THE OPEPE SIGNBOARD

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 148, 25 June 1935, Page 10

THE OPEPE SIGNBOARD

TRAGEDY OF; MAORI WAR

NOT A "MASSACRE"

A great many motorists, who -have read, at the side of the, Taupo-Napier Road, 11 miles from Taupo, a signboard proclaiming that .a byroad.leads .to the scene" of the Opepe "Massacre" in 1869, have. doubted the .necessity of keeping green'so unhappy a memory of a tragedy of a war over which no i bad feeling now remains. Leaders of the people of the Rbtorua district recently, approached, the Gov-ernor-General, Lord Galway, asking that the board should be removed .ir the wording altered, and the subject has been dealt'with' at;sbme length in the Napier' Press by Mr. R. H. Ward, who maintains that the rword "massacre" cannot rightly be applied to the happenings of the night of June 7,. 1869. ' ' -...

The facts of the. Opepe- affair, he writes, are, briefly, as. follows: Lieu-tenant-Colonel. St. John had been.instructed by Colonel.(afterwards MajorGeneral) Whitmore to establish a. headquarter!. camp .between 4he Urewera Country and Taupo. Unfortunately, steps to this end were not taken until the Maori leader, Te Kooti, was about tr- move towards the King Country, via the Kaingaroa Plains and Taupo.

On the evening of June 5, 1869, a Saturday, Colonel St John left 14 of his escort at a deserted Maori kainga at; Opepe arid went ■on to Tapuaeharuru, overlooking the outlet of ' the Waikato River from Lake Taupo. Having been assured that there was no danger, the junior officer in charge of the fourteen men posted no sentries.

An hour-before dark on Monday, June 7, a number of Maoris approached the whares in which the soldiers were at the time. Despite the' friendly attitude of some of the Natives the cavalrymen sensed in a few moments that the visitors were enemies. Realising that they: could not retrieve their, arms, which were in the whares, they made a dash for the bush, the Maoris at once opening fire. '

Mr. Ward quotes, from Mr. James Cowan's "New Zealand Wars," in which the writer, with all the: known records to back his opinion, expresses the opinion that < there was-inexcusable neglect in the failure to post sentries. All the facts, Mr. Ward maintains, show that the incident was clearly in the category of military surprises. In historical literature' the word "massacre," is usually reserved to denote the killing of unarmed civilians, or the slaughter of defenceless prisoners. No charge of departing from usual military standards can justly be: laid against the Maoris of -Te Kooti's taua at Opepe. ■ . .