The Spinoff: My ancestors were colonisers

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Charles Wilson Hursthouse I

It is a beautiful object, and yet it holds something ugly. The tattered leather notebook, roughly the size of my hand, flips open to reveal a lining of silver stars on a deep blue background. Further inside is a jumble of surveyor’s notes, made in pencil: a sketch of a road cutting; a measurement set down as “South 332˚ 0 – North 201˚ 30 – arc of height”; the cost – twenty-four pounds, ten shillings and sixpence – of hiring a wagon for two months. And then, over the page, a translation, from te reo Māori to English. 

The translated material comes from two speeches by the prophets Tohu and Te Whiti, the leaders of the Parihaka community that peacefully resisted the theft of indigenous land in the late 19th century. The translator is someone else entirely. He will later be criticised in court for the errors in his renderings; more seriously still, he assists in the confiscation of Taranaki land, and serves as the interpreter for the invading forces when Parihaka is sacked in 1881.

This translator, and sometime surveyor, is my great-great-great-uncle Charles Wilson Hursthouse. His notebook is held in the New Plymouth library, Puke Ariki, and I am seated in its reading room, turning the faded pages and pondering three intertwined questions. What led Charles Wilson, and indeed his wider family, to perform actions that we now so severely condemn? How do I absorb this inheritance of memory? And what relevance does it have, right now, amidst the rekindled debates about how settler and indigenous peoples can abide with each other?

Mob I

My ancestors, Englishmen and women who settled in Taranaki from 1843 onwards, were unusual migrants. A mixture of highly literate professionals and small-scale landowners, they were “gentry … although in reduced circumstances”, according to one of their biographers, the historian Frances Porter. They had come to New Zealand less for personal advancement – though there was that, too – and more because they sought better health, a closer connection to nature and the chance to build a fairer society. New Zealand, Porter wrote, offered “the opportunity … for stretching mind and limbs”. During their emigration, my ancestors’ three distinct families – Hursthouses, Richmonds and Atkinsons – became tightly wound, by marriage, co-location and emotional sympathy, into one larger clan. Their fond nickname for each other was “the Mob”.

Rapidly pressed into service in the colony’s nascent political scene, the Mob soon numbered in their ranks a prime minister (Sir Harry Atkinson), a minister of native affairs and later supreme court judge (C. W. Richmond), a minister of lands (William Richmond Hursthouse), another minister of native affairs (J. C. Richmond), and sundry newspaper editors and regional politicians. The women of the family, though ineligible for high office, immersed themselves in the intellectual, spiritual and political debates of the day. The Mob were, in the view of the Nelson Colonist, “the most prominent of the governing families of New Zealand”.

Sometimes, within their settler world, my ancestors were a force for social progress. As a Taranaki farmer, Sir Harry had long stressed the virtues of individual self-reliance, hard work and thrift, but later came to realise that these virtues did not, by themselves, offer sufficient protection against economic shocks. Witnessing the poverty unleashed by the Long Depression of the 1880s, he became one of the first advocates of state support for those in dire need. His proposal to levy an early form of income tax – and use the revenue to assist widows, orphans, the elderly and the sick – was decades ahead of its time. 

Outside parliament, the family made useful contributions. In a court case concerning the Irish freedom fighters known as “Fenians”, an oppressed minority in colonial New Zealand, C. W. Richmond delivered a judgement of relative leniency and tolerance. His daughter Mary helped found New Zealand’s kindergarten movement, and the Mob’s women were influential advocates for temperance and female education. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the family’s politicians believed in public service for its own sake, rather than as a means to get rich. The Mob’s members read widely on philosophy and religion. They were scientific investigators. They held an intense curiosity about the world. And they singularly failed to apply these values to their dealings with Māori.

C.W.H. II

During his 70 years of life, Charles Wilson Hursthouse found himself at the scene of an improbably large number of historical events. Entering adulthood in 1850s Taranaki, he turned his hand to various frontier occupations, first of all surveying, a profession whose “naming, taming, marking out and mapping of the land” were, in the words of the historian Giselle Byrnes, “assertions of colonial power”. 

One of his first tasks was to help survey the Waitara “Purchase”, a large expanse of prime Taranaki land acquired in dubious circumstances. Charles Wilson’s older cousin C. W. Richmond had helped authorise the land’s sale by a minor chief, Te Teira, even though the latter had no right to dispose of it. Kuia from the local iwi, Te Ati Awa, responded with non-violent resistance, repeatedly pulling up the surveyors’ measuring pegs. 

