War or rebellion began with an axe

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 17

War or rebellion began with an axe

New Zeeland’s First War or the Rebellion of Hone Heke. By T. Lindsay Buick. Government Printer, 1926. Capper Press reprint, 1976. 304 pp. $19.50. (Reviewed by Ashley Spice) (A To this day. many Maoris have a -r.her appreciation of the effect of a dramatic gesture than many New Zealanders of European extraction. Hone Heke’s story is clear proof that they have inherited this in their blood, for when Hone Heke chopped down the flagpole at Kororareka on which the Union Jack was flying, he chopped his way into New Zealand history. Every New Zealand schoolchild learns of his act to defiance, often to the neglect of later incidents in which other Maoris made a more bitter, desperate resistance, in the 1850 s and 1860 s, against the European tide from a much clearer understanding than Hone Heke appears to have had, in the 1840 s, of the threat that Europeans posed to Maori ways and to the Maori hold on the land of New Zealand. To Hone Heke, at least as his exploits are described by Lindsay Buick, taunting the British was all a bit of a lark. But at the same time Buick’s story makes it clear that what Hone Heke

mounted was an organised attempt to dispute British sovereignty over New Zealand and that he was one of the f i r s 1 Maori “nationalists,” endeavouring to maintain the Maori hold over or at least preeminence in New Zealand. There was of course, no Maori “nation” at the time, and the fighting in the north in the mid 1840 s was clearly also, as Buick’s pages make clear, a continuation of the tribal wars of the pre-European period. The British appear, from the Maori point of view, at times merely a complicating, secondary factor and not the main reason for Hone Heke to be fighting as much because fighting was what came naturally to the Maori from “patriotic” motives. But Buick’s material, all the same, justifies his dignifying the scrapping with the name of “rebellion.” Having convinced himself that it was a rebellion — a fight against properly constituted authority — Buick is in a difficult position of writing with true objectivity about Hone Heke and his cause. For what appeared a “rebellion” to European New Zealanders was obviously something else to the Maoris, even

though Hone Heke himself had signed the Treaty of Waitangi. So the portrait Buick paints of Hone Heke himself is not always as understanding or as sympathetic as it might be, even allowing for the fact that the. chief was a fiery, unpredictible, restless fellow even by the Maori standards of the day. Buick sometimes discredits his motives for fighting, and the suspicion is there that this is at least partly because of prejudice than Hone Heke’s actions or words justify such strictures. But Buick does balance this — with uncomplimentary and sometimes harsh words for many of the Europeans involved in the fighting or in the negotiations that preceded and followed it, although he is partisan to Grey and the missionaries and fairer to Fitzßoy than many historians have been. The real strengths of the book are not the interpretations it advances or its analyses of motives but the very fine narrative passages in which the attack on Kororareka and the battles at Ohaeawai and Ruapekapeka are told from*both sides, Maori and European, and credit and criticism dispensed with fine impartiality between Maoris and Europeans.