How the intervention of a great-nephew of Hōne Heke and the advent of the telephone defused the last armed resistance by Māori against the British crown.
The Dog Tax War. The very name ensures the events of 1898 in Hokianga can be safely categorised as farce rather than tragedy. However, the story of those events contains elements that could have been taken from today’s newspapers, apart from two symbols of late-Victorian modernity: the Maxim gun and the telephone. Fortunately, the latter had the greater impact on events.
The “tax” – an annual registration fee of up to 10 shillings (equivalent to about $100 today) payable to councils, for which owners received a collar – enabled authorities to identify dog owners. It was resisted up and down the land by Māori, for cultural and financial reasons (see “Tax ‘an affront’”, below), and events came to a head in the Hokianga in 1898.
On the morning of May 6, the bulk of New Zealand’s only standing army was drawn up in two rows along one side of the road in the small settlement of Waimā. At the end of one of the rows, flanked by two Maxim machine guns, stood Inspector James Hickson of the Auckland police force and Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Newall, veteran of the 1860s land wars and the 1881 sacking of Parihaka. Back in the harbour settlement of Rawene were further soldiers and two Nordenfeldt artillery pieces, while offshore was the Royal Naval vessel HMS Torch.
Advancing up the road towards them came a party of Māori men, women and children led by Hōne Tōia and accompanied by Hōne Heke Ngāpua, member of the House of Representatives and grandnephew of the Ngāpuhi leader who had cut down the British flagstaff at Kororāreka half a century before. Newall halted them with a raised hand and Heke, coming forward, said Tōia’s people had come to surrender unconditionally and give up their guns. A number then put down their rifles, butts forward.
Hōne Riiwi Tōia was the acknowledged leader of a small party of the Mahurehure hapū which had set itself apart and at that time lived on the gumfields near Waimā. They called themselves Te Huihui and held regular meetings at which, it was said, Tōia called down spirits and conducted séances. The meetings were also political and discussed the detrimental effects of the passage of land through the Native Land Court and subsequent sales to the government.
Te Huihui believed the recent introduction of the dog tax and other European taxes infringed the Treaty of Waitangi. The Hokianga County Council tried unsuccessfully to issue summonses to tax defaulters, who in response threatened to come armed to Rawene to demonstrate their opposition.
Warned of this, many local residents evacuated, and on Sunday, May 1, events appeared to escalate when an armed party of Māori appeared in Rawene. The authorities were primed: Hickson and four constables had arrived by the steamer Glenelg from Auckland and with some local civilians, waited on deck behind a barricade of beds. They had a small ceremonial cannon and a ship’s gun, both loaded with nuts and bolts and pointing up Rawene’s main street.
Robert Cochrane, who had chaired the council, walked up the hill with the Wesleyan missionary William Gittos and an interpreter and spoke to the men, advising them to go home. The armed group seemed surprised that everyone had left town and expressed friendship with all, except the law. The group told Gittos “they wanted to be relieved of all taxation and be allowed to live as Māori”. They would not burn down houses or attack women and children – the necessary fight could be held at a pre-arranged spot out of town. They then headed inland to Waimā, where they prepared to defend themselves from the government response, which was already under way.
Dispatched from Wellington
That evening, Newall left Wellington on the Hinemoa with 90 men of the Permanent Artillery, a Maxim gun, two Nordenfeldt artillery pieces and a letter he had been given by Hōne Heke Ngāpua at a meeting in the capital. Another 30 men of the Permanent Force left from Auckland on the Gairlock, taking another Maxim gun with them.
Heke thought he could persuade Tōia to surrender peacefully, and set out on a marathon trip to the Far North by ship, train and relays of horses.
Premier Richard Seddon requested that a small Royal Navy warship, HMS Torch, be sent north, too. It arrived on Wednesday evening, playing its searchlight on the hills, apparently in the belief this would impress or frighten the protesters. James Carroll, acting colonial secretary, requested the aid of local chiefs to block any moves south by the disaffected group.
On arrival in Rawene, Newall read Heke’s letter to a gathering of 13 elders and chiefs in the town’s courthouse. Through an interpreter, Newall (who once had a Māori arrested for ‘looking suspicious’) informed the assembled Māori he was “glad to look into their faces which were unclouded towards the Queen and the law”.
