Return of the King Country
Intriguing picture of a lost time in our history
Visit busy Central North Island holiday hotspots like Otorohanga’s Kiwi House, Waitomo’s glow worm caves or Turangi’s trout fishery and it’s hard to imagine that as recently as the 1880s this was all a no-go area.
From 1864 to 1885, the King Country was an independent state where Europeans ventured at their peril, the writ of the Government did not run, fugitives gained sanctuary and road and rail networks ended.
The background to this was well explained last year in Vincent O’Malley’s The Great War for New Zealand. British and colonial forces invaded Waikato, defeated supporters of the Maori King and confiscated vast areas of land. Some 3000 Waikato people followed their king into exile in the territory of friendly iwi and created their own realm.
In Dancing with the King, Michael Belgrave, formerly research manager for the Waitangi Tribunal and now history professor at Massey University, has painstakingly pieced together snippets from official reports, meeting notes, private letters, memoirs, Land Court Archives and newspaper accounts to build up a remarkable picture of the negotiations that led to that realm eventually rejoining New Zealand.
The intriguing central character in his narrative is Tawhiao, the second Maori king. For much of his life he was a tragic figure; defeated in war and afterwards outmanoeuvred by colonial politicians, he unsurprisingly turned to the consolation of alcohol. But Tawhiao rose above adversity, remembered today as a prophet whose wisdom is still relevant, who preserved the King Movement, went from drunkeness to an icon of the temperance movement and set the scene for the modern Maori renaissance.
As Belgrave explains, Tawhiao’s tragedy was that he could not achieve the central purpose of the kingship: to protect all his people’s land. So strongly did he feel his duty to the iwi who had named him king, he felt unable to accept surprisingly generous offers from the Government to return some of the confiscated land and acknowledge his authority. As a result he was bypassed, major iwi negotiated separate deals — which saw much of their land lost, anyway — and the King Country faded away.
Deprived of his original role, Tawhiao launched a successful tradition of annual royal pilgrimages to marae allied to the King Movement, which served to renew vital links.
Then he took a petition to London asking Queen Victoria to order her governments to honour the provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi. Though it could not progress officially, the petition underlined the status of the Treaty as a compact between Maori and Crown, the foundation for today’s Waitangi Tribunal hearings, Treaty settlements and all that has followed.
It is an amazing story, easy to read, superbly researched and casting light upon a largely unknown yet hugely important chapter in New Zealand’s history.