Pick the odd one out:

• A: The German Nazi regime, founded on a belief in the supremacy of the Aryan ‘race’ and ruled as a dictatorship by a single party and leader, which launched a war of aggression in Europe, embarked on a systematic campaign of extermination of Jews, and murdered political opponents, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals and disabled people.
• B: The apartheid regime of South Africa, founded on a belief in the supremacy of the white ‘race’, which stole the land and resources of black Africans, exploited black labour, denied non-white people the vote and other political rights, and jailed, tortured and assassinated its political opponents.
• C: The American South during the Jim Crow era, when laws based on a belief in the supremacy of the white ‘race’ denied African Americans voting and other political rights, African Americans were confined to substandard schools and housing and to the most menial and low-paid work, and the Ku Klux Klan and other armed groups regularly terrorised African American communities with lynchings and mob violence.
• D: Political policies in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand which aim (after decades of political processes which marginalised Māori) to give Māori a formal role in decision-making, to ensure that their interests and cultural perspectives are represented; or which facilitate the establishment by Māori of their own services, organisations and spaces where they can (if they choose) be themselves, govern themselves and help themselves in an environment underpinned by Māori cultural values and practices.

If you chose ‘D’ – congratulations! You have a better sense of perspective than some of the most senior figures in the current New Zealand Government, and can tell the difference between an oppressive system of racial domination and one that creates space for indigenous people to represent their own interests and pursue their own collective aspirations. The attempts by certain politicians to draw parallels between policies such as co-governance with Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, and Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa or the Jim Crow South, are both offensive and historically illiterate.

But what about historical parallels closer to home? On Thursday, ACT party Tertiary Education and Skills spokesperson Dr Parmjeet Parmar announced that she was writing to every tertiary education institute in the country to ask about their policies on spaces set aside for particular sections of the student community. This follows confected outrage from the usual suspects about a sign at Auckland University for a designated study area for Māori and Pasifika students. In making this announcement, Dr Parmar said that ‘The signage reminds us of darker days when different races were segregated at swimming baths and barber shops.’

Although it wasn’t clear from her media release, an article by Dr Parmar published today confirms that she was referring to past discriminatory practices in New Zealand: ‘Māori were once segregated at cinemas and swimming baths. Indians like me were excluded from some barber shops until the 1950s.’

This is a welcome acknowledgement by Dr Parmar of past discrimination experienced particularly by Māori, but also by Indian, Chinese and Pacific peoples in Aotearoa. Most notoriously, the town of Pukekohe in South Auckland had a de facto ‘colour bar’ for many years. For a number of decades from the 1920s, Māori in Pukekohe were segregated in the local cinema, most barbers refused to cut their hair, and most bars would not serve them alcohol. For a time, the local school had segregated bathrooms and sessions at the swimming pool for Māori. (For more on this, see stories here, here and here.) While segregation seems to have been particularly strong in Pukekohe, Māori also experienced it elsewhere in the country. Segregation in Pukekohe also extended to the local Indian community, and there is a significant history of discrimination against Indian New Zealanders, too.

As with the comparisons to discriminatory regimes overseas, comparing dedicated study areas for Māori and Pacific students with past segregation in places like Pukekohe is specious. This is a history blog, so I won’t get into the merits of separate study spaces in contemporary universities here. But there is all the difference in the world between, on the one hand, laws or practices that ban marginalised groups from freely accessing goods and services; and, on the other hand, providing spaces for members of such groups to associate together, if they choose to do so.

Instead of adding to the stresses of university staff with inane information requests (surely a waste of the taxpayer funds that ACT claims to be focused on spending wisely), Dr Parmar could more usefully help to educate New Zealanders about the little-known history of discrimination in this country, and to draw connections between the experiences of Māori and Indian communities. And if some politicians can’t see the difference between past oppressive practices and present-day programmes that are designed, at least in part, to overcome the legacies of those past practices, they might need to go back to school for some remedial study themselves.

My mother died earlier this year, after several years of moving through different stages of residential care. This tribute to her is adapted from an unpublished essay I wrote in 2017, when Mum was still living in her own home in Palmerston North, and is written from the perspective of that time. For a story from another phase of Mum’s life, see this earlier post.

The houses of Palmerston North’s Savage Crescent are solid and full of character. They have, as we say of both houses and people, good bones.

My mother does not have good bones. Hers are brittle with osteoporosis, but they have never yet broken. Her slight frame puts little pressure on her fragile bones. When I hug her, she turns herself to one side, as though to evade me or to shield her slender body.

Savage Crescent, one of New Zealand’s first state housing areas, was developed between 1937 and 1945. It was designed as a Garden Suburb, with a looping road and a recreational reserve in the middle. Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand’s first Labour Prime Minister, spoke of building ‘smiling homes’ for New Zealanders. His namesake street represents an enlightened belief that state houses could be well-built, using good materials. While there were standard designs, the houses were not identical to each other.

Mum’s home is state house design no. 638, an English-cottage-style design. I know this because it appears in a book on state houses in New Zealand, and also in an article in Heritage New Zealand magazine. Mum’s house is featured because, when she purchased it in 2011, it was substantially unchanged from the original design. She is only the second private owner of this house, the previous owners having bought it from the government in 1957. There are still traces of its earlier residents in decorative flourishes such as the floral carpet, salmon-pink shutters on the front and side windows, and an odd wallpaper design that looks like a curtain behind Mum’s bed.

Mum lives with her elderly tortoiseshell cat, Sindy. Sindy turned up with a litter of kittens at my parents’ house in another part of Palmerston North in 2005. Other homes were found for the kittens, but Sindy stayed on. At the time, Mum was reading a book which mentioned the popularity among seventeenth-century English Puritans of moralistic names like Sin-deny. And so the cat became ‘Sindy with an S’, as Mum was careful to make clear when introducing Sindy to strangers.

It wasn’t long after Sindy arrived in Mum’s life that my parents’ marriage ended. Mum stayed on in their house for a number of years, while my sister and I tried to persuade her to move somewhere smaller and more manageable. She resisted for a while but then, to our surprise and on her own initiative, she bought the house in Savage Crescent. The house was cold and in need of sprucing up, but was fundamentally sound. Mum set about making it her own, turning it into a warm and cosy environment by having heating, insulation and double glazing installed.

The house is filled with items that bear witness to her life in Australia, the US state of Minnesota, and New Zealand. In the toilet is a figurine of a boxing kangaroo; on a bookshelf, a pipe by an Ojibwe artist from Minnesota, with a human head in red pipestone at one end and a wooden bird’s head at the other; on a wall is a plate showing a cheerful pūkeko striding along. Indigenous artworks and artefacts are displayed on walls and shelves, alongside childhood art by my sister and me, and by Mum’s two grand-daughters. There are owls, collected over decades: owl figurines of metal, stone or clay, owls on cards, owls in cartoons. A bookshelf in the living room is full: even as Mum gives books away to the Red Cross, she continues to buy more. In that, as in so much else, I am my mother’s son.

