Sir George Grey's statue in Auckland's Albert Park was daubed with red paint during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020.
Photo / Michael Craig
Sir George Grey's statue in Auckland's Albert Park was daubed with red paint during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020.
Photo / Michael Craig
A Whanganui-based Māori historian is one of 50 international scholars participating in a study of the monuments housed in St Paul's Cathedral in London.
Professor Danny Keenan (Ngāti Te Whiti Ahi Kā, Te Ātiawa) was invited to present A Māori View of Sir George Grey to an international audience. Grey was governor of New Zealand twice, and premier once, also serving in parliament until his return to England in 1898.
"The project is especially pertinent at a time when public monuments in Britain and the USA have been increasingly challenged, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter [BLM] and Rhodes Must Fall movements," Keenan said.
A statue of Grey in Auckland's Albert Park was daubed with red paint during an Aotearoa BLM protest in 2020.
"Writing about Sir George Grey was interesting," Keenan said.
"Because not a lot is known about him beyond New Zealand, certainly not in the Rhodes Must Fall context."
Keenan said in some quarters, Grey was remembered as a strong-minded, reforming politician who mentored a later generation of radical liberal politicians who would transform New Zealand after 1891, including Whanganui's John Ballance.
"I was interested to focus on his early career as a British army officer in Ireland, followed by colonial administrator in Australia and South Africa, where his uncompromising defence of Empire was set in concrete.
"Grey's career was very complex, to say the least. His scholarship with a number of rangatira [Māori leaders] earned him some respect. But for Māori, Grey's insistence that Māori could not be anything other than subjects in their own country did not, of course, go down well."
Keenan said Grey's legacy was most particularly tainted by his pre-emptive invasion of the Waikato and the punitive land confiscations that followed during the 1860s.
Waikato–Tainui iwi finally received a Treaty of Waitangi settlement and a formal apology from the Queen in 1995.
"The invasion and confiscations inflicted so much hurt, dispossession, and loss on Māori - only recently ameliorated - undoubtedly tainted his legacy," Keenan said.
Whanganui-based historian Professor Danny Keenan is one of 50 international artists and scholars studying the monuments of London's St Paul's Cathedral.
Photo / Supplied
The monument inside St Paul's "to the memory of Sir George Grey" was presented by the New Zealand Government in 1904, following Grey's death and burial there in 1898. It was engraved by Edward Onslow Ford of Farmer & Brindley, London.
The monument project, entitled Pantheons: Sculpture at St Paul's, was launched in December in partnership with the Department of the History of Art, University of York. Keenan, along with 49 international historians, writers, poets, musicians, and theologians from around the world, was partnered with a monument to study.
Keenan said there were mixed views on the fate of monuments to controversial colonial leaders of the past.
"I've never been too sure about statues, to be quite honest. I've been reading the St Paul's contributions from the other writers with interest; opinion as to what happens next is really divided," he said.
"Perhaps pulling down statues is more of a political act, where distinguishing between black and white appears straightforward. When the statues were falling overseas, my cousin, Debbie Ngāwera-Packer MP, and others were quite outspoken and unequivocal about what should happen, and they were not, per se, wrong."
Keenan said history as a discipline was really nuanced and complicated, with a lot going on at once, as the St Paul's writers were showing him.