The Crown’s attempt to quell this resistance formed the opening salvo of the New Zealand Wars. At Waireka, on March 18, 1860, the Taranaki Rifle Volunteers and Militia became the first colonial unit to take the field against Māori. Sergeant W. H. Free “had the honour”, as one settler historian put it, of firing the first shot; Charles Wilson fired the second.

Although this phase of the war ended in ceasefire less than a year later, Charles Wilson continued his dual life as surveyor and militia-man. He did so throughout the 1860s and 70s, the main phase of the New Zealand Wars, as the colonial government – acting on trumped-up pretences – invaded and then confiscated large swathes of the central North Island. When the Waikato iwi retreated to their stronghold in the King Country, a new centre of Māori resistance emerged at Parihaka, the village where the followers of Tohu and Te Whiti had gathered, halfway between Mt Taranaki and the sea.

By 1880, Charles Wilson had risen to the rank of lieutenant, and served briefly on the Taranaki Provincial Council. He had also become the council’s resident engineer, and it was in this capacity that he was charged with pushing a road through the fields used by Parihaka’s inhabitants. Once again, his survey pegs were pulled up.

Charles Wilson nonetheless became a frequent visitor to Parihaka. Drawing on language skills acquired during two decades of contact with Māori, he sent numerous translations of Tohu and Te Whiti’s speeches to politicians and the press. (Hence the notebooks held at Puke Ariki.) Meanwhile settler anger over Parihaka, a symbol of indigenous resistance, grew with each passing month. 

When, in 1881, the colonial government sent troops to attack the village, Charles Wilson acted as their interpreter. In an event later known as Te Rā o te Pāhua, the Day of Plunder, around 1,600 troops marched on Parihaka, only to be greeted by children singing and adults seated silently. As the Crown has subsequently acknowledged in its formal apology, the troops began “forcibly evicting many people who had sought refuge there, dismantling and desecrating their homes and sacred buildings … and systematically destroying their cultivations and livestock”. The apology also notes “the rapes committed by Crown troops in the aftermath of the invasion”, acts that caused “immeasurable and enduring harm … to the women of Parihaka, their families, and their descendants until the present day”. 

In the aftermath of the invasion, the land around Parihaka was either confiscated or removed from its owners’ control, while Tohu and Te Whiti were held without trial for 18 months. Charles Wilson’s translations, which had formed part of the government’s pretext for invading, were later deemed suspect. Casting the prophets’ speeches as more bellicose than they really were, his interpretations had been, historian Hazel Riseborough judged, “full of … inconsistencies”.

The Mob II

In their pursuit of settlement, and their indifference to its effects on Māori, my ancestors were well within the mainstream of colonial opinion. Some dissenters sought to preserve indigenous rights: the missionary Octavius Hadfield, for one, correctly described the Waitara Purchase as “a flagrant act of injustice”. But few settlers felt the same way; certainly not my ancestors. They never questioned their belief that, as Porter put it, “in the North Island of New Zealand were thousands upon thousands of acres of unoccupied, untilled land simply awaiting the axe, the plough, and European occupancy”. 

Māori, as has been well-documented, saw their land quite differently. Viewing it as a collective possession, they claimed “exclusive rights in their gardens, hunting grounds and fisheries”, as the anthropologist Atholl Anderson put it in the 2014 book Tangata Whenua. They had also formed themselves into political entities such as iwi and hapū, settling disputes and making binding resolutions through hui that the academic Māmari Stephens has described as an “exercise of civic decision-making power”. Detailed tikanga determined status, allocated responsibilities and ensured justice. Māori had, in short, their own structures of government, adapted to the way they wanted to live.

My ancestors, though, had little interest in understanding such facts. Among the exceptions were Sir Harry’s brother Arthur, whose creation of one of the first English-Māori dictionaries suggested some desire for cross-cultural understanding. But even he was eager to wage war against local iwi, and by and large his cousins held even worse attitudes. C. W. Richmond, in the words of historian Keith Sinclair, knew “almost nothing about Māori culture or land tenure” – and what he did know, he didn’t like. The “beastly communism” of collective landholding, C. W. once argued, must be “destroyed”. Māori should become “civilised”, adopting British habits and practices. Elsewhere in the family, Richmond Hursthouse described the people of Parihaka as “scum”, while Sir Harry thought they were a “semi-barbarous” people led by “fanatics”.

