Monash University, Australia, professor Dr Bain Attwood has written the book A Bloody Difficult Subject Ruth Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History 50. Photo / Supplied
Monash University, Australia, professor Dr Bain Attwood has written the book A Bloody Difficult Subject Ruth Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History 50. Photo / Supplied
Ruth Ross is a name most New Zealanders won’t automatically associate with Te Tiriti o Waitangi but a new biography of her life lifts the lid on how the middle-class Pākehā woman became a fierce proponent of the Māori text of the infamous document.
Dr Bain Attwood, a professor of history at Monash University in Australia, has written the book A Bloody Difficult Subject: Ruth Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the Making of History. It comes 50 years after her own work transformed the way the Treaty was understood in Aotearoa, leading to its prominent place in Aotearoa politics, law and culture.
“She came to the Treaty much earlier than many Pākehā. She came to the Māori text of the Treaty almost before any other Pākehā in New Zealand did. This was in the early to mid-1950s.”
When she died in 1982, it was found she had stored documents, notes and many thousands of letters she had written. And Attwood says, surprisingly for a middle-class woman of her time, she swore a lot, which is the basis for the title of the book.
“I thought she had a really interesting life, sometimes a sad life, but she was something of an outsider.
“There’s a significant moment. She and her husband and two young children moved from Auckland, and went way up north to Hokianga. Her husband was teaching in the Māori school system, and they were living in a small rural Māori community. She’s already interested in the Treaty by this time but she engages with two Māori men in particular that she calls rangatira.”
Attwood says Ross presented the two men with the Māori text of the Treaty, which was signed at Waitangi and also at the Māngungu Mission, which was not far from where she lived at Motukiore.
Ruth Ross. Photo / Te Ara Encyclopedia
“There’s this really interesting conversation. She’s intensely interested in Māori perspectives of the Treaty and that was unusual in the mid-1950s. She had other views about the treaty but what has come to characterise her work was this interest in the Māori text. She was convinced that the Māori text was very different from the text in English. And that’s what drew me into it.”
He says the standing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi has been transformed enormously in the past 70 years, due in part to the work Ross did on the Māori text. The dominant position of legal scholars in the 1950s had been that the Treaty had no validity in international or domestic law. That began to change in the 1970s.
“When Ruth Ross is doing her work, the dominant position is that the law has no validity. And she really followed that assumption.
“Had she not died as early as she did in 1982, I think she would have been very surprised by this major shift in the law and in the way the Treaty was understood. It was also that the law really had no interpretive authority. What’s happened since the mid-1980s, is that the law in my view has now become the dominant idiom. The dominant frame in the Treaty is understood.”
New Zealand-born Attwood has written several books about colonisation and indigenous history on both sides of the Tasman. He says he has been fascinated with understanding why Britain created a treaty with Māori but not other indigenous peoples in Australia.
“I wasn’t satisfied with the way that had usually been explained. I was really mostly focusing on the English text of the Treaty because, of course, that was the text that the British had drawn up.
“Perhaps as part of the ageing process, as I age I want to return more to my New Zealand roots and so then I came to write this book about Ruth Ross but not only her but seeing how her work was read or received in ways that I think was surprising, and then how generally historians tell stories about the past and how Pākehā historians tend to do that in ways different from the ways that many Māori would tell that story.”
