Annabel Lee-Mather
speaker
64 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 19 Jul
Annabel Lee-Mather’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Wairinga ahika happens at an interesting time in our history because...
In the other wars that we have covered, it is iwi and iwi allies against the Crown.
This one's a little bit different because there's some intertribal dynamics going on.
Also across that is the rising of the Paimarire movement, which was a resistance religion political movement at the time.
And then you've got
multiple iwi who kind of held sovereignty over their area at the time and for the most part had quite good relationships and were economically successful, but they were sitting on prime real estate and there were moves undertaken to remove that whenua for them.
So despite their best efforts, the war was coming whether they liked it or not.
Well, I wasn't taught anything about the New Zealand wars at high school.
I started at Auckland Girls Grammar in 1989 and we learnt about all sorts of international conflicts and historical moments, but never about the New Zealand wars.
And it was really...
About 10 years ago, when some of our rangatahi started to speak up about it and started a petition to have the New Zealand wars recognised, you know, a day of commemoration and for it to be introduced to our school curriculum, that I began my journey of learning about them.
And, you know, every chapter that we've done in this series has been a revelation to me, things that happened that I had no idea about happening.
And while I was sort of vaguely familiar with the stories of Te Kooti, who I've had a long fascination with, to actually understand what happened at Wairinga Ahika has been a huge learning for me.
And particularly the impact on the iwi in terms of so much of the adult population being wiped out as a result of this war.
Them being, you know, incarcerated without trial, sent off to Rekohu.
to the Chatham Islands.
So for me, it's been such a privilege to tell these stories because I have learnt this whole huge chunk of New Zealand history that I had no idea about.
And once you start to learn about it,
Things that we just take for granted, street names, cemeteries, things like Te Hauki Turanga, the wharenui that stands in Te Papa, and how that came to be there, which was actually as a result of Wairinga Ahika.
It was dismantled by the Crown and taken away and put in the Dominion Museum as punishment for
Showing 1–20 of 64 · page 1 of 4
Next →