On the living-room floor are two rows of boxes, full of copies of the book Mum self-published in 2011, based on her PhD thesis. The book focuses on the life stories of seven women from the Ojibwe people, one of the Native American peoples of Minnesota. It took Mum almost twenty years to revise her thesis for publication, and by the time it was finally finished she was too frail and tired to promote the book actively or to travel to Minnesota for the party she had long planned to hold with the women whose story the book tells. This was the price of her perfectionism, another trait I share with her.

If you look carefully around the house, you can see Mum’s notes to herself. A chart on a wall sets out the places where she’s lived over the years, a sequence she now struggles to remember. In the kitchen is a list of the things she plans to eat for dinner that week. She writes notes of her conversations with me, and with my sister. In the study, beside her computer, is a note that simply says ‘HANG IN THERE’.

Outside, you would once have seen her little yellow car, which she had to give up on doctor’s orders. She didn’t concede without a fight. ‘It’s not easy arguing with a lawyer’, the doctor joked. When he asked her at a subsequent meeting ‘Do you remember me?’, she replied: ‘Yes, you’re the man who took my car away!’ But she’s got used to coping without a car, using taxis or saving up chores in town for when I or another friend or family member visit.

In the book on state houses, Mum is quoted describing herself as a ‘fanatical gardener’, and Savage Crescent’s gardens were part of what drew her to the street. Even now, her ability to care for plants and to remember their names is undimmed. She pays someone to help with heavy garden work, but it’s Mum’s skill and knowledge that keep the garden looking immaculate. In the front yard are well-trimmed trees and shrubs and colourful flowers. In the back are kangaroo paws (a reminder of her Australian origins); rhubarb plants with rich, red stalks; vegetables growing on raised beds; and lemon and mandarin trees. In summer, strawberries grow under tunnels of protective netting.

Mum likes to look out over her garden and watch the birds and the neighbourhood cats coming and going, just as she enjoys watching the people passing by along the street. She’s happy to talk to visitors who come to the door. Jehovah’s Witnesses, so used to being turned away, have no doubt been delighted to find her willing to listen. She takes an interest in who her neighbours are, and was friendly with the man with many cats in the house across the road, the house where police cars would occasionally pull up. Then the man across the street moved out suddenly, and the house was taped off while it underwent decontamination. ‘Methamphetamine isn’t illegal, is it?’ Mum asked me, though I suspect she half-knew the answer.

My sister worries about Mum’s safety, frets that she’s too trusting and can be taken advantage of, or that she might leave an element on and start a fire. I’m more willing to put Mum’s quality of life and independence ahead of her safety, but I still worry that Mum might get suddenly worse, either physically or mentally, and need to move into residential care at short notice. Both my concern and my sister’s lead in the same direction: to thinking about the day when she will have to leave the home she has made for herself on Savage Crescent.

Once you start looking, you realise that promotions for residential facilities for the elderly are everywhere: glossy inserts in newspapers, online ads, even posters on giant billboards. They always show beaming, healthy older people leading fun-filled lives. As Atul Gawande writes in his book Being Mortal, these places are not marketed primarily to elderly people themselves, but to their middle-aged children:

They try to create what the marketers call ‘the visuals’ – the beautiful, hotel-like entryway, for instance… They tout their computer lab, their exercise center, and their trips to concerts and museums – features that speak much more to what a middle-aged person desires for a parent than to what the parent does. Above all, they sell themselves as safe places. They almost never sell themselves as places that put a person’s choices about how he or she wants to live first and foremost.

I find it hard to imagine Mum thriving in such places. She is not one who fits in easily in an institutional environment, and she doesn’t want her life too closely enmeshed with the lives of others.

Near the end of Mum’s doctoral thesis, the writing takes a personal turn and she describes movingly her experience of feeling different throughout her adult life, concluding:

I am still different and sometimes I curse it, but at other times I know that my difference is a gift to be used creatively and in a way which is life-giving. Because I have made gardens all over the world I belong to all those places. Mainly I belong in Australia. I also belong in Aotearoa and even have a small place in my heart for Minnesota. I belong with my family, and I belong with my friends who live scattered throughout the world and who are, when I think about it, in general, ‘just as crazy as I am!’

Twenty-five years after writing those words, Mum’s world has shrunk, and she’s seldom in touch with her crazy friends overseas. But her garden is still at the centre of her world.

In her thesis, Mum writes about traditional Ojibwe attitudes towards old people. Old people were respected, but respect was accompanied by an expectation ‘that old people should, as far as possible, be self-sufficient and look after themselves. They did not complain about this; it was important to them that their manido [spiritual power or life force] be acknowledged.’ This philosophy seems wise, and yet so much rests on those few words, ‘as far as possible’. How far will it be possible for Mum to maintain her independence as her memory and judgement continue to falter, or if she falls and breaks those brittle bones?

Mum’s thesis ends with an enigmatic story about the time when she and her twin sister, growing up in rural Australia, found an echidna walking up their drive. Echidnas were rare in their area, so they were excited, and managed to capture it in a bucket to show their mother. Afterwards, they turned the bucket upside down with the echidna underneath. The next day, they found that the echidna had burrowed into the ground under the bucket, and escaped.

I don’t know how to interpret this story. Does Mum see herself as the echidna, spiky and somewhat solitary? Is it about the impossibility of holding on to the things you love, or of ever fully comprehending a complex culture, like that of the Ojibwe? Or perhaps it’s about the importance of respecting the independence of others, not confining them for our own convenience.

In her book, Mum discusses the Ojibwe concept of bimaadiziwin, which she says can be translated as ‘a long life, a good life, and a healthy life’. She notes that a good life includes both good and bad times, and that another way of translating bimaadiziwin is ‘a life which is truly alive’.  A comparable ideal of human flourishing lay behind the creation of places like Savage Crescent, with their promise of healthy homes and pleasant surroundings in which individuals, families and communities could live fulfilling lives.

When Mum self-published her book, she called the publishing imprint Mokoroa Press. This was a reference to the whakataukī (Māori proverb) ‘He iti hoki te mokoroa, nāna i kakati te kahikatea’. The mokoroa is the larva or caterpillar of the pūriri moth. It gnaws into trees, feeding on their sap and eventually killing them. The whakataukī says that, although the mokoroa is small, it chewed through the tall kahikatea tree. In other words, something small can bring down the mighty through sheer persistence.

Mum is small in stature and unassuming in manner, but strong and determined. Or, as she once said to my sister: ‘I may be small, but I can still pack a punch!’ The whakataukī also relates to something Mum remembers her mother saying: ‘You wait, the worm will turn!’ Mum is on the side of the worms that turn, the underdogs waiting to have their day (although she has always been more of a cat person). The whakataukī speaks to Mum’s willingness to challenge those in authority, and to her determination to work away at her thesis and book until she finally completed them.

