Obituary: Hugh Kawharu

Sir Hugh provided a cool head for negotiations after the bitter Bastion Pt land battle ended.

Professor Sir Hugh Kawharu, ONZ, Maori leader. Died aged 79.

History seems likely to judge Sir Hugh Kawharu both as a man of his time and of his people, the Ngati Whatua, especially during the years when they were embroiled in their bitter struggle to recover land at Auckland's Bastion Pt.

Sir Hugh, who died on Tuesday, was a leader of quiet persuasion and manner, able to maintain persistent and detailed argument during years when issues of alienated Maori land rose to great prominence.

He was for 26 years chairman of the of the Ngati Whatua o Orakei Maori Trust Board, centred at Bastion Pt.

He was also an emeritus professor at Auckland University, a man of high education moving with apparent ease in Maori and European surroundings.

It may well be that the great disturbances of the occupation of Bastion Pt by protesters led by Joe Hawke of Ngati Whatua dissuaded the Government from proceeding with a subdivision of prime city coastal land.

But the eventual progress towards a negotiated settlement owed much to cooler tribal heads equipped with research and determination.

Professor Kawharu could and did outline events in the area from the time in 1869 when the Maori Land Court, having looked at the title of the 284ha Orakei Block, established it as a trust estate for Ngati Whatua and how that land was later partitioned off and bought by the Crown.

Other land disappeared under the Public Works Act for gun emplacements and even more land, ostensibly for state housing.

In the event in 1988, after seven months of deliberations, the Labour Government effectively handed back 10ha.

The then Professor Kawharu said the decision went a long way towards righting the wrongs of the past. It meant Ngati Whatua could now administer their own marae, something that was central to their mana.

As a reminder of the earlier tensions under which they had worked at the time of the occupation, the Prime Minister of those earlier days, Sir Robert Muldoon (by 1988 reduced to being the Opposition MP for Tamaki), could not resist hailing the decision as a recipe for major racial disharmony.

He said the Government must stop the process, as it opened the way for a multitude of claims at a cost that was impossible to contemplate.

Sir Hugh was also involved in the creation of Te Runanga o Ngati Whatua, a unifying body for all his tribe.

In academia he was a foundation professor (personal chair) in social anthropology and Maori studies at Massey University from 1970 to 1984 and professor of Maori studies and head of the anthropology department at Auckland University from 1985 to 1993.

He authored, edited and co-authored publications on Maori land tenure, the Treaty of Waitangi and ethnicity. He held an MA (Cambridge) and a DPhil (Oxford).

On historic matters he once characterised the Native Land Court of earlier times as "a veritable engine of destruction for any tribe's tenure of land, anywhere".

But he also watched matters involving modern Maori. He once observed that catering to the special needs of Maori children was not and never had been the raison d'etre of the state secondary school system.

In 1970 he said Government aid programmes to Maori - for example, housing, land settlement, trade training and vocational guidance - could make sense only in Pakeha terms.

Such a process of individualisation eroded the tribal basis of the Maori groups. The absence of alternatives was the clearest indication that when the Pakeha said "integration" he really meant "assimilation".

Sir Hugh was involved with many academic and professional organisations, notably as a research fellow with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (UN); the NZ Council for Educational Research and the Royal Commission for Courts. He was on the Maori Council, the Waitangi Tribunal, the trust board of the Auckland War Memorial Museum and the Arts Foundation of New Zealand.

Sir Hugh attended Auckland Grammar School and Auckland and Victoria Universities before going off to Oxford and Cambridge on a Sir Apirana Ngata Scholarship.

He completed a masters degree and then a doctorate with research on ethnic relations and land tenure, which he later expanded into full studies of New Zealand land dealings.

He once wrote of the Ngati Whatua of Orakei's situation 50 years or so ago. He said few Maori communities of the time could have been more perplexed and disconcerted by the loss of their lands, their marae (on the Okahu Bay foreshore) and their economic independence.

Few people were "more completely stripped of identity and self-respect".

Knighted in 1989 for services to Maori, Sir Hugh was also made a member of the Order of NZ in 2002.

He is survived by daughters Margaret, Evelyn, Lindy, Merata and Amokura. His wife, Lady Freda, died in 2000.