Saturday, 21 June 2014 - New Zealand Herald
By Andrew Stone
The key figure in one of the most notorious murders in New Zealand colonial history has been pardoned.
For author and film-maker Peter Wells, the Crown's pardon came too late to be included in his new book about Volkner and Kereopa, Journey to a Hanging.
His account — a blend of history, imagination and biography — charts the collision course of the immigrant minister with the influential Kereopa, a disciple of the Pai Mairie ("Good and Peaceful") faith, an indigenous religion with Old Testament roots, and the subsequent hanging of Volkner's accused killer.
Wells recounts that the tragedy had an inevitability once Volkner, against all advice, returned to Opotiki from Auckland, where he had been visiting his wife Emma. The churchman was viewed with deep suspicion because he had come to be seen as a Government spy.
"He was heading to his doom," said Wells, and the Whakatohea people, who built Volkner's church, could not alter the fatal outcome.
Kereopa, for his part, arrived in the Bay of Plenty with a heavy heart and possibly revenge on his mind. The year before, his wife and two daughters died near Te Awamutu after British troops burned down a whare where missionaries told the family they would be safe. The next day, in another Waikato seige, Kereopa's sister was killed.
Volkner had sent Governor George Grey a plan of the pa where the family burned to death.
Says Wells: "There was going to be a victim." The only doubt was who would be chosen - Volkner or Thomas Grace, a Taupo missionary who fled his parish because of war.
Wells' book includes a portrait of the prisoner Kereopa taken in Napier prison by the town's photographer, Samuel Carnell. Just days from the gallows, Kereopa stares mournfully from the image, a cloak pulled up beneath his chin and his moko traced with a marker and added after the shot was taken. The garment was placed to conceal a serious neck wound which the incarcerated chief had inflicted with a concealed razor in a vain attempt to defeat Pakeha justice.
On his last night on Earth, after the influential colonist William Colenso had tried but failed to get clemency for Kereopa, Catholic nun Mother Mary Aubert kept the prisoner company "in a fight for his soul".
Wells believes both Volkner and Kereopa faced their fate with courage.
'Journey to a Hanging' which is released by Random Penguin on 4 July 2014.
More
For author and film-maker Peter Wells, the Crown's pardon came too late to be included in his new book about Volkner and Kereopa, Journey to a Hanging.
His account — a blend of history, imagination and biography — charts the collision course of the immigrant minister with the influential Kereopa, a disciple of the Pai Mairie ("Good and Peaceful") faith, an indigenous religion with Old Testament roots, and the subsequent hanging of Volkner's accused killer.
Wells recounts that the tragedy had an inevitability once Volkner, against all advice, returned to Opotiki from Auckland, where he had been visiting his wife Emma. The churchman was viewed with deep suspicion because he had come to be seen as a Government spy.
"He was heading to his doom," said Wells, and the Whakatohea people, who built Volkner's church, could not alter the fatal outcome.
Kereopa, for his part, arrived in the Bay of Plenty with a heavy heart and possibly revenge on his mind. The year before, his wife and two daughters died near Te Awamutu after British troops burned down a whare where missionaries told the family they would be safe. The next day, in another Waikato seige, Kereopa's sister was killed.
Volkner had sent Governor George Grey a plan of the pa where the family burned to death.
Says Wells: "There was going to be a victim." The only doubt was who would be chosen - Volkner or Thomas Grace, a Taupo missionary who fled his parish because of war.
Wells' book includes a portrait of the prisoner Kereopa taken in Napier prison by the town's photographer, Samuel Carnell. Just days from the gallows, Kereopa stares mournfully from the image, a cloak pulled up beneath his chin and his moko traced with a marker and added after the shot was taken. The garment was placed to conceal a serious neck wound which the incarcerated chief had inflicted with a concealed razor in a vain attempt to defeat Pakeha justice.
On his last night on Earth, after the influential colonist William Colenso had tried but failed to get clemency for Kereopa, Catholic nun Mother Mary Aubert kept the prisoner company "in a fight for his soul".
Wells believes both Volkner and Kereopa faced their fate with courage.
'Journey to a Hanging' which is released by Random Penguin on 4 July 2014.
More
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