For Mum, life has often felt like a struggle, but she has got through by focusing on the things that sustain her: a tūī singing in the kōwhai, a cat basking in the sun, a laugh and a piece of cake shared with a friend. As she recognised, being different can be a curse, but it can also be a blessing and a source of creativity. By hanging in there and always being resolutely herself, Mum has found her own way to live a life which is truly alive.

In memory of Gwen Morris, 20 November 1941 – 9 April 2023

References

Bill McKay, Andrea Stevens and Simon Devitt, Beyond the State: New Zealand State Houses from Modest to Modern (Auckland, Penguin, 2014)

John O’Leary, ‘Unaltered States’, Heritage New Zealand, issue 130, Spring 2013, pp. 30-35

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End (London, Profile Books, 2014)

Gwen Morris, ‘Gifted Woman Light Around You: Objibwa Women and their Stories’ (PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1992)

Gwen Morris, Gifted Woman Light Around You: Life Stories of Seven Ojibwe Women (Palmerston North, Mokoroa Press, 2011)

Aotearoa New Zealand continues to move towards greater official recognition of the unique status of Māori culture as the original culture of this land. Two recent examples of this trend relate to matters I’ve previously discussed here.

On Friday last week, the Treaty of Waitangi settlement relating to Taranaki Maunga was initialled by representatives of the iwi of Taranaki and of the Crown. If ratified by iwi members and then enacted through legislation, the settlement will recognise Taranaki Maunga and the surrounding peaks and national park as a legal person, Te Kāhui Tupua, whose interests will be represented by an entity made up of iwi and Crown representatives.

As lead iwi negotiator Jamie Tuuta and Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Andrew Little both noted, the settlement will see the name Egmont finally disappear from the map. Egmont will no longer be an official name for the maunga (mountain), which will be known solely as Taranaki Maunga, nor will it be the name of the national park, whose name will change to Te Papakura o Taranaki.

In a speech outlining aspects of the settlement, Andrew Little drew attention to the history behind the restoration of the name of Taranaki Maunga:

It was people in Taranaki who drove the effort to officially add the name Taranaki alongside Egmont [in 1986].

Those efforts generated enormous controversy. It seems that at different points in time all of us have worried about what changing our mountain’s name could mean for us, our heritage, our region and our country.

I discussed that controversy and the successful campaign to have Taranaki recognised as the name of the maunga in a recent journal article. Restoration of the name of the maunga is only part, though an important part, of the long struggle of the iwi of Taranaki to undo the harms caused by the Crown’s confiscation of the maunga.

At the moment, the official name of the maunga is still that recognised in 1986: ‘Mount Taranaki or Mount Egmont‘. More than one person has told me that the name of the maunga has already been changed to Taranaki Maunga, perhaps because of news reporting in late 2019 that suggested the name change would happen the following year. Official place names can only be changed in two ways: through a decision of the New Zealand Geographic Board or the Minister for Land Information under the New Zealand Geographic Board (Ngā Pou Taunaha o Aotearoa) Act 2008, or by legislation (most commonly, legislation implementing a Treaty settlement). Neither of these two avenues have yet been used to change the official name of the maunga to Taranaki Maunga.

When the name of the maunga is finally changed by legislation, the name will break new ground by being completely in Māori: ‘Taranaki Maunga’, not ‘Mount Taranaki’. This will be another significant step forward for the recognition of te reo Māori and of Māori connection with place.

Another important recent development has been the decision to celebrate Matariki, the Māori new year, with a new national holiday. The second annual Matariki holiday will be coming up in a few months, and just last week Professor Rangi Matamua, a key figure in the modern revival of Matariki, was named New Zealander of the Year. Professor Matamua has done an enormous amount, through his research and his book Matariki: The Star of the Year, to better inform Aotearoa about Matariki and Māori astronomical knowledge.

The media inevitably likes to focus on particular individuals when telling stories about developments like the revival of Matariki, and Professor Matamua has been described in the media as ‘the man behind Matariki’. This, of course, is not Professor Matamua’s description of himself, and it take nothing away from his achievements to note that the growing public recognition of Matariki has been a collective achievement of many people, starting around the mid-1990s. I discussed some of this history here. It’s only right to celebrate some of the wāhine Māori behind Matariki as well, such as:

• the artist Diane Prince, who was a key figure in starting the modern celebration of Matariki in Wellington in 1995
• the broadcaster and film-maker Libby Hakaraia, who published Matariki: The Māori New Year in 2004
• Māori Party MP Rāhui Kātene, whose Te Rā o Matariki/Matariki Day Bill in 2009 was an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to create a Matariki public holiday.

This is a very partial and somewhat Wellington-centric list. A revival of Matariki seems to have happened in Hawke’s Bay independently of that in Wellington, for example, and there will have been women and men throughout Aotearoa who contributed to the increasing public presence of Matariki. It’s worth remembering that any campaign, whether for restoration of the name of a maunga or recognition of an indigenous seasonal festival, is the work of many individuals.

New Zealand’s premier historian of war memorials, Jock Phillips, once called Whanganui the ‘war memorial capital of the world’. It’s a big claim, but Whanganui certainly does seem to have more than its share of memorials – although not all are directly connected to war.

Whanganui’s most well-known memorials are probably those at Pākaitore/Moutoa Gardens. Three of those memorials have connections to a remarkable wahine Māori, Pura Te Mānihera McGregor (Makarika), whose own memorial elsewhere in Whanganui is fascinating in its own right.

Pura Te Mānihera was born in 1855 at Karatia on the Whanganui River. She was the eldest daughter of Hōhi Te Aotūroa (Ngāti Ruakā and Ngāti Rangi) and Māui Te Mānihera (Ngā Poutama). Her father Te Mānihera was among the Māori who were killed fighting on the Crown side against supporters of the Pai Mārire movement in the 1864 battle of Moutoa. As such, his name appears (as ‘Manihera Maui’) on the Moutoa monument at Pākaitore, with its infamous inscription to the Māori who died fighting against ‘fanaticism and barbarism’.

While still in her teens, Pura herself became involved in the New Zealand Wars, accompanying her uncle Te Keepa Te Rangihiwinui (Major Kemp) as he led Māori troops pursuing Te Kooti on the East Coast in 1868-69. She reportedly climbed a tree to hoist the Union Jack while under fire and was recommended for a New Zealand War Medal, but this recommendation was denied because she was a woman. Te Keepa and the military campaigns he was involved in are commemorated by a memorial at Pākaitore, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

In 1879, Pura married Gregor McGregor, the son of Scottish settlers in the Whanganui district. From then on she was known as Pura McGregor (transliterated to Makarika in Māori), and in accordance with the sexist naming conventions of the time she commonly appears in the historical record as ‘Mrs Gregor McGregor’. Gregor subsequently became a station manager near Rānana on the Whanganui River, but Pura lived for most of her married life at the couple’s house in Whanganui township.

