THE H FILES
offices of the Daily Southern Cross to seek further news.”
But the article was a hoax, a presocial-media example of fake news published for political purposes.
Careful readers would have been tipped off by an asterisk in the headline and a note at the end stating the article was “from the Daily Southern Cross of Monday, the 15th of May, 1873”, three months in the future and, anyway, a fake date; the 15th was a Thursday.
Another clue was the name of the ironclad ship, the Kaskowiski — thought to stand in for “cask of whiskey”.
The paper’s editor, David Luckie, also the MP for Nelson, had been running the Cross for just weeks and was no doubt keen to make his mark.
As a journalist, Luckie was later said to have had “few equals in the Colony”.
The next day’s Cross admitted the prank had caused some offence and explained the point of the half-comic deception: “Where is the British navy? It is true that we have some excellent old [wooden ships] in these seas, heavily armed . . . But could these cope with an ironclad?”
The Waikato Times agreed New Zealand was vulnerable. Britain’s Australasian fleet was miserably small and harbour protection with forts was “little more than a farce”.
Massey University historian Professor Michael Belgrave says the hoax was a “small but interesting incident” in the wider context of New Zealand’s fear of Russian aggression during most of the 1800s.
He said Russia was seen, for possibly most of the century, as the major threat to Britain’s imperial interests worldwide and, as a British colony, New Zealand was caught up in this.
One example was that in an 1878 telegram to the British Government, New Zealand Premier Sir George Grey promised New Zealand intervention in support of the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli in Turkey against Russia.
After the Crimean War of the 1850s, in which Russia, and Britain with the Ottomans, were on opposing sides, New Zealand was punctuated by regular panics about Russian expansion into the South Pacific. New Zealand’s anxieties ramped up after the departure of British imperial troops in 1870.
Gradually these pressures fuelled the construction of harbour defences around the colony, such as the gun emplacements that can still be seen at Auckland’s Maungauika/North Head.
“Most of New Zealand seemed to consider raids inevitable,” says the National Museum of the Royal New Zealand Navy.