by Michael King
The duration of tangi varied. Until the end of the nineteenth century they could go on for weeks, even months if the deceased was sufficiently important (the last one of considerable length was for King Tawhiao in 1894, which lasted nearly two months). Public health legislation early in the twentieth century restricted the mourning time and it became customary to hold ceremonies within a week; improving systems of transport and communications also reduced the need to display the body for longer periods. The ceremonies ended with a Christian funeral service, usually conducted by Maori clergymen, of whom the Anglican Church in particular had an ample supply (the Catholics, by contrast, did not ordain a Maori priest until 1944, although the church had had Maori seminarians, one of whom was sent to study in Rome, as early as the 1850s), and a European-type burial service in the course of which many of the deceased’s personal possessions were likely to be interred with the body. A year or more later another ceremony would be held to ‘unveil’ the headstone, and this fulfilled some of the functions of the pre-European hahunga or exhumation rite, which ended the period of mourning. Late in the nineteenth century Maori women began to adopt the Victorian mourning costume of black clothes for tangi, and the practice continued long after Pakeha New Zealanders had dropped the custom.
Although the proceedings of the country’s Parliament were remote from the daily lives of most Maori, some legislation had affected them intimately. Since European settlers had been granted so-called responsible government by the British Parliament in 1852, one of the most difficult issues of governance had been devising ways to ascertain ownership of communally held Maori land and hence whom to deal with in sales transactions. The problem increased as the European population increased. Inevitably, too, Pakeha buyers wanted the best agricultural and pastoral land available.
In an attempt to accelerate such transactions the Native Land Court was established in 1865, its functions superseding those of the earlier Native Land Purchase Department. The court held sittings presided over by a judge to investigate claims to land based on ancestral occupation, right of conquest and continuity of use and occupation, to rule on the validity of such claims, and to record the names of successful claimants as owners. Although one of the main reasons for establishing the court’s procedures was to facilitate the transfer of Maori land to Pakeha ownership, Maori themselves often displayed a considerable willingness to bring land to the court and to offer it for sale. The reasons were complex. In some cases would-be sellers simply wanted money with which to purchase commodities or expand their capacity to offer hospitality, or the land concerned was unwanted; but in many other cases court sittings and sales were initiated by Maori to prove the validity of their claims over those of rivals. The sittings became, in other words, another forum for the inter-hapu and tribal rivalries that had always characterised Maori life. In some instances spurious claimants launched proceedings simply to annoy an opponent, or to take utu for some wrong inflicted on them previously. In this manner court sittings became an extension of – or at least a sequel to – tribal confrontation.
The Native Land Court also became a major institution in Maori life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some elderly people, repositories of tribal traditions, became almost professional court-goers as claim clashed with counter-claim. More important, perhaps, the court minutes carefully recorded most of the testimony presented and thus became the country’s first archive of Maori oral history on a large scale. Families often accompanied elders to sittings in the towns nearest the lands under discussion and camped close to the court. Thus the hearings also became occasions for reunions and hui.
When the national Parliament had instituted four Maori seats in 1867, one of the factors that made this measure acceptable to Pakeha MPs was that it gave the North Island a more favourable balance of seats in relation to the South Island, where gold rushes had ensured a population explosion and consequent disproportionate increase in the number of seats there. In some respects this was an enlightened move, giving adult Maori males universal sufferage twelve years ahead of pakeha men and making New Zealand the first neo-European country in the world to give votes to its indigenous population (it would be another 95 years before Australia did the same). But had those seats been allocated on a population basis, as the non-Maori ones were, Maori would have had fourteen or fifteen. Initially the new electorates were established as temporary ones, reflecting the widely held belief that the Maori population would barely survive the nineteenth century. But they were made permanent in 1876 and, towards the close of the twentieth century, increased in number on – at last – the basis of population.
Early Maori MPs were kupapa and tended to be the nominees and protégés of the powerful Minister of Native Affairs, Donald McLean. They had at first little contact with the ‘flax roots’ of Maori communities, where national issues, other than the disposal of Maori land, were not a major concern. But by the close of the nineteenth century such members as James Carroll, Wi Pere, Hori Kerei Taiaroa, Tame Parata, Hirini Taiwhanga and Hone Heke Ngapua had begun to surprise and then annoy successive governments by opposing Maori legislation of the day as being not in the interests of Maori constituents. Until the admission of James Carroll into the Liberal Government’s cabinet in 1892, Maori members were not effective in changing the course of such legislation. But Maori representation did serve as a Trojan horse to introduce both a Maori presence and Maori considerations into the legislature, and eventually those considerations became part of legislation when more able and more sophisticated members took the seats.