Pura was very involved with community life in Whanganui, and during the First World War she was President of the Lady Liverpool Māori Soldiers’ Fund in Whanganui. The Fund raised money to support Māori soldiers during the war, but a surplus remained at the war’s end and Whanganui Māori decided to use this money for a memorial at Pākaitore to Māori participation in the war (I’ve written about this memorial as well).

Pura was a woman of great mana and high standing among Māori and Pākehā alike. Her wartime activities led to her becoming the first Māori woman to be awarded an Order of the British Empire in 1919. Pura also made important contributions to the cultural life of Whanganui and Aotearoa New Zealand generally. She was involved in the Wanganui Beautifying Society, and worked with other Whanganui River Māori to obtain native plants for the area surrounding Rotokawau/Virginia Lake in Whanganui. Similarly, when Gregor was appointed site superintendent for the ‘model Māori pā‘ at the New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch in 1906-07, Pura helped to recruit Whanganui carvers and builders, and to find materials, for the project. One of her greatest contributions to Whanganui was her donation of her collection of taonga Māori to the city of Whanganui, helping to form the collection of what is now the Whanganui Regional Museum.

Pura’s interests in civic improvement and taonga Māori came together in 1917, when the Wanganui Chronicle reported:

A ‘tiki’ in the form of a Maori canoe, which took part in a fight at Kapiti, has been acquired by the [St John’s Hill Beautifying] [S]ociety and is being carved under the supervision of Mrs. Gregor McGregor, and is being erected on ‘Pura’ Point, overlooking the far end of Virginia Lake.

Wanganui Chronicle, 28 September 1917

However, when Pura died on 4 March 1920, this project was evidently uncompleted. In December of that year, the President of the St John’s Hill Beautifying Society feared it would not be possible to complete the carving of the waka, due to Pura’s death. A year and a half later, however, work on the tiki had resumed, and it was now being described as a memorial to Pura:

The canoe, from which the memorial is being prepared, is a very old one, but its timber is in a splendid state of preservation. It has been thoroughly overhauled, cleaned, and painted in a typical Maori manner, and will make an appropriate memorial.

Wanganui Chronicle, 23 May 1922

By January 1923, the waka had been installed at the far end of Virginia Lake/Rotokawau, on the former site of Toronui pā, as a memorial to Pura. It was described as ‘a very old and fine Maori canoe erected on its end, and painted in true Maori style, and is visible from all parts of the lake’. The memorial was surrounded by an iron fence, and there was a plaque at the base stating that the tiki had been erected to the memory of Pura McGregor.

The description of the memorial as a tiki may seem unusual, as that term is more commonly used today for an abstract human figure worn as a neck ornament. However, another meaning of ‘tiki’ (according to Williams’ Dictionary of the Māori Language) is ‘a post to mark a place which was tapu [under a spiritual restriction]’. The use of the word tiki to describe the memorial to Pura probably refers to the Māori practice of using upturned waka as grave markers for people of high rank. Waka whakamaumahara (memorial canoes) has been recorded by Pākehā observers since the 1830s. When rangatira died, their waka might be cut in half so that the prow could be carved and painted, and erected as a memorial. The rangatira might be buried at the site where the waka whakamaumahara is erected, but more likely their remains would lie elsewhere and the waka would function as a memorial.

The waka whakamaumara for Pura McGregor was a memorial only: she is buried, together with Gregor, in Heads Road Cemetery, Whanganui. Unlike European memorials of stone or metal, waka whakamaumhara were not made of durable materials, and were perhaps not intended to survive indefinitely. In the case of Pura’s memorial, it become rotten and was removed in 1988.

In recent years, the Virginia Lake Trust decided to replace the memorial and, with support from the McGregor whānau, commissioned a new steel memorial by local artist Cecilia Kumeroa. The new memorial was opened in September 2020. It preserves the form of the waka whakamaumahara in a more durable material, and repeats the painted patterns from the original memorial as a cut-out design. It’s a striking and modern memorial which very effectively links past and present to commemorate Pura’s achievements in both the Māori and Pākehā worlds.

There are two things about the original memorial, and its modern replacement, that I find particularly interesting. First, it’s a rare example of a memorial to a Māori woman (indeed, memorials to women of any ethnicity are notoriously rare not only in Aotearoa but around the world). Second, it’s an early example of a memorial in a public place that draws on Māori iconography and commemorative practices, rather than copying the commemorative forms of Europe. The move away from European commemorative traditions is becoming more common now, with increasing use of pou (commemorative poles) and innovative memorials like those designed by Tūranga (Gisborne) artist Nick Tupara. By erecting the waka whakamaumahara to Pura Te Mānihera Makarika a century ago, Whanganui took a forward-looking step that the rest of Aotearoa is only just catching up with.

References

Miriam McGregor, ‘Pura McGregor’, in her Petticoat Pioneers: North Island Women of the Colonial Era, vol. 2, A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1975, ch. 19.

Michelle Horwood and Che Wilson, Te Ara Tapu: Sacred Journeys: Whanganui Regional Museum Taonga Māori Collection, Auckland, Random House/Whanganui Regional Museum, 2008.

Stephen Deed, Unearthly Landscapes: New Zealand’s Early Cemeteries, Churchyards and Urupā, Dunedin, Otago University Press, 2015, ch 2.

Ewan Morris, ‘Māori Monument or Pākehā Propaganda? The Memorial to Keepa Te Rangihiwinui, Whanganui’, in Annabel Cooper, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla (eds), The Lives of Colonial Objects, Dunedin, Otago University Press, 2015, pp. 230-235.

Ewan Morris, ‘“Kia Mau ai te Ora, te Pono me te Aroha ki te Ao Katoa”: The Māori First World War Memorial at Whanganui’, Turnbull Library Record, vol. 46, 2014, pp. 62-79.

In a previous post, I wrote about the fierce debate that took place in the 1980s about the name of Taranaki Maunga (known at the time to most Pākehā as Mount Egmont), and about my struggle to turn my research about this debate into a published article. Now, courtesy of giving myself a push by presenting a paper at the New Zealand Historical Association (NZHA) conference last year, I’ve finally published my article on the debate. It’s been published in a special issue of the Public History Review journal on the theme of ‘Public History in Aotearoa New Zealand’, based on a selection of papers from the 2021 NZHA conference. The articles in this issue of the journal will be good reading for anyone with an interest in history and memory in Aotearoa.

My article (titled ‘”Egmont, Who Was He?’ The Debate Over Restoration of the Name of Taranaki Maunga”) looks at the background to this major place name debate, the themes in the debate, and the reasons for the intensity of the debate. It also draws some connections to the new Aotearoa New Zealand histories curriculum, which features themes relating to place names.

Currently, the official name of the maunga is still ‘Mount Taranaki or Mount Egmont’, the compromise solution which emerged from the 1980s debate. However, the name is due to be finally changed to recognise the Māori name Taranaki alone, as part of the Taranaki Maunga Treaty of Waitangi Settlement, which is expected to be completed soon. I hope my article can provide some useful context when this change finally takes place.