The Mob may have had a vested interest in failing to respect Māori rights: their access to land, and the renewal of their prosperity, depended upon it. But they also appear, in a manner so profound that it goes beyond mere pecuniary interest, to have been unable to reach across the barriers of culture, to recognise that different traditions – alternative ways of holding land, relating to nature, and conceiving of rights, justice and fairness – could be in any way equal to their own. And so they, in various ways, contributed to the taking of Māori land, the removal of Māori autonomy over their own affairs, and the wider attempts, under the guise of “assimilation”, to suppress all that was distinctive about Māori culture. It was on J. C. Richmond’s watch, for instance, that the government finally abandoned the idea – mooted even in early colonial legislation – of self-governing Māori districts.

New Zealand history can, as a result, be something of a minefield for people like me. The columnist Matthew Hooton once joked that whenever a political tome is published, half of Wellington rushes to Unity Books – not to read the work, but to check the index for any mention of their name. A similar effect operates with my family and works of history. “What have they done now?” I ask myself as each book appears, scanning the pages for names beginning with H, R and A. Of course they have done nothing now, my 19th century ancestors, but we are constantly discovering more about their misdeeds, and those actions resonate right into the present day.

Take the now-infamous argument that the Treaty of Waitangi was “a simple nullity”, a phrase generally associated with an 1877 declaration by the chief justice, James Prendergast.  As mere “savages”, Māori could not – Prendergast thought – have had the mental capacity to assent to such an agreement. Thus the Treaty was null and void, a convenient verdict that heavily influenced New Zealand law for the next hundred years. Bad enough, you might think. But looking up the judgment one day, I was intrigued to discover that Prendergast had had a co-author – and then horrified to find that his partner in judicial racism was none other than C. W. Richmond. 

Another time, a cousin forwarded me a story about a carved wharenui (meeting house) that had long been on display at Te Papa and, before that, the Dominion Museum. The wharenui, Te Hau ki Turanga, had been carved by the Rongowhakaata iwi but was confiscated in 1867 by the Crown. In a 2022 interview, Te Papa’s kaihautū (co-leader), Arapata Hakiwai, said it had been “ripped from the heart and roots, the umbilical cord really, wrenched from the heart of Ōrākaiapu pā”. The man responsible? C.W.’s brother J.C., “informally acting as director of the Colonial Museum”.

Seeing Clearly I

We stand at one of the inflection points that have marked the relationship between Māori and Pākehā for over two centuries. In recent decades we have witnessed a growing Māori presence in public life: more reo Māori in the media, greater biculturalism in government agencies, wider uptake of indigenous images and concepts. Māori have also begun to demand a restoration – at least in part – of the autonomy they enjoyed before European arrival. Some elements of this autonomy, including Treaty settlements and te reo immersion schools, are now uncontroversial. 

But, as has been exhaustively canvassed, the last Labour government began extending this trend to include seats for Māori on local councils, a Māori health authority, and greater Māori influence over water use. Much of this is now labelled “co-governance”. The term sometimes denotes situations where Māori and Pākehā jointly manage a major, non-separable institution like a national park. But it has come to also describe the practice of Māori running separate services for Māori and, indeed, the calls for a parallel Māori sphere of government.

Such moves have been met with a backlash that now dominates New Zealand politics. Debates about co-governance consume the airwaves. Alongside attempts to wind back Māori wards and remove references to the Treaty of Waitangi from legislation, the major flashpoint has of course been Act’s Treaty principles bill, which seeks to limit any affirmative action that might help redress inequalities for Māori. 

Clearly, some Pākehā – or New Zealanders of European descent, to use the official terminology – are uncomfortable with where things are headed. In some cases this seems to be motivated by outright racism. The Christian evangelist Julian Batchelor, for instance, claims that teaching children to speak te reo is a form of abuse, and has likened the phrase “kia ora” to “heil Hitler”. It is hard to see this as anything else but hatred of another culture.

In other cases, I suspect, something subtler is at work. Some Pākehā feel “got at”; they think they are being made to apologise for acts they didn’t commit, to condemn their own culture as defective, to feel bad now because white people have done bad things in the past. But history need not be so threatening. I don’t think that, by and large, Pākehā are being asked to feel terribly guilty, nor would it achieve anything very much if we did. Guilt, for me, doesn’t pass down the generations, doesn’t travel in the blood. But we do have a public duty to perform an act at once complex and simple: to see things clearly, and then do something about them.

C.W.H. III

By 1884 Charles Wilson, having returned once more to surveying, was helping push the Main Trunk railway line through the King Country. There, he and two colleagues were captured by members of the Ngāti Kinokahu hapū seeking retribution for the attack on Parihaka. Three pigs were given the names of the three surveyors, and were killed and eaten. Apparently on the verge of being killed himself, Charles Wilson was rescued by a party that included yet another Māori prophet, Te Kooti. 

