A few years back I discovered something about myself in in an academic magazine. They’d reviewed my major book on the New Zealand Wars and, according to the reviewer, I’d apparently written this book to intentionally displace a particular Oxford professor in the public eye. It was the first I knew of this supposed motive. … More All about the history of Hawke’s Bay, and some other things
I have always thought it ironic that the Treaty of Waitangi was signed on 6 February 1840 largely by accident. If everything had gone according to prospective governor William Hobson’s plans, it would have been signed on 5 February. That was the day Maori assembled outside the house of James Busby at Waitangi to discuss … More The Treaty of Waitangi and ‘Hobson’s pledge’
It’s the eighty-seventh anniversary today of New Zealand’s most lethal historical disaster; the Hawke’s Bay earthquake. Around 10.47 am on the sunny morning of 3 February, a magnitude 7.8 quake struck the district and threw the towns of Napier and Hastings into ruin. Damage extended from Gisborne in the north to Whanganui in the south-west, … More Remembering the Hawke’s Bay quake of ’31 – and the ‘big ones’ of 1460
I was rather sorry to see that an Auckland memorial to the New Zealand Wars (1845-1872) was vandalised the other week. Those doing it, according to the reports, were protesting the act of colonial oppression that these wars represented. And that’s fair enough; the wars were indeed colonial assertions of power, although not quite in … More Remembering the New Zealand Wars
It’s kind of hard to imagine these days, but way back in the nineteenth century New Zealand had gone all American. It wasn’t just the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ look of the colonial towns with their limed streets, hitching posts and detritus of recent construction scattered around clap-board fronted buildings. It was also in … More When New Zealand went all American
Announcing The History of Hawke’s Bay. My latest book. Out today. It’s an all new volume about my home district’s past – 260 pages in large format, with over 120 photographs and maps covering the full sweep of the region’s past, from its geological origins through to its Maori history, the rumbustious cowboy world of … More The history of Hawke’s Bay
I spotted some protestors a while back in central Wellington. “Aha,” I said to myself, “the people’s revolution is happening a century too late.” But it wasn’t. It was a group of public servants wanting a pay rise. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the western world was riven by upheaval; the radical … More The illusions of revolution – how Karl Marx misled historians…and the world…
