Author turns back history's page

Mike Butler's  first book takes readers back to New Zealand in 1821 and the first person from the first six ships to make land in Petone, Wellington. That person, says Mike, was his great grandfather Samuel Deighton, who was just 19 at the time. The First Colonist is his story, spanning 60 years.

Mike worked for 18 years as a newspaper journalist and subeditor for the Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune in Hastings and was a contract writer for the New World Encyclopaedia.

I asked Mike some questions about his book.

What sparked your interest in history?

Family history was the starting point, since we knew very little of our grandparents.

Earlier, I had done papers in medieval history, church history, and European history of the 20th century as part of a BA in English literature and a post-graduate diploma in religious education.

What made you decide to write this book?

About 30 years ago, my bookworm aunt Ruth MacLean began to look into early settler history books, held at the local library and museum, to see if Deighton was mentioned. She found a number of paragraphs detailing aspects of his life. She copied these by hand, researched Samuel's brothers who also sailed to New Zealand as colonists, and collected birth, marriage and death certificates.

When I showed an interest, about 27 years ago, Ruth gave me a copy - 30 handwritten pages. Her cousin Beryl Trewavas had a version of this typed up and published for the 1990 celebrations [marking 150 years of English settlement], as a collection of notes and photocopied photos, in a stapled-together book entitled Samuel Deighton in New Zealand 1840-1900.

Perhaps I had a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, and Deighton's story remained an unrecorded part of New Zealand history.

So I decided to extend the research. Apart from learning about your family tree while researching this book, what else did you learn about early New Zealand?

I did learn that five Deightons came to New Zealand in those early days. Samuel Deighton arrived on the Aurora with his older brother Richard in 1840. His half-brother Francis arrived in Wanganui 1855, while his sister Ellen and cousin Joseph also arrived that year, to live in Akaroa.

Samuel Deighton spent time in the Wellington area, Wanganui, Wairoa, the Chatham Islands, and in Christchurch. Therefore, by investigating his story I learned about the establishment of the New Zealand Company colony at Petone, then Thorndon, in Wellington, and the early days at Wanganui, including the early land purchases and battles that pre-dated the First Taranaki War.

Deighton was the resident magistrate in Wairoa during the East Coast Hau Hau wars of the 1860s, so he was involved with campaigns against them, and later, against Te Kooti's Whakarau after the latter's escape from the Chatham Islands. Interesting to note that Deighton's nephew married one of Te Kooti's former wives.

Part of his role as resident magistrate in the Chatham Islands, from 1873, was to record a vocabulary of the Moriori language. The Moriori were the original inhabitants of the Chatham Islands before an invasion of Te Ati Awa people from the Wellington area in 1835 all but wiped them out. The record of his time there sheds light on the effect of Taranaki Parihaka prophet Te Whiti's campaign on Chatham Islands inhabitants, both settlers and Maori.

An interesting observation involves Waitangi Tribunal reports. I read a number of these reports related to the areas Deighton worked in and noted the difference in treatment of history as written by James Cowan, who grew up on a farm where old Maori warriors would walk across from time to time, and whose father fought in the Waikato campaign, and history written by early 21st century tribunal report writers. Cowan wrote blow-by-blow accounts of each battle and campaign, whereas the tribunal writers tend to recast events into atrocity tales as part of detailed arguments to justify Treaty-based compensation payouts.

What did you do to research it?

Without diaries or anything surviving from Deighton, I was seriously short of material. Since I knew when Deighton spent time in the various regions, I went to early histories of the period, a number of which mentioned the Deightons, to recreate the context, so was able to flesh out his life story. While researching this topic, I could imagine what a detective working on a cold case may feel like. Snippets of information could spark scenarios that would later be dismantled by details in printed accounts, found in a series of searches of the Papers Past archive of newspaper reports. The most-readily available material came from obituaries which, like numerous 19th century eulogies, read like Boy's Own Annual adventures.

How long did it take?

A visit to National Archives in February 2006 marks the start of the research, when I found 38 of Deighton's original hand-written letters on file. The slanted writing style was difficult to read. I worked on the project when I had time and interest to do it. I collected a lot of material, so spent the Easter of 2009 writing through everything I had, to see if there was enough for a book. At that stage, I started delving into James Cowan's The New Zealand Wars and the Pioneering Period, to piece together the details of the East Coast wars. A first draft was ready by the end of April 2010.

What do you think was the hardest thing for colonists from England to adjust to?

Everything was difficult for the New Zealand Company colonists, who left an established economy for a country where everything had to be started from scratch. Most left England never to return.

Do you think poverty had a hand in the decision families made to come to NZ?

A recession in the United Kingdom in the late 1830s limited both profitable business opportunities and the number of jobs available. This, plus a rural sector that was in distress, with little work, low wages, bad harvests, and ongoing enclosures that forced tenant farmers off the land, led to overcrowding in the cities. The glowing picture painted by New Zealand Company marketeers of a life of opportunity in New Zealand was certainly attractive.