A contested death

• Published date: 22 April 2023
• Publication title: Mix, The

I remember, as a child, sitting in the kitchen talking to my mother about what, in those days, we called the Māori Wars. At that time, it was not uncommon to be teased by my Pākehā classmates, who claimed they were in charge because they had beaten us in the Mowri wars

My mother is Pākehā and her grandparents had moved to New Zealand after the Highland clearances. My father is Māori from the Ngāti Maniapoto and Waikato iwi (tribes). I was probably worried about how unfair the wars were. I distinctly remember her mentioning that the ‘‘Hauhaus’’ were ‘‘terrible people’’, and I recall thinking, ‘‘How does she know they were terrible?’’, ‘‘How does she know about the Māori Wars?’’, and ‘‘I can’t believe we were in the wrong’’.

I found out how she knew a few years later when she showed us an old school journal, where the story Children of the Forest, a memoir of the childhood of A.H. Messenger, had been serialised. It told of Messenger’s life as the son of an officer who was guarding a frontier post at Pukearuhe, north of New Plymouth, to stop Māori in the King Country from reaching through to Taranaki in the early 1880s. There was one particular description of a fearsome Māori leader, Te Wētere, who had led the attack at Pukearuhe that killed five men, a woman and three children in 1869. Messenger described how they had ‘‘gazed fearfully at this tall sinister figure’’ and wrote, ‘‘I remember that all that night in my dreams I was being chased by tattooed Maori warriors’’.

So this was where my mother had got her vision of the ‘‘Hauhaus’’. It had obviously made a lasting impression on her.

In the mid-1980s I was visiting home from Auckland and my mother pulled out a Dunedin Weekender article on the 19th-century photographers, the Burton Brothers. One photo stood out to her and she had saved it because the man in it looked exactly like my father in his mid-40s. The resemblance was so uncanny she had ordered extra copies of it. I looked at the caption and saw the name ‘‘Wetere Te Rerenga Great Mokau chief ’’. It was the very same Te Wētere who had formed her image of the Hauhau some 30 years before. I looked at my mother and said, ‘‘That is Dad’s great-great-grandfather’’. It was so ironic: the man she married was both the descendant and spitting image of the bogeyman that had such an impact on her as a child.

For over 150 years my great-great-great-grandfather Wētere Te Rerenga has been referred to as the murderer responsible for the death of the Methodist missionary the Rev. John Whiteley, a claim that is disputed by the family to this day. Whiteley was among those killed in 1869 at Pukearuhe, a military redoubt at Parininihi, a natural boundary between Taranaki and the Tainui tribes of Ngāti Maniapoto and Waikato. The attack on Pukearuhe redoubt was a defining moment of the war against the Waikato–Tainui tribes because these were the last shots fired in anger in that conflict; the gunship rounds launched at Mōkau pā a few weeks later were the last shots of the Taranaki war.

The first part of the attack on the redoubt is reasonably clear. Wētere Te Rerenga led a party of around 15 men to attack the Pukearuhe redoubt by deception. They pretended they had pigs to sell, and while the four soldiers stationed at the fort were separated from one another, the attackers killed them with tomahawks. They also killed the wife of one of the soldiers and her three children, aged five, three and three months. It was as grisly a scene as you can imagine. Even the dog was killed.

The men gathered some of the bodies together and buried them in a shallow grave. They then searched for arms and ammunition and anything else of value that they could carry. But as the group prepared to leave, a lone rider was seen approaching. It was John Whiteley, on his regular visit to parishioners. Whiteley had previously been...