Hokianga rebellion

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.

- BY CHRIS ADAM

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’”, page 32), 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 Waima. 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 Kororäreka 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.