FICKLE FAME

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVII, Issue 4402, 8 June 1933, Page 7

FICKLE FAME

KAWANA: KIORE. ROMANTIC LIFE OF GREY. BULLETS FOR OTHER GUNS. “Never was any ruler of a land with a native race so greeted and so lamented as Sir George Grey was when he was leaving New Zealand in 1853 on the completion of his first term of Governorship. . . The scene had changed indeed when Grey returned for his second Governorship.” The contrast between the Maori love of Grey as the pacifier of the forties, and the Maori reaction of the sixties, is touched on by Mr. James Cowan in an article in the “New Zealand Railways Magazine,” on Governor Grey. Kawana Kerei, the idol of the forties and fifties, became in the sixties kiore, the rat. It became “a common saying that Governor Browne was a hawk who came swooping down on the Maoris from a clear sky, whereas Kawana Kerei was like a kiore, a rat; he would burrow underground and come out when and where least expected.”

Maori Wheal Farmers in Waikato.

Mr. Cowan paints the earlier picture. In the Waikato “Rangiaowhia, under missionary and official guidance and help, became a garden of cultivation and fruitfulness in the days before the war. Here came Grey in 1848 and 1849 visiting his loyal wheatfarmers and giving them practical encouragement in the arts of civilisation. An Englishman, Tom Power, was sent to instruct the people in ploughing and other farm work. Hoani Papita Kahawai and other chiefs of Rangiaowhia, in their address of farewell to Kawana Kerei, recalled the great kindness which he had manifested towards the people of the place and the gifts of ploughs, horses, carts, and other property, which had enabled the Maori to assimilate some of the usages of the pakeha. ‘You have made our lands important,’ they wrote. ‘Our love to you and our remembrance of you will not cease; no, never. Go hence, O friend, go to the Queen and carry with you our love to her in return for the gifts which we have in our possession. If the Queen should send another Governor, let his love for the Maoris be like yours, and we will repay him with our love.’ “Another farmer chief, Hore te Waru, wrote:—‘Our love for you is great because you have shown us much kindness. You have elevated us and provided teachers to instruct our children and implant good principles in their hearts/ Yet ten years later the same Hoari Papita and his people were flying for their lives to the swamps and the ranges, from the army launched by the Governor against those once so loyal of Rangiaowhia.

Abandoned Church and Plough.

The Maoris left their beautiful village of Rangiaowhia “a ravaged and bloodstained ruin, and never again were they to worship in their pretty churches (that old Selwyn church of Rangiaowhia still stands there) or gather the fruits of the good soil. Land and cultivations, churches, and all passed to the pakeha. For in Kawana Kerei’s absence in South Africa, Rangiaowhia had become the centre of Maori Kingite politics; and gun and tomahawk displaced the peaceful age symbolised by Tom Power’s plough.” When- Grey returned for his second Governorship, “profound distrust had succeeded the olden confidence. Governor Grey was no longer the gladlyhailed benefactor. Some of the Maori description of him and his officials in the critical period just before the Waikato War were excellently apt and terse and to the point. The chief Patene told young John Gorst, the Government Commissioner at Te Awamutu, that the officers of the Government were worms, bait that Governor Grey was fishing with, and if they were suffered to remain some tribes of Waikato would inevitably be caught. ... A Ngati-Haua chief said that the usual way of catching a rui'u (owl) was for one man to shake some object before it to attract its attention, while his companion slipped a noose over its head from behind; so Governor Grey had sent his companion (Gorst) to dazzle them with laws and regulations while he was waiting a chance to entangle them in the meshes of the Queen’s Sovereignty.” It is worth while here to glance at Sir George Grey as seen by the late Sir William Pember Reeves (Encyclopaedia Britannica): —- “In 1845, when the little settlements in New Zealand were involved in a native war, he was sent to save them. The Maori chiefs made their submission. The Governor gained the veneration of the Maori tribes, in whose welfare he took a close personal interest, and of whose legends and myths he made a valuable and scholarly collection, published in New Zealand in 1855 and reprinted thirty years afterwards.

“Grey presently became involved in harassing the disputes with the colonists, who organised an active agitation for autonomy. In the end a constitution partly framed by Grey himself was granted them, and Grey, after eight years of despotic but successful rule, was transferred to Cape

Colony. ... In 1861 the Colonial Office sent him as Governor to New Zealand, where an inglorious native war in Taranaki had just been succeeded by an armed truce. Grey did his best to avert war, but it came in 1863, and spread from province to province. Ten thousand regulars and as many colonial riflemen were employed to put it down. The Imperial troops were badly handled, and Grey, losing patience, became involved in bitter disputes with their commanders. As an example to the former he himself attacked and captured Weraroa, the strongest of the Maori stockades, with a handful of militia, a feat which delighted the colonists, but made him as much disliked at the War Office as he now was at Downing Street. Moreover, Grey had no longer real control over the islands. New Zealand had become a selfgoverning colony, and though he vindicated the colonists generally when libellous imputations of cruelty and land-grabbing were freely made against them in Lo'ndon, he crossed swords with his Ministers when the latter confiscated three million acres of tribal land belonging to the insurgent Maori. Yet a condition of something like tra'nquillity had been reached in 1867, when he received a curt intimation from the Duke of Buckingham that he was about to be superseded. The colonists bade farewell to him in an outburst of gratitude and sympathy; but his career as a colonial governor was at an end.” Yes, Grey’s career as Governor had ended. Of his career in Parliament, what shall be said?

Kawau to Thomdon. From his unique island home, Kawau Island, he was called into politics. “It was from this quiet retreat, among the great pohutukawa groves and the products of many foreign lands, that he was called forth to lead a party and shake up the dry bones of politics in Wellingto'n (writes Mr. Cowan. He was an inspiration to reform; his presence, his eloquence, and his magnetic mana carried all before them —for a time. But that great burst of popularity, which followed on the successful appeal of a deputation which waited on him at the Kawau, was chiefly co'nfined to Auckland, where Grey always was a hero. He was Premier of the colony for two years, 1877-79. There is no space here to narrate the ex-Gover-nor’s career as a fighting politician; but it may be summed up as a meteor-like life, full of fire and thrust. The veteran’s last few years in politics were a miserable dragging out of a great career; wiser of him had he retired before his reputation and his popularity waned. He alienated his supporters by his too autocratic methods, his obstinacy, his secretiveness, his unreliability, his indifference to the views of others of his party. But the sidelights on Grey as humanist; his literary and artistic interests, his splendid bequests to Auckland City, his friendship with scholars and scientists, are the most pleasant thiiigs in retrospect.” Reeves sums up the Parliamentary side of Grey by saying that in 1875, on the invitation of Auckland settlers, he became Superintendent of their Province, entered the House of Representatives, and became Premier in 1877. His leading policy points—manhood suffrage, triennial parliaments, land tax, purchase of large estates —he did not carry but he lived to see them carried. Another of his leading points was popular electio'n of the Governor. “For the fifteen years after the fall of his Ministry in 1879 he remained a solitary and pathetic figure in the New Zealand Parliament, respectfully treated, courteously listened to, but never again invited to lead.”