Yesterday was Guy Fawkes Day, and it is almost becoming a tradition for New Zealand media to celebrate the occasion by running pieces on two topical issues: Should the sale of fireworks be banned? And should we be commemorating the resistance of the Taranaki Māori community of Parihaka (which was invaded by government forces on 5 November 1881) instead of the foiling of the 1605 plot by Guy Fawkes and other English Catholics to blow up the English Parliament and install a Catholic monarch? For the record, my answer to both questions is ‘yes’, but the focus of this post is a bit different.

As the historian David Cressy notes, after the Gunpowder Plot was discovered and the conspirators had been captured, tortured and executed, the English Parliament passed a law for an annual act of public thanksgiving on 5 November to ensure the nation’s deliverance from the plot was held in ‘perpetual remembrance’. Cressy calls this ‘one of the earliest examples of legislated memory’, which ‘provided a model for subsequent acts of commemoration’. The law mandating the day of commemoration was not repealed until 1859, and the imperative to remember was also captured in the popular rhyme:

Please to remember the Fifth of November

Gunpowder Treason and Plot

We know no reason why Gunpowder Treason

Should ever be forgot.

Over time, Guy Fawkes Night became a popular festivity marked by socially licensed misrule, featuring bonfires, the burning of effigies of Fawkes and others, and, eventually, fireworks. In the late nineteenth century, authorities had some success in bringing the festivities under control by providing organised entertainment, and the focus changed again during the twentieth century with the commercial availability of fireworks.

As Guy Fawkes Night became a popular festival, it also came to focus less on the historical details of the Gunpowder Plot and more on current events and hate-figures of the times in which the festivities took place. David Cressy writes that:

Foreign and imperial affairs brought new figures into the Guy Fawkes pageant. Effigies of the 1870s included Pope Leo XIII, the Tsar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, the Amir of Afghanistan, Araby Pasha and the king of the Zulus. The Irish leader Parnell appeared on the bonfires in 1879…. Historical memory gave way to current affairs.

David Cressy, ‘Four Hundred Years of Festivities’, in Brenda Buchanan et al, Gunpowder Plots: A Celebration of 400 Years of Bonfire Night, London, Allen Lane, 2005

In New Zealand, too, Guy Fawkes effigies of the German Kaiser were burned during the First World War, as were effigies of Hitler during the Second World War. What may be surprising, however, is that in 1881 some Pākehā New Zealanders drew a connection between Guy Fawkes and the Parihaka leader Te Whiti-o-Rongomai.

Today, when people argue that we should commemorate Parihaka’s campaign of non-violent resistance rather than the Gunpowder Plot, the underlying assumption is that the two events could not be more different in their nature and their significance to Aotearoa New Zealand. The Taranaki Daily News, for example, editorialised in 2012:

Fawkes was a religious zealot and would-be terrorist who almost succeeded in killing and maiming thousands of people. On the other hand, Parihaka played host to the dramatic conclusion of a now-celebrated campaign of peaceful activism against land theft in a manner that propelled other activists in other countries to iconic status worldwide.

Taranaki Daily News, 26 June 2012, p 8

At the time of the invasion of Parihaka, however, many Pākehā had convinced themselves (or been convinced by what we might now call disinformation) that Te Whiti, Tohu and their followers were themselves dangerous plotters who posed a genuine threat to public order and safety. Astonishing though it may seem today, it was not outlandish in 1881 for Pākehā to speak of Guy Fawkes and Te Whiti in the same breath. The fact that the Gunpowder Plot was a Catholic conspiracy may be relevant here. This was a time when sectarianism was still a powerful force in New Zealand society, and many Protestants viewed Catholics as superstitious, credulous and in thrall to their religious leaders – the same characteristics Pākehā attributed to the people of Parihaka. But above all, Parihaka had been the subject of so much rumour- and fear-mongering that it could seem plausible to depict Te Whiti as New Zealand’s Guy Fawkes.

In the leadup to the invasion, for example, rumours spread that the people of Parihaka had positioned dynamite in the village so that ‘the Divine interpretation promised by Te Whiti on the 5th November will consist in blowing up the New Zealand forces as Guy Fawkes proposed to do to the House of Commons on that day two or three centuries ago’. Even the newspapers at the time conceded that this rumour was unfounded and absurd. The Poverty Bay Herald, however, published two poems which mocked Te Whiti, linked him to Guy Fawkes, and celebrated the suppression of the Parihaka resistance:

Remember, remember, this Fifth of November,

Native Policy, Armed Force, and the lot.

There is reason to doubt, that they’ll suffer a rout,

If they give way to Te Whiti one jot;

Then let it appear,

To that savage, most clear,

That his day dreams have come to an end —

He is doomed to the Pakeha to bend,

And so say all of us.

‘Monteagle’, ‘Ye Modern Guy Fawkes Plot’, Poverty Bay Herald, 5 November 1881, p 2

Ah! Long shall we New Zealanders a well-known date remember —

The which Guy Fawkes commemorates, the fifth day of November

When Bryce, by British bayonets backed, read out the Act called Riot,

And bold Te Whiti — why he “caved in,” like a lamb so quiet.

‘J.J.P.’, ‘The N.Z. Guy Fawkes’, Poverty Bay Herald, 7 November 1881, p 2

Of course, Te Whiti had not ‘caved in’ but rather been arrested, and would be held in detention by the government, not being allowed to return to Parihaka until 1883. The invasion was a source of huge and ongoing trauma for the people of Parihaka and for Taranaki Māori more widely. For many Pākehā at the time, however, it was cause for celebration. The New Zealand Herald reported:

The Fifth of November, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, has been celebrated this year with unusual rigour, principally it is believed, as enabling the youngsters to hit two birds with the one stone — namely, commemorating the crime of Guy Fawkes, and the capture of Te Whiti. Crackers and squibs were being exploded in the streets to a late hour on Saturday, while bonfires were blazing in every suburb, and on the top of nearly all the hills surrounding Auckland.

New Zealand Herald, 8 November 1881, p 4

Pākehā ‘youngsters’ of today may still enjoy fireworks, but we can hope that the new New Zealand histories curriculum will mean they will have a much better understanding of the events at Parihaka than their counterparts of 140 years ago.

• The ‘high diction’ (as literary historian Paul Fussell called it) of terms like ‘the fallen’ and ‘sacrifice’.
• ‘Anzac Day doesn’t glorify war’ (no, but it does sentimentalise and de-politicise it).
• ‘They died for our freedom’. (Fighting for the British Empire in the First World War or to prop up the corrupt regime of South Vietnam?)
• The fake Kemal Atatürk ‘Johnnies and Mehmets’ quote.
• Silence about the wars of invasion that took place within Aotearoa and Australia.

To be clear, I have no problem with people mourning those who died in wars overseas or who returned from those wars physically and psychologically wounded. But I am tired of the cliches that, every year, get pressed back into service on this day.

