The Marsden Cross is known to most of us only as a photograph. It is on a remote northern shore in the Bay of Islands, not as accessible as Waitangi or Russell. It should be. It marks an event almost as significant to New Zealand as the Treaty. It was there, at Rangihoua Bay, that Maori allowed the first European missionaries to establish a settlement. They arrived a few days before Christmas, 1814. The Rev Samuel Marsden conducted their first Christian service on Christmas Day.
The bicentenary has particular meaning for the Anglican Church, which will hold a commemoration tomorrow at the Celtic cross marking the probable spot where the service was held. But it is a moment in history that deserves to be noted by New Zealanders of all faiths, or none, and it is suitably marked also by the opening last Sunday of the Rangihoua Heritage Park, distinguished by a modern informational memorial on a hill overlooking the bay.
The arrival 200 years ago is New Zealand's own Christmas story. It is a simpler and warmer beginning of a bicultural nation than the act of colonisation 26 years later. Marsden, known to Australia as the "flogging parson" of its penal colonies, had been a good host to Maori leaders visiting New South Wales. One of them, Ruatara, nephew of the Ngapuhi chief Hongi Hika, stayed at Marsden's farm at Parramatta, and decided his people needed education and agriculture. He resolved that the children would be taught to read and write, and he had wheat planted at Rangihoua after he returned.
He was less sure he wanted permanent Pakeha residents, according to scholars Alison Jones and Kuni Kaa Jenkins in an article the Herald published on Waitangi Day this year. Ruatara would have seen how many colonists were in Sydney and he had been warned what could happen. But he realised that if he did not get the mission Marsden wanted to send to New Zealand another iwi would get the skills and resources it could offer.
Marsden left three missionaries in New Zealand. Their families, said Jones and Jenkins, were probably the first Pakeha women and children the local people had seen, a change from whalers, traders and other strays.
