New Zealand History

[perotter]

Last night I decided to watch a movie. I like to history and when I went to search for something to watch, I realized that I knew almost nothing of the history of New Zealand. About the first thing I ran across was about it's early wars and picked that to start with.

I don't know how accurate it is, it's interesting. Also from them showing what it looks like there today, I can see why one would consider wintering there.

youtube.com/watch?v=J0z1mFRL2NU

[JeffinNZ]

Pretty horrendous history really but I guess no worse than most other places the European powers touched down on. We are just set to get a new annual public holiday to remember the colonial wars. History is being discovered all the time and I heard one campaign cost the lives of 20K.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

A lot that happened was horrendous enough for those it happened to, and yet New Zealand has done a lot better than most countries in patching up relations afterwards. Many Maoris still suffer economic and educational disadvantages, reduced life expectation, high crime rates etc., and yet plenty of them are well integrated into New Zealand society, with a high degree of intermarriage. There are about ten times as many Maoris as there were before the wars. I've never heard a New Zealander talking about Maoris the way Americans sometimes talk about blacks. It is a pretty good outcome for people who used to be cannibals. But then I am old enough to remember the old men saying the cannibal is generally a gentleman you can trust, when he isn't cannibalizing.

I always used to think the extermination policy in "Quigley" was fictional, and certainly it was uneven and rarely governmental. But it has even come out that a very large number of aborigines were killed in Australia, without the excuse of doing as splendid a job of shooting back as the Maoris did. Nearly always, around the world, indigenous peoples who put up a good showing in war get the best deal. The British in South Africa always rated Zulus as a cut above the ordinary African, and Queen Victoria appears to have liked Cetewayo when they met.

[perotter]

Of course much is written(etc) about wars so they are easy to find information about, but I will be studying more about NZ than just this. I'll will be having a look at both how the Maoris lived and how the European people farmed. Mainly just regular life. Not of the highest priority, but will be much of my recreational studies.

I've always liked hearing a regular families first hand accounts of normal life and the things that happened. Add up a few of them and gives a good idea what life was like.

[Driver man]

If NZ history is of interest to you you will need to start at the beginning . The Waikato war was one of many. My ancesters fought on both sides from 1845 to the end of the Taranaki campaigns of the 1880,s and modern NZ reflects our past closely. We are an interesting mix . Some interesting characters are speckled through the history of these times and a bit like the US we have some of extra interest. Gustavus von Tempsky is just such a man of interest. He headed the forest rangers and waged a guerrilla war in the bush where close quarters hand to hand fighting was the norm. He had seen some action in California and was much taken by the Bowie knife in close quarter fighting and had 30 made for his rangers . He went into battle with a sabre but when the fighting closed up he would draw his Bowie and use this to deflect the cut and thrust of the Maori hand axe and thus deflected would shoot his enemy through the body with his revolver. He selected his weapons to suit the conditions in which he fought which was mostly heavy bush and steep rough country. His weapons of choice were bowie knives, Calisher and Terry .54 carbines, colt navy .36 pistols,and his favorite the .44 Beaumont–Adams revolver. He was known to the Māori as Manurau, "the bird that flits everywhere" due to his ability to move through the bush. Von Tempsky fought on the british side but there were equally noted characters on the Maori side including a few Pakeha Maori (European living as Maori).

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Yes, a very interesting character. I must have been about fourteen when I read about him in the novels of Errol Brathwaite, a writer so fallen from favour that even www.bookfinder.com (http://www.bookfinder.com) my life support system, turns up nothing by him but non-fiction at the moment. He was undoubtedly a prima donna, with erratic attention to orders. But with guerrillas as with spies, wise superiors know they get the best value out of those who need to play their own hand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavus_von_Tempsky

Here is another interesting Victorian character, of whose activities in New Zealand little is known. But he resigned as vice-consul in what is now Eritrea to go there in 1864, and later his scouting in Ethiopia, where he very much identified with the natives, was crucial in Lord Napier's campaign. So activities there surely were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristram_Speedy

[perotter]

It's a set of documentaries that I'm watching about is the wars with the Maori. I will study more about NZ from before those wars and after them.

When the films had about Gustavus von Tempsky I did read up a little on him. Handy watching movies on the computer, as one can stop watching and look up information right away. Interesting to see that his descents that moved to Hawaii made a name for themselves also.

[JeffinNZ]

Colonialism certainly has a lot to answer for. If you look around the world right now a great deal of the strife can be attributed back to European colonialism.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Bad or brief colonialism, certainly. The former Turkish empire, or Leopold of Belgium's non-governmental demesne in Africa are a pretty accurate map of beastliness to this day. But there are plenty of places we don't hear of, because nothing very bad happens. Society isn't static, even in the Third World, and very often colonialism was a better deal than the locals than a decline into warlordism, often abetted by freelance western adventurers.

[perotter]

Human migrations have always been 'messy'. Sometime the natives pushed out, wiped out, assimilated, etc or at times are assimilated themselves.

But more often than not those natives had done that to previous native population in some forgotten history. Greece, Italy, England, Iran, etc. Everywhere? Seems that everyone came from somewhere else.

My grade school teachers were Norsk-Americans that ancestors came to to US between 1850-1880. They could and did give names of relatives/ancestors who had literally starved to death in Norway.

[trebor44]

Thanks for the link, I enjoyed this via ROKU. There is a lot of 'history' that was never presented via the public education system for a variety of reasons, mostly political. The USA has a lot of little known incidents that only the locals know about. Check out the local, small town museums for local history books etc. as a place to start.