Resuming his surveying in the King Country, which kept him away from his New Plymouth family for long spells, Charles Wilson formed a relationship with a Ngāti Kinokahu woman, Mere Te Rongopāmamao Aubrey. Their daughter, Rangimarie, later became Dame Rangimarie Hetet, a craftswoman revered for having helped preserve the art of harakeke weaving. By this stage, Charles Wilson seems, from the documents he left, to have come to better appreciate the Māori world, and regret some of his past deeds. He later moved south, to Lower Hutt, and it was there, as he lay dying in 1911, that he finally told his Pākehā family about Rangimarie’s existence. 

Charles Wilson was buried at Taita Cemetery, nestled under Lower Hutt’s eastern hills; several decades later, and just a few kilometres further south, a wharenui was built by Te Ati Awa, whose members include Rangimarie’s many descendants. The meeting house, Arohanui ki te Tangata or Love to All the People, was named in honour of Tohu and Te Whiti.

Seeing Clearly II

To see clearly is, for me, to face hard truths front-on. It also requires us to hold good and bad in tension. Although the older histories were far too kind to my ancestors, it would achieve little to swing the pendulum its full arc, to collapse their characters into one-dimensional villains. We have to be able to see in double vision. We can accept that my ancestors’ actions were in line with the dominant moral judgments of their society, while acknowledging that they would fail – catastrophically, in some cases – the moral tests we apply today. We can see them from the point of view of their time and the point of view of ours. We can see that they behaved well towards their own community and terribly towards others.

Some people object to this line of thought, fearing that the better deeds will be used to excuse the worse ones. But the good doesn’t cancel out the bad, no more than the bad erases all memory of the good. Instead, in the tension between the two, important questions open up. If my ancestors had been all bad, little could be learnt from studying them. It is only when we see their good side, the positive values they sometimes embodied within their own world, that their failures come into sharpest relief. It is ironic, given that iwi were often labelled “tribes”, that my ancestors behaved in what might be termed a “tribal” – that is, insular – manner. As the religious scholar Sharon Brous has written, “One of the great casualties of tribalism is curiosity.” My ancestors were not, at heart, curious about indigenous culture; had they been, they might have relaxed their views about their own superiority, and treated Māori as equals.

Nor is this a purely historical point. Today’s opponents of greater Māori autonomy will think of themselves as good people – and within their own sphere perhaps they are. They may be kind parents, upstanding members of their residents’ associations, the first people to volunteer to bake cakes or run sausage sizzles. Within the Pākehā world, they may stand for honesty and fair play. But, I wonder, are they applying those values and that respect to all New Zealanders or, as with my own ancestors, only to those they regard as equal members of their own community?

To ask these questions, to look at things unflinchingly, is not easy. While the exact feelings that my family and I experience, as we grapple with this history, is a matter for ourselves, it would be fair to say we find the process sometimes uncomfortable. But the history of Parihaka – and countless related events – is such that if we, as its inheritors, aren’t occasionally uncomfortable, we are probably doing something wrong. 

Clarity of sight also helps reaffirm our place here. There is a theory, in some academic circles, that the wrongs done during colonisation will always render Pākehā identity unstable. It makes us interlopers, uneasy people standing on stolen land. And some Pākehā try their best to skirt around this ugly history, to close their eyes and stop their ears, striving to avoid anything that might distress them. The writer Bill Pearson once described Pākehā as “fretful sleepers”, haunted by something at the edge of consciousness. Pearson wasn’t thinking about colonisation per se, but the point still applies. Our ancestors are part of us, and we need to be in a right relationship with them. If we don’t deal honestly with history, we will always suffer a disturbed sleep. But if we do acknowledge past wrongs, we will, as I see it, have earned the right to a stable identity.

Not that this is the sole point of the exercise, or even the main one; that would be somewhat self-regarding. Clarity of sight must be put in the service of a broader justice, one that recognises the connections between past and present. Take, for instance, Richard Shaw’s 2021 work The Forgotten Coast, which describes an ancestor who, like Charles Wilson, assisted in the attack on Parihaka’s inhabitants, and then became prosperous farming their land. Or take, with a wider lens, the Atlas of Deprivation, a publication that invites us to look at the map of the million-plus acres of Waikato farmland confiscated by the colonial state, look at the modern map of that region’s most fertile and wealth-generating land, and think long and hard about why the two charts so closely overlap.

