The long road is a continuation of his earlier book, The Spark, The Logs, and The Gasoline, in which he uses the same incisive, back-to-basics approach to New Zealand’s 19th century civil war that has variously called the “Maori wars”, “New Zealand wars”, “sovereignty wars”, and, most recently, “land wars”.
“History is not a farce of heroes and villains, of black and white. It is not a three-word tweet and an emoji or a specious aphorism. There is always a back story and there are always two sides to that story,” he wrote.
The Parihaka village was founded by Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahi immediately following the 1865 Taranaki land confiscations, on confiscated land, and became the centre of an asymmetrical cold war against the much stronger government.
Seed goes deeper into Te Whiti the person, who styled himself as a prophet who blended traditional Maori beliefs with a radical interpretation of the Old Testament. He explicitly taught that Maori were descended from the lost tribe of Israel.
On the 18th day of every month, Te Whiti and Tohu held massive gatherings at Parihaka, sometimes with more than 2000 people. Thousands of Maori from across New Zealand travelled to attend.
Te Whiti used these meetings to deliver sermons, and prophesies, but most of all, to build support to increase his leverage against the government to get control of confiscated land.
He likened the actions of the British colonial government to Pharaoh or the Babylonians, while Maori were like the oppressed Israelites.
Because he had built a strong presence on confiscated land, various officials talked to him before implementing any plan for the confiscated land, especially, building a road.
Thirteen years of meetings built Parihaka into the biggest Maori settlement in New Zealand, before the government began surveying the confiscated Waimate Plains on July 29, 1878.
Less than two months later, on September 19, a cook in a surveyor's camp was shot dead. The killer sought and got refuge at Parihaka. Te Whiti refused to turn him over to the government.
Te Whiti made an actual move against the government on March 24, 1879, when he ordered his men to remove physically the government surveyors working there, which they did.
A further step came two days later, when Te Whiti and Tohu ordered their people to plough settler’s farms, to assert that they, not the government, owned the land. They aimed to occupy all confiscated land.
The ploughing protest expanded throughout Taranaki region, eventually leading to 400 arrests. That was the ploughing campaign.
The government built a road through the confiscated land.
In June 1880, Te Whiti’s people blocked the road by building fences across it. When constables removed the fences, Te Whiti’s people rebuilt them. There were 200 further arrests. That was the fencing campaign.
Te Whiti was not the sort of person who would himself physically fight in battle. His thing was achieving gains through manipulating opinion.
He understood the power of the press and knew that if he posed as a victim, he would get settler sympathy and would make it more difficult for the government to act without appearing as a bully.
Then, at a monthly meeting in September 1881, Te Whiti talked about war. That provided the government an excuse to crack down.
On November 5, 1881, at 9am, 1600 men with Native Minister John Bryce leading on horseback entered the village of Parihaka.
The sheer numbers of soldiers was the main reason why there was no resistance. Leaders were arrested and held without trial. More than 1600 residents were evicted. Houses and crops were destroyed.
There were no deaths and the only injury was when a horse stepped on a boy's foot on eviction day. That boy was five-year-old Maui Pomare, who grew up to become the country's first Maori doctor and later the Minister of Health.
That narrative, from Seed’s book, compiled from 19th century newspaper reports, is totally different from today’s narrative, as it appears in the apology in the Parihaka Reconciliation Act, which starts with:
“A few short years after guaranteeing to Maori the undisturbed possession of any lands they wished to retain, the Crown began to systematically dispossess the tangata whenua of their Taranaki lands. By purchase deed, force of arms, confiscation and statute, the Crown took the rich lands of Taranaki and left its people impoverished, demoralised, and vilified”.The “tribal rebellions” cited in the New Zealand Settlements Act 1863, which enabled land confiscation as a consequence of going to war against the government, have been reframed as “dispossession” of land”.
As part of a new wave of independent books on New Zealand history written by people who are not government-funded funded, Seed’s book is an important reminder of what actually happened here just two or three generations ago.
Readable and insightful, Seed’s book shows what has happened here when a government was slow to carry out a reasonable policy for fear of appearing as a bully.
The Long Road to Parihaka, by Piers Seed, Probitis Publishing, 321 pages, is available in paperback by contacting info@piersseed.co.nz or in digital form from https://www.amazon.com.au/ and entering "Long Road to Parihaka" in the search bar."