Meanwhile, with the military-themed street names of Waiwhetū and Waterloo having been in the news over the weekend, it seems timely to refer back to my posts about these names (here and here).

Walking through Wellington the other week, I saw a message chalked on the footpath outside the offices of the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. It had clearly been written by one of the protesters (commonly, though not entirely accurately, described as ‘anti-vaccination mandate’) currently occupying the Parliament grounds and surrounding area. The message said ‘Culture of apartheid’, with a jagged line separating two faces, only one of which was smiling.

There’s been some commentary about the misuse of historical parallels by the protesters. New Zealand’s Jewish community has condemned the protesters for comparing the situation of unvaccinated New Zealanders to the treatment of Jews by the Nazis, even as anti-Semitic poison spews out of the protest camp. The RSA also felt compelled to repudiate slogans likening the protest to New Zealand involvement in the Gallipoli campaign during the First World War. (Because we all remember the stirring moment when the Anzacs, under heavy Turkish fire, ummm… refused to take a safe and effective vaccine. Actually, given the strong opposition to the protest from Wellington mana whenua and most Wellingtonians, perhaps the comparison with the Anzacs’ attempt to forcibly occupy the Gallipoli peninsula is apt after all.)

Likening vaccination mandates to the apartheid policy of the former white minority regime of South Africa is another spurious historical comparison made by the protesters. Protest signs say things like ‘End apartheid we go home’, while one I saw the other day wins the prize for combining Nazi and apartheid references: ‘Welcome to Fuhrer Ardern’s apartheid New Zealand’.

The rhetoric of the current protest is dominated by a vague but highly individualistic concept of ‘freedom’. Jehan Casinader recently wrote a good response to the protesters’ outlandish claims that New Zealanders’ freedoms are under threat from a dictatorial government. The individualist emphasis on ‘freedom’ unites the ‘alt right’ and the New Age ‘wellness’ movement, with protest rhetoric drawing freely from both of these ideological strands. However, it leaves the protesters with an impoverished language for talking about fairness or equality: which is where the idea of ‘apartheid’ (with the implication that the unvaccinated are suffering unfair segregation and discrimination) comes in.

South African apartheid has now passed into history, and with its passing the popular understanding in New Zealand of the nature of apartheid has been sanitised. If you ask New Zealanders today to define apartheid, many would probably say something like ‘treating people differently on the basis of race’ (or ‘based on the colour of their skin’). It’s this watered down understanding of apartheid that has allowed the political right to position itself as the leaders of the new anti-apartheid struggle.

For most of the time that South African apartheid was actually in existence, the right in New Zealand was generally opposed to the idea that New Zealand should put pressure on the South African government to end white minority rule. Anti-apartheid activism in New Zealand was largely confined to leftists and liberals. With the fall of the apartheid regime and the widespread acceptance that anti-apartheid movement had held the moral high ground, however, the right’s position shifted.

To be sure, some fringe right wingers in New Zealand display a barely concealed nostalgia for apartheid by perpetuating a myth of post-apartheid genocide against white South Africans which, as Ross Webb has described, has been promoted within New Zealand’s white South African community. But far more common is a strategy of claiming the anti-apartheid mantle for the right. Act Party leader David Seymour recently referred to people coming to New Zealand ‘from South Africa to escape apartheid’ when arguing that New Zealand history is marked by a quest for equal opportunity and freedom. (In fact, most South African New Zealanders arrived well after the end of apartheid.) And last year Seymour compared legislation making it easier to establish Māori wards in local government to the laws of apartheid South Africa.

Whether it’s Māori wards, the current government’s Three Waters proposals, the proposed establishment of a Māori Health Authority, or a range of other issues, any suggestion of specific arrangements to recognise Māori rights and interests is inevitably met with claims of apartheid from opponents, most of whom are on the political right. Sometimes it’s not even necessary to mention the ‘a’ word – it’s usually enough to attack ‘separatism‘ (as if colonisation was not itself a separatist project from the start). The current claims that vaccine mandates are a form of apartheid seem to draw on this existing right-wing rhetoric.

Such claims rely on forgetting the realities of life in apartheid South Africa. When apartheid is described as ‘treating people differently on the basis of race’, a lot is hidden in those words ‘treating people differently’. The official ideology of apartheid was one of separate development for different ‘races’, but separation was simply a tool for white racial domination. Under apartheid, millions of non-white South Africans were forcibly relocated; freedom of movement for black South Africans was severely curtailed; public services such as health and education were not simply segregated but grossly unequal, with whites accessing much better services than others; and non-white citizens had no voting or other political rights, while many black people had their citizenship revoked under the pretence that they were citizens of independent black ‘homelands’. Opponents of the apartheid regime were killed by police and security services, imprisoned and tortured.

Above all, apartheid was a system of white supremacy underpinned by economic exploitation. Apartheid cemented white ownership of productive land that had been taken from the black majority, and tight control of the lives of black people kept the wages of black workers low. Exploitation of the land and labour of black South Africans created wealth that the elite could share to some extent with the white working class, helping to maintain their support for the ruling National Party. Common interests in upholding white supremacy also helped to overcome pre-existing divisions between Afrikaners and British South Africans.

It should be clear from this brief description that vaccine mandates in New Zealand are not even remotely like apartheid (not to mention that this is a temporary policy created in response to a deadly pandemic). There is no resemblance, for example, between a vaccine passport and the infamous pass laws of apartheid South Africa – not only is the intent and enforcement of vaccine passports vastly different from the apartheid pass laws, but those laws were part of a much larger system of economic, political and social control that has no parallel in modern New Zealand.

If apartheid is understood as system of economic exploitation and racial control, it also becomes clear that policies designed to provide Māori with a political voice, to recognise their rights and interests, and to address injustices and overcome inequalities they experience, have nothing to do with apartheid. Here is a very incomplete list of things that are not apartheid:

• The establishment of separate health, education or social providers to deliver more effective and culturally appropriate services to those Māori who choose to use them.
• Provision for Māori representation on elected bodies to ensure that there is an independent Māori voice to advocate for Māori views and interests.
• Māori choosing to form their own structures to manage their own affairs and advocate for their distinct rights and interests.
• Recognition and protection of the unique status of Māori culture as the indigenous culture of Aotearoa, one which exists nowhere else in the world.
• Māori exercising control over access to their own lands and communities.
• Redress to Māori for historical injustices, and targeted funding or programmes to address unequal social, economic and health outcomes for Māori.

The irony of the right’s apartheid rhetoric is that, to the extent that anything resembling apartheid’s system of racial control has been experienced in New Zealand, it has been experienced by Māori. The connections between the histories of colonisation and racism in South Africa and Aotearoa were pointed out by Māori activists during and after the protests against the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand. Māori have, at different times in Aotearoa’s history, experienced forced removal from their lands, armed suppression of political protest, imprisonment without trial, discrimination and substandard government services. This history, too, is forgotten in glib comparisons of present-day policies to apartheid. It’s curious, to say the least, to see Pākehā – including some individuals with significant wealth and privilege – now positioning themselves as the victims of apartheid policies.