Exhorted by Seddon to advance on Tōia’s group, Newall set off with nearly all his detachment, accompanied by armed police, reporters, a photographer, and an ambulance dray draped with a Red Cross flag borrowed from HMS Torch – an imperial punitive expedition in miniature.
Newall led his party through the narrow Waimā Pass; the long and slow-moving column wound its way along the road passing within yards of more than 50 well-armed Māori hidden behind felled logs on one side of the valley.
They did not fire on the column and Newall was able to proceed to Waimā where he halted, intending to advance to Tōia’s camp the next day. Hōne Heke Ngāpua arrived from Wellington that morning. He went to Tōia and negotiated his unconditional surrender, bringing the group back to Waimā to lay down their arms.
The police arrested 16 of the group, including Tōia. After a weekend of further talking (and a sports event), the prisoners and the soldiers and police marched back to Rawene in the rain, and the prisoners were shipped to Auckland.
Had the insurgents carried out an ambush in the Waimā Pass, it is probable Newall’s force would have suffered heavy casualties. That this did not occur is largely due to Tōia’s willingness to walk back from the threat of bloodshed and the efforts of key participants in the crisis to allow this to happen. Technology was instrumental in this and shaped the nature of the incident itself.
Heke’s race to the north by train, steamship and horse allowed him to arrive in time to negotiate the surrender of Tōia before the soldiers moved in, while the telecommunication systems available to the premier ensured he could order Newall to hold his position while the talks went on. A telegram from Heke advising Tōia to disband his followers and return peacefully to his home apparently led Tōia to send out messengers warning the ambush party not to fire.
By 1898, telegraph offices had spread throughout the country, including in Northland: Taheke, Waimā and Rawene had telephone offices by the mid-1880s, as did Omanaia by 1897. The instantaneous flow of information from and to the area meant the government could assert much more control over the situation than in the past and alter its response to rapidly changing circumstances.
The local constable, Alexander McGilp, expected the wires to be cut at any moment. They never were and Tōia assured the local postmasters they would not be harmed. McGilp’s messages to his superiors were the first in a stream of communications between protagonists in the Far North and military and ministerial officials in Auckland and Wellington. Newall’s column marching from Rawene was pursued by riders with messages from the nearest telegraph/telephone offices reporting on Heke’s progress and government instructions, and Newall in turn kept his superiors informed on an almost hourly basis.
Tōia, too, used the telephone and telegraph to communicate with the authorities. Thomas Millar, the postmaster at Rawene, reported that, “The leader of the Hauhaus [sic] informs me confidentially by telephone from Taheke that the attack on Rawene will be tomorrow. I shall stay by the instrument to the last.” HW Geissler, teacher at the native school at Waimā wrote to his bosses in the Department of Education a week after the crisis: “I had to stay night and day in Post Office hanging onto the telephone … I had turned into a telephone myself.”
Misinformation spread
The impact of technology on events was not entirely benign. The quality of the information being so speedily communicated in a developing situation was important, but both fact and misinformation transmitted helped determine the government response, which was widely condemned and ridiculed by the press as being excessive.
Reports from the Hokianga repeatedly exaggerated the numbers of “disaffected” Māori taking up arms, and the nature of their weaponry. McGilp’s initial telegram, passed on to Seddon in Christchurch, spoke of a “half-insane” crowd of “over 100 fully armed Hauhau” about to march on Rawene. Thomas Millar reported on the Sunday: “Attack made on Rawene by land forces of 210 armed men. Most of them had Winchester repeating rifles.” In fact, when Cochrane and Gittos walked up the street to talk to the group they saw only a couple of dozen men and no repeating rifles.
The telegraph also ensured reports about the events in Hokianga appeared overseas soon after. A Lyttelton Times editorial expressed concern that the disturbance might give the impression that New Zealand “is not yet a safe place for white people to live in”, and there is some evidence the government shared the concern. On May 6, Seddon cabled Minister of Justice Thomas Thompson that “the reports that are reaching England and the rest of the world … are doing the colony great harm and the sooner this business is brought to an end one way or another the better”.
