Sometimes, history can reveal itself as having a rough face - the sort which no amount of post-mortem polishing can ever quite smooth out. When confronted with a truly gruesome historical visage, the inclination of many people is to avert their gaze, in the hope something unseen becomes unknown, and then eventually forgotten.
But such history tends not to remain concealed permanently, no matter how unpleasant its appearance. So when parts of an interview I gave for TV3's 3rd Degree programme were broadcast this week, I was deluged with email and calls from incredulous viewers, most challenging my statements about the degree of suffering that Tuhoe experienced at the hands of the Crown from the 1860s. And quite rightly, too.
Despite the magisterial research of the late Judith Binney into Tuhoe's history, and indeed my own more modest ventures detailing aspects of its past, I suspect most people remain oblivious to the full horror of some of the events that unfolded there - horrors perpetrated by New Zealanders against New Zealanders.
If anything, my observations on 3rd Degree retreated slightly from disclosing the full abhorrence of this period in our not-too-distant history. From 1869 to 1871, the Crown carried out what became known as the "scorched earth policy", in which Tuhoe were held in the incendiary grip of rapacious Crown tactics. The designation "scorched earth" was a reference to the Crown's policy of setting fire to houses, livestock, and corn, while crops such as potatoes and kumara, which could not be burnt, were dug up by Crown troops so that they would be exposed to the frosts and die.
The starvation of the Tuhoe that followed swiftly from the systematic destruction of crops and livestock, the looting of anything troops could carry away, the burning of homes, and the confiscation of land, went unchecked by the Crown, which in effect had turned on a group of its own citizens with the intention of annihilating their presence in certain regions.