Last Monday, 30 August 2021, was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealand-born atomic physicist. Rutherford was born at Spring Hill, near Nelson. Although Rutherford’s family left Spring Hill when he was only five, and subsequently lived in a number of other locations, his birthplace is home to a large memorial to him.

Aotearoa New Zealand has relatively few monuments to scholars and scientists, compared to those commemorating soldiers, statesmen and sporting heroes. The Rutherford birthplace memorial is also unusual in its size, its design and the fact that it includes an open-air display of information about Rutherford’s life.

Before the creation of the present memorial, the site was marked with a plaque mounted on a concrete slab, erected in the 1950s. The Waimea District Council purchased the site in the 1970s, and public meetings were held to decide what to do with the site. One meeting in 1981 voted in favour of a symbol of an atom on a tower, but this idea was subsequently rejected because it was feared the site might become the target of anti-nuclear protests.

(Rutherford had nothing to do with the development of the atomic bomb, though some of his students, and other New Zealanders, did contribute to work on the bomb. We can’t know what Rutherford would have thought of nuclear weapons if he’d lived to see their development, but we do know that in the 1930s he spoke at Cambridge University in favour of a ban on the use of aeroplanes in warfare.)

In the late 1980s, Rutherford’s biographer and convenor of the Rutherford Birthplace Project, John Campbell, proposed a memorial based on a display about Rutherford’s life. A number of organisations threw their weight behind the proposal, and the memorial was completed at a cost of some $400,000, opening in December 1991.

The memorial consists of a series of semi-circular terraces descending from a small mound in the middle. Display boards telling the story of Rutherford’s life are located in the terraces (there’s a list here of the topics covered). On the mound in the centre of the memorial is a statue of Rutherford as a child. He’s depicted as a young boy with an unusually large head, carrying an arithmetic primer.

My guess is that the shape of the memorial is intended to be reminiscent of Rutherford’s model of the atom, with the statue located in the atom’s nucleus. But the structure also suggests Rutherford’s ever-widening fame and engagement with the world. As the introductory panel explains, the site shows Rutherford’s progression from ‘humble beginnings in rural New Zealand’ to ‘world eminence’ as a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, ‘New Zealand’s most famous son’. The countries where Rutherford won his fame are represented by trees planted in the corners of the site: tōtara for New Zealand, maple for Canada and oak for England. According to the introductory panel, the memorial is meant not only to pay tribute to Rurtherford but also ‘to show New Zealand children that they too can aspire to great heights.’

By the end of his career, Rutherford had been made a British peer, Lord Rutherford of Nelson, and his coat of arms is reproduced on the wall of the memorial.

The Latin motto means ‘To seek the first principles of things’, and the shield is quartered by the growth and decay curves of radioactivity. The supporter on the left is Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary patron of alchemy, but I was most interested in the supporter on the right.

This ‘Māori warrior’ seems to function simply as a generic representation of New Zealandness, like the kiwi on the crest of the coat of arms. But it made me wonder what, if any, connection Rutherford and his career had with Māori.

Rutherford’s parents had both been born overseas (his father James in Scotland and his mother Martha in England), but came to New Zealand as children. Martha’s family settled in New Plymouth, but were evacuated to Nelson in 1860 as ‘Taranaki refugees‘, Pākehā who fled during the First Taranaki War. Martha was a school teacher, while James began his career as a mechanic, but moved into flax-milling. James’s flax-milling business took the family first to Havelock in the Marlborough Sounds, and then in 1888 to Pungarehu in Taranaki.

By the time Rutherford’s family moved to Taranaki, Rutherford was boarding at Nelson College, but he spent school and then university holidays at Pungarehu, and helped lay out the levels for the mill ponds, which were used for soaking flax. Rutherford was digging potatoes at Pungarehu when he received news in 1895 that he had won a scholarship to study at Cambridge University in Britain, and reportedly responded by saying ‘That’s the last potato I will ever dig.’

The Rutherford’s home and mill at Pungarehu was located on Lower Parihaka Road, and Pungarehu is close to the Māori settlement of Parihaka. The resistance of the Parihaka community to the imposition of land confiscation had led to its invasion by government forces in 1881, only a few years before the Rutherfords moved to Taranaki. Some twenty years of conflict in the province had left Taranaki Māori stripped of the land and autonomy they had fought hard to maintain.

Māori had dominated the flax (harakeke) trade in the early colonial period, stripping flax by hand for use in rope-making. But the invention of the mechanical flax-stripper in the 1860s, together with the taking of Māori land and the accompanying loss of their economic base, left Māori in the role of labourers and providers of raw material for Pākehā mill owners. Mills were generally small, and located near flax swamps.

It seems reasonably likely that Rutherford would have come across Māori in and around the flax mills his father operated. James Rutherford did well from his flax-milling business, going on to open another two Taranaki mills at Ōpunake and Warea. The late Ian Matheson, a historian of the New Zealand flax industry and former Palmerston North City Archivist, commented in an article on flax in New Zealand Geographic:

Lord Rutherford’s father was a flaxmiller in Nelson and Taranaki during the 1880s and 1890s. Profits from his business helped give young Ernest a start in life. Just think, the humble flax plant indirectly contributed to the splitting of the atom!

Quoted in Gerard Hindmarsh, ‘Flax: The Enduring Fibre’, New Zealand Geographic, no. 42, 1999, p. 49.

It may be drawing a long bow to see a connection between James Rutherford’s flax mills and the splitting of the atom. But it is helpful to understand the colonial society from which Rutherford emerged, and the way in which, within that society, growing Pākehā prosperity came at the expense of marginalisation of Māori. Such an understanding is a useful counter-balance to celebratory narratives of the lone genius emerging from humble origins to take on the world.

Today is the 250th anniversary of the birth of the Scottish writer Walter Scott, and I mark the occasion by publishing the second part of this post, based on a lecture I gave in 2017.

Why did British settlers and their descendants give places in Australia and New Zealand names associated with Walter Scott? I’ve already suggested some reasons: Scott’s worldwide fame, his status as a symbol of British culture, and the desire of immigrants for reminders of home. It’s notable that many, though not all, of those giving Scott-related names to places were Scottish. I think there’s another reason, however: for at least some colonists, Scott’s stories provided a template through which to imagine the experience of settlement in romantic but ultimately reassuring terms.

In his book Writing the Colonial Adventure, Australian academic Robert Dixon describes how the Waverley novels allow the hero to pursue dreams of adventure, but ultimately end with the reassertion of social stability rooted in possession of property. White settlers in New Zealand and Australia could experience directly or, if they lived further from the frontier, vicariously through newspaper accounts, the dangers of conflict with indigenous peoples, raids by bushrangers, and natural disasters such as bushfires, floods or earthquakes. If they were of a romantic bent, they could imagine themselves as embarked on their own heroic adventure, while always aware that the ultimate aim of colonisation was the pacification of the wild country, the subjugation of its indigenous inhabitants, and the creation of secure property rights for settlers under a British-derived legal system.

