Former Masterton historian honoured in Australia

A former Masterton historian, Kristyn Harman, has been honoured in Australia for her book remembering some of the nation's forgotten prisoners.
Dr Harman's book, Aboriginal Convicts - Australian, Khoisan and Maori Exiles, was awarded the Kay Daniels Award from the Australian Historical Association.
According to the citation the book is "primarily concerned with Australian Aborigines and the criminalising of their resistance to European invasion", but also features both South African Khoi and Maori, who became convicts "often for similar acts of defiance". Harman's detail "captures a world defined by ... frontier conflict, the dubious application of law, and the malevolence and hardship of convict servitude in some of the darkest corners of the system".
Dr Harman, speaking from Tasmania on Monday, says she was drawn to these stories while visiting Tasmania in 1994, where she was directed to the headstone of one Hohepa Te Umuroa, a Maori prisoner who died there in 1847.
"I was just fascinated that he had been there in the 1840s."
Te Umuroa's body had been repatriated to his former home at Jerusalem, on the Whanganui River in 1988 - a significant year as it was Australia's bicentenary.
"It was quite a celebration," Dr Harman said. "And it sort of highlighted indigenous grievances as a counterpoint."
For her doctorate degree, Dr Harman studied firstly the stories of the Australian Aborigines who were imprisoned for acts of resistance to white settlement.
"There were frontier wars fought across all of Australia," she said.
"A lot of men got captured and a number were put through the convict system."
In her book, Dr Harman was able to include stories of Maori, such as Te Umuroa, who suffered a similar fate, and of the Khoi people who resisted white rule in the Cape Colony of South Africa.
According to Dr Harman the Australians saw Maori, "as more civilised, more noble" than aboriginal people, and were more willing to see them as "martial enemies", rather than simply criminals.
"It was a matter of perception," she said.
Aborigines "were seen as being lower down the scale".
Dr Harman, who first studied history at Wairarapa College under teacher Jim Graydon, says it is important to understand such stories because "as Aboriginal people say, the past lives in the present".
Dr Harman now lectures in Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania.