Book of the Week: Does anyone need Vincent O’Malley?

Vincent O’Malley’s new book on the Waikato wars, a much shorter version of his weighty, 690-page work The Great War for New Zealand, is aimed at school students and other readers new to this history. It presents accessible, up-to-date material on colonial history to support the newly introduced New Zealand history curriculum. But what worries me most about the book is its tendency to downplay historical complexity on behalf of student readers.
Bridget Williams Books has produced accessible editions of scholarly histories before. Also on its list, and on another key topic for understanding Aotearoa’s past and the way it shapes our present, Claudia Orange’s milestone The Treaty of Waitangi (1987) has been reissued in whole or part in several other formats, including a large format illustrated edition (1990) and an entry-level illustrated edition (2022). They are pitched at nearly every willing reader. A quite different strategy is James Belich’s I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru’s War, 1868-1869 (1989; re-issued in 2010). Taking up one conflict covered in his PhD-turned-book on the New Zealand Wars, this book was written specifically with high-school history students in mind. It ripped along at a rattling pace, buoyed by the inherently dramatic material of this war for Taranaki. I dipped into it again the other day, and got completely sidetracked: Belich cracks out a page-turner. O’Malley’s own excellent Voices from the New Zealand Wars (2021), a book of letters, speeches and other documents from the period, is another inviting way in to this past.
What makes a good history that will engage both student readers and a non-specialist reading public? The basics aren’t up for argument: it has to be accurate, balanced, and grounded in the evidence. It needs a broad overview as well as some more detailed coverage of key events. It must also – and this is more demanding – help present-day readers understand people in the past, their often radically different ways of thinking and different concerns, without imposing our assumptions and preoccupations (especially important for student readers, coming to terms with the practice of history). At the same time, it needs to show how what happened in the past has made the world we live in today. Beyond these fundamentals there are questions for the author. How much in the way of scholarly apparatus (footnotes, appendices and the like)? Should they dive into historiographical debate? How to balance setting down the facts with bringing out the drama? How do illustrations help to carry the narrative? What kind of tone or authorial voice can best engage general readers and younger readers? If it doesn’t tell a good story, it won’t keep these readers.
The Waikato War of 1863-64 was the largest of the many conflicts of the New Zealand Wars, involving around 2000 Tainui defenders and according to the estimate here, about another 2000 supporters from other iwi. Over the period the 5000 British troops in New Zealand grew to about 10,000. The colonial government spent over three years planning for it, more or less surreptitiously, and its field of conflict extended from southern Auckland to the Puniu River south of Te Awamutu, and east to the Firth of Thames. Although this book does not cover it, the campaign then extended across to Tauranga Moana. The decision to invade Waikato, which had until 1863 been held and governed by iwi, was undertaken under settler pressure to make more land available but was also a direct challenge to Māori sovereignty.
O’Malley charts the lead-up and then the course of the war in a little under half of the book. Having described the pre-war scene and particularly the thriving Tainui economy of the 1850s and early 1860s, he sets out the various efforts by Māori to limit land-selling and the emergence of the Kingitanga movement; and the strategies of colonial governors and ministers, as they variously worked towards or, occasionally, spoke against the invasion.  The once ‘Good Governor’ George Grey’s well-established duplicity gets a renewed airing. The sequence of the invasion is charted, battle by battle. And then stops rather abruptly, with the final battle at Ōrākau in April 1864. The book then turns to the first of a series of aftermaths: the raupatu or series of confiscations, which snatched up the land of iwi who had fought with the Crown as well as against it; and the haphazard and uneven compensations awarded over time. It turns back again to explain what else happened after the war: the ‘peace’ during which many Tainui people went with King Tāwhiao south of the Pūniu River (the aukati or border of Te Rohe Potae/the King Country) for over a decade, the period of severe deprivation which saw many die of starvation and disease, and then an economic recovery of sorts. Then we return to the ‘Search for Justice’ and over a century of negotiations, into the period of the Waitangi Tribunal and the Tainui settlement of 1995. A final section covers the fate of the battle sites and the question of how the war has been held, or not, in public memories.
The book is extensively illustrated, including photographs both historical and contemporary – some wonderful images among the historical photographs – to portraits and watercolour images and a number of maps, as well as a series of profiles of present-day figures who have been significant in making the case for Tainui in various ways. At times it would be good to see more explanatory detail linking the images to the text.
So there is a lot here – and anyone who wants to pursue points further is directed to the parent tome The Great War for New Zealand – but it is not clear exactly whose needs this book will answer.
It is shorter than the big book, but there’s little sense of an effort to make it more engaging or to create paths into the subject for students or readers new to the subject. Clearly O’Malley is drawing on previous work and condensing it for this book. That sometimes results in a rather disrupted narrative and questions raised that never get answered. Why did General Duncan Cameron so emphatically refuse to continue the invasion south after Ōrākau? It’s a crucial question but never canvassed.
And there is a whole section on raupatu (confiscation) before we return to pick up the story of the people who survived the battle and retreated south across the Pūniu. Indeed, we seldom get much sense of the people themselves. There is plenty to draw on – O’Malley’s own Voices of the New Zealand Wars, and James Cowan’s many oral histories of the Waikato War – but they hardly appear in this book. It would be greatly enriched by more from and about these people who lived through the events. It would be helpful, too, to have more sense of this war’s context: except for the First Taranaki War, there is little reference to the conflicts that preceded and followed the Waikato War. 
The aftermath of wars is usually underestimated. They seldom end with ceasefire. Instead the impacts of the losses of people, land and economies roll on over generations, with scarce resources often channelled into protracted negotiations for redress. That has certainly been the case for Tainui. A good half of the book charts this awful aftermath and the various negotiations, petitions, committees and commissions and claims. I cannot argue with the emphasis, but the story told here is ponderous. I struggled, and all the while I thought of high school students wading through committee after commission. Would they, could they, stay the course?
While O’Malley does record doubts among the invading British (asking for example whether the Irish drew parallels with their own history), there’s not a great deal of room for variety of opinion on either side. Yet, a number of the references to bad Pākeha attitudes come from other Pākehā who disapproved of them. In the final chapter on ‘Remembering the Waikato War’, collective memory divides more or less neatly into two: Māori remembering and Pākehā forgetting. While there is a broad truth here, the reductiveness is neither accurate nor helpful. Nor is it as interesting as what really went on. Yes, there were definitely ‘don’t mention the war’ elements in Pākehā society, and a widespread capacity for contented ignorance (which James Cowan fumed about and tried to counter).
But it was far from absolute. Similarly, not all Tainui people wanted to remember, and not all felt the same way about the war. It’s just not the case that Pākehā responded to TV series like The Governor (1977) or The New Zealand Wars (1998) with a collective “How dare they say that stuff about our Pākehā ancestors?” Both series attracted and held huge audiences and while they were contentious, the furious jumpers-up-and-down were a vocal few. O’Malley dismisses Rewi’s Last Stand (1940) because it reinforces the myth of Ōrākau as a story of ‘mutual respect’. It may well have done that, especially in the only version which still exists (it was cut almost by half, with a great deal of footage discarded to avoid offending audiences when it screened in post-war Britain). Its original uncut version – made with the support and input of many Tainui people including Te Puea Hērangi – was far more critical of the British and included many scenes of the terrible conditions inside Ōrākau Pā and the massacre that followed. The original film was highly praised here and attracted large audiences of both Māori and Pākehā.
Again, O’Malley makes no mention of the truly fascinating Te Awamutu Historical Society, a bicultural amateur society enthusiastically investigating Waikato history in the 1930s. This attitude to previous generations is frustrating, because it misses much that is both interesting and perhaps grounds for optimism; and annoying, because it fosters such self-congratulation in the present.
Which brings us to the related question of how to pitch a story of colonial invasion to students and general readers. Many young readers will be coming to the stories for the first time. Some of them will be Māori, some Pākehā or New Zealanders of various other ancestries, and many will whakapapa to both Māori (resistant or Crown-allied) and Pākeha. They will be variously situated on one or both sides of the battle lines, the confiscation lines, and the courtrooms. It’s important that they all understand this past, but they all need to live with it, too (and while they may be disadvantaged or advantaged by its aftermaths, none of them played a part in what happened). 
In light of this, even-handedness matters, and tone, which is harder to get right. Reading the dour account in The Invasion I was reminded of the responses that James Belich and Tainui Stephens reported in the wake of the 1998 TV series, which placed a robust emphasis on Māori agency and the brilliance of the resistance. Belich and Stephens had many stories of young Māori whose pride swelled as they watched it – it gave a huge boost to their identity as Māori. Belich’s I Shall Not Die brings the same kind of uplifting spirit and excitement. It’s important to tell these terrible stories. But what takeaways are there for the young? I can’t help feeling that they are better served by the Belich/Stephens strategy.
The Invasion of Waikato/Te Riri Ki Tainui by Vincent O’Malley (Bridget Williams Books, $39.99) is available in bookstores nationwide.