A movement to boycott this year’s Tuia – Encounters 250 commemorations of the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook’s landing at Tūranganui-a-Kiwa is gaining strength, writes RNZ’s Leigh-Marama McLachlan. More than $20 million is being spent on events and resources to mark the anniversary of Cook’s landing in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa, later named Gisborne, in 1769. Indigenous … Read more
Emily Writes speaks to researcher Leimomi Oakes about Plunket’s dark past and the despicable views of its founder Sir Frederic Truby King. Since becoming a parent six years ago and being introduced to our country’s Plunket health service, I’ve been fascinated by the history of the organisation. By all accounts, its founder Frederic Truby King … Read more
Foxton author Anne Hunt backgrounds the legal challenges she faced when she published her book about a woman who accused her therapist of rape. Content warning: suicidal ideation and rape My 2003 book Broken Silence was published too long ago to capture a readership mesmerised by the complexities of the #MeToo movement. It documented the … Read more
When even the ‘woke’ are ignorant about Te Tiriti o Waitangi, it’s clear we need to make teaching its history compulsory in schools, writes Liam Hehir. Sometimes something happens in the news that shakes you out of a bubble. I thought that making New Zealand history a compulsory part of the curriculum was more heavy-handed … Read more
Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Fire rages in tinder-dry Tasman region, contention over call for compulsory colonial history teaching, and another big jump for dairy prices. Hundreds of people haven’t been able to return to their homes overnight, as fires rage in the Tasman District. A Civil Defence emergency was declared yesterday … Read more
A new petition is calling for changes to address New Zealand students’ ‘shameful’ ignorance of their country’s history, writes RNZ’s John Gerritsen. In the lead-up to Waitangi Day, history teachers are calling for compulsory teaching of New Zealand’s Māori and colonial history in schools, but government representatives are rejecting the idea. The chairperson of the … Read more
When musician Anthonie Tonnon started to research the history of Dunedin’s railway system for his new music video, it grew into a consuming, Aotearoa-wide investigation – and the inspiration for the tour that kicks off this week. If you live in a large city with a passenger rail network, a railway underpass will not be … Read more
Book of the Week: Jane Stafford reviews a vast, thought-provoking study of late colonial New Zealand, when European portrait artists romanticised Māori culture. I have long regarded Roger Blackley as a living taonga, an unfailing resource for anyone working in the field of Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial culture. There is no enquiry too recondite, no … Read more
Horatio Robley witnessed the most famous battle of the New Zealand Wars, he fathered a child with the daughter of a sworn enemy, his sketching helped end a war and his book helped save the art of Māori tattooing. But mostly he’s famous for his grotesque collection of nearly 40 human heads, writes William Ray for RNZ. If … Read more
Hamish Parkinson investigates one of our great nation’s least-known foundational moments: Sir Edmund Hillary’s ultimately fruitless 1960 expedition to Nepal to look for the yeti.
