Cowan’s ‘Wars’ 60 years on

Press, 19 May 1984, Page 18

Cowan’s ‘Wars’ 60 years on

The New Zealand Wars: A History ot the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period. Two Volumes. By James Cowan. Government Printer, 1983 reprint (first published 1922-23). 466 pp and 633 pp. Illustrated. $69.50. (Reviewed by Ann Parson son) It was 120 years last month since the famous battle of Orakau, the last battle of the Waikato War which opened the way to government confiscation and Pakeha settlement of the rich Waikato lands. And it is 60-odd years since James Cowan’s “The New Zealand Wars,” commissioned by the Government, was first published. This is the second reprinting, and the only amendments are a useful introduction by Michael King, and a new expanded index, inserted in Volume 2. How, then, does Cowan’s massive history of the nineteenth-century armed struggles between Maori and Pakeha (and between Maori and Maori, ranged on different sides), stand up today? If we start on the last page, we may not feel particularly encouraged: “Pakeha and Maori,” Cowan concludes, “are now knit in such close bonds of friendship that they can contemplate without a trace of the olden enmities the long-drawn struggles of other years.” Did Cowan really believe that in 1922? Was he generalising from his own remarkable rapport with Maoris in many parts of the country, whose history and traditions and legends he painstakingly recorded and published over many years? Did he hope to convince his fellow New Zealanders that it might, or could be true? Or was he merely seeking to reassure his fellow Pakehas? “The effect of Cowan’s work,” according to historian Peter Gibbons, “was to legitimise the racism of the European settlers and their

destruction of Maori civilisation.” I am not sure it was quite as simple as that. In his teens — before he left his Orakau home in the 1880 s to begin a career in journalism — Cowan attended hearings of the Maori Land Court in the King Country, listening to the old people telling the history of their occupation of their ancestral land (he was bilingual). It was an experience which clearly left its mark on him — that, and the hours of listening he had spent since. He writes warmly in his “Wars” of “the Maori’s regard for his ancestral land” which, he says, successive New Zealand governments failed to understand. Many of his analyses, indeed, have an unexpectedly modern ring to them. He was scathing about the “crude and unjust” confiscations of Maori land carried out by the government. He was sympathetic to Wiremu Kingi (the chief whose refusal to agree to the sale of land at Waitara led the government to send troops in 1860), and he accused government of “wholly illegal acts which had sent (Kingi) into an unwilling rebellion.” He understood pretty well the reasons why there was general suspicion of the government amongst supporters of the Maori King in the early 1860 s, pointing to “the inevitable friction over Europe encroachment . . . the reluctance of the authorities to grant the tribes a reasonable measure of self-government,” “the passionate sentiment of nationalism and home rule for the Maoris.” And he applauded Te Whiti’s “sincere patriotism” and his “desire for peace,” and condemned the government’s invasion of his village Parihaka in 1881. But if Cowan pauses occasionally to reflect on the causes of the fighting in nineteenth-century New Zealand, his history is essentially a military history

— a record of the details of every single engagement between 1845 and 1872. Walking over battlegrounds all over the North Island, usually with old soldiers — Maori and Pakeha — beside him, he meticulously reconstructed every battle and skirmish, gathered descriptions of fortifications, tactics, casualties, and the combatants themselves. Indeed his book is full of people, their courage, their frightful wounds, their shattered lives — on both sides. As an exercise in oral history, Cowan’s work is superb. But eyewitness accounts, of course, do not tell us eveything we need to know. All of Cowan’s informants were old by the time he began his research in 1918, and they were fewer (especially the Maoris) than they had been. There are other nineteenth-century sources — newspapers, Army Department records, Maori letters — which must be used to throw more light on the information Cowan has given us. And his work has other limitations. If it is not always clear who the enemy is in Volume 1, it is obvious in Volume 2 (1864-72): it was the “Hauhaus” (a term Cowan used loosely to describe Maoris in arms against the government, rather than adherents of the Hauhau faith). Indeed, he did not understand the faith, calling its founder Te Ua Haumene “half-crazed”; a Canterbury University authority on Te Ua’s writings, Lyndsay Head, has, on the other hand, recently concluded that he was an independent Christian. Likewise Cowan shared the general Pakeha horror of traditional Maori fighting practices revived in the latter years of the Wars; in Volume 2 the words “savage” and “fanatic” and “murderous” appear again and again. It is easy to understand why, when he had spoken to men who conveyed to him the heart-stopping terror of facing the tomahawk, or who had witnessed the singeing of a human heart, neatly cut from the body of a slain man to use for divination. Today, though, when historians are less likely to pass judgment on customs that reflect cultural differences, they would shrink from flinging such terms at one side only.

Cowan himself recorded the Maori explanations of their war customs. The care which he took to gather evidence from Maoris who fought on both sides (whose skills he greatly respected), is one of the reasons why we are eternally in his debt — and in that of his informants. They give us a remarkable insight into Maori society at this time, and into the reasons why Maoris fought on one side or the other.

They remind us, moreover, that we have not considered very carefully why it was that the Maoris who fought against the government forces did not win the wars. What, for instance, went wrong at Orakau? Why was no strong united Kingite force waiting to meet the British — why only 300 people, half of whom were outsiders, Tuhoe from the Urewera and others, who had come to help? Why were the Tuhoe visitors allowed their way in the choice of battle site — though Rewi Maniapoto (the local chief who commanded the defence) warned them it was a poor one, and foretold their defeat there?

Or what can we make of Titokowaru’s surprise evacuation in February, 1869, of his immensely strong South Taranaki fortification Tauranga-ika, which he might easily have defended against Colonial troops? A new military historian, James Belich, has followed Cowan in arguing that it was caused by the discovery by Titokowaru’s people that he was having an affair with another man’s wife, and their fear that his mana-tapu, his supernatural powers, would be diminished, and they would be defeated.

What a fateful departure, Dr Belich tells us; for his own study has led him to acclaim Titokowaru as a military genius who had waged a masterful and successful campaign against the colonists and who, but for his own personal problems, might well have won his war and secured the Wanganui region, causing a major crisis for the government.

In short, we have some way to go yet before we really understand the New Zealand Wars (Cowan’s wellchosen term) and their outcome. Cowan has provided his successors with splendid raw material on which to draw for their reinterpretations — though it is doubtful whether the sheer drama of this account will ever be surpassed.