AN EARLY PRIMATE

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32322, 13 June 1970, Page 4

AN EARLY PRIMATE

Octavius Hadfield. By Barbara Macmorran. David Jones, Wellington. 197 pp. “In the making of New Zealand, Octavius Hadfield played a statesmen’s part. In the history of Wellington, he looms co-equal with Fitzherbert, Featherston and Wakefield” —From an obituary notice in 1904. Yet Hadfield’s name had almost faded from our history in a few short decades. Octavius Hadfield arrived in New Zealand in 1838, commissioned by the Church Missionary Society in England to minister to the Maori people. He was twenty-three, a tall, thin, young man with handsome, clean-cut features, severe countenance, blue eyes and erect carriage. He was well-educated, cultured, purposeful, and in very precarious health. In fact it was thought he had not long to live. But although ill-health plagued him all his life, he lived to be ninety. In the course of his 65 years of service in New Zealand, Octavius Hadfield became Archdeacon of Kapiti, then Bishop of Wellington and finally Primate of New Zealand. This office he held for only four years, from 18891893, then feeling too unwell to carry on he resigned and retired to live in Marton. Before he left he destroyed the bulk of his journals and papers and letters—the memoirs of 55 years’ work in New Zealand. Much of great interest must have been burned that day, but quite a lot was left. Printed pamphlets and letters and copies of his letters to the Church Missionary Society are back in New Zealand. And • his great-grand-daughter, Barbara Macmorran, has used extracts from letters and his diaries as the basis of this biography. It is a pity that in spite of all this personal and authentic material, Bishop Hadfield himself remains a cardboard figure—he does not come alive and step from the pages as it were. In real life he must have been a magnetic person; some vital spark is missing in

this rather dry account of his career. Hadfield did magnificent work amongst the Maoris, a people that appealed to him and whose cause he championed fearlessly—his influence with them was very strong and his mana high. Often it was owing to his direct intervention that clashes between Maori and European were averted. He was most fearless in expressing his own opinions where he thought them right, and incurred much odium in vindicating what he believed to be the rights of Maoris regarding the sale of their land. For years he was troubled with great pain in his chest—frequent entries in his dairies read “felt very unwell” or “felt far from well." In spite of this constant affliction, Hadfield travelled extensively by boat, horse or on foot, visiting his people in most out-of-the-way places. Sometimes he had dinner, sometimes not, once even “had some boiled flour for dinner.”

Having a keen mind steeped in the classics and trained in the art of logic, Hadfield got hold of the essential elements of a question, marshalled his arguments with impetuous rapidity in clear and logical order and would seize like lightning on the weak points in the argument of an opponent. He was by nature an exceptionally clear thinker —as a debater he had no-one approaching him in the Wellington Synod. Writing to his eldest son Henry in the years 1894-1903, he discussed affairs in Greece, India, Cuba, China, France and he even suggested that because of the drop in demand for wool in England, New Zealand merchants should try to find a market in Japan! His own philosophy was summed up in another of his letters to Henry—“to be interested only in what concerns one’s own time would be contemptible selfishness.” Denial of self to the point almost of sacrifice was one of the greatest strengths of this eminently worthy man.