Encircling the past
by Nicholas Reid writing in The Listener

Judith Binney’s magnificent history of the Tuhoe people sweeps away many popular misconceptions.

An opinionated non-historian once told me: “You can learn more history from novels than from history books.” He actually seemed to believe it. It’s a comforting thought for people who want to avoid the hard scholarly slog that the real study of history entails. But as a means of understanding the past, it’s a non-starter. History always confronts us with rival interpretations of causes and events, and the more real evidence there is available, the more complex that history will be. History is also ongoing. Neat novelistic beginnings, middles and endings have little to do with it. And yet, underlying even the most complex history can be some remarkably straightforward principles.

This duality is well illustrated in Judith Binney’s magnificent and capacious Encircled Lands: Te -Urewera 1820-1921. The product of more than 10 years’ research, Encircled Lands originated in an an overview report Binney prepared for the Waitangi Tribunal. It’s the work of a scholar who has been engaging with Maori -history and culture for over four decades.
In one sense, Encircled Lands is a general history of the Tuhoe people’s relationship with their land, and negotiation of outside forces, in a century of European colonisation. But it also argues a case. Through careful consideration of traditional land tenure, “first contact” with various Pakeha, the impact of the 19th-century wars and an apparent settlement with the Liberal Government, Binney makes a strong case for Te Rohe Potae o Te Urewera, which she defines as “the sole legally recognised self-governing tribal enclave in the country”. The Government’s systematic undermining of this tribal authority, from the 1890s to the 1920s, is interpreted persuasively as a major cultural and social disaster.

And the remarkably straightforward principle that Binney’s painstaking history reveals? Simply the fact that a colonial government will try any trick in the book when it wants to extend its authority and thinks an indigenous people can’t answer back. For the relatively uninformed Pakeha reader (like this reviewer), it is positively embarrassing to encounter the chronicle of force, fraud and theft as governments nibbled away at Te Urewera. Bad enough were the antics of the 1860s and 1870s, where the whole Tuhoe people were held responsible for the actions of Te Kooti (at that time leading raids on various townships in central North Island) and suffered land confiscation as a result. But -possibly worse was the later show of legality, when courts endorsed land-grabbing by bare-faced con men like Harry Burt.

Read the rest of Nicholas Reid's review in The Listener online. It was first published in The Listener dated January 23-29, 2010. Nicholas Reid is an Auckland writer and historian.

ENCIRCLED LANDS: TE UREWERA 1820-1921,
by Judith Binney (Bridget Williams Books, $79.99).