George Hamish Ormond Wilson 1907-1988

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 21, Issue 2, 1 October 1988, Page 69

George Hamish Ormond Wilson 1907-1988

R. I. M. BURNETT

J. E. TRAUE

In a review of Ormond’s From Hongi Hika to Hone Heke a schoolman likened the author to a ‘detached patrician’. Nothing could have been further from the mark. If good manners and an expectation that research enquiries would be treated responsibly indicate the patrician then Ormond shared this behaviour with many other and quite plebeian Library readers. This assessment cannot otherwise be supported. His robust voice as it echoed round the reading room and then down through the stacks and perhaps out onto the street was not that of a patrician. It had more in common with a high country shepherd working the top beat in a fall muster. The staff and other readers immediately knew from this voice who had arrived and with this recognition there would come a buzz of excitement. It just somehow felt good to have him around. One knew that, unlike some, he was only too willing to discuss his research bothers with anyone who had similar enthusiasms and that he would not allow the staffs intuitive recognition of his needs to earn any sort of most favoured nation treatment. He even observed most of the Library’s restrictions on the use of tobacco —a sore trial for someone with his level of addiction.

Nor was he a ‘detached’ worker. Throughout all his studies he continued to feel every insult offered a Maori chief as if this had occurred yesterday and he still felt repelled by the many examples of greed and arrogance that dot our history of that period. His sensitivity survived a long apprenticeship in the study of cruelty between one man and another. He perhaps felt detached only when the behaviour of his characters had moved from the use of violence against other men to less reprehensible offences, or to secular challenges such as bartering, where he could admire a rapidly acquired skill, or the preparations for a feast planned for visitors where he could recognise the generosity and sacrifice of the host.

His uncomplaining acceptance of all the pains and disappointments of historical research was one of his hallmarks and this, along with his capacity for work, explains why Library staff and friends found it easy to respond to him. He had plenty of what Dr Johnson calls ‘useful diligence’ and his working notes, even more than his publications, bear testimony to his industry when trying to ferret out such elusive items as passenger lists, sailing dates of vessels, reasons for misunderstandings

between individuals or groups, the legacies of inadequate interpreting, and the undertones in myths and legends. For instance, in From Hongi Hika to Hone Heke, he reluctantly repeated the conventional story that Heke had cut down the flagstaff three times at Kororareka. He always felt uneasy when accepting such oft-repeated statements and usually preferred to put them to the test of further enquiry. However, in this one case and after consulting other historians, he decided to follow the main current and credit Heke with three separate assaults on the flagstaff. But the doubts remained. When working on a more detailed but still unpublished study of Kororareka itself he found these doubts confirmed and that Heke had in fact cut it down four times. The one thing he could do to make amends was to apologise to Heke’s memory.

Only rarely did his native scepticism desert him and allow him to fall into this sort of error. His historical imagination, sharpened by this scepticism, would usually give him a nudge that something did not quite hang together or that some element seemed to be missing. He would then be off on another of his intensive searches. He did not begin this sort of research with any pre-ordained thesis or with many preconceptions but was urged on by a need to understand why. So he always found himself covering a lot of ground. Because understanding can sometimes be slow in coming, he could never be content but would go on devilling in the Library or continue discussing his uncertainties with a multitude of correspondents until satisfied that the particular circumstance was not going to yield up its secret.

Sometimes, as with most of his kind, time compelled him to take his primary sources at their face value. A case in point occurs in his War in the Tussock, published in 1961 for the Historic Places Trust. This reconstructed the operations against Te Kooti in 1869 that culminated in the attack on Te Porere near the headwaters of the Wanganui River. He repeats, but with the cautionary ‘according to his own account’, Lieutenant-Colonel McDonnell’s statement that he had accepted command of the Taupo field force only under the pressure and promises of financial reward from the Defence Minister, Donald McLean, and at the request of friends and the Premier, William Fox, alike. At that time McDonnell did not hold any military appointment but was, at the government’s request, visiting some of the tribes that had fought for the Queen to learn what their present expectations were and what they thought of the new government. In fact it was the Government Agent for Hawkes Bay, J. D. Ormond, who made the new appointment and then asked the Defence Minister for his approval. The question of McDonnell’s pay was not .mentioned at the time, he was already drawing £SOO per annum while engaged on this programme of visitation, and the amount of the pay he was to draw for taking on this command was not decided until some three and a half months after the appointment had been made. It was then fixed at 2 guineas

per day for the duration of the campaign. There was no suggestion of any additional or indirect reward.

