Battlefield tales have ring of familiarity

In the forging of most nations there have been periods of mayhem and bloody tragedy. For some the battles and wars went on for centuries and for others, like New Zealand, these conflicts were mercifully shortlived.

Initially the histories of these wars have been told by the victors but eventually the roles of all sides are recorded and, for the most part, remembered without too much rancour or resentment. Battlefields in Ireland and Scotland are cared for as war memorials and open to the public with extensive historic information available on site. The roles of all combatants are taught in schools with reverence and respect regardless of original loyalties.

On a recent tour of these countries I walked the battlefields of Boyne River in Ireland and Culloden in Scotland. It was a sobering experience and disturbingly familiar.

In spite of popular myth these battles were not fought between England and Ireland or England and Scotland. These were contests between related and competing claimants for the British monarchy and the people of England’s neighbouring Celtic nations became embroiled in wars not of their making.

A major contributing factor in both cases was the fierce competition between opposing factions of Christianity.

In 1685 James II, the unpopular Catholic English King, faced a number of attempts to unseat him. Eventually a group of Protestant nobles invited the related Dutch prince William of Orange to claim the English throne and James II fled to France. He returned to Ireland four years later with French support to gather an army to retake the monarchy. His supporters, known as Jacobites, included French, Danish and Irish fighters, some of whom were forced to join a campaign in which they had little interest.

William brought his army of Dutch regulars, English cavalry and Protestant Irish to Ireland and after a series of running battles the two sides met at Boyne River on July 1 1690. James II was beaten and his army scattered. He fled again to France never to return and the remnants of his army were finally defeated in Galway a year later.

A little more than 50 years later another claimant to the English Crown, James Francis Edward Stuart, known as Bonnie Prince Charlie appeared. He was the eldest son of the deposed James II and claimed the joint thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

This led to another Jacobite uprising which ended in a crushing defeat at Culloden in 1746. As with the Battle of Boyne River there were Scots, Vikings, French and English on both sides.

The reprisals and retribution taken against the Irish and Scots in the aftermath of both wars could only be described today as attempted genocide. For more than a year in both countries thousands of suspected Jacobite sympathisers, men women and children were summarily executed. Thousands of acres of land were confiscated from people who had taken no part in the wars and granted to speculator supporters of England.

The cultures of the defeated nations were all but destroyed as speaking their native languages and wearing traditional dress were outlawed. Thousands of people in two nations were left landless and destitute with much of their original culture lost forever and it took many generations for them to recover. Only in recent decades has there been a serious Government sponsored effort to rescue the native languages of Ireland and Scotland from extinction.

Sound familiar?

Just over a century after Culloden the New Zealand Land wars erupted in Taranaki in 1860 and lasted for 12 years. The British forces were aided by competing missionaries, knowingly or otherwise, and encouraged by land hungry English settlers. The fate of Ma¯ ori who opposed British land speculators was little different to the Irish and Scots. Land confiscations and the near destruction of an indigenous culture, including a prohibition on speaking Ma¯ ori in schools and the outlawing of traditional tohunga among other things, followed a similar destructive pattern.

Unlike Ireland, Scotland and England however the history of the New Zealand Wars has never been adequately taught in our schools, most battle sites have disappeared or locations are no longer known and the names of all but a few combatants have been forgotten.

That situation has finally been addressed thanks to a group of Otorohanga College students who started a campaign to have the wars remembered. They have attracted the support of the Waipa¯ District Council and Nga¯ Iwi To¯ pu o Waipa¯ who hosted the second New Zealand Wars commemoration to be held in the district with October 28 now set aside as the annual commemoration day.

There is still much to do which must include teaching Maori in schools, identifying and restoring battlefields and honouring those on all sides who fought and died in the establishment of the country we are so fortunate to call home.

The reprisals and retribution taken against the Irish and Scots in the aftermath of both wars could only be described today as attempted genocide.