By the close of the nineteenth century, however, the prognosis for the Maori population and culture did not seem favourable. Numbers were falling, as was the Maori percentage of the population as a whole. From constituting 50 per cent of the nation’s citizens in 1860, they made up only 10 per cent by 1891. Their remaining lands constituted only 17 per cent of the country, and a great deal of this was marginal and in effect useless. While some communities thrived healthily on their own holdings, most notably those on the East Coast and in parts of the Bay of Plenty, others were demoralised and handicapped by malnutrition, alcohol and disease.
It was an awareness of these negative factors that led Archdeacon Walsh to write of ‘The Passing of the Maori’ in the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute. He summarised: ‘The Maori has lost heart and abandoned hope. As it has already been observed in the case of the individual, when once the vital force has fallen below a certain point he died from the sheer want of an effort to live; so it is with the race. It is sick unto death, and it is already potentially dead.’ It was in an attempt to rectify those same conditions that a number of Maori leaders from a new generation decided to experiment with new forms of political and social activity. And the patient did not die, as Archdeacon Walsh predicted: he got up from his bed and walked.
[1] Te Uira Te Heuheu’s shock, it should be noted, arose from the fact that such conditions were by no means universal. Some Maori communities, especially those with a sound economic base on the East Coast of the North Island, in Hawke’s Bay, in Tuwharetoa territory and in parts of the South Island, were coping with their vicissitudes with determination and considerable success.
[2] The Urewera was the last Maori district to be ‘penetrated’ by Europeans and European influences. For this reason it became a target for ethnologists such as Elsdon Best. These men, most interested in manifestations of ‘old-time’ Maori culture, tended to ignore or condemn the experiment in acculturation being conducted by Rua Kenana.
[3] Mount Tarawera erupted on the night of 10 June 1886. At least 147 Maori and six Pakeha died; the villages of Te Wairoa, Moura and Te Ariki were buried, and the fabled Pink and White Terraces destroyed.
Chapter 18
Party Politics Begins
Sir Harry Atkinson – whose fifth and final administration was defeated by the Liberal Party led by John Ballance in January 1891 – was the most continuous ingredient in the so-cal
led ‘continuous ministry’. But the old survivor would not survive this time. In just over a year, after elevation to the office of Speaker of the Legislative Council, he would be dead. The Liberals would be in office for the next 21 unbroken years and the country was about to experience what one historian has called ‘a revolution in the relationship between the government and the people …’
That revolution would become apparent in the way that political parties began to condition the conduct of politics, particularly elections. Initially, though, the party apparatus worked on one side only, because the Liberals did not face an organised ‘opposition party’ until 1909, when Opposition leader William Massey reluctantly recognised the clear advantage of committing candidates and sitting MPs to an agreed set of policies. The revolution was also apparent in the way that Liberal policies would both lay the foundation for the welfare state and the ‘apparatus of modern government’ by establishing twelve new government departments.
None of this should suggest that the Liberals assumed office with the backing of a coherent philosophical blueprint, however. Its MPs were not, on the whole, socialists, though one of the party’s few ‘intellectuals’, poet and newspaper editor William Pember Reeves, had socialist ideals, wrote about socialism and would later form close associations with the Fabian Society in England (indeed, he named his only son Fabian). Their unifying belief was in a dominant role for central government in the nation’s affairs, but on pragmatic rather than ideological grounds. Private enterprise was weak in New Zealand. Only the Government could assemble sufficient capital to extend the country’s transport and communications infrastructure. Most Liberals, according to the major historian of the party, David Hamer, ‘simply wanted the benefits of private ownership of property spread more widely …’ Further, they were not unhappy with the notion of ‘social hierarchy’ – they just wanted the hierarchy to be open to the reception of the ‘hard-working and morally worthy … The Liberals’ policies aimed at removing barriers to social mobility.’
If the Liberals had one common and dominant preoccupation it was how best to use land, widely recognised as the country’s richest resource. For most of them, and in particular Lands Minister John McKenzie, the best use was pastoral farming and the spectacle of ‘idle’ or unfarmed land, such as that in Maori ownership, a scandal. One of the party’s most popular policies, which actually created further political support, was the determination to break up the big estates, formed in the days when ‘sheep was king’, to allow settlement by smaller landholders able to take advantage of the new refrigeration technology which made meat and dairy farming not only viable but profitable.
The party’s first leader, John Ballance, was a northern Irishman who had emigrated to New Zealand via England and Australia and set up in business in Wanganui in 1866. At first he was a retail jeweller, then a newspaper editor and proprietor. He gained both visibility and a local following through his editorials in what became the Wanganui Herald, and was in Parliament from 1875 and holding ministerial office, initially under George Grey, from 1878. His impact in and on Wellington was strong and favourable from the outset, particularly in his role as Colonial Treasurer in 1878–79. Ballance fell out with Grey, however; and he had three years out of Parliament in the early 1880s. By 1884 he was an MP again, and a minister, and one of his achievements was helping to persuade the ariki of Ngati Tuwharetoa, Horonuku Te Heuheu Tukino, to gift to the nation the land and mountains in the central North Island that became in 1894 the Tongariro National Park, the country’s first national park and one of the earliest in the world.