What these accounts share is a conviction that we can’t put matters right unless we understand how they went wrong. When Pākehā try to deflect debates about history, they typically argue that the bad things either didn’t happen or aren’t relevant today. I am here, bringing with me my own family’s record in this matter, to tell you that they did, and they are.

Culture and Autonomy I

When people live in a world ordered by their own values, they may not recognise the benefits this brings, so invisible and natural do they seem. Yet these advantages exist, as I know well. When today’s members of the “Mob” are born, married and interred, we perform rituals practised for generations. We can freely speak our native language at all times, and be understood. Even the public realm – schooling, healthcare, the whole set of state services – is organised around familiar Western notions of individual responsibility and bureaucratic neutrality.

Why does this matter? Because it ensures that in almost any situation, even in public, I can be myself. Too often, though, this is not true for Māori, as their leaders have long argued. Taranaki educator Keri Opai’s book Tikanga describes its subject as “a Māori way of doing things, the customary system of practices and values that are expressed in every social context”. Hui, for instance, start with more formal introductions than do Pākehā meetings, because Māori understand the world through whakapapa, the long bloodlines connecting individuals and families. 

Opai also cites the example of tangihanga, where the ceremonials last several days, koha are expected, and attendees often commune with a deceased person lying in an open casket. These practices are required to give effect to values such as whakapapa and manaakitanga. Māori schools, likewise, typically teach a more holistic view of the world; Māori health services often involve the whole family in consultations.

Every human being, Opai says, should be able to “bring their whole selves” to a given situation. This implies that agencies delivering services to Māori must be able to follow tikanga. And that, in its turn, may require those bodies to be run by Māori. Put it another way: how well will organisations dominated by one culture ever work for another? The French would not enjoy public services organised along Iranian lines, nor would Nigerians flourish under American law. Each of those peoples has, of course, maintained its sovereignty. But then so too have Māori.

He Whakaputanga, commonly translated as the Declaration of Independence, was signed by northern iwi in 1835, and asserts exactly what its name suggests. In Te Tiriti, the reo Māori iteration of the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori guaranteed themselves “tino rangatiratanga”, the nearest English equivalent of which is “sovereignty”. Indeed it is hard to imagine why iwi would ever have ceded that power, given the tiny number of Pākehā in the colony at the time – roughly 2,000, against perhaps 80,000 Māori – and the minimal power they exerted. As the late scholar Moana Jackson argued, it requires “a profound suspension of disbelief” to think Māori would ever have relinquished “the authority to make independent decisions”.

Under international law, it is the Māori language version that holds sway. And even the English text’s assertion that the Crown had gained “sovereignty” probably doesn’t mean what we have come to think it means. In his 2023 book The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi, historian Ned Fletcher argues that, according to contemporary letters and instructions, the British drafters of the document saw “sovereignty” not as absolute, an all-or-nothing outcome, but as something eminently divisible, something that could be shared. And all that the Crown sought was sovereignty over its own settlers, disputes between them and Māori, and foreign relations. Māori were to govern their own affairs. 

In other words, Fletcher’s thesis, grounded in painstaking archival research, is that in 1840 the Crown was comfortable with the idea of co-governance. It was only afterwards, when profit motives intervened, that the dominant settler view changed. So if the colony’s Victorian founders could envisage co-governance, why can we not?

Seeing Clearly III

What that co-governance would look like is a question well beyond my compass. All I am trying to do, as a descendant of settlers, is use my own history as a means to reflect on the present moment, encourage other settler descendants to do likewise, and help lay the foundation for the redress of historical injustice. That injustice includes the loss of Māori autonomy over their own affairs; the solution, as Māori leaders have long argued, must involve some restoration of that autonomy.

I know many Pākehā worry that co-governance will lead to segregation, and I understand that fear. I don’t pretend to know exactly how this will pan out. All I can say is that segregation seems to me unlikely. There will always be countless social spaces in which different peoples mix. Māori and Pākehā will always come together in offices and on sports fields, at holiday camps and in church choirs, in all the venues and meeting grounds of daily life. Their cultural practices will continue to be influenced by each other, their lives united by friendship and marriage. 

My ideal is that both Māori and Pākehā – and, indeed, every one of this nation’s many communities – can engage warmly with the other, and do so from a firm base of security in their own culture. For Pākehā, the task as I see it is to understand the wrongs that were done, then help put them right. And this is a challenge we can all meet. If I, who would – given my family’s history – have more reason than most to feel got at or guilty, can sidestep those feelings; if I can look this history full in the face, address the facts, and encourage our country to follow the long arc back towards justice; then, I would hope, others can do the same.