The Parihaka Woman Read online

  The Parihaka Woman

  Witi Ihimaera

  Ko tenei ’e ma’i aro’a, ei w’akamana i nga poropiti i a Tohu Kaakahi raua ko Te Whiti o Rongomai, ’ei tautoko ’oki i nga kuia, i nga tau’eke, me nga tangata katoa o Parihaka

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A Note on Taranaki Dialect

  PROLOGUE: Taranaki

  CHAPTER ONE: Always the Mountain

  ACT ONE: Daughter of Parihaka

  CHAPTER TWO: Flux of War

  CHAPTER THREE: Te Matauranga a te Pakeha

  CHAPTER FOUR: Oh, Clouds Unfold

  CHAPTER FIVE: Parihaka

  CHAPTER SIX: A Prophet’s Teachings

  CHAPTER SEVEN: What Was Wrong with a Maori Republic?

  ACT TWO: Village of God

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Do You Ken, John Bryce?

  CHAPTER NINE: The Year of the Plough

  CHAPTER TEN: Te Paremata o te Pakeha

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Saga of the Fences

  CHAPTER TWELVE: 5 November 1881, Te Ra o te Pahua

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Sacking of Parihaka

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A Wife’s Decision

  ACT THREE: Three Sisters

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Muru of Parihaka

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The Quest Begins

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Empire City

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Ever, Ever Southward

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: The Courage of Women

  CHAPTER TWENTY: City of Celts

  ACT FOUR: Horitana

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Horitana’s Lament

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Marzelline

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: History and Fiction

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Island at the End of the World

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: A Walk to the Other Side of the Island

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Rocco and Marzelline

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Marzelline’s Diary

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: A World Saturated in the Divine

  EPILOGUE: Always the Mountain

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: The Radiance of Feathers

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER NOTES

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Parihaka Woman is dedicated to Ray Richards, my literary agent, mentor and dear friend. Ray flew Corsair ground attack fighter aircraft from Fleet Air Arm aircraft carriers in World War II and was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross. Later, for services to book publishing, he became an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

  Always ahead, guiding me on the wing.

  A Note on Taranaki Dialect

  In deference to Taranaki iwi, the magnificent Taranaki dialect is used throughout the novel. Some spellings and word usage will therefore strike some readers as unusual, for example, ‘mounga’ rather than the standard ‘maunga’, and ‘tauheke’ for old men rather than the standard ‘koroua’. As well, because Taranaki Maori do not sound the ‘h’, this usage has been marked with a single apostrophe, e.g. ‘’aere’ instead of ‘haere’, ‘mi’i’ instead of ‘mihi’ and ‘tau’eke’ instead of ‘tauheke’.

  Taranaki Maori pronounce the ‘wh’ as in ‘whare’ not as an ‘f’ sound but rather as a soft ‘wh’ as in the English word ‘whine’. This usage is also marked with a single apostrophe, e.g. ‘w’are’.

  The exception to the above is that names, such as Te Whiti o Rongomai, Tohu Kaakahi, Parihaka, Horitana and so on, are not marked in this manner. Please note that these names would be pronounced as Te W’iti o Rongomai, To’u Kaaka’i, Pari’aka and ’oritana. In fact in some nineteenth-century manuscripts Te Whiti and Parihaka are rendered as ‘Te Witi’ and ‘Pariaka’.

  A further exception is that where quotes have been taken from other sources and commentaries, the quotes are as rendered by the original authors.

  PROLOGUE

  Taranaki

  CHAPTER ONE

  Always the Mountain

  1.

  I’m a retired high school teacher who once taught history, and I’m not important.

  I was born in the Taranaki and so was my wife, Josie, whom I met in the 1960s. In those days, if you were a young bloke like me, you got drunk after playing rugby with your mates and hoped you’d meet some nice girl at the pub. That’s where Josie caught my eye. She was out painting the town red with some of her girlfriends, though she likes to change that story now and tells people we met at the local Sunday school picnic. Yeah, right.

  Josie and I got married and, a few years later, bought our three-bedroom bungalow here in New Plymouth. We honeymooned in Australia and, since then, we’ve had a trip to London and another one to Hong Kong to see New Zealand play at the Rugby Sevens. We’ve lived in New Plymouth all our lives, and have three children and seven mokopuna. Josie’s saving up to take them to Disneyland.

  As for the bungalow, well, we bought it for the view of Taranaki Mountain. New Plymouth at that time was a small town with oil rigs off the coast. Look at it now: prosperous port, tourism, an art gallery, even a mall. A lot of the original outlook has gone as other houses have mushroomed around us but we still have a great view from the sitting room, and the bathroom too, if you open the window when you’re sitting on the lav.

  Doesn’t the mountain look majestic today? When Captain Cook saw it in January 1770 he thought he had naming rights and called it Mount Egmont; apparently there was an Earl of Egmont and, for all I know, Cook might have known him.

