Geoff Parker: Kororareka Unmasked

On 11 March 1845, Hōne Heke and his warriors chopped down the British flagstaff at Kororāreka (officially renamed Russell in 1844) for the fourth time. Modern commemorations often frame it as a heroic stand for Māori sovereignty. But the real story is far messier.

Hōne Heke had in fact been the first chief to sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. His later rebellion was not triggered by some newly discovered constitutional betrayal. The immediate grievances were far more practical.

When the colonial government shifted the capital from the Bay of Islands to Auckland in 1841, Kororāreka’s economy collapsed almost overnight. Ships that had once crowded the harbour began docking in Auckland instead. Trade dried up, customs revenues vanished, and the lucrative provisioning economy that local chiefs had benefited from sharply declined.

For leaders such as Heke, the loss was not merely economic. It was also political. The prestige of hosting the governor — and the influence that came with it — shifted south to Ngāti Whātua, long-standing rivals of Ngāpuhi.

These factors — declining trade, loss of influence, and shifting alliances — were powerful motivations in the conflict that followed.

The evacuation myth

Modern commemorations tend to romanticise the events of the battle itself.

Some accounts note that Ngāpuhi fighters did not interfere with the evacuation of civilians to ships in the harbour. But that is not the same as “granting safe passage.” The evacuation was organised by British forces, and once the town was abandoned, several hundred Ngāpuhi warriors attacked the settlement. The town was ransacked and much of it destroyed.

Kororāreka was not a symbolic protest — it was the destruction of a frontier town.

A more complicated past

None of this diminishes the importance of remembering the Northern War. But it does highlight why modern attempts to frame the conflict as a simple moral struggle between Māori and “the Crown” fall short.

Even at the time, Māori were not united. Prominent Ngāpuhi leader Tāmati Wāka Nene fought alongside government forces against Heke and Kawiti.

The war was therefore not merely a clash of two peoples, but a complex political struggle within a rapidly changing society — complexity that tends to disappear when history is repackaged for modern narratives.

History should unite us, not weaponise the past

Commemorating the Battle of Kororāreka is entirely legitimate. The Northern War was a formative episode in New Zealand’s early history and deserves to be remembered.

Remembrance should be about understanding the past, not bending it to fit modern narratives. The real story of Kororāreka involves rival Māori leaders, economic competition, shifting alliances, and the difficult birth of a new political order.

In 1858, Maihi Parāone Kawiti — son of the Ngāpuhi war leader Te Ruki Kawiti — personally erected the flagstaff that still stands on Maiki Hill today. Ngāpuhi themselves undertook to protect it.

It has never been vandalised since.

That fact alone tells us something important: the people who actually fought the Flagstaff War eventually chose reconciliation. The narrative of an endless conflict with “the Crown” is a modern invention.

It suggests that the people who actually fought the war understood that the future of the country lay not in permanent grievance, but in building a shared nation.

Another fact rarely mentioned in modern retellings is that the Northern War did not end with land confiscations. Unlike later phases of the New Zealand Wars, the government did not seize Ngāpuhi land after the rebellion led by Hōne Heke and Te Ruki Kawiti. The conflict ended instead with a pragmatic political settlement and eventual reconciliation — a reminder that the early history of the country was more complex than the grievance narratives often promoted today.

These lessons matter — because understanding them is the only way to remember history honestly.

Geoff Parker is a passionate advocate for equal rights and a colour blind society.