A tool of colonisation or liberation? Te Paipera Tapu (The Holy Bible) turns 150 this year, with the first full translation being published in 1868. Dr Hirini Kaa shares some of the cultural and historical significance of this book. The late, great Māori academic Ranginui Walker, in one of his memorably powerful phrases, once described Christianity as ‘total … Read more
The Single Object is a series exploring our material culture, examining the meaning and influence of objects that surround us in everyday life. In the second piece in the series, Danyl Mclauchlan visits the Reserve Bank to inspect Bill Phillip’s MONIAC. It looks like an artifact from an alternate timeline. MONIAC is about two metres … Read more
Toby Morris has illustrated a new publication in the School Journal Story Library that tells the story of the Treaty of Waitangi. Below, a selection of the work, introduced by Ātea editor Leonie Hayden Toby approached me to read a few early drafts of his School Journal, and I was struck by how simple you … Read more
Many of today’s concerns around home ownership and urban planning were found in centuries past, writes Jeremy Moyle Current anxieties about city planning and the possibility of home ownership can seem like particularly modern issues, but their origins are old – really old – and the concerns of 19th and early-20th century New Zealand sound … Read more
The story of the illustration of an unnamed Māori trading a crayfish with Joseph Banks, drawn by the Endeavour‘s onboard navigator Tupaia, is told in a beautifully produced book on Cook’s three voyages to New Zealand. Tupaia’s only known drawing of New Zealand may have been made during or soon after the visit to Tolaga Bay. … Read more
Tina Shaw reviews Fiona Kidman’s powerful and haunting new novel based on the short life and brutal death of Albert Black, hanged at Mt Eden jail in 1955. Fiona Kidman is adept at casting her imagination into the past and bringing to life significant characters and times. She stepped back to the Sydney and New … Read more
When the n-word slipped out of former National MP Tau Henare’s mouth on national television last Sunday, Ātea editor Leonie Hayden realised she’d been harbouring a guilty secret. I saw a video on Twitter a couple of weeks ago where Kendrick Lamar, who is playing here this week, stopped a white fan from rapping along … Read more
Based on one of the most notorious murder cases in New Zealand history, Mistress, Mercy finds itself hamstrung by the limits of the doco-drama genre. In 1989, Renee Chignell and Neville Walker were convicted of the murder of Peter Plumley-Walker. Police alleged they had thrown him into the Huka Falls after a bondage session with Chignell, … Read more
Historian Vincent O’Malley conducted his own survey over the weekend on what people did and didn’t learn about New Zealand history at school. The results, no matter how unscientific, still paint a clear picture. By now many people know something of the story of the small-town petition from which big things grew. In December 2015 … Read more
Taranaki are expected to host next year’s national commemoration of the New Zealand Wars and yet the Waitara land-grab that sparked the Taranaki Wars has still yet to be fully resolved. The first national commemoration of the New Zealand Wars (Te Pūtake o te Riri) was held last month in Northland. The gathering took over the … Read more
In this instalment of Black Sheep, the RNZ series about the controversial characters of New Zealand history: Kimble Bent, the American soldier who fought – and switched sides – in the Taranaki Land Wars of the 1860s. It’s reasonably common knowledge that large numbers of Māori fought on the side of the government during the … Read more
Cyrus Haley burned down several of the most famous buildings in 19th century Auckland and tried to kill the family of a prominent businessman. To this day we still don’t know why. THE CHASE January 27th, 1872. Auckland’s chief of police, Inspector Broham, is hot on the trail of a fugitive who’d been terrorising the … Read more
‘Be kind to animals,’ Gwen Shepherd instructed an avid listening audience when her wedding was broadcast in 1930, as told in an extract from a new book by Peter Hoar. Gwen Shepherd wore a gown of ivory georgette when she married Bruce Stennett at Wellington’s St Paul’s Pro-Cathedral, now known as Old St Paul’s, on Wednesday, … Read more
For 20 years, the second Māori King, Tāwhiao, governed Rohe Pōtae (the King Country) as an independent state. Tāwhiao also sailed to London in an attempt to see the Queen; the mission is described in this extract from a new study of that 20-year reign. Going to London to see the Queen was a rare … Read more
Black Sheep is an RNZ series about the shady, controversial and sometimes downright villainous characters of New Zealand history, presented by William Ray. Here he introduces Richard Burgess, ‘New Zealand’s worst serial killer’. Richard Burgess may be the most prolific murderer New Zealand has ever seen. It’s estimated the death toll his gang of outlaws inflicted while … Read more
Māori historian Dr Danny Keenan explains why it is highly unlikely William Hobson ever made his famous ‘pledge’. Great play has been made by anti-Māori Pākehā on a statement attributed to Lieutenant Governor Hobson at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, that new settlers and Māori ‘were now one people’. But did Hobson ever … Read more
Building magnate Sir William Gallagher’s recent comments calling the Treaty of Waitangi a ‘fraud’ have been roundly condemned. But he’s not the first to believe it, writes Scott Hamilton. Sir William Gallagher knows a lot about fences. He joined his father’s fencing business in 1962, and has turned it into a multinational company that he … Read more