But McDonnell was full of such conceits and phantoms. His selfconfidence was boundless and any failures occurring under his command were always to be blamed on the incompetence of allies and subordinates or, just as frequently, the failure of the government to give him a completely free hand in his field of operations. Of all the colonial officers, mostly undistinguished, who held field rank during this period he was undoubtedly the most incompetent. Yet he has such an infinite and persistent capacity for promising results, but always subject to the condition that he must have untrammelled authority, that governments and press alike often seemed to fall for this line. They would then join the chorus in singing his praises. They would somehow forget his habit of threatening to throw in his command. The one surprising thing about this man’s record is that successive governments continued to employ him.

It is equally surprising to find that James Belich in his monumental The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict follows this well-rehearsed path and heaps praise on McDonnell. Ormond on the other hand is more judicious. The twelve summer months he spent working on the redoubt at Te Porere had given him the opportunity to ruminate on McDonnell’s last campaign. He also distrusted many of the collective opinions that pass as history. Thus he forbears from passing any sort of judgement on McDonnell either as a soldier or as a man. But at the same time he indicates a wariness about the worth and even the honesty of McDonnell’s subsequent reports on these military operations.

As a by-product of the summer months Ormond spent at Te Porere tackling the problems of the preservation and management of an earth redoubt in a logistically remote area he published in the Historic Places Trust Newsletter of June 1966, an account of his work on this site. This gives an admirable if brief explanation of the competing disciplines of preservation and restoration and maintenance. These years of work in the field would have enlarged many of his perceptions and one had only to accompany him through, for example, the remnants of the earthworks at Ruapekapeka in the Bay of Islands to know that he was seeing more than the rest of us. Kawiti had become for him a very real person.

The search to understand Te Kooti and why he was at Te Porere in 1869 led Ormond back to the Bay of Islands, and to an earlier prophet Papahurihia. The first fruits took the form of an article on the latter for the Journal of the Polynesian Society in December 1965. Then in 1985 From Hongi Hika to Hone Heke appeared. This thoroughly readable and scholarly work still awaits the recognition it deserves. However, this is not the place to review it. It is sufficient to say that it will continue for a long time to repay careful re-reading.

One does wonder what problems of selection faced Ormond when he came to organise the mass of material that had piled up during twenty years of research and enquiry. For instance, Hongi apparently had a younger brother who was baptised in 1832 and who for the rest of his life remained steadfast in his new faith. What sort of a person was he, and did the brothers have anything in common apart from a shared parentage? Ormond does not mention him. Perhaps he found him to be of little account and without any influence on events. Ormond may have decided that any speculation about the very different directions of these two brothers belonged more appropriately to the novelist than to the historian. Similarly, the apprehension and trial in 1942 of Maketu may have had other and more disquieting features than Ormond mentions. These of course may not have been material to the final outcome of the whole affair. But I would guess that Ormond may have side-stepped these because of reservations about the authenticity of such reports. At other times, though, he does not hesitate to discuss some of the problems caused by the introduction of this, to Maori, strange criminal justice system.

Despite his commitment to the study of history, tempered always by his respect for Kant and Hegel, and despite the imperatives that led him from Te Porere to the Bay of Islands he found time to join in the Library’s network of advisory services. The Chief Librarian’s note describes the nature and span of Ormond’s investment in this work. Ormond also gave us a very honest autobiography and finally, on behalf of Christ’s College Library, he published John Harris: A Memoir as his salute to the memory of another distinguished New Zealander. Yet my most vivid recollection of Ormond has little to do with books. Instead it concerns a lean and spare figure bobbing up and down while picking peas in a paddock at ‘Mount Lees’ and revelling in the freedom of nudity.

Ormond Wilson was one of the four foundation members of the Trustees Special Committee for the Alexander Turnbull Library and the Turnbull Library Endowment Trust Board, appointed by resolution of the Trustees of the National Library on 29 April 1966. He retired, at his own request, in June 1985 after nineteen years of service. Ormond was a long-term user of the Library and if he could be said to represent any interest on the Special Committee for the Turnbull it was that of the historians outside the universities. Ormond brought a robust common sense to the deliberations of the committee and the board. His persistent theme was that of the

responsibility of the Library to make its resources available to a wider audience through publication, and he backed strongly all the publishing ventures of the Library. He always wanted the Library to do more, and just before his death submitted a memorandum outiining proposals for the inexpensive publication of original diaries and groups of letters in the collections. Ormond was a true believer in the Turnbull, and displayed his belief through donations to the collection and nineteen years of advice and counsel in an official capacity, and a continuing concern for its well being right up to his death.