The prisoners shipped to Auckland were charged with forming an intention to levy war against the Queen in order to force her to change her measures (a treasonable offence), conspiring to prevent the collection of taxes and rates and being members of an unlawful assembly. The treasonable charge was subsequently dropped and the defendants pleaded guilty to the other charges. The defendants’ lawyers spoke eloquently of their clients’ belief in the inviolability of the treaty, to the provisions of which they “still clung with the energy of despair”.
On July 9, 1898, the four leaders were sentenced to 18 months hard labour and the others fined £10 each and imprisoned until £25 surety was given. Heke and other Ngāpuhi chiefs petitioned the crown for clemency and on March 15, 1899, the balance of the sentences was remitted. That same month, eight Pākehā residents of the Hokianga district were convicted of selling arms to natives without licences.
Opposition to the dog tax continued and the government handed responsibility for collection to the police in some areas. Seddon was moved to comment that the decision by local authorities to enforce it cost the government more than the tax would have collected in 100 years. The tax is still with us today, in the form of dog registration fees levied and collected by councils.
Chris Adam is a Rangiora archivist.
Tax ‘an affront’
In this edited excerpt from The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa, Catherine Comyn outlines why Māori so opposed the dog tax.
IN 19TH CENTURY NEW ZEALAND, THE question of taxes was inextricably bound up with questions of legitimate political authority. Tensions over the taxation of land, wheels, dogs and other “assets” intersected with movements for mana motuhake and rangatiratanga occurring at both local and national levels. The dog tax became a pivot for dissent, taken to be emblematic of a financial regime through which the crown attempted to enforce political sovereignty and mould Māori into governable British subjects.
The Dog Registration Act that came into force in January 1881 aimed to reduce the number of dogs throughout the colony and enable owners to be identified. It required owners to pay an annual registration fee of 5 to 10 shillings, in return for which they were issued a collar. Any person keeping an unregistered dog for more than 14 days was liable to be fined £5. The act also provided for cattle and sheep farmers to immediately “destroy any dog running at large amongst such cattle or sheep”.
To hapū, the tax represented an affront to systems of livelihood established many centuries before Pākehā arrival. Kurī, small, fox-like dogs with pricked ears and full-pointed jaws, accompanied Māori to Aotearoa as early as 900AD. In addition to providing a valuable means of subsistence, both as a food source and as a hunting tool, kurī had strong traditional, cultural and spiritual significance within te ao Māori. One Taranaki tradition tells of a kurī who scented Aotearoa long before land was visible and leapt overboard from Tokomaru, guiding it through the darkness and safely to shore.
With the introduction of larger European dog breeds from the mid-18th century, kurī became scarce. Nevertheless, dogs remained central to Māori hunting practices, subsistence and prosperity.
The multifaceted significance of kurī within te ao Māori was disregarded by Pākehā advocates of the dog tax. Īhaka Te Tai Hakuene, Ngāpuhi leader and MP for Northern Māori, spoke against the tax in Parliament, reportedly saying “Māoris valued their dogs as much as they did human beings”. When he went on to explain that one of his ancestors was a dog, he was met with laughter.
The inability or unwillingness of the House to even consider this idea reflected fundamental disjunctions between Pākehā and Māori conceptions of the relationships among humans, other living beings and spiritual entities. In te ao Māori, these categories all exist in a symbiotic relationship. The idea of owning land, resources or animals was alien to Māori prior to the arrival of Europeans.
Yet the Dog Registration Act attempted to enforce an ideology according to which dogs were the exclusive property and responsibility of an individual. This ideological disjunction impeded the registration process. Court officials struggled to determine the “ownership” of unregistered dogs, with Māori frequently admitting to keeping dogs but denying any property right to them.
At the forefront of the Hokianga resistance was Te Huihui, a religious and political movement led by Hōne Tōia. Te Huihui drew on Parihaka founders Te Whiti and Tohu, whose disruption of land surveys in Taranaki was in part motivated by the dog tax. Like Te Whiti and Tohu, Te Huihui’s overarching political concern was self-determination, key to which was the recovery and retention of land.
Hōne Tōia understood the centrality of taxation to the confiscation of Māori land and the enforcement of Pākehā political authority, reportedly prophesying that “if dogs were to be taxed, men would be next”. It was not only the dog tax, but – as with other movements across Aotearoa – the very idea of liability to colonial rule that incited Hōne Tōia and Te Huihui to take direct action in 1898.