended by a large, mostly Pākehā crowd, who had come to celebrate an event they believed had given rise to 50 years of peace and ‘the greatest race relations in the world’ (O’Malley, 2015: 82). The writer and journalist James Cowan (1983) had been instrumental in popularising the wars in Pākehā imaginations, observing that these had ended ‘with a strong mutual respect, tinged with a real affection, which would never have existed but for this ordeal by battle’ (p. 3).…”

“…Compared with Gallipoli or the Western Front, the wars fought within New Zealand provided almost no source of patriotic pride. From the perspective of many Pākehā, it was easier to forget they had ever happened especially as a resurgent Māori population demanded that historical grievances be addressed (O’Malley, 2015: 91). In 1975 legislation provided for the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal, a standing commission of inquiry charged with investigating Māori claims against the Crown under the Treaty of Waitangi.…”

“…Colonial military hostilities against indigenous populations, if they are mentioned in contemporary state narratives at all, are frequently represented as having been mutually and satisfactorily resolved in the interests of a reconciled modern settler nationhood (O’Malley, 2015). But what happens when public silences around the colonial past begin to fragment?…”