  To Maori, of course, the mounga has always been Taranaki. Geologically speaking, it’s a volcano, dormant right now, and it is very sacred to us. People have taken to calling it ‘The Shining Mountain’, which is how it looks in winter when it is snow-capped, but also in summer the peak sometimes glistens. Forgive me if I boast, but can you see how perfectly shaped it is? Its symmetry is similar to that of Mount Fujiyama in Japan, and I guess that’s why Tom Cruise made his movie, The Last Samurai, here in the Taranaki. Josie got a part as an extra, but I was offended that somebody would borrow our mountain and pretend it was someone else’s.

  The mounga has always been ours.

  Of course Taranaki is more than a mountain. It is a tipuna, an ancestor. Born in a mythical past when mounga were able to move, Taranaki had an unhappy love affair with another volcano, Pihanga, and shifted west to get over it; the Whanganui River now pours along the deep channel scored in the earth by Taranaki’s passing.

  Taranaki lived through amazing historical times. How did the mountain feel, I wonder, when, some seventy years after Captain Cook, it saw European ships bearing settlers from across the sea? I’m talking about the early 1840s, when English migrants from Great Britain bought inland bush country from Taranaki and Ngati Awa tribes, and six ships of the Plymouth Company arrived to settle it. Between 1841 and 1843 around 1,000 settlers raised New Plymouth.

  By 1859, however, the migrants wanted more land. They cast their eyes to the north-west: if they purchased land there, they could have a harbour.

  That’s when the troubles with the Maori, here in the Taranaki, started.

  From the very beginning, the purchase of what became known as the 600-acre Waitara Block was disputed, and Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake refused to let government surveyors onto it. ‘I have no desire for evil,’ he protested, ‘but, on the contrary, have great love for the Europeans and Maoris.’ Although there were such verbal objections from Maori, no violence was offered. One contemporary newspaper account relates, instead, that the surveyors were ignominiously overcome by one aged kuia who embraced a member of their party, and another woman who removed a protective chain.

  This provocation was apparently enough, however, for the government troops to fire on Te Rangitake’s pa
at Te Kohia, on 17 March 1860. The defenders withdrew, but soon retaliated with warrior reinforcements from as far south as Waitotara. Although the Crown had the greater firepower, and the battle had a disastrous impact in terms of the number of chiefs who were killed, Te Rangitake rallied and was victorious at the battle of Waireka thirteen days later. The great chief Wiremu Kingi Moki Te Matakatea, already renowned for years of fighting, sided with him. His name, which meant ‘The Clear-Eyed One’, referred to his lethal marksmanship.

  Humiliation is a good word, I think, to describe how the government troops must have felt, but the Pakeha exacted their revenge the next day. They had a warship, the Niger, off the coast of Taranaki, and the captain was ordered to punish the Maori victors. Not by direct bombardment of the rebel force, though; no, by targeting the Maori settlement at Warea in the kind of lateral and indirect retaliation on civilians for which they were to become famous.

  Warea was a small, tranquil village led by Paora Kukutai and Aperahama Te Reke. It had also become the home of two remarkable young chiefs, Te Whiti o Rongomai and his uncle, Tohu Kaakahi, and their band of followers. Some twenty years earlier they had returned to the region from Waikanae, further south. Te Whiti was baptised by Minarapa Te Rangihatuake — a Maori missionary who had migrated with them — and from the beginning Te Whiti was marked for leadership.

  Minarapa set about raising a Wesleyan church and pa at Rahotu. In addition, by agreement of Te Whiti and Tohu, a mission station was established at Warea by the Reformed German Lutheran missionary, Johann Friedrich Riemenschneider, otherwise known as Rimene. It was there that Erenora, the Parihaka woman, was born. At the time of the bombing, she was four years old.

  When she was an old woman in her eighties, Erenora told of the terror of the occasion in an unpublished manuscript that’s lodged in Anglican Church archives at St John’s Theological College in Auckland. As it was written in Maori, it has been overlooked and forgotten, but it is from this document that we, her descendants, have been able to access the information that is contained in this narrative.

  2.

  ‘As well as the mission station,’ Erenora wrote, ‘Warea comprised a small group of houses with a flour mill, livestock and crop plantations; there was good trading with New Plymouth.

  ‘We knew, of course, that the Pakeha war with us had started. By prior arrangement, a young girl lit a huge fire at Waitara to alert all the tribes it had begun. But we had not expected Warea to be a target, so we had been carrying on our lives as normal. The deadly bombardment continued for two days, most of the shells falling short, the deafening explosions sounding all around. The Niger’s guns finally calibrated the range and pinpointed the village and, very soon, the missiles were falling on the flour mill. I was sheltering with my teachers and other children in the nearby schoolroom, aware that our situation was becoming dangerous.

  ‘Then the shells began to fall closer to us. I saw Te Whiti come running to the rescue. My parents, Enoka and Miriam, who had just returned from working on a nearby settler’s farm, were with him.’

  Te Whiti took quick command.

  ‘Take the children to the pa,’ he yelled to the teachers.

  Enoka told Miriam to take Erenora’s hand, and together they followed the others from the schoolroom. They were halfway across the square in front of it when, suddenly, the earth exploded beneath their feet. One minute Erenora’s parents were there, the next minute they were gone. But their bodies shielded Erenora from the blast.

