Strange story of the Fox boy

An expat Kiwi writer has come across the intriguing saga of a little boy lost who ended up at the centre of major historical events. MARGIE THOMSON explains.

Since the 1980s Pakeha guilt has been at the forefront of New Zealand's political agenda, thrown centre stage by the dismantling of a myth, and fought over by Pakeha of emotional tendencies ranging from self-abasement to harsh unrepentance.

What Peter Walker offers us in his history-laden and captivating book The Fox Boy (Bloomsbury, $29.95), based around the kidnapping of a young Maori boy at the battle of the Beak of the Bird in 1868, is another take on European culpability.

Amid the scurrilousness, the broken promises, the confiscations and clearances (and the murders that these things sometimes entailed) were Pakeha of a different bent - "wonderful people," Walker asserts, "intellectual and political forebears who we can be proud of."

Walker is a kind of semi-expat: born and educated here, he has lived in London since 1986, a journalist of some prestige who has worked for seven years on the Independent, followed by three as foreign editor for the Independent on Sunday. But he hasn't cut his ties to home, and has visited at least once a year since he left, sometimes for extended periods, such as when he researched his piece on our race relations for Granta a few years ago.

"So," he says, "I've never lost my eye for the place, or my feeling for it."

Commissioned to write a kind of travel book about New Zealand - "just travelling around and finding the story, a fairly standard formula now" - he was leafing through Dick Scott's book about Parihaka, Ask That Mountain, when he came across the photo of Ngatau Omahuru, the 6-year-old boy whose misfortune it was to be out in the forest alone on the day the colonial forces, led by Thomas McDonnell and Gustavus Von Tempsky, attacked the headquarters of the formidable chief Titokowaru at Te Ngutu O Te Manu, the Beak of the Bird, on the Taranaki plains in 1868.

Omahuru was captured, along with two other children taken from Titokowaru's hospital. One of the other children had his brains "dashed out" because he wouldn't stop crying, and the other child's fate remains uncertain - eye-witness accounts differ on whether she was also murdered - but Omahuru was taken, baptised, renamed William Fox after the Prime Minister of the day, and brought to Wanganui where he was "adopted" by Fox himself and, luckily for all of us who are now able to play our own small part in this little boy's ultimate fate, photographed. "He looks as if he has seen a ghost," Walker writes.

"Only one original print of the photograph exists. It is in the National Library in Wellington. Who deposited it there, and when, are not known.

"On its back, in careful, faint handwriting, are a number of lies. It is in the nature of images to change their efficacy, and it was this image of powerlessness, the expression on the face of a kidnapped child which, more than a hundred years later, had turned the tables.

"Now, for example, it waylaid me. I saw a copy a few months before going to New Zealand to write a travel book. Well, I thought, looking at this expression, I wonder what happened to you."

Surprisingly, wonderfully, Walker's research in the Turnbull, the Hocken and among people likely to know (Maori, as he says at one point, are a deeply memorious race) showed the little boy to be a lightning rod for some of the most significant political events of the coming decade.

Through the story of Omahuru move some of the worst and best characters of New Zealand's short past. After his capture, the little boy was eventually taken to Wellington, where he lived in the Native Hostelry on Tinakori Rd for a couple of years before moving into the dour home of the Hon Premier, Sir William Fox, a fanatical foe of the evil drink, also known for his vanity and vindictiveness. There he remained until the age of about 16 when he was passed to a prominent conveyancing lawyer, the more cheerful but unscrupulous Walter Buller, to begin his ordained career as "the first Maori lawyer."

Many other significant personalities are also to be found here: murderous John Bryce who became Native Minister; cold, shrewd Attorney-General Whittaker; the Christian humanitarian Governor Sir Arthur Gordon who, through lack of foresight, was hoodwinked into allowing far worse men to decide the fate of the Taranaki Maori; the Bishop of Wellington, Octavius Hadfield, who publicly proclaimed that crimes had been committed against Taranaki Maori.

And, looming over all of these in Walker's mind, is the figure of Te Whiti, prophet of peace, as yet officially unrecognised ("he's not even on a postage stamp, and Parihaka is not even on the map"). Te Whiti is, Walker believes, quite simply our "great moral figure."

And indeed, as if with the blast of an army bugle, Omahuru's story as told by Walker leads us straight to the gate of Parihaka, into the sphere of Te Whiti, with a new theory as to why after so many months of not attacking this peaceable man's domain, Bryce was finally given the go-ahead by Fox to do so.

By that stage, Omahuru had in effect fled the Pakeha world. For a while, as the first Maori lawyer and in the dubious position of working within Pakeha law, he was busy transferring titles from Maori to the land's new owners. He seems to have been shocked by a series of events involving the mistreatment of his older brother into returning to his roots, to take his place at the side of Te Whiti. Walker suspects - and provides lucid reasons for doing so - that the attack on Parihaka was a retaliation by the vindictive Fox for his foster son's perceived treachery.

One thing to be said for Walker is that he is not afraid to throw a theory into the ring.

He does it several times in his book, perhaps most notably when he speculates that New Zealanders' "poverty of speech" is a result of the buried shame of having broken so many promises to Maori.

"It may be a wacky theory," he says, "and it may be wrong, but at least it's a theory, and we need some deep theory in New Zealand.

"Because it's not a boring country and it's not a simple country, and it seems to me that this great series of events where we did break our word has of course had an effect on all of us."

He believes this is changing as we face our past - the Waitangi Tribunal, for instance, is part of the process of getting skeletons out of the closet, as is the movement of people on to marae to learn more about "what this country is, who and how we got here, and who we were met by."

A startling effect of Walker's book is that he makes three-dimensional the street maps of our cities and towns: Fox Glacier; Whittaker Place; tiny Mawhitiwhiti, a blink-and-you've-missed-it scattering of bungalows on the highway, the village where Omahuru was born.

"We live amongst our history," he says, "and we don't even know it.

"It's staggering to me that the country was able to hide its past - to bore people away from their own history. The marvellous stories - there was a kind of veil drawn over them, and I really think that was an almost deliberate part of the process. They won but they lost the moral battle and they were ashamed of themselves ...

"I think that had a weird effect on the whole of our national psyche. After all, it was New Zealand more than any other British colony which was really predicated on good relations between the races ... this was the point, it was our moral foundation, it was our raison d'etre as a colony, as a country, as an idea and it worked very well for 20 years from 1840 until 1860, and then the thieves and the rogues and the warmongers took over and that's hard to explain."

For all the biblical tone of his theory - the wages of sin, and so on - it is not confession, or guilt or even self-forgiveness that is the answer, but knowledge.

"If we really know our history then that's all we need," he says.

"We don't need to pour ashes over ourselves and debase ourselves with guilt - although I think it's pretty hard not to feel guilty, and there's nothing wrong with a bit of guilt, but it would be wrong to make too much of it.

"So much was hidden from us, but knowledge will free us."