By July 1889 Ballance was leader of the Opposition. He was not a charismatic man, nor a spellbinding orator. But he was, according to his biographer, ‘kindly, courteous and considerate and displayed great patience. He was [also] a man of honesty and integrity. As a result he attracted extraordinary loyalty among his cabinet and party.’ He also gained considerable political capital from his first major challenge as Premier. After he lost the 1890 election but before he left office, Harry Atkinson had packed the Legislative Council with his own supporters. Ballance attempted to redress this imbalance, which would have paralysed the Liberals’ legislative programme, by making additional appointments of his own. Two Governors, Lords Onslow and Glasgow, declined to accept Ballance’s nominations.
The Premier was forced to appeal to the Colonial Secretary in London, who supported his position and told Glasgow that a governor had to accept the advice of his ministers unless that advice was clearly contrary to the will of the legislature, thus clarifying a vitally important constitutional point. Glasgow obliged and made the appointments – four working men whom Ballance had nominated after close consultation with trades councils in the four main centres. This consultation and its fruit was characteristic of the Liberals’ attempts in their early years in office to maintain close relations with trades and labour councils and thus with working people, whom they viewed as an essential part of their constituency, along with small farmers and small businessmen.
While Ballance was temperamentally well suited to maintain the ‘liberal–labour’ association, much of his time as Premier was blighted by illness. He was widely mourned when he died of cancer in April 1893. A statue of him – regrettably bearing little resemblance to the deceased leader – was erected and still stands in the grounds of Parliament.
Ballance’s successor as Premier, Richard John Seddon, is the leader most strongly associated with the Liberals’ decades in power. In contrast to his predecessor, Seddon was charismatic and an orator. He had a huge appetite for the antics, the rituals and the effluvium of politics. He is the first leader of the country who viewed politics holistically – that is, treating every aspect of life as political. And his nickname, ‘King Dick’, indicates both the manner in which he bestrode his contemporaries and the extent to which he concentrated power in his own hands.
Seddon had been born in Lancashire in 1845, the son of schoolteacher parents. He had no academic talents or aspirations of his own, however. He worked in foundries in England and secured an engineer’s certificate before emigrating to Australia in 1863. Dissatisfied with prospects there, he came on to New Zealand in 1866 and joined an uncle on the Waimea goldfield on the West Coast. There he apparently made sufficient money to open several stores and to persuade his Australian fiancée’s family to allow him to marry their daughter. In 1872 he obtained a publican’s licence for his store at Big Dam and over the next four years acquired a reputation as ‘an athlete and fist fighter … renown[ed] for feats of strength and endurance, and for settling matters – including the payment of debts – with his fists’.
In 1876 Seddon moved his family to the new goldfield and mushrooming township at Kumara and established there a hotel, store and butchery. He plunged into local politics, becoming mayor of Kumara and a member of the Westland County Council and Provincial Council, and it was in those forums that he discovered both his gift for the arm-twisting cajoleries of public affairs and the heady exaltation that he derived from practising them. He also became well known as a theatrical but effective miner’s advocate in the goldfields warden’s court. By 1879, when he was elected to Parliament representing Hokitika, he had become a West Coast character of considerable proportions, both physically and in his personality. And everything he had learned on the Coast would eventually stand him in good stead as a national politician.
Not at first, though. Although his impact on Parliament was immediate, because of the exuberance of his verbosity and his rapid mastery of standing orders, longer-serving MPs regarded him as uncouth and made jokes about his accent, his malapropisms and his tendency to drop his h’s. Initially, too, Seddon concerned himself primarily with constituency issues and made little impact on the country as a whole. At this stage of his career, wrote David Hamer, ‘Seddon knew little of New Zealand beyond the West Coast, and it knew little of him.’ That would change, however, once he entered the Liberal cabinet in 1891.
The national pl
atform Seddon acquired as Minister of Mines, Defence and Public Works enabled him to transfer to the country as a whole the populist style of politics he had perfected on the West Coast. His portfolios, especially Public Works, gave him an excuse to travel the country, turn first sods, open roads and branch railway lines, make highly colourful speeches in the course of which he gesticulated and slapped his thighs, and in general to be seen and heard. William Pember Reeves, who frequently shared platforms with Seddon, said that audiences warmed to ‘the big, smiling man with the flushed face and the powerful voice; they liked the swelling chest, the energetic arm, the flapping coat … [He] left contentment behind him.’
Seddon also used these opportunities to meet with and speak to local committees of the Liberal Party and cement their sense of loyalty to him. Sometimes, Hamer notes, he behaved outrageously, but he also had ‘a very acute sense of when he could get away with this … [He] was just under six feet in height and [eventually] weighed nearly 20 stone … he ate and drank without moderation. Totally committed to politics, he had few other diversions …’