Peter Walker: The Fox Boy: The Story of an Abducted Child

By DICK SCOTT*

Possessed by a face, the hauntingly bewildered face of a 7-year-old Maori boy plucked from the Taranaki bush and photographed in high-fashion Eton suit and smart boots, Peter Walker, a journalist long employed away from his home country, came back to New Zealand for some intensive research.

"Looking at the child's expression," he writes in The Fox Boy, "I wonder what happened to you."

The stolen boy, Ngatau Omahuru, was baptised with the name of his guardian, Sir William Fox, his real parents' names replaced in the records by those of two people safely dead.

Growing up in the childless Fox house, he became a law clerk, a key figure in Sir Walter Buller's land-grabbing legal office. And then, sickened by Pakeha manipulation of his life, he joined Te Whiti O Rongomai at Parihaka.

The story has been briefly recorded in published Parihaka history, but with dramatic detail buried in the archives and some clues from Maori relatives, the book unravels a riveting trail that leaves the reader as transported by the boy's photograph as the author has been.

A reporter with the polish to make the past as alive as a current news story, to follow Peter Walker's researches is to be at the shoulder of a crack detective in a high-level kidnapping case.

Well-known villains such as Fox, four times Prime Minister, and Bryce of Parihaka invasion ill-fame, are stripped of all possibility of exoneration - by the standards of the time as much as by those of today - their thinking revealed in previously unpublished correspondence can only stoke new waves of revulsion.

Two hundred pages follow the boy through the fascinating political climate of the time until, now a 19-year-old, he abandons Wellington's privileged world to sit beside Te Whiti as his translator.

Given the rare honour of speaking on Te Whiti and Tohu's own monthly speech day, the Fox boy explains he had found that his foster-parent, "the great lawyer of high standing, was not a 100-year-old rata, but only a cabbage tree ... After that, could I have remained to be deceived. Never! ... Listen, when you receive kindness from lawyers, and Pakeha are loving to you, be on your guard ... My love for my people and land will never pass away ... No teaching will change my nature, but the Pakeha will not see that an albatross cannot be changed into a crow."

In a grand climax to the broken foster parent/son relationship, the book presents the invasion of Parihaka as no more than the vengeful action of a deeply humiliated Fox. That he had been out of office for eight years and that the destruction of the village was the work of the ruthless Maori-basher John Hall, the Prime Minister who chose Bryce as Native Minister, escapes mention.

The final 100 pages on Te Whiti and Tohu's teachings, the invasion and its sequel, bring sparkling new life to the history we know. To keep the momentum rolling - and how it rolls - speculation to cover lack of hard evidence is sometimes stretched too far, but when the author writes of what "may seem fantastic suggestions", readers in this country have enough background knowledge to make their own judgments.

Along the way to visiting his two Maori informants, the author digresses to tell of New Zealand's dismal provincial towns.

In Hawkes Bay he sees gigantic plastic ducklings at the entrance to Waipawa (he speaks of "Disneyesque image ... on the heart of every local councillor") and hears details of "Mungie" (Mongrel Mob) burglaries in Hastings' "notorious crime-ridden Flaxmere". Taranaki is introduced with an angry woman "slamming down plates" in Patea's Canoe Cafe and bleakly continues with several pages on the unlovely people of Hawera. Was this the kind of put-down an English publisher required to please his readers?

Allowed to be small for a moment beside an engrossing tale, it is disappointing to read that the face that had so fascinated him was one he found without reference to its source, the full-page photo that has appeared in a book in print since 1975.

Bloomsbury

$29.95

* Dick Scott is the author of Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka.