Think you know your stuff? Test yourself
professor of history at Victoria University of Wellington
now your stuff? Ten questions on New Zealand’s 19th-century history:
1. What famous sporting event did the first of New Zealand take part in as a student at Cambridge in 1829? (Bonus points: how did his athletic skills enhance his work as a guardian of souls?)
2. Which northern rangatira’s daughter ended up in Calcutta in 1809 in the company of the shady George Bruce? (Bonus points: how do we know about her story, and who has told it since she lived?)
3. What form of government did the 1852 Constitution Act bring to New Zealand? (Bonus points: where did the first elected assembly meet, and how is that site marked now?)
4. Where did Edward Gibbon Wakefield write his first major treatise on ‘‘systematic colonisation’’ in 1829? (Bonus points: what was he doing there and why was Wakefield’s suggestion a radical departure from orthodox thinking about how Britain might use colonies?)
5. What was Charlotte Badger convicted of and what is she doing in New Zealand waters, and in New Zealand history generally? (Bonus points: is she a folk devil or a lost figure in our national history?)
6. What did Elizabeth Cook embroider while James Cook ‘‘explored’’? (Bonus points: where might her work be found in 2019?)
7. How did the final success of the campaign to abolish slavery in the British Empire influence debates around British intervention in Aotearoa New Zealand? Why did some missionaries and some rangatira welcome intervention while others opposed it? (Bonus points: why is the ‘‘fatal impact’’ argument no longer part of explanations of what happens in New Zealand c.1835-70?)
8. What part of the British Isles did most of Taranaki’s New Zealand Company settlers of the early 1840s call home before embarking for New Zealand? (Bonus points: how does this compare with regions of greatest outflow of emigrants to all destinations in the 19th century?)
9. Who was the first casualty in the violent encounter that took place between Nelson settlers and Nga¯ ti Toa at Wairau in June 1843? (Bonus points: who became very unpopular for his report on this tragic incident and what did it mean for him?)
10. Who painted the two rangatira Hongi Hika and Waikato on their visit to Cambridge University and London in 1819-20? (Bonus points: where is that painting now, and how has it got there? Who has the power in the painting?)
Score well? Great. Puzzling for answers? Find a good history of New Zealand (there are many), enrol in a course in New Zealand history, encourage your school to teach New Zealand history. We have a dramatic story to tell.
The New Zealand History Teachers’ Association has called for ‘‘the coherent teaching of our own past across appropriate year levels in our schools’’ in a petition addressed to Parliament.
In most parts of the world such a petition would be unthinkable. Not because it is not a good idea, but because history is a foundation. Ask Americans about the constitution, the French about the revolution, Canadians about federation, Britons about 1066.
We have had an odd idea in New Zealand that we don’t have much history, or that it is not very interesting. False on both accounts.
Human history in Aotearoa is as unique and curious as our birdlife. A mere 800 or so years old, it is possible to trace the whole span of human existence in these islands through soil, bones, gardens and whakapapa as Atholl Anderson has so recently done in Tangata Whenua: an illustrated history (BWB, 2014). Between 1851 and 1861 New Zealand’s population grew by 280 per cent. This was not a place standing still.
Nor was it a place that was quiet or predictable. Everybody, Ma¯ ori and incoming Europeans, were finding themselves in a world that was new. Ask Tamihana Te Rauparaha about his life compared to that of his father, or Mary Ann Swainson, whose letters from Wellington to her Birmingham friend Isabel Percy discussed violence in the Hutt Valley alongside the 1848 revolutions sweeping Europe.
The history we know is itself being made new. Visit the stunning Aotea Utanganui (Museum of South Taranaki) at Patea, or Te Awahou Nieuwe Stroom at Foxton (telling a Ngati Raukawa ki Te Tonga, Dutch and European story). Here we see ourselves in fresh, sharp colours.
What is there not to like? Nothing. History is the story we have to treasure. A story of ourselves, our places, our best and worst: interesting, tragic, funny, hopeful, gritty and impressive. And ours to know, and to tell.