As I suspected, I found it quickly enough. The Cesspit. Also known as the comments section of a news article.
It was with morbid fascination that I clicked to read more, knowing exactly what I’d find.
And sure enough, I wasn’t disappointed. Or rather, I was predictably disappointed.
It’s always the same dross on any article referencing anything Māori.
Utterly predictable. Typical of Facebook too, where the angry vie to out-angry the other angries.
All because of an idea for a cultural centre at the site of a historic battle.
Pukehinahina, the Battle of Gate Pā, was a major event in Tauranga’s history. Almost 160 years ago, Māori defeated the British at the site, which most Tauranga residents would recognise as the Gate Pa Shopping Centre. You know the one, it’s home to a giant orange hardware store.
Part of the battle site is a reserve, and the Pukehinahina Charitable Trust has submitted a proposal to the Tauranga City Council to establish a cultural and historic centre there.
The trust, by the way, is not an iwi entity despite its Māori name. Its board does include people of Māori heritage, obviously, and it also counts among its membership business people, historians, a professor and Heritage Bay of Plenty. In other words, a fairly typical charitable organisation board.
One of the trust’s ideas for the centre includes uncovering some of the famed trenches from the battle. Trenches. Right here in little old Tauranga. Won’t that be something to see?
You can learn as much as you like about history by reading written words and hearing knowledgeable people speak about it. But there’s something just so much more real, poignant, about being at the actual location of a historic event and seeing for yourself just how it played out.
Or maybe that’s just my inner history nerd speaking.
What is so threatening about that? Perhaps it’s the use of the word “cultural” in the phrase “cultural centre” that automatically pushes certain people’s rage buttons. The people who perceive the promotion of Māori culture as being equivalent to subjugating Pākehā.
It’s bizarre in this context. Pukehinahina is Tauranga history. New Zealand history.
It was a battle between the English army and Māori warriors. The English lost the battle, although they certainly got brutal revenge for their loss a few months later at Te Ranga. Both sides lost people.
You cannot tell the Māori story without the English perspective, or vice versa. It wasn’t a one-sided battle, and most of the remaining primary sources are from English people.
But yes, it is quite likely the planned cultural centre would have a heavy focus on the Māori experience during this particular battle – and for good reason. After all, Māori were the resident population defending their land against a foreign army.
No, truly. I’m not saying this because I’ve got some anti-Pākehā agenda or whatever. The English soldiers arrived in New Zealand to fight in the New Zealand Wars. They weren’t settlers, they came here on orders and, if they survived, most returned home again after their time was up. As far as I can discover anyway – I’m a history fan, not a historian.
The soldiers who fought in Pukehinahina arrived in Tauranga on ships in 1864. Esk St, Harrier St and Miranda St are named after the very vessels that brought the soldiers here to fight.
General Duncan Alexander Cameron, the man Cameron Rd is named after, was only in New Zealand for a handful of years. It’s a similar story for Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Harpur Greer (Greerton) - many of our other streets were named after English soldiers who either died here or returned to their homeland after the wars ended. Those men weren’t locals. They came, they fought, they left.
For that reason, it makes sense that Māori stories would feature prominently at any cultural centre. They’re the locals who were involved in the wars.
Even so, there does seem to be a rather pervasive belief out there that allowing Māori culture to flourish will somehow lead to Pākehā people being ostracised or persecuted as if raising one culture up can only be achieved by bringing the other down.
That’s just not true. We can all be New Zealanders while also separately being Māori or Pākehā. One is not better than the other, they both simply are.
Our country’s past is our shared heritage and it deserves to be remembered in a sensitive, honest and educational way.
Our history belongs to us. All of us.
- Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader, and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.
