History lessons

For his second novel, Airana Ngarewa draws from his own whakapapa to tell the story of a survivor of Tītokowaru's war.

- BY PAULA MORRIS

In 1869, the Pakakohi iwi from Taranaki were almost wiped out – not in battle, but in retribution, Vincent O’Malley tells us in his book Voices from the New Zealand Wars. After a decade of fighting for a gifted military commander, Tītokowaru, more than 200 men, women and children surrendered to the crown. Seventy-six of the men were tried for treason in Wellington and sentenced to death; most ended up transported to a Dunedin prison. According to eyewitnesses to their arrival in Otago, the prisoners were largely old men and boys. Within three years, almost a quarter were dead.

Koko William, the main narrative voice of Airana Ngarewa’s second novel, is “the final survivor of Tītokowaru’s war”. He doesn’t see it as a surrender: “When everything was said and done, we scattered into the winds, taking refuge on ancient grounds or among the other tribes. I s’pose we believed we’d made our point. We’d shown the soldiers and the blowhards in the House we weren’t gonna roll over when they started marching in and telling us where to go.” Koko is bitter that “the Māori on the Pātea ... were made an example of. All of us men – me, my father, my grandfather, my brothers – were sent down to the South Island to labour, rot and die in their gaols.”