FEATURE: New slant on Bay `massacre'

JONATHAN DOW
Next month is the 140th anniversary of the battle of Omarunui.
Settler militia and Ngati Kahungunu warriors attacked members of the Pai Marire. The religious sect which believed Maori were a lost tribe of Israel and which became a focus of anti-settler sentiment, were camped alongside the Tutaekuri River.
The fighting on October 12, 1866, lasted only an hour and left 21 Pai Marire, one settler, and one Ngati Kahungunu dead.
It has been called a massacre.
Historian Matthew Wright disagrees: "We have to put that (claim) in the context of the people who made it."
In his new book, Two Peoples, One Land, Wright has placed the New Zealand Wars in their social and cultural context.
Wright acknowledges the work of the revisionist historians of the 1970s and 1980s in shattering the myth that, after the wars, New Zealand was a "race relations nirvana". Revisionism offered a new perspective and successfully demolished many of the race-relations myths of the mid-twentieth century.
But he takes broad issue with a number of ways in which the wars have been interpreted.
In the introduction to Two Peoples, One Land, Wright explains how some revisionism has prompted debate "partly because the approach challenged long-accepted ideas, partly because such thinking was inevitably received - and sometimes expressed - within the framework of late twentieth-century attitudes to colonisation and race relations. Enthusiasm for the new also led on occasion to overstatement; the New Zealand Wars were elevated, idealised, even labelled sacred".
Wright has detailed, in far more detail than can be done here, the scene in Hawke's Bay before and after the battle of Omarunui. Pai Marire were welcomed by Ngati Whatuiapiti chief Te Hapuku, who had been living at Te Hauke since losing an 1857-'58 war with Ngati Kahungunu.
Ngati Kahungunu in Heretaunga opposed Pai Marire.
Donald McLean, three years before he became both Native and Defence Ministers, wielded considerable influence. The settlers were very nervous.
Wright said you could compare it to how communism was perceived during the Cold War, or terrorism today: "What we imagine the threat to be is far greater than what it actually is.
"But what counted was the fear that the Pai Marire generated rather than their actual ability, and the political capital that people like Donald McLean could make by exploiting that fear."
The Pai Marire could have made a raid on Napier, but in reality they could never have taken what was then the major centre between Auckland and Wellington.
Wright said that although the threat was not as great as the settlers thought, they really did believe a grave threat existed.
The claim of a massacre at Omarunui was first made in 1866, and Wright said that must be understood in context.
McLean and the man who commanded the raid on the Pai Marire, national militia commander Colonel George S Whitmore, who owned land at Rissington, hated each other.
McLean was trying to build his power-base. The Church Missionary Society objected to any settler attacks on Maori. Put the documents of the period in the context in which they were created, said Wright, and it is obvious McLean put a spin on the battle.
Wright said talk of a massacre suited some historians too.
"The allegation that the peace-loving Pai Marire were brutally slaughtered by evil settlers fitted the post-colonial ideals of the 1980s and 1990s, and that's why it was so attractive to revisionism."
He details the efforts McLean made to obtain a surrender, and how such efforts were rejected by the Pai Marire forces.
"I've tried to portray the wars as they were seen by the people of the day.
"It was a different time, and we can only understand its meaning if we first see it on its own terms," he said.
Some of what happened won't be acceptable to people today, and some settler behaviour may appear odd, even offensive by our standards, he said. Wright knows some of their behaviour may now appear to be a contradiction.
But, of course, it didn't appear so to them.
That is the trick, to understand the dynamics of the time, Wright said. That is what he has explored in Two Peoples, One Land.