Call to move controversial memorial

Otahuhu's Nixon memorial. An activist says Colonel Nixon "treated Maori as prey". Photo / Supplied

A petition has been launched against an Auckland monument commemorating a colonial colonel who "pursued Maori as prey" during the settler invasion of the Waikato in the 1860s.

In a move echoing the racially charged Confederate monuments debate in the United States, community activist and former Labour Party official Shane Te Pou yesterday launched the petition urging mayor Phil Goff to relocate the Nixon Memorial in Otahuhu to a museum.

Colonel Marmaduke George Nixon was an early settler in south Auckland and the Franklin Member of the House of Representatives who commanded the Colonial Defence Force Cavalry during the invasion.

He died on May 27, 1864 from wounds suffered in a battle with Maori three months earlier.

Te Pou said while the memorial stood in tribute to the cavalrymen who perished, the spilling of Maori blood went unmentioned.

"Nixon pursued Maori as prey, including the women and children who died during his notorious and deadly attack on Rangiaowhia," he said. He described Nixon as "a man who embodies the worst of colonial brutality".

Earlier this year Vincent O'Malley, author of The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000 described the invasion of Waikato as a brutal and ruthless conflict and the attack on Rangiaowhia as "one of the more shameful episodes in a greater tragedy".

Writing in the Listener, O'Malley said Rangiaowhia was an undefended village occupied by women, children and the elderly, placed there to keep them safe from the fighting.

British accounts said 12 Maori men and women died in the attack and a hut was accidentally burnt to the ground by sparks from gunfire. But O'Malley said Maori witnesses said the soldiers deliberately torched several huts, killing up to 100 people.

Te Pou is asking for the statue to be moved to Auckland War Memorial Museum, and says it "represents a Eurocentric historical worldview that inhibits a full reckoning with New Zealand's past".

In a statement, Mayor Phil Goff said if there was sentiment in the community that the "other side of the story" needed to be told, he was "not opposed to it".

- NZN