The deadly battle New Zealand forgot
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Kia ora, I'm Amanda Gillies and today on The Detail, a devastating and deadly war in New Zealand that's been relatively unknown until now.
Waringahika, I'd argue, is the decisive turning point in the history of this district. But it's a story that a lot of people wouldn't know about. and we lost people, we lost connection, and we also lost ourselves. We lost the memory of us, who we are, where we belong. The people of Wairinga Ahika didn't ask for war, didn't want it, but were ultimately powerless to stop it.
What was the Six-Day battle at Wairenga-a-Hika and who was involved?
The story of the brutal Six Day War at a small pā near Gisborne is part of RNZ's New Zealand Wars collection. It's chapter six and has just premiered in New Zealand.
In November 1865, about 500 men descended on a place called Wairinga-a-Hika. Roughly 150 were Pākehā military settlers. The rest were their Māori allies. Some had come for the whenua. 50,000 acres of very fertile land, some of the best lands in the country. Some had come for utu. He basically went on a spree of payback, of revenge. Some had come out of fear of a new religion. Here was a group of people which had a deep sense of determination that the land had to be purged from Europeans.
The Wairinga Ahika battle effectively saw control of the region swing away from Māori and into the hands of the Crown. And by the end, at least 71 from the pā were killed, while many more were wounded, captured and deported to the Chatham Islands. To find out exactly what happened and why we don't know much about it and why it's still so relevant today, I talked to the team behind the documentary, presenter and executive producer Mihi Narangi Forbes and journalist and executive producer Annabel Lee Mather. I start by asking them why the small settlement with a community of 800 and about 10km inland from modern-day Gisborne was attacked in 1865. Annabel responds first.
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.
How deadly, vicious, cruel was this war?
You know, they talk about this really great relationship they have with Pākehā settlers at the time prior to this wall. And there was a good lot of respect on both sides for each other's sovereignty and their business and economics and the rest of it. And I think when the tide turned was when the Waikato and the Taranaki walls were taking place across the other side of the country and people like Bishop Selwyn were going over to be the bishop for the Crown and the colonial soldiers and settlers and he was starting to pop up and other people who had, you know, kind of made a promise and a handshake to live alongside each other in harmony and respectfully. And so I think that's probably when they started to prick their ears up, thinking what's going on over here.
And actually, if this is happening in Taranaki, in Waikato, are we next? And so that's probably where the tipping point was for them. And they started to kind of start to think about what happened next. I mean, you talk about deadly. One thing about the New Zealand wars is that almost never was there a standing army there. In the iwi side, they were always children and women and pregnant women and elderly because that's how a kainga or a pā operated. In this pā in particular, Wairinga Ahika, it was a pā full of artists and musicians and and gardeners, orators. And it's interesting because when we had the launch on Saturday, the people who stood afterwards talked about how we may have lost 90% of our whenua as they did.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:06–0:58
2
What was the Six-Day battle at Wairenga-a-Hika and who was involved?
0:58–9:04
3
Why was Wairenga-a-Hika attacked in November 1865?
9:04–12:42
4
How many people were killed, deported or dispossessed after the battle?
12:42–17:02
5
How did intertribal dynamics and the Pai Mārire movement shape the conflict?
17:02–23:17