Dixon’s discussion of the Waverley novels is a prelude to his consideration of the writing of Thomas Browne or, to give him his nom de plume, Rolf Boldrewood. Browne, a prolific Australian novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose most famous book is the bushranging tale Robbery Under Arms, was openly influenced by Scott and took the name Boldrewood from Scott’s Marmion.

Before he became a writer, Browne ran a succession of cattle and sheep stations, starting in 1844 with a station in the southwest of what is now the state of Victoria. He called the property Squattlesea Mere, a name that, as a self-described ‘devout worshipper of Walter Scott’, he borrowed from Scott’s novel Woodstock. He later recalled Squattlesea Mere in terms that self-consciously drew on the tropes of adventure stories:

There were wild beasts (kangaroos and dingoes), Indians (blacks, whose fires in ‘The Rocks’ we could see), a pathless waste, and absolute freedom and independence. These last were the most precious possessions of all. … I felt as if this splendid Robinson Crusoe kind of life was too good to be true. Who was I that I should have had this grand inheritance of happiness immeasurable made over to me?

But the land had not, in fact, been ‘made over’ to Browne, but rather taken from its Aboriginal inhabitants, and he goes on in his memoir to spend several chapters recounting what he calls the ‘Eumerella War’ with local Aboriginal people. The settlers won the war and, as Browne puts it: ‘Our border ruffians being settled for good and all, we pioneers were enabled to devote ourselves to our legitimate business – the breeding and fattening of cattle.’

Another settler who gave his property a name with Walter Scott associations was Robert Christison of Lammermoor station in Queensland. Born at Foulden, Berwickshire, son of a Church of Scotland minister, Christison emigrated to Australia with his brother in 1852, at the age of only 15. Christison’s life story was told by his daughter Mary Bennett in the book Christison of Lammermoor, published in 1927. Bennett recounts the following story from Christison’s childhood:

One day, long remembered, Bob was sent with a message to a neighbouring minister. The kindhearted man asked him if he had read Ivanhoe, and lent him the book. Bob devoured it almost at a reading, while day and its concerns faded unheeded, and new worlds opened to his vision. He was another knight without inheritance, and the earth a Holy Land for service and adventure.

This is the only mention of Scott’s writing in Christison of Lammermoor. But Bennett emphasises the importance of this incident by calling it ‘long remembered’ and by placing it just before Christison’s departure for Australia is recounted. Christison, we are given to believe, was inspired by his reading of Scott to seek a life of adventure in a new country.

When Christison reaches the land that is to become Lammermoor station, the book provides an ecstatic description of his first view of ‘the high land of trees and watercourses’:

All at once he seemed to see the Lammermoor Hills standing above the Merse, as the table-land stood above the rolling downs. He had thought of many romantic names for the homestead that he would build. Now he set them all aside for Lammermoor.

There’s no mention here of Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor, only of Christison’s childhood memories of the Lammermoor Hills, but a man who read Scott as a child and had been thinking of ‘romantic names’ for his property can hardly have been unaware of the name’s literary associations. It’s interesting that, as with Thomas Browne (who refers to christening his property Squattlesea Mere ‘in my mind instantly’ because the name was ‘so exceedingly appropriate’), Christison’s naming of the station is depicted as a spur-of-the-moment decision, and yet one that is so right that it is almost predestined.

Christison’s station was located on the land of Yirandali Aboriginal people (also known as the Dalleburra). There’s been some historical debate about Christison’s relationship with the Yirandali. Unlike other owners of sheep and cattle stations in Queensland, Christison encouraged the Yirandali to continue living on their ancestral land, and it was only after he sold Lammermoor in 1910 that many of the Aboriginal people were moved off to government reserves far from their home. Christison’s daughter Mary Bennett later became a prominent advocate for Aboriginal rights, and her biography of her father is not only a work of filial piety but also a polemic about mistreatment of Aboriginal people, using her father as a model for how things should have been. Yet Christison’s treatment of the Yirandali was not always as benign as Bennett makes out, and he profited from the use of their labour on the station at minimal cost.

Christison did make the effort to learn some of the language and, importantly, the place names of the Yirandali. A map in Bennett’s book shows some of the wealth of indigenous names that continued to blanket the landscape, even as Christison added new ones – Lammermoor, Merse, Foulden – from the landscape of his childhood. In her book, Bennett has Christison recall, before he leaves Lammermoor for the last time, ‘the aboriginal names of the noble chain of waterholes that form the head of Tower Hill Creek’: ‘Kooroorinya, like the roar of its waters in flood’; ‘Pilmunny, … a favourite cattle camp, where once the Dalleburra had used to hold their bora ceremonies’; and so on.

Writing about the disastrous expedition of the explorers Burke and Wills in the 1860s, the historian David Denholm has commented that ‘We shall have to blame William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott and other Romantics for giving Colonial Australians the means to shape their dreams with such splendid foolishness.’ In a sense, place names associated with Walter Scott bear witness to the dreams (whether foolish or otherwise) that settler Australians and New Zealanders brought with them or inherited from Britain, dreams of adventure but also of property and stability.

Yet these dreams were shadowed by anxieties, even nightmares: by fears of degeneration of the British ‘racial stock’ in the colonies, of threats from without from Chinese or other non-white peoples and from within from class conflict. And underlying all, though rarely spoken of, an anxiety about their right to possess land that had so recently been taken from Aboriginal and Māori peoples. Perhaps names such as Abbotsford, Waverley, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, Ravenswood, Deloraine, Lochinvar, Lammermoor – names redolent of leather-bound volumes, centuries-old tradition and middle-class respectability – provided a reassuring reminder that they were part of a great and powerful empire; an empire that ruled not only the waves, but also the Waverleys.

Further reading

Robert Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in Anglo-Australian Popular Fiction, 1875-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995)

Stuart Kelly, Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation (Edinburgh, Polygon, 2010)

Joyce Miles, ‘Oh Young Lochinvar is Come Out of the West…’, Placenames Australia, September 2008, pp. 1, 3

Malcolm Prentis, The Scots in Australia (Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2008)

A.W. Reed, The Story of New Zealand Place Names (Wellington, A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1952)

Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012)

Graham Tulloch, ‘Two Hundred Years of Waverley in Australia’, The Bottle Imp (online journal), issue 16, 2014, http://asls.arts.gla.ac.uk/SWE/TBI/TBIIssue16/Tulloch.html

Benjamin Wilkie, ‘Space, Commemoration, and Iconography: Scottish Monuments and Memorials in Australia’, in Fred Cahir, Anne Beggs Sunter and Alison Inglis (eds), Scots under the Southern Cross (Ballarat, Ballarat Heritage Services, 2015), pp. 157-165