  Of that horrific event, Erenora had only flashes of memory: maybe she tripped, or perhaps that was when the shell which killed her parents blew her off her feet. Suddenly her mother’s hand was no longer pulling her across the compound. A voice in Erenora’s own head called, ‘Mama? Kei w’ea koe? Where are you?’

  She stood up and saw two bodies on the ground; one of them was her mother’s. She ran to Miriam, shaking her, telling her to wake up. Her mother’s eyes were closed and blood was issuing from her lips and nostrils. Then Te Whiti lifted her away. He was saying something to Erenora like, ‘Your mother is dead.’ Her ears were ringing from the blast as he took her to the pa.

  Erenora was frightened, in shock; she didn’t know what was happening. Nor could she understand why her parents were no longer there. Around her, in the underground chambers of the fortifications, people were praying. She couldn’t hear the words of the karakia; all she saw were the lips moving. ‘Oh God of Israel,’ the villagers prayed, ‘hear our karakia and take pity on your people in their misery. You, God of deliverance, rescue us as you did the Israelites out of Egypt.’

  The Niger’s bombardment was just the beginning of the assault on Warea. Soldiers, seamen, marines, artillerymen and others followed in an overland attack; they numbered 750 or so. Some reports say that the actual target of the shelling was the pa rather than the settlement and mission station; if so, it is puzzling that the invading force avoided the pa altogether and, although they spared the church, ransacked the rest of Warea and then retreated.

  In the darkness of the pa Erenora met a young boy, about five years older, who held her tightly in his arms as the redcoat soldiers went about their business. He must have heard her whimpering at the sounds of the pillaging: rifle shots, and whooping and hollering as the village was razed.

  Was it true about her mother? And father? What did being dead mean?

  The young boy had tender, shining eyes and his voice was strong and comforting. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘I’m an orphan too. Cast away your fears and don’t be sad. I will look after you.’

  ACT ONE

  Daughter of Parihaka

  CHAPTER TWO

  Flux of War

  1.

  This is not a history of the Taranaki Wars. After all, I’m only a retired teacher who obtained my qualifications from Ardmore Teachers’ Training College, Auckland, in the 1960s. I will there-fore leave it to you to read the accounts of university-trained historians on the subject.

  When I was younger, my elders would often talk on the marae about what happened to Maori way back then, but I really wasn’t interested. I had a well-paid job, Pakeha friends — and a Pakeha girlfriend that Josie doesn’t know about. Although I copped the occasional Maori slur or racist remark — ‘Hori’ or ‘Blacky’, you know the sort of thing — I generally laughed it off. If it got a bit too out of hand, as in, ‘Hey, you black bastard, can’t you find a girlfriend among your own kind?’ I was handy with my fists. On the whole, however, Pakeha and Maori got along pretty well really.

  I think my tau’eke and kuia were affronted that I was teaching our kids about the kings and queens of England when there was all our own Maori history around us. In my own defence, I guess it was easier for me to look somewhere else, where history belonged to the victor and happened to other people, rather than locally, where we were the vanquished and it was a bloody mess. ‘Why bring up all that old stuff?’ I’d say to my elders. ‘We’re all one people now.’

  It took the 1970s, when Whina Cooper led the land march from Te Hapua at the top of the North Island all the way down the spine to Parliament in Wellington, for me to confront the fact of ‘that old stuff’ and that, actually, we weren’t one people at all: history’s fatal impact had also happened here, in my own land.

  I joined the march because my Auntie Rose came around to pick me up, no buts or maybes. She said to Josie, ‘I’m borrowing my nephew for a while.’

  Josie answered, ‘Good, don’t return him if you don’t want to.’

  The protesters carried banners proclaiming Honour the Treaty and Not One More Acre of Maori Land; while some of the stuff they spouted was pretty offensive, there I was, right in the middle of it all, and it started to rub off on me. It wasn’t long before I looked around and realised: Hey, where was our land, here in the Taranaki? What had happened to us? My eyes were opened.

  They stayed opened.

  But this isn’t my story; it is Erenora’s.

  I’ve done my best in tellin
g it because, of course, Erenora wrote it originally in Maori. When the family gave me the task of translating the manuscript into English, I must say I found it daunting. A lot of her handwriting had faded, making it difficult to read. And some of her phrasing — well, I’ve had to explain it a bit for the modern reader. But I’ve tried to ensure at all times that it’s my ancestor’s voice, not mine, in the translation.

  Better a family member to do the job than a stranger, eh?

  2.

  ‘Mine were not the only parents who were killed by the Niger’s shells. All of us who were orphans were taken in by other families at Warea. In my case a couple by the name of Huhana and Wiremu took a shine to me. Even so, I felt I owed it to Enoka and Miriam to remember them as long as I could. As old as I am now, I have never forgotten their a’ua, their appearance. I know they loved me.

  ‘Following the attack, I returned to the mission’s classroom, my Bible and my books. After all, I was a little Christian girl, somewhat serious, and although I was puzzled that my parents were dead, I knew they would be together in heaven. But I did begin to wonder why, when the Pakeha professed Christian love, they would fight on Sundays, destroy the very churches we worshipped in and burn our prayer books. And